BDS advocates claim victory as General Mills divests its Israeli dough operation

By ANDREW LAPIN/JTA - Yesterday 5


General Mills announced Tuesday it would be fully divesting from a business venture in Israel that had operated in an East Jerusalem settlement, in a move pro-Palestinian activists celebrated as the result of their campaign against the food conglomerate.


© (photo credit: NYTTEND via WIKIMEDIA COMMONS)

View from the southwest of the General Mills processing plant on Martel Road in Martel, Ohio, United States, 28 August 2015.

The Minnesota-based company has operated a Pillsbury frozen-food factory in the Atarot Industrial Zone since 2002, in a joint venture with Israeli investment group Bodan Holdings. In a statement, the company said it would sell its majority stake in the venture back to Bodan as part of a larger international investment strategy.

General Mills’ statement did not mention politics and noted that the company had previously moved to sell off its European dough business, as well. Reached for comment, a company spokesperson redirected the Jewish Telegraphic Agency to its statement.

The company has been a target of pro-Palestinian activists since it was included in a 2020 United Nations database of companies doing business in Israeli settlements.


BDS ACTIVISTS in action (credit: GALI TIBBON / AFP)

American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker-affiliated activist organization that has been pushing the company to end its Israel operations via a campaign called “No Dough For The Occupation,” took credit for the divestment in a statement.

“General Mills’ divestment shows that public pressure works even on the largest of corporations,” Noam Perry, a member of the group’s Economic Activism team, said in the statement.

The divestment carried echoes of another food producer’s Israel-related move: last year’s decision by ice-cream manufacturer Ben & Jerry’s to stop selling ice cream in “Occupied Palestinian Territory.” In that case, the decision was explicitly political, coming on the heels of Israel’s deadly conflict with Hamas.

And the blowback was swift, with Jewish groups and several state governments lining up to not only boycott Ben & Jerry’s products but also divest from its parent company, the British multinational conglomerate Unilever — in many cases citing anti-Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions laws to do so.

For Japan's star poet Tanikawa, it's fun, not work, at 90

TOKYO (AP) — Shuntaro Tanikawa used to think poems descended like an inspiration from the heavens. As he grew older — he is now 90 — Tanikawa sees poems as welling up from the ground.



The poems still come to him, a word or fragments of lines, as he wakes up in the morning. What inspires the words comes from outside. The poetry comes from deep within.

“Writing poetry has become really fun these days,” he said recently in his elegant home in the Tokyo suburbs.

Shelves were overflowing with books. His collection of ancient bronze animal figurines stand in neat rows in a glass box next to stacks of his favorite classical music CDs.

“In the past, there was something about its being a job, being commissioned. Now, I can write as I want,” he said.

Tanikawa is among Japan’s most famous modern poets, and a master of free verse on the everyday.

He has more than a hundred poetry books published. With titles like “To Live,” “Listen” and “Grass,” his poems are stark, rhythmical but conversational, defying elaborate traditional literary styles.

William Elliott, who has translated Tanikawa for years, compares his place in Japanese poetic history to how T. S. Eliot marked the beginning of a new era in English poetry.

Tanikawa is also a reputed translator, having translated Charles Schulz’ “Peanuts” comic strip into Japanese since the 1970s. He demonstrated his ear for the poetic in the colloquial with finesse, choosing “yare yare” for “good grief,” transcending the lifestyle differences of East and West in the universal world of children and animals.

“He was more a poet or a philosopher,” he said of Schulz.

Tanikawa has translated many others' works, including Mother Goose, as well as Maurice Sendak and Leo Lionni. In turn, his works have been widely translated, including into Chinese and European languages.

Tanikawa’s poem “Two Billion Light-Years of Solitude” catapulted him to stardom in the early 1950s. Tanikawa had his eyes on the cosmos and Earth’s spot in the universe, years before Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote the magical realism classic, “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

Tanikawa was always in demand, the darling of poetry readings around the world, a rare example of a poet who effortlessly crossed over to commercialism without compromising his art.

But poetry used to be a job — his profession, his daily work.

Tanikawa is the lyricist for the Japanese theme song for Osamu Tezuka’s TV animated series “Astro Boy.” He also wrote the script for the narration of Kon Ichikawa’s documentary of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

A popular author of children’s picture books, he is often featured in textbooks.


He swears he doesn’t have “projects” anymore because of his age, which has made walking and going out more difficult. But in the same breath he says he is collaborating with his musician son Kensaku Tanikawa, who lives next door, on what they call “Piano Twitter.”

He has already written dozens of poems to go with the score. They are all short, more abstracted than his past work, conjuring surreal images like staircases descending to nowhere, or a caterpillar dancing uncontrollably.

He isn’t sure how the work will be presented, but speculated it could become a book with a barcode so readers can listen to the poems being read with music online.

Among his voluminous output, he is most proud of his 1970s “Kotoba Asobi Uta” series, which utilized singsong alliterations and onomatopoeia, as the title “Word Play Songs” implies.

One repeats the phrase “kappa,” a mythical monster, as in: “kappa kapparatta,” which translates to “the kappa took off with something” — a “rappa,” a “trumpet,” as it turns out in a later line. The poetry is, both visually and aurally, a sheer celebration of the Japanese language.

That was unique, Tanikawa said, and he still likes what he came up with.

“For me, the Japanese language is the ground. Like a plant, I place my roots, drink in the nutrients of the Japanese language, sprouting leaves, flowers and bearing fruit,” he said.

Married and divorced three times — to a poet, an actress and an illustrator — Tanikawa stressed he was changing with age, noting 90 felt much older than 80, and he was getting forgetful.

Yet he appeared on a recent sunny afternoon totally comfortable with social media and everyday technology, although he used a magnifying glass to make out fine print. He was curious about new movies, including what might be on Netflix. He likes eating cookies, he said, looking more like a mischievous child than the great-grandfather that he is.

He usually works at his huge desk in a spacious study, which has a window that lets in the breeze and a fuzzy ray of light. It looks out into a yard with flowers. On the wall hangs a sepia-toned portrait of his mother with his father, Tetsuzo Tanikawa, a philosopher.

While growing up, Tanikawa was more afraid about his mother’s dying than of any other death. He also remembers how he saw corpses upon corpses after the American air raids of Tokyo during World War II.

“Death has become more real. It used to be more conceptual when I was young. But now my body is approaching death,” he said.

He hopes to die as his father did, in his sleep after a night of partying, at 94.

“I am more curious about where I go when I die. It’s a different world, right? Of course, I don’t want pain. I don’t want to die after major surgery or anything. I just want to die, all of a sudden,” he said.

When asked to read his works out loud, he doesn’t hesitate.

He reads excerpts from his latest collaboration with his son. Then he reads his debut work that, translated into English, ends with these lines:

“The universe is twisted, / That is why we try to connect. / The universe keeps expanding, / That is why we are all afraid. / In two billion light-years of solitude / I suddenly sneeze.”

So what does he think?

“It feels like a poem written by someone else,” Tanikawa said.

But it’s a good poem?

He nods with conviction.

___

Yuri Kageyama is on Twitter: https://twitter.com/yurikageyama

Yuri Kageyama, The Associated Press

As natural gas expands in Gulf, residents fear rising damage



LAKE CHARLES, Louisiana (AP) — The front lawn of Lydia Larce’s home is strewn with debris: Remnants of cabinets and chunks of pink shower marble lie between dumpsters. She lives in a FEMA trailer out back, her home in shambles more than a year after Hurricane Laura tore through Lake Charles.



Larce, like many in Southwest Louisiana, has what she calls “storm PTSD.” Tornado warnings trigger anxiety. She fidgets and struggles to sleep.

"The fear and the unknown — it has me on an edge,” Larce said. “I’m scared.”

A string of devastating hurricanes has torn through this region in recent years. Nationally, too, there have been more Category 4 and 5 hurricane landfalls in the past five years than in the previous 50 years combined. Larce and her neighbors know they are on the front lines of climate change.

Her region is now the epicenter of a trend that she fears will make those disasters even more destructive.

Developers plan to build a series of liquefied natural gas export facilities across Southwest Louisiana, already the heart of the industry. Even in a state with a heavy industrial base, these facilities are among the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in Louisiana.

“They’re an absolute powerhouse for greenhouse gas emissions,” said Naomi Yoder, a staff scientist at Healthy Gulf, a nonprofit that advocates for clean energy. That’s because these export facilities tend to burn off, or flare, natural gas.

Greenhouse gases are raising global temperatures and fueling extreme weather, from wildfires to violent storms like the ones that have pummeled Larce’s hometown.

“We all are living in chaos," Larce said.

For a while, it looked as though an era of steadily expanding fossil fuel facilities might be ending. Last year, after taking office, President Joseph Biden announced his intention to fight climate change by eliminating fossil fuels from electricity generation by 2035 and by sharply reducing emissions from the rest of the economy.

Yet since Biden became president, the U.S. has become the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas as demand for the fuel, known as LNG, has escalated.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine suddenly intensified the push. It heightened demand for natural gas, especially for countries in Europe that relied on Russian energy but now need to cut those ties.

Seizing the opportunity, the natural gas industry promoted U.S.-produced LNG as a way to fill the gaps, and prices for the fuel have skyrocketed. American terminals are now exporting gas at full capacity, which is why the expansion of the terminals has accelerated.

It is along the Gulf Coast, in a line from Louisiana to Texas, where the new and proposed export terminals are clustered. Talk to some locals and government officials and you'll hear unqualified support for the facilities in this battered region.

“It’s a significant boon to our economy, because it provides good, high-paying jobs,” said Eric Tarver, a member of the Calcasieu Parish School Board and chief financial officer of Lake Charles Toyota. “More than that, it’s a tremendous amount of tax revenue that just dwarfs what we’ve had from any other industry.”

But some long-time residents — often the ones who've lost the most to the storms — dispute those claims, saying that few of those coveted jobs end up going to people who grew up in the region.

REGION IN DISTRESS

Scattered across the neighborhoods of Lake Charles, blue tarps cover dozens of dilapidated roofs. Bungalows, pockmarked by gaping holes, are marred by broken siding and boarded-up windows — evidence of the damage inflicted by Hurricanes Laura and Delta more than a year ago. Yet with few other options, some residents are living here under the tarps.

“I feel Southwest Louisiana has been made a sacrificial lamb,” said Roishetta Ozane, a single mother of six and an organizer for Healthy Gulf.

An outspoken critic of the expansion of LNG facilities, Ozane warns her neighbors that the emissions worsen global warming and violent storms and impair their community's air quality. She has raised money, organized food drives and helped neighbors navigate government agencies to obtain relief after disasters hit.

“Now is the time to get people’s attention, to open their eyes that climate change is real,” Ozane said. “They’re going to continue to bring these facilities here. We’ve already had these major hurricanes here. Where are we going to live?”

As she drives around a predominantly Black area of Lake Charles, past shuttered businesses and crumbling homes, Ozane's phone buzzes with requests for help.

“Are you living in a FEMA trailer?” she asks one caller. “Text me what you need.”

There are other helpers here. Cindy Robertson is one of them. In her front yard bursting with daisies and ferns, she refills a pantry box that she stocks each morning to help feed homeless neighbors. By mid-afternoon, it’s nearly empty.

Her neighborhood has endured seven federally declared disasters in two years, and she's grown increasingly concerned, even though her family worked in coal mining. Robertson, 62, runs a nonprofit to help vulnerable people recover.

From her house, with its seascape paintings and tapestries, she provides water, sleeping bags and tents. With a succession of LNG terminals opening around her, she worries that her region hasn't yet seen the worst.

“The more we have more pollution from greenhouse gases," she fears, “the worse our storms are going to get.”

A few miles away, Cameron LNG began exporting LNG in 2019. Further south, Venture Global Calcasieu Pass is shipping its first loads.

Still another LNG company, Driftwood, recently broke ground to build an export facility. That’s on top of more than a dozen oil, gas and chemical processing plants surrounding her community.

Robertson would much prefer increased investment in renewable energy, in line with Biden's stated priorities when he took office.

“Instead of focusing on LNG, expanding what they already have... we need to take all that brainpower and all that money and put it into expanding our renewable resources,” Robertson said.

EXPORTS SURGING

The use of wind, solar and other renewable energy has grown as prices of solar components and wind turbines have plunged. But so has the world’s thirst for natural gas. In February, the U.S. exported 317 billion cubic feet of liquefied natural gas — six times times the amount five years earlier.

Investment in LNG terminals catapulted from nothing in 2011, before the U.S. export industry existed, to $63 billion over the next decade, according to Rystad Energy. The firm projects that investment could swell an additional $100 billion over the next two decades.

That's despite warnings from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that emissions from existing fossil fuel infrastructure alone would cause global warming to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) — a level that scientists say would bring dangerous consequences.

Of the eight terminals now exporting LNG, five lie on the coast of Louisiana and Texas. At least 16 more plus four expansions are proposed or under construction, nearly all along that same stretch of Gulf coastline.

The projects are backed by Exxon Mobil, Qatar Energy, Total Energies and numerous other global energy giants. Financing for several proposed plants comes from BlackRock, Vanguard and Mitsubishi, according to Global Energy Monitor.

At Cameron LNG in Hackberry, Louisiana, storage tanks loom over the wetlands next to rows of intersecting pipes. There, gas is treated to remove impurities. Then it's cooled to a liquid at minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit to flow onto ships. In a narrow channel, a huge French vessel called LNG Endeavor, escorted by tug boats, heads for the facility, dwarfing the homes it passes.

“We’re delivering a cleaner, more environmentally friendly fuel,” said Charlie Riedl, executive director of the Center for LNG, the industry's lobbying group. “The U.S. can use that to help defuse some of the geopolitical issues around the world by delivering a reliable fuel source.”

Initially, Biden's administration held off on approving requests that would expand the LNG industry. But after the war in Ukraine began, the Energy Department allowed some facilities to upgrade, increasing how much they could produce.

“The U.S. is exporting every molecule of liquefied natural gas that we can to alleviate supply issues in Europe,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in March, urging the oil and gas industry to ramp up production.

Asked whether boosting fossil fuel exports contradicts Biden's climate goals, Granholm told The Associated Press “we have got to do both." She said she believes the United States can help its allies, reduce the cost of fuel and transition to more sustainable options.

Since the war increased the need for alternatives to Russian gas, some European LNG import projects that had stalled are being revived, said Emily McClain, a vice president at Rystad.

“It’s really showing we’re not quite ready to table gas and move to cleaner or greener energies,” McClain said.

Riedl said he would like the administration to do even more, by approving any of the proposed LNG export terminals.

Louisiana offers a property tax break of up to 10 years to companies that build LNG terminals. Even with those tax breaks, the increased property tax income provides a windfall for the area, said Tarver, the school board member.

With Driftwood LNG beginning construction of a facility, the expected jobs are a “shot in the arm after a devastating series of disasters,” Tarver said. That the world is looking to the Gulf Coast as an energy supplier is, he said, a source of pride.

“That’s a very powerful thing to us locally, just because we’re big Pro-America, proud American people here," Tarver said.

Others, like Ozane, argue that the tax breaks give away too much.

“We have a big homelessness problem," Ozane said. "Our schools look horrible. If LNG is doing so much for the state, why is it like that?”

CLEANER THAN COAL?

Down the road from Cameron LNG, a new export terminal has opened about a mile from John Allaire’s beachfront home. His property, where he's lived in an RV for 17 years since Hurricane Rita washed away his bunk house, is a refuge for spawning shrimp and diving sea birds. When his children were young, Allaire brought them fishing and hunting there.

At sunrise, the dark sky begins to crack into shades of orange and gray. A bright orb on the horizon looks like the rising sun. It’s not. It’s a flare from Venture Global’s Calcasieu Pass LNG, the latest export terminal to open. The flare, a mixture of flames and smoke that pours out when the facility burns natural gas, had been burning non-stop for a week, Allaire said.

“That’s pure profit and pollution going up the stack,” he said.

Allaire, 66, a retired environmental engineer for an oil company, doesn't oppose oil and gas use. His property sits on a former oilfield.

But he fears the destruction of the wetlands he loves: The soft waving cordgrass where black rails hide, the pelicans diving down over the lapping water to catch fish.

Commonwealth LNG has proposed another export terminal, sandwiched between Allaire's yard and the LNG terminal that just opened. It would cover about half the ponds that are packed with blue crabs and mud minnows.

“I’m glad there’s still places like this left — I really don’t want to see it paved over,” Allaire said.

The wetlands he loves play a beneficial role for climate, too. They absorb carbon dioxide. And they provide a buffer from storm surges.

Together, the four LNG export terminals on the Gulf Coast emitted nearly 10 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2020 — comparable to all of Costa Rica, according to the Global Carbon Project.

The LNG plants are tied to climate change in another way, too. Along the whole pathway to export, from the wells where companies drill to the ships getting loaded with LNG, methane — the powerful greenhouse gas that's the primary ingredient of natural gas — can escape.

And it does, from leaky wells, pipelines, compressors and storage tanks. In the Permian Basin, one of the world's richest oil and gas fields, well heads and pipelines are leaking far more methane than previously thought, according to a study that concluded that 9% of the gas produced in New Mexico's side of the basin is leaking.

“That's a shocking leakage estimate,” Rob Jackson, a professor of earth system science at Stanford University and chairman of the Global Carbon Project, an international research group, said about natural gas.

At that that rate, he said, the leaking methane alone is warming the climate more than the carbon dioxide that would be released if all the produced natural gas were burned.

Natural gas proponents say it's better for the climate than burning coal, because it releases fewer emissions when burned. But gas isn’t substituting for coal in most places, Jackson noted. Instead, as energy demand grows globally, natural gas is being used in addition to coal and other sources.

According to projections by the Energy Information Administration, natural gas use will drive an overall increase in greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. from 2037 to 2050 as the nation’s population and its reliance on gas grow.

To show it's trying to limit its environmental impact, Cameron LNG reduced its emissions by 10% from 2020 to 2021. It's also built 500 acres of tidal marsh, using material it digs up when dredging the canal.

But residents who are enduring the trauma of relentless storms know any facility that adds emissions to the atmosphere magnifies the likelihood of destruction in vulnerable communities.

“In building more LNG export terminals," Jackson said, “we’re locking in emissions for decades to come.”

______

Associated Press journalists Janet McConnaughey in New Orleans and Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Cathy Bussewitz And Martha Irvine, The Associated Press

15 people charged with criminal contempt over pipeline protest, 10 others await fate



PRINCE GEORGE, B.C. — The British Columbia Prosecution Service says 15 people are being charged with criminal contempt of court following protests last fall over a natural gas pipeline being built near Houston in northern B.C.


© Provided by The Canadian Press15 people charged with criminal contempt over pipeline protest, 10 others await fate

The prosecution service says it will take four more weeks to decide if there's enough evidence to charge an additional 10 people, while two others who were arrested won't be prosecuted.

Court documents say all 27 people were arrested over six days between September and November along a forest service road leading to a work site for the Coastal GasLink pipeline.

Those charged are alleged to have breached a B.C. Supreme Court injunction granted to Coastal GasLink in 2019 that prohibited blockades or interference with the company's construction activities.

The 670-kilometre pipeline is expected to carry natural gas across northern B.C. to the LNG Canada terminal in Kitimat.

The project has sparked protests across the country in recent years by those in support of Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs who say it violates their traditional laws, while the elected council of the Wet'suwet'en First Nation and others nearby have agreed to the project.

In a statement read in B.C. Supreme Court on Wednesday, the prosecution service says it worked closely with RCMP to obtain investigative materials and considered correspondence from both a lawyer for some of the defendants and the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs.

The review concerning the 10 defendants whose fate has yet to be determined will focus on their knowledge of the terms of the injunction, it says.


There wasn't enough evidence to show the two people who won't be prosecuted were aware of the terms of the injunction, it says, even if their conduct had potential to infringe upon it.

"Because of the way matters arose, police did not have a copy of the injunction at the time of the arrests and were only able to paraphrase it orally after the protesters had been arrested," the prosecution service says in the court documents.

The guidelines the Crown uses to determine charges in cases of civil disobedience say it's not always in the public interest to pursue criminal contempt charges.

Factors favouring prosecution may include, but aren't limited to, violent conflict resulting in physical harm, serious property damage, an assault on an officer, or less serious but persistent offences that significantly obstruct public access.

The Crown must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused defied or disobeyed a court order in a public way.

A statement from the Gidimt'en checkpoint, a logging road camp that's led by members of one of five clans within the broader Wet'suwet'en Nation, alleges they are experiencing an escalation of harassment and intimidation on the territory.

The camp issued a call to supporters last week saying it needs help to prevent Coastal GasLink from drilling under the Wedzin Kwa river, also known as the Morice River, which it says violates Wet'suwet'en rights and title.

Coastal GasLink says in a statement that it has dealt with numerous violations of B.C. Supreme Court injunctions since 2018 that are meant to allow safe access and construction of the project.

It says its work is fully authorized and permitted by the federal and provincial governments, with local Indigenous support, and the company agrees with the charges.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 1, 2022.

The Canadian Press

Members of Parliament unanimously back bill to outlaw modern slavery


OTTAWA — Members of Parliament unanimously voted Wednesday to clamp down on modern slavery by backing a bill requiring Canadian companies to ensure they are not using forced labour or exploiting child workers overseas.



Labour Minister Seamus O'Regan ensured government backing for the private member's bill that would make Canadian firms and government departments scrutinize supply chains with the aim of protecting workers.

O'Regan said the Liberals want the bill, introduced by a senator, to go to committee where it may be strengthened further with government amendments.

In a vote in the House of Commons at the bill's second reading, it was backed unanimously by MPs, including the Conservatives, Bloc Québécois, NDP and Greens.

Most private member’s bills — introduced by individuals rather than the government — do not receive ministerial backing, parliamentary time or proceed through all the parliamentary stages needed to become law.

O'Regan said the vote was an "important first step" in tackling "forced labour in our supply chains."

"We voted to send this bill to committee. There we'll look at amendments to strengthen it," he said.

The bill, tabled in the Senate by Sen. Julie Miville-Dechene, would make Canadian firms check that none of their products or components are made in sweatshops employing children or adults forced to work excessive hours for free or for paltry pay.

The senator has warned that a number of products sold in Canada, including coffee, cocoa and sugarcane, may be linked to child or forced labour. She has also warned about imports of products made in factories in the Xinjiang region of China where members of the Uyghur community have been forced to work.

The senator's bill is one of a number of private bills cracking down on forced labour in supply chains that politicians have attempted to get backing for in the past four years.

They include a bill tabled by Liberal MP John McKay, who has long argued for action to make companies ensure their products are not produced overseas by forced labour or children.

Liberal MP Marcus Powlowski recently tabled the same bill as McKay's and the NDP have tabled two similar bills.

The senator's bill, known as Bill S-211 in Parliament, will now move to the foreign affairs committee for scrutiny, a further parliamentary stage before becoming law.

A report by the House of Commons international human rights subcommittee said that in 2016 some 4.3 million children were involved in forced labour, a figure the International Labour Organization warned was an underestimate.

The report warned that child labour most often occurs at the lowest tiers of the supply chain out of the sight of buyers, inspectors and consumers. In South and Southeast Asia, children have been found making clothes, fishing and processing seafood.

The report found child labour interferes with young people's educations and can involve work in hazardous conditions, including with toxic substances or at extreme temperatures.

It can also include confinement at work sites and indentured labour, where whole families are forced to work to repay debts.

Rocio Domingo Ramos, business and human rights policy and research officer at Anti-Slavery International, has warned that Canada is lagging behind countries such as France, Germany and Norway which have already introduced laws requiring firms to check their supply chains to make sure their products are not made using forced labour.

In 2020, the Canadian government prohibited importation of goods produced by forced labour under the customs tariff.

Miville-Dechene has warned that at least 90 million children and adults around the world could be involved in forced labour, including to produce cheap products for wealthy countries such as Canada.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 1, 2022.

Marie Woolf, The Canadian Press

OPINION: It has always been difficult to be an expat American in New Zealand.

I feel grief and guilt for being American

Art Nahill

Jun 02 2022

ART NAHILL/SUPPLIED
Art Nahill, who lived in the United States for 45 years, has struggled to be an apologist for it recently.

It has always been hard to answer these frequently asked questions - why is America like this? Why are Americans like that?

Out of an abiding fondness for the country in which I was born and lived for 45 years, I have always felt it important to try and answer.

“America is actually many countries,” I often say.

I try to explain the ways in which its puritanical origins, frontier experience, deep and troubled racial history, and idolatry of rugged individualism, have combined to make America the much-loved and much-hated country it is.

I have often felt, in trying to explain all of this, as though I was defending the bad behaviour of a good but troubled mate who, despite his well-meaning heart, seems to screw up everything he touches.

But, if it has been hard to be an apologist for America in the past, that role has proven impossible over the last several months.

There was bombastic and frequently violent opposition to proven public health measures during the peak of the pandemic.

It has also recently been leaked that the Supreme Court of the United States could be poised to overturn the landmark legal precedent of Roe v Wade, affecting abortion rights.

In the eyes of far too many, it is an abuse of governmental power to enforce mask and vaccine mandates, but pregnancy, not so much.

Even more recently, re-enacting a far too common scenario, an 18-year-old walked into a primary school in Texas and shot children dead. The response from some local and national politicians has predictably been to advocate for more guns rather than fewer.

The only thing that can stop a bad guy wth a gun is a good guy with a gun, or so the thinking goes.

So much for being pro-life.

The easy virtue-signalling of mostly Republican conservatives seems to be that regard for the sanctity of life seems to end somewhere in the birth canal.

I am simultaneously outraged and heartbroken.

This country that I have done my best to understand and explain to outsiders. This country, whose amazing potential I have always loved and celebrated. This country of diversity. This country of innovation and creativity, has become like that good mate who has gone completely off the rails.

It seems to be succumbing to its inner demons, racism and bigotry, and its addiction to religion and violence.

It is spiralling downward into a state of rabid self-loathing.

And I can only stand back and watch it unfold from a distance.

I grieve for its loss of decency, reason, and tolerance.

But I also feel an acute and enduring sense of guilt for turning my back, as I must now, on a good, but troubled mate, blinded and hell-bent on his own destruction.

ABC News' Linsey Davis speaks with James Kirchick, author of "Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington" about homophobic fears by the federal government in different eras of recent history.

 

ABC News' Mireya Villarreal speaks with transgender families directly impacted by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's directive that investigates parents providing gender affirming care for children.

GOP Lawmaker Manages To Blame Abortion For Mass Shootings

"Life has no value to a lot of these folks," Rep. Billy Long of Missouri said.


Josephine Harvey
Jun. 1, 2022

HUFFPOST



There’s a new contender for most absurd GOP scapegoat for gun violence.

Rep. Billy Long (R-Mo.) was asked during an interview with Missouri radio station The Eagle 93.9 on Wednesday whether there was any appetite among Republicans in Congress to pursue changes to gun laws. It came in the wake of a gunman’s massacre of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas.

Long, who is running for the U.S. Senate, said guns aren’t the issue. He criticized proponents of gun control for “trying to blame an inanimate object for all of these tragedies.”

He said there are a few solutions but that the problem can be traced back to when abortion became legal nationwide.

“When I was growing up in Springfield, you had one or two murders a year,” he said. “Now we have two, three, four a week in Springfield, Missouri.

“So something has happened to our society. I go back to abortion, when we decided it was OK to murder kids in their mothers’ wombs. Life has no value to a lot of these folks.”

The data doesn’t support that claim. The Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973 established abortion rights in the U.S.

In 1970, 499 murders were reported in Missouri. in 1975, the figure was 505. And in 2019, 568 murders were reported in the state.

The data does show, however, that the gun problem in America is linked to the proliferation of guns and the ease at which people can obtain them. Other countries have had great success in curbing gun violence by tightening gun laws or banning guns and implementing gun buyback programs.

Semiautomatic assault rifles, the guns frequently used in mass shootings like the one last week in Uvalde, are also shown to be part of the problem. In 1994, sweeping legislation was passed that banned certain assault weapons. It expired in 2004. Mass shooting deaths were 70% less likely during the ban, one study found.

“If there was something that would work that would prevent some of these things, any reasonable person is going to look at anything like that,” Long said.

“But to this day and time, no one has been able to come up with any kind of a suggestion that would have helped in any of these situations.”

He proposed retrofitting schools with additional doors so that all classrooms had both entry and exit points. Classrooms without extra doors are just “killing zones,” he said. He suggested the money spent on foreign aid to Ukraine could have been used to do this.

Elected Republicans, many of whom receive significant campaign support from the gun lobby, have blamed just about everything but guns in the wake of a recent spate of mass shootings. The supposed culprits include “wokeness,” architecture and a departure from worshipping Jesus

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), for example, thinks the issue is schools have too many doors.

ON THE OTHER HAND;

'These kids are being marketed militarized weaponry': Texas state senator | ABCNL

 

#DemocracyNow

"The Failure Begins with Greg Abbott": Texas Lawmaker Demands Gun Control After Uvalde Massacre

NATIONALISM IS REACTIONARY

Legault doubles down on decline of French as Bill 96 is signed into law
Philip Authier, Montreal Gazette - Yesterday 

Quebec Premier François Legault responds to reporters' questions after Bill 96 was adopted on Tuesday, May 24, 2022 at the legislature in Quebec City. Simon Jolin-Barrette, minister for the French language, looks on.

QUEBEC — In the hot seat for comparing Quebec’s language situation to that of Louisiana, Premier François Legault dug in his heels Wednesday, announcing he now wants a more complete statistical picture of the use of French in all aspects of society.

“Everyone has to concede there is a decline in French,” Legault told reporters as he arrived for question period at the National Assembly. “When we look at the statistics, the language most used in the home is in decline, the language most used at work is in decline.

“It becomes a question of time. If this decline continues, it will take how many years before French is not used a lot?”

Legault quoted government statistics showing the number of people on the island of Montreal using French in the workplace has gone from 59.5 per cent in 2011 to 56.8 per cent.

He said the data is one reason his Coalition Avenir Québec government adopted Bill 96 to bolster the Charter of the French Language.

“There is an urgency to act,” the premier said.

Legault made the statements to justify his new campaign to pressure the federal government into surrendering more powers over immigration to Quebec. Specifically, he wants the province to have control over the category of family unification, a request Ottawa has already denied.

At his party’s policy convention over the weekend , Legault said immigration will be a key issue in the October general election, and that obtaining more power is a question of survival for the Quebec nation.

“If we continue with a system where Ottawa picks these immigrants and only half speak French, in a matter of time we could become a Louisiana,” he said at the convention.

At the same time, the CAQ government has been trying to ease the fears of the English-speaking community over Bill 96. It took out a full-page ad in Tuesday’s Montreal Gazette titled Bill 96: The Facts and stating “several falsehoods have circulated.”

Pundits and critics have complained the ad does not respond to the concerns of the anglophone community.

But on Wednesday Legault re-tweeted a comment made by a citizen complaining about the Gazette’s coverage of the bill. “Having to pay for full-page ads in a newspaper to respond to the disinformation in the same newspaper,” said the tweet.

All this comes as Legault is being accused by the opposition of inventing a crisis over immigration for political reasons while Quebec heads into an election campaign.

Liberal MNA Saul Polo, who was born in Santa Marta, Colombia, and moved to Quebec 30 years ago, told the legislature on Tuesday he “refused to accept the label that immigration is a threat to the Quebec nation.”

He said it’s not the government’s business if he chooses to speak Spanish at home and French outside. He was especially irked to hear Legault say Tuesday in the legislature that Polo’s success at integrating into Quebec society was an “anecdote,” and that the overall problem remains.

“Being treated as an anecdote by the premier wounded me profoundly,” Polo told reporters. “I and many Quebecers made all the necessary effort to integrate and become full citizens.”

Legault said he meant to say Polo is an example and that the premier is more concerned with the global situation. Data shows fewer people are speaking French in the home and the trend will continue, he said.

“The data we have, language spoken at home and the language of work, are important,” he said. “I would like to add another statistic. So I have asked (minister of the French language) Simon Jolin-Barrette and his team for data on the language used in the public sector.

“What we are saying is, we want French to be the common language. Well, we have to look what is the language at home, what is the language at work, what is the language in the public sector. They go together.

“If there is nobody who speaks French at home, well, that means French will eventually disappear.”

Legault grew irritated when pressed by a Gazette reporter to expand on the issue of languages spoken at home.

“Do you agree with me that if 50 years from now, nobody is speaking French at home, that the future of French wouldn’t be good? Do you agree with that? So you have your answer.”

He then left the room.

D’Arcy-McGee Liberal MNA David Birnbaum, the party’s point person for the English-speaking community, later reported hearing Legault make remarks about citizens in the West Island in the legislature during the question period that followed the news conference.

“Shameful,” Birnbaum tweeted. “Just now, François Legault, off-micro(phone) but audible and twice, said: ‘C’est le West Island qui s’énerve!’ This was his outrageous response to our question-period intervention on his on-the-record attacks on Quebecers whose mother tongue is other than French.”

Legault grew up on the West Island, in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue .

The premier received a strong rebuke from the Quebec Community Groups Network, the umbrella group for English-language organizations, which responded with its own tweet.

“Premier François Legault — officially the minister responsible for relations with English-speaking Quebecers — is showing incredible disrespect for his constituency,” said the tweet.

Sparks were already flying in question period, with the opposition parties ganging up on Legault for a second day in a row because of his decision to wade into the emotional subject of language and immigration.

“If the premier thinks 14,000 people (the approximate number of family-unification immigrants per year) are going to lead us to Louisiana in a few years, it is because he is trapped in his ideology,” Québec solidaire co-spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois fired across the floor at Legault.

“In the ideology of the premier, immigrants are a threat to French.”

Legault continued his offensive on the same day Bill 96 became law.

In a short signing ceremony early Wednesday, Lt-Gov. J. Michel Doyon signed the bill, which was adopted last week in the National Assembly .

Jolin-Barrette said Bill 96 will give Quebec the “tools it needs” to protect and promote French.

He said some measures will take effect immediately, such as the creation of the Ministry of the French Language. Other measures, like those applying to commercial signs and francization requirements for small businesses, will apply in three years.

The ceiling on enrolment in English CEGEPs will kick in next year, but the requirement to take additional French courses will come into effect in two years.

Within the next year, Jolin-Barrette will table a new government linguistic policy.

“There’s time to get things done correctly and we’re giving people time to adapt,” he told reporters.

pauthier@postmedia.com

Related

Pundits, advocacy groups knock CAQ's Bill 96 ad in the Montreal Gazette

Quebec's use of notwithstanding clause for Bill 96 opens constitutional debate

Jamil Jivani: Quebec's Bill 96 hardly at odds with conservative movement

There is an emerging consensus among Canadian journalists and politicians on Quebec’s Bill 96, which requires most government and many business services to be offered exclusively in French, with specific exceptions. Before jumping on any bandwagons, we should try to understand what exactly is happening in our country’s second biggest province.

Anglophone Canadians may reasonably conclude that Premier François Legault and his ruling Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) are on an island unto themselves. Five of six Conservative Party of Canada leadership candidates have publicly opposed Bill 96, as has the Conservative Party of Quebec, the Quebec Liberal Party, and numerous members of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal caucus.

The general criticism of Bill 96, which was signed into law Wednesday, comes down to its potential to marginalize anglophone minority communities and non-francophone immigrants. Comments from the political left and right sound remarkably similar: former NDP leader Tom Mulcair described the bill as a return to a period of “great darkness” for Quebec, while the Washington Post’s JJ McCullough said it detracts from “Canadian progressiveness.”


But, outside of Canada, premier Legault is far from alone. In fact, there is a growing global conversation about national conservatism that is philosophically aligned with what the CAQ is implementing in Quebec. Critics of Bill 96 should account for this reality, rather than dismiss the legislation as simple pandering for votes.

The term “national conservatism” has been popularized by Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony, who serves as president of the Herzl Institute and chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation. Hazony’s most recent book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery , outlines a vision of conservative politics that is based on the view that a person’s political obligations grow from his or her belonging to a family and nation. This vision conceives of language as one of a handful of traditional institutions (in addition to religion, laws, government, business) that families and nations use to pass their values on to future generations.

Quebec fits Hazony’s definition of what constitutes a nation: “a number of tribes with a common language or religion, and a past history of acting as a body for the common defence and other large‐​scale enterprises.” In fact, given Quebec’s commitment to secularism, the French language is an even more important bond between the province’s diverse communities than it might be otherwise.

National conservatism is gaining significant traction . In the past three years, Hazony’s Edmund Burke Foundation has hosted conferences in London, Brussels, Washington, Orlando, and Rome featuring some of the biggest names in politics and media: Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, entrepreneur Peter Thiel, former European Union MP Daniel Hannan, and The Spectator’s Douglas Murray. Earlier this year, in Brussels, the Foundation welcomed two prime ministers: Poland’s Mateusz Morawiecki and Slovenia’s Janez Janša.

I don’t mean to suggest that premier Legault is part of the national conservatism network, or even knows that it exists. But what’s clear is that in the context of this global conversation, the CAQ are not nearly the outcasts that other politicians or journalists might make them out to be. Leaders from around the world share Legault’s view that language is central to national identity, and that a nation’s traditional institutions should be primarily focused on passing its values on from one generation to the next.

That Premier Legault finds himself in international company doesn’t mean Bill 96 is without flaws. The bill’s most incisive critics will argue that this legislation goes too far by curbing the constitutional rights of citizens. There is certainly a debate to be had on that point. It’s also worth questioning if Bill 96 is the best way to achieve its stated purpose. Research published by the Review of Economic Studies in 2020 indicates that heavy-handed assimilationist policies can have the opposite effect than what’s intended.

But the fact that Legault’s vision for Quebec can be easily placed in a global context does strengthen the case for taking Bill 96 seriously. The ideas at play are bigger than one politician’s re-election campaign. This is about the future of Canada, and how the nation of Quebec fits into our country.

National Post

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Mouse study links air pollution exposure to adverse outcomes in pregnancy

UCLA research deepens understanding of air pollution’s impact on placenta

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - LOS ANGELES HEALTH SCIENCES

FINDINGS 

A new study in mice by UCLA scientists reveals how exposure to traffic-related air pollutants causes cellular changes in the placenta that can lead to pregnancy complications and affect the health of both mother and offspring.  

The researchers found that the cellular changes caused by chronic exposure to air pollutants were related to immune activation by foreign substances entering the blood from the lungs. This immune response attacks some of the placental cells that are required to maintain the placenta structurally, and most importantly, the blood flow from mother to developing baby.  

BACKGROUND 

Although previous research has analyzed the effect of air pollution on pregnancy, those studies did not utilize cell-specific methods or focus on molecular signatures of the placenta. This study is the first to assess how such exposure can negatively affect the placenta, leading to adverse outcomes in pregnancy.  

METHOD 

One group of female mice was exposed to environmental air pollutants nasally starting two months before conception and during pregnancy, while the control group of mice was exposed to saline. By the end of the study, tissue samples indicated that inhaled air pollutants had compromised the composition of the placental cells and molecular signatures. Researchers also identified inflammation in the mucosal lining of the uterus triggered by pollution. 

IMPACT 

The placenta is essential for a successful pregnancy and for maintaining the health of both the mother and the baby. These study findings suggest that maternal cells of immunity may be responsible for destruction of vital vascular cells in the placenta. This auto-destruction of placental structures can disrupt the maintenance of a healthy pregnancy or at least affect nutrient supply from the mother to the baby, with the potential for adverse pregnancy consequences or outcomes such as preterm labor or uteroplacental insufficiency as encountered in pre-eclampsia. 

"The cellular changes we have observed could provide the missing link between exposure to air pollutants and adverse pregnancy outcomes, thereby helping to focus development of preventive strategies for at-risk pregnancies,” said Dr. Sherin Devaskar, lead author of the study and physician-in-chief of UCLA Mattel Children's Hospital and distinguished professor of pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. 

The research also underscores the need to examine the timing of exposure and whether acute v. chronic exposures have different effects. The authors also plan to study dietary interventions to alleviate distress on placental molecular signatures, nutrient supply and development.  

AUTHORS 

The collaborative study also involved Dr. Suhas G. Kallapur, chief of neonatology and developmental biology; Amit Ganguly, staff research associate; Shubhamoy Ghosh, PhD, assistant project scientist; Monica Cappelletti, PhD, adjunct assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine, all four in the department of Pediatrics-Neonatology at UCLA; Matteo Pellegrini, a professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology at UCLA and Anela Tosevska, PhD, bioinformatics scientist in the division of rheumatology, internal medicine at Medical University of Vienna, Austria.  

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JOURNAL

Scientific Reports

DOI

10.1038/s41598-022-12340-z 

ARTICLE TITLE

Integrated analysis of an in vivo model of intra-nasal exposure to instilled air pollutants reveals cell-type specific responses in the placenta