Some Edmonton politicians skeptical about Premier Smith's pitch for city political parties

Lisa Johnson - 12h ago

Edmonton Mayor Amarjeet Sohi.© Greg Southam

In an interview with Postmedia columnist Rick Bell published Wednesday, Smith said she’s been lobbied on the issue in both Calgary and Edmonton.

“It may be something that makes sense for big cities rather than small municipalities, but there seems to be an appetite for it in Calgary and Edmonton,” she said, adding she will be asking her cabinet ministers to consult on the issue.

In a statement to Postmedia, Edmonton Mayor Amarjeet Sohi said he hasn’t heard anything about the idea from the premier or the UCP government, but he believes the current system works well.

“At a time when we are seeing so much political polarization across the country, keeping municipal councils not affiliated to any political party is the best approach,” he said.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Edmonton Ward O-day’min Coun. Anne Stevenson acknowledged such a system could simplify things for voters, and help provide support for those who face barriers to entering politics.

However, Stevenson said at the municipal governance level, she doesn’t think it’s helpful.

“I really value the non-partisan nature of municipal politics and that’s something that I’d want to see continue in Alberta,” she said.

Related video: Alberta Premier Danielle Smith debuts new cabinet

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NDP Leader Rachel Notley said at an unrelated news conference Wednesday in Medicine Hat the province shouldn’t be imposing such a system on any municipality.

“That is a matter for the community, the voters and the candidates to decide,” said Notley.

Related
Smith proposal on COVID-19 fine amnesty raises political interference concerns

SHE DID WHAT
Premier Smith defends expanded cabinet, axing of labour, status of women and housing ministries

It isn’t common in Canada to run under party banners in municipal elections, but there are examples , including in Vancouver, where the A Better City slate won a commanding election victory this month.

University of Calgary political scientist Jack Lucas, who focuses on municipal politics, told Postmedia there’s nothing legally preventing candidates from running under a specific conservative or progressive banner, and there have already been examples of partisan competitions in Edmonton and Calgary elections.

“There’s a lot of evidence that candidates run, and think of themselves as running, in a particular part of the ideological spectrum,” said Lucas.

Lucas said party labels provide valuable information to voters, but they can have a downside.

“When you have political parties in the mix, it’s hard to deny that even issues that seem like they wouldn’t necessarily divide people along left-right lines, or other lines, they tend to become a matter of partisan bickering anyway,” he said.

— With files from Lauren Boothby and Keith Gerein

lijohnson@postmedia.com

Transgender activist buys Miss Universe Organization for $20 million

Asher Notheis - Yesterday Washington Examiner

A transgender business owner and activist from Thailand has purchased the Miss Universe Organization for $20 million.

JKN Global Group, owned by Chakrapong “Anne” Chakrajutathib, acquired the rights to the Miss Universe pageant from IMG on Wednesday. The company established a subsidiary in the United States, JKN Metaverse, in order to own the Miss Universe Organization and will use the Miss Universe name to promote the company's consumer products, including beverages, food supplements, and beauty and consumer products, according to Associated Press.

RIGGED? MISS USA PRESIDENT SUSPENDED AS CONTROVERSY MOUNTS OVER 2022 WINNER

The purchase is “a strong, strategic addition to our portfolio," Chakrapong said in a statement.

Related video: Thai transgender businesswoman Miss Universe for $20m

View on Watch

Growing up, Chakrapong had studied at an all-male school and was harassed for identifying as female, the report said, citing a profile this year in the Bangkok Post. After gaining wealth and financial status, Chakrapong spent 40 million Thai baht, or roughly $1 million, on sex reassignment surgery to resemble a woman, per the newspaper.

Chakrapong helped establish the Life Inspired For Transsexual Foundation, a nonprofit group that promotes transgender rights. Chakrapong has a large following on social media, boasting 6.8 million followers on Instagram.

The Miss Universe Organization was owned by former President Donald Trump from 1996 through 2015, when it was then purchased by IMG, a sports, talent, and events marketing company.

ZIONIST DEFINITION

Manitoba, Canada adopts IHRA definition of antisemitism

By ZVIKA KLEIN - The Jerusalem Post

Manitoba became the sixth Canadian province to adopt or commit to using the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism on Thursday


Canada - Manitoba Provincial Parliament Building in Winnipeg illuminated in blue for Israel

© (photo credit: FOREIGN MINISTRY)

The IHRA working definition of antisemitism provides policymakers, law enforcement, and community leaders a tool to identify, understand, and combat contemporary forms of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere. IHRA is the consensus definition of antisemitism that best reflects lived experience of Jews today. Developed by IHRA’s Committee on Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial, it is grounded in the research of the world’s foremost experts on antisemitism and the Holocaust and is supported by the UN, EU, and 30 countries including the US and Canada. It is also being used by Canadian provinces such as Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec, Alberta and New Brunswick.

“Premier Heather Stefanson’s adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism is a clear affirmation of the Manitoba government’s recognition of the surge in hate targeting Jews and the need to counter this rise,” said Shimon Koffler Fogel, president and CEO, Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs in Canada. “Defining antisemitism is the first step in recognizing its manifestations, which is key to standing against it. Today, Manitoba joins governments across the country to say that enough is enough. Canadians cannot stand by and allow Jew hatred to spread unchecked. This is especially important because history has repeatedly demonstrated that what begins with the Jews never ends with the Jews. This is a victory for all who stand against hate – no matter what group is the immediate target.”


The Bosnia & Herzegovina parliament approving the IHRA definition of antisemitism (credit: PARLIAMENTARY ASSEMBLY OF BIH)

"As antisemitic incidents in Canada continue to rise, the need to counter them is urgent"

"As antisemitic incidents in Canada continue to rise, the need to counter them is urgent," a press release on behalf of the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg stated. Statistics Canada released police-reported hate crime data for 2021 in August, revealing, once again, that hate crimes targeting the Black and Jewish populations remained the most common reported by police. Overall, hate crimes targeting religious groups increased 67% from 2020, breaking an encouraging three-year downturn. Incidents targeting the Jewish community grew dramatically by 47 percent since 2020, and cumulatively 59% over the last two years.

According to the press release, Manitoba’s organized community representatives, including the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg and CIJA, have consistently advocated for the endorsement of the IHRA definition. "The adoption of IHRA signals that the Government of Manitoba recognizes the struggle faced by the Jewish community and that they stand in solidarity in the fight against Jew-hatred and all forms of hate," the Jewish Federation stated.

“Today, Premier Stefanson and the Government of Manitoba sent a strong message that antisemitism has no place in society,” said Gustavo Zentner, President of the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg. “To combat antisemitism effectively, it must first be defined. The IHRA definition will help Manitobans identify and combat antisemitism in all its forms. With antisemitic hate crimes on the rise across the country, fighting antisemitism is a priority – not just for the Jewish community, but for all Manitobans and for all Canadians.”

“Our government is proud to stand united with the Jewish community here in Manitoba and around the world,” said the Honourable Heather Stefanson, Premier of Manitoba. “Antisemitism has no place in our communities, and today is an important step forward in our collective commitment to ensure we build an inclusive and safe society, and a future full of hope and opportunity for our future generations.”

The Federation concluded that "the [Jewish] community is encouraged that, through IHRA, Jewish-lived experience will now be reflected in the official understanding of antisemitism."

New map of methane 'super-emitters' shows some of the largest methane clouds ever seen

JoAnna Wendel - 

Some of the largest clouds of heat-trapping methane gas ever detected are currently floating over New Mexico, Iran and several other "super-emitter" hot spots around the world, according to a new NASA report.

This image shows a methane plume 2 miles (3 kilometers) long that NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation mission detected southeast of Carlsbad, New Mexico.© NASA/JPL-Caltech

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that contributes to the warming of the atmosphere. Although it's less abundant than carbon dioxide (CO2), methane can trap 80 times more heat pound-for-pound than CO2, according to NASA. Human activities like the fossil fuel, natural gas, agriculture and waste industries contribute methane to the atmosphere, and understanding where the methane emission hot spots are can help scientists better understand humanity's impact on the warming climate.

NASA's Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT), which was installed on the International Space Station in July to help scientists understand how dust affects climate change, managed to detect methane plumes as well.

EMIT detected more than 50 methane "super-emitters," or facilities and infrastructure that emit methane at high rates. These super-emitters occur all over the world, from the Southwest United States to Central Asia and the Middle East.

Related: There's so much methane in this Arctic lake that you can light the air on fire

The super-emitters spotted by EMIT include an oil field in New Mexico, southeast of Carlsbad; oil and gas infrastructure in Turkmenistan east of the Caspian Sea port city of Hazar; and a waste processing complex south of Iran's capital Tehran.

Methane plumes from these sources ranged from 2 miles (3.3 kilometers) to 20 miles (32 km) wide, and researchers estimate that these three sources together emit around 170,000 pounds (77,110 kilograms) of methane per hour.

"Some of the plumes EMIT detected are among the largest ever seen — unlike anything that has ever been observed from space," Andrew Thorpe, a scientist leading the EMIT methane research at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a NASA statement. "What we've found in just a short time already exceeds our expectations."

EMIT was originally designed to help researchers understand another atmospheric phenomenon that affects climate — dust that is swept around the globe from Earth's largest deserts. The minerals that make up the dust can trap or reflect heat, depending on their chemical makeup, and until now, there wasn't an instrument capable of producing high-resolution data about these minerals.

EMIT identifies different minerals through spectroscopy, or analyzing the light that the minerals reflect. Each mineral reflects light in a slightly different way, allowing EMIT to identify each mineral like a fingerprint. Because methane also absorbs infrared light in a unique way, EMIT can detect it.

The team expects that the instrument could detect hundreds more methane hotspots around the world, allowing scientists to better understand where Earth's methane comes from. Methane doesn't last as long as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — the heat-trapping gas lasts just decades versus CO2's centuries-long-lifetime — and climate experts say that reducing methane emissions could have a much more immediate effect (relatively) on slowing climate warming.

"We have been eager to see how EMIT's mineral data will improve climate modeling," Kate Calvin, NASA's chief scientist and senior climate advisor, said in the statement. "This additional methane-detecting capability offers a remarkable opportunity to measure and monitor greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change."

Centuries-old Martian mystery finally solved as scientists make 'remarkable' discovery

Anugraha Sundaravelu -  Metro UK


Scientists are studying data from two large meteorite impacts on Mars, hoping that it will give us a better understanding of how the red planet was formed.


Nasa’s InSight lander, which touched down on Mars in 2018, recorded the vibrations caused by both impacts (Credits: PA)

The space rocks crashed into the Martian surface at different times in the latter half of 2021, resulting in two large craters upwards of 130 metres in diameter.

Nasa’s InSight lander, which touched down on Mars in 2018, recorded the vibrations caused by both impacts.

These vibrations, or seismic surface waves, gave scientists an insight into the structure of the Martian crust, which may hold important clues about the origin and evolution of the planet.

‘This is the first time seismic surface waves have been observed on a planet other than Earth,’ said Doyeon Kim, a geophysicist and senior research scientist at ETH Zurich’s Institute of Geophysics.

‘Not even the Apollo missions to the Moon managed it.’

The researchers used data from the Insight lander to determine the structure of the crust at depths of between roughly five and 30 kilometres below the surface of Mars.

They found that the crust was denser than previously thought.

The team said its new findings are ‘remarkable’ because a planet’s crust provides important clues about how that planet formed and evolved billions of years ago.

The scientists said their work could also help solve a centuries-old mystery: The Mars dichotomy.

The Mars dichotomy is described as a sharp contrast between the volcanic lowlands of the northern hemisphere and a plateau covered by meteorite craters in the southern hemisphere.



The space rocks crashed into the Martian surface at different times in the latter half of 2021, resulting in two large craters upwards of 130 metres in diameter (Credits: PA)

‘As things stand, we don’t yet have a generally accepted explanation for the dichotomy because we’ve never been able to see the planet’s deep structure,’ said Domenico Giardini, ETH Zurich Professor of Seismology and Geodynamics.

The researchers said that their initial analysis suggests that both hemispheres may be structurally similar at lower depths, despite appearing different on surface.

They believe that contrary to previous research, the north and the south are not likely to be composed of different materials.

The findings are reported in two separate papers in the journal Science.

Meanwhile, another team of international researchers analysed data from Insight’s seismometer, which has recorded more than 1,300 marsquakes.

Based on their findings, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the experts believe volcanic activity is still present on the planet, in shaping the Martian surface with magma – hot molten and semi-molten liquid – flowing beneath.

MOE BACK STABS LIQUOR WORKERS

SASKATCHEWAN

Public liquor store employee horrified by retail sell-off

Jeremy Simes - 

Public liquor retail employee Courtney Topping says she felt a great deal of uncertainty after learning the government wants to sell off Saskatchewan’s remaining stores, resulting in hundreds of layoffs.


Members of various unions gather at a rally at the Legislative Building. Yesterday the provincial government announced the closure of all SLGA retail liquor stores in the province.

Topping, who rallied outside the Legislative Building on Thursday in support of public jobs, said she’s been a Saskatchewan Liquor and Gaming Authority (SLGA) employee for 11 years. It’s a well paying job that lets her support her children, she said.

“Being able to provide means the world,” she said. “But what they (the government) are doing is absolutely horrific. It’s going to affect so many people. Our roads, our hospitals, our education is going down the drain without SLGA.”

On Wednesday in the throne speech, the government announced it would be selling off Saskatchewan’s remaining 34 SLGA stores by March 31 .

The retail store permits associated with the 34 stores will be sold by public auction. Successful bidders are required to qualify for a commercial liquor permit.

Lori Carr, the minister responsible for SLGA, said the move will impact 284 full-time equivalents. The Saskatchewan Government and General Employees’ Union (SGEU), however, said more than 350 people will be let go.

Carr said the government is getting out of retail because the stores could start losing money, even though they are currently profitable.

“I think the fact that we have privatized other liquor stores have just given people a choice of where they want to go,” she told reporters. “That’s just the trend that’s happening and it’s a consumer choice.”


Members of various unions gather at a rally at the Legislative Building. Yesterday the provincial government announced the closure of all SLGA retail liquor stores in the province.

© MICHAELBELLPHOTOGRAPHY

Related

Sask. government poised to sell off remaining public liquor stores

Saskatchewan's liquor future uncertain three years after privatization

According to government figures, SLGA retail profits were $3.2 million in 2021-22, a 194-per-cent decrease from a profit of $9.4 million in 2018-19. The government projects net income for 2022-23 will be $395,000.

The province said many of the stores would need to be relocated or adapted to better meet customer needs, which it believes would come at a significant cost and “no guarantee” to recuperate those expenses.

Carr said the dollars saved could be used on public infrastructure, like hospitals, schools and roads.

At a rally outside the legislature Thursday morning, SGEU vice-president of retail Bob Stadnichuk said the stores would always be profitable.

Stadnichuk, who works at an SLGA store, said profits from liquor stores help support public infrastructure because the dollars go into government revenues.

He said the jobs the stores provide are essential.

“They are jobs that you could actually raise a family on,” he said. “To suggest that we go to a minimum wage job, if that’s even available, that dream is gone.”


Members of various unions gather at a rally at the Legislative Building. Yesterday the provincial government announced the closure of all SLGA retail liquor stores in the province.

© MICHAELBELLPHOTOGRAPHY

Carr has said jobs for impacted workers will be available, noting they could own a store or work in the private liquor sector, even though wages would likely be lower.

“It’s always hard when people are transitioning from what they’re used to into something new,” she said. “Unfortunately, the model of retail liquor is just not feasible anymore for the province of Saskatchewan.”

NDP SLGA critic Nathaniel Teed has said his party doesn’t support the sell-off of public liquor stores. Axing them amid an affordability crisis, he said, is the wrong approach.

When asked what she thinks about being told other jobs are available, Topping said she thinks Carr should “wake up and smell the coffee.”

“We’re going to be fighting. We’re not going to lay down and let them walk over us,” she said. “We’re going up kicking and screaming.”

Carr has said the government will work with SGEU to negotiate a workforce adjustment plan for affected employees.

Stadnichuk said the union is working on strategies, which will involve all the members that are affected.

“I’d like to take a quote from Scott Moe: just watch us,” he said.

On the same day it announced the sell-off, the government announced it’s creating a new Crown corporation to handle lotteries and gaming. It will be called Lotteries and Gaming Saskatchewan (LGS).

The government said SaskGaming Corporation will be reconfigured as a wholly-owned subsidiary of LGS and will continue to operate Casinos Regina and Moose Jaw.



Members of various unions gather at a rally at the Legislative Building.© MICHAELBELLPHOTOGRAPHY

Members of various unions gather at a rally at the Legislative Building.© MICHAELBELLPHOTOGRAPHY

Americans die younger in states run by conservatives, study finds

Martin Pengelly in New York -  The Guardian

Americans die younger in conservative states than in those governed by liberals, a new study has found.


Photograph: Jeremy Woodhouse/Getty Images

The authors wrote: “Simulations indicate that changing all policy domains in all states to a fully liberal orientation might have saved 171,030 lives in 2019, while changing them to a fully conservative orientation might have cost 217,635 lives.”

Related: Pandemic probably caused biggest drop in US life expectancy since 1945 – study

The study was published on Plos One, “an inclusive journal community working together to advance science for the benefit of society, now and in the future”.

The authors were from Syracuse University in New York, Harvard in Massachusetts, Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Washington, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Western Ontario, in Canada.

They wrote: “Results show that the policy domains were associated with working-age mortality.”

Bucking the trend, the study found that “more conservative marijuana policies” were associated with lower mortality rates.

But it also found that “more liberal policies on the environment, gun safety, labour, economic taxes, and tobacco taxes in a state were associated with lower mortality in that state”.


They added, “Especially strong associations were observed between certain domains and specific causes of death: between the gun safety domain and suicide mortality among men, between the labour domain and alcohol-induced mortality, and between both the economic tax and tobacco tax domains and CVD [cardiovascular] mortality.”

According to the National Council of State Legislatures, as of June this year Republicans controlled 61% of state legislatures and Democrats 35%. In terms of whole state governments, Republicans controlled 46% and Democrats 12%, with 12 states divided.

The study authors also noted that American life expectancy as a whole is lower than in most high-income countries, “fall[ing] between … Cuba and Albania”.

They wrote: “The rise in working-age mortality rates in the US in recent decades largely reflects stalled declines in cardiovascular disease mortality alongside rising mortality from alcohol-induced causes, suicide, and drug poisoning; and it has been especially severe in some US states. Building on recent work, this study examined whether US state policy contexts may be a central explanation.”

With federal and state midterm elections less than two weeks away, increased social spending in legislation passed by Democrats in Congress and the Biden administration has become a key issue in voters’ minds.

Joe Biden and other senior Democrats have sought to emphasise the success and necessity of such measures. But Republicans, who have presented such measures as irresponsible and contributing to inflation, are poised to retake the House and perhaps the Senate.

The study authors wrote: “One study found that US life expectancy could increase by nearly four years if the country matched the average level of social policy generosity offered in 17 other high-income countries.

“More recent research has turned attention to policies and politics at the US state level, given the federalist structure of the US political system and the large size and geographical spread of the population. This new work suggests that changes in state policies and politics may have played a contributory role in producing the troubling US mortality trends.”

Overt U.S. antisemitism returns with Trump, Kanye West: ‘Something is different’

Michelle Boorstein, Isaac Arnsdorf - WASHINGTON POST

Longtime watchdogs of antisemitism say there is nothing new about the kinds of derogatory comments about Jews that the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, former president Donald Trump, sundry far-right political candidates and others have made in recent weeks.

© Salwan Georges/The Washington Post

But what has struck some experts is how blatant the comments about Jews are at a time when incidents of harassment, vandalism and violence against them have been at their highest levels since at least the 1970s. Recent data already showed that a majority of American Jews fear violence against them.

“Empirically, something is different. The level of public animosity towards Jews is higher than it’s been in recent memory,” Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said in an interview.

Experts said the climate is the product of a stew of forces including a digital culture that spreads misinformation and hate and right-wing political forces focused on protecting White Christians’ status. Some said current antisemitism is also aggravated by more people downplaying it as merely an interreligious issue instead of a dangerous form of racism; in the past majorities from Germany to America made clear they saw Jews as a distinct and inferior race.

Trump’s long history of trafficking in antisemitic tropes

To survivors of even the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history — the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh — the most urgent worry is that the event, which left 11 dead and at least six wounded, is already fading from public consciousness, crowded out by the dozens of mass shootings that followed.

Barton Schachter, a Tree of Life member and a former president of the synagogue, said: “This is what scares me, that in time [the shooting is] just another thing. I’m afraid this will drift into that direction. I don’t know how to save it."

He called West, who now goes by Ye, “an idiot ... but eventually he’ll be gone. Another person will take his place. The question is: How do we continue keeping the good stuff alive? That’s the hard part. The memory of these 11 [who were killed at Tree of Life] and the 6 million [Jews who died in the Holocaust], that’s the hard part.”



A makeshift memorial stands outside the Tree of Life synagogue in October 2018.

© Matt Rourke/AP

Some experts say the increasingly unconcealed antisemitism brings 2022 into line with most of Jewish history.

“To me, it’s like we’re coming back from a 50-year vacation,” said Mark Oppenheimer, co-host of the Jewish podcast “Unorthodox” and author of the 2021 book “Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood.” “We’re back to ‘Keep your head down; no one has your back.’ It’s not that we’re back to real estate bans; it’s more the old ‘It’s a little unseemly to be Jewish.’”

But current attitudes toward Jews are complex and can seem to run in different directions, say antisemitism watchers. Americans overall espouse less antisemitic views than they did 60 years ago. An ADL index in which people are asked if they agree with a series of negative stereotypes about Jews has measured antisemitism since the 1960s, when 29 percent of Americans were considered antisemitic. In 2019, ADL’s most recent year of measurement, the number was its lowest ever in the United States, 11 percent.

That same year, however, the ADL also tracked 2,107 incidents of vandalism, violence and harassment toward Jews in the United States, which at the time was the highest number since the group began gathering data in the 1970s. (That record was broken in 2021.)

“While at a generalized level, antisemitic attitudes have dropped, the incidents have risen because there is less shame. People feel they can say and do anything,” Greenblatt said.Shapiro emphasizes Jewish faith as he warns of Mastriano’s extremism

Benjamin Lorber, a longtime researcher of antisemitism with Political Research Associates, said the latest rush of antisemitic rhetoric “fits into that broader political project,” and he is not surprised to see it in the lead-up to the midterms this year. “The right is trying to regain power it felt it lost in 2020, so it makes sense, in addition to virulent anti-LGBTQ bigotry, that antisemitism is in the mix again,” he said.

He and other experts noted that the 2018 Tree of Life massacre came just before the 2018 midterm elections and that the suspect had posted on the far-right social media site Gab that he was angry about “filthy” Jews who work to resettle refugees, especially Muslims.

“We’re in an era when the MAGA movement’s boundaries of who is considered a real, good, authentic American are mutating and the future is very unpredictable,” Lorber said.Trump attacks American Jews, posting they must ‘get their act together’ on Israel

Trump earlier this month attacked American Jews in a post on his Truth Social platform, saying Jews in the United States must “get their act together” and show more appreciation for the state of Israel “before it is too late.” Trump has multiple times raised the old antisemitic trope that U.S. Jews hold, or should hold, a secret or dual loyalty to Israel rather than the United States. He said evangelicals are “far more appreciative” of actions on Israel than Jews.

Most Republicans said nothing about Trump’s Truth Social post. Trump also defended Ye in an Oct. 18 interview with Salem News Channel, and other conservatives also rallied to support Ye, most commonly by portraying him as a victim of supposed efforts by Democrats, in combination with the media and corporations, to suppress opposing viewpoints.



The BILLIONAIRE rapper Ye, formerly Kanye West, watches a National Basketball Association game in March.© Ashley Landis/AP

Fox News host Tucker Carlson, in clips released by Vice News, didn’t challenge Ye during an interview when the performer repeated a belief held by some that today’s Jews aren’t the legitimate Jews of the Bible. This is part of the doctrine held by the movement known as the Black Hebrew Israelites: that African Americans are the true descendants of ancient Israelites, a belief that is often blended with accusations that mainstream Jews aren’t the legitimate Jews.

“When I say Jew, I mean … the people known as the race Black,” Ye told Carlson.

In the interview, Ye also said there is some “financial engineering” to being Jewish.

Antisemitism has also become a prominent issue in the Pennsylvania governor’s race between Republican Doug Mastriano, who promotes Christian nationalism, and Democrat Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish. Mastriano’s campaign has advertised on Gab. In a September campaign speech, Mastriano attacked Shapiro’s attendance of a private Jewish day school in Bryn Mawr, in remarks that were criticized as coded antisemitism. An adviser to Mastriano, former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis, responded to the backlash by dismissing Shapiro as “at best a secular Jew."The Kanye West Tucker Carlson didn’t want his audience to see

Lorber said that, in a period of rampant misinformation, economic insecurity and alienation, such comments fit into the narrative of a segment of Americans looking to identify internal enemies, groups they perceive to be not sufficiently American or, in the case of Jews, part of some invisible power structure keeping them from success or censoring them. When Adidas ended its partnership with Ye on Tuesday over his antisemitic remarks, some conservatives were quick to cast him as a victim of “woke capitalism.”

“They’re like: ‘Maybe Kanye is on to something,’” Lorber said.

Adidas acted in response to a public pressure campaign, and some observers said it was evidence that efforts to push back harder against antisemitism are working.

David Baddiel, a British comic and screenwriter, last year published a book called “Jews Don’t Count” about the ramifications of antisemitism not being seen as a form of racism equally dangerous to others.

“Since I wrote the book, I hear more and more people speaking out about antisemitism (even as I see it growing),” Baddiel wrote to The Washington Post. “I used to think the concept of allyship, very important to progressives, would never apply to us ... but I think that’s changing.”

Greenblatt, in a statement, praised Adidas’s move as a “very positive” one that “creates consequences,” because brands today “mediate so much of our lives.” Other brands, including Balenciaga and Gap, also cut business ties with Ye.

Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. State Department’s envoy on antisemitism, in a statement Wednesday emphasized the role of corporate accountability. She said that “social media and online spaces have been dominated by dangerous, inflammatory antisemitic rhetoric in recent weeks.”

“I commend the stand that various private companies and platforms have taken against antisemitism, ensuring their platforms are not used to spread hate, and cutting ties and ending lucrative business relationships with partners who engage in it. Corporations should continue to act responsibly and make it clear that touting hate is not profitable.”

But Oppenheimer said people shouldn’t leave it to corporate America to police prejudice.

"It’s nice when corporate leaders have a conscience,” he said, “but anyone who relies on the dictates of profit margins to enforce sane and moral norms is in trouble.”

Jeremy Merrill contributed to this report.

 

Considering COVID A Hoax Is ‘Gateway’ To Belief In Conspiracy Theories

 October 27, 2022 

By Eurasia Review

 Belief that the COVID-19 pandemic was a hoax – that its severity was exaggerated or that the virus was deliberately released for sinister reasons – functions as a “gateway” to believing in conspiracy theories generally, new research has found.

In the two-survey study, people who reported greater belief in conspiracy theories about the pandemic – for which there is no evidence – were more likely to later report they believed that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from Donald Trump through widespread voter fraud, which is also not true. Participants’ overall inclination to believe in conspiracy theories also increased more among those who reported believing COVID-19 was a hoax.

Based on the results, the Ohio State University researchers have proposed the “gateway conspiracy” hypothesis, which argues that conspiracy theory beliefs prompted by a single event lead to increases in conspiratorial thinking over time.

Preliminary evidence suggests a sense of distrust may function as one trigger.

“It’s speculative, but it appears that once people adopt one conspiracy belief, it promotes distrust in institutions more generally – it could be government, science, the media, whatever,” said senior author Russell Fazio, professor of psychology at Ohio State. “Once you start viewing events through that distrustful lens, it’s very easy to adopt additional conspiracy theories.”

The study is published in the journal PLOS ONE.

The field of conspiracy theory research is relatively young, and to date has tended to look for traits that predict the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories at a given point in time.

“But if you read interviews or forums frequented by conspiracy theorists, you see a phenomenon where people tend to go down the rabbit hole after something happens in their life that triggers general interest in conspiracy theories,” said first author Javier Granados Samayoa, who completed the work while a graduate student in psychology at Ohio State. “With COVID-19, there was this large event that people could not control, so how could they make sense of it? One way is by adhering to conspiracy theories.”

The researchers asked 501 participants in a June 2020 survey to answer questions assessing their beliefs in COVID-19 conspiracy theories, political ideology and what is called conspiracist ideation, or one’s overall affinity for conspiracy theories. In this section, participants used a 5-point scale ranging from “definitely not true” to “definitely true” to rate statements such as “Some UFO sightings and rumors are planned or staged in order to distract the public from real alien contact” and “New and advanced technology which would harm current industry is being suppressed.”

Six months later, in December 2020, 107 of those same participants again responded to statements gauging their level of conspiratorial thinking. Researchers further assessed conspiracist ideation by asking participants to report the extent to which they believed that there had been extensive voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Statistical analysis showed that participants who reported greater belief that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was released for dark purposes and that the severity of COVID-19 disease was blown out of proportion also reported greater belief that the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump. And compared to their baseline conspiracist ideation measured in the June survey, COVID skeptics had higher levels of general endorsement of conspiracy theories six months later.

The association held true even after the analysis took into account the association between belief in conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and voter fraud and conservative political views, said Granados Samayoa, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

The team also cited data from a large United Kingdom multi-part survey conducted during the early spring and late fall of 2020 that supported the gateway conspiracy hypothesis: The Ohio State team’s analysis showed that belief among a nationally representative sample of UK adults that the pandemic was a hoax predicted increases in conspiracist ideation over time.

The Ohio State data showed one strong trend suggesting that financial distress during the lockdown could have been a factor in adopting conspiracy theory beliefs about the pandemic – even among those who started off with low levels of conspiracist ideation.

“And then there is the question: Once that happens, what changes over time? That’s where we got into this longitudinal work, which has been absent in previous research,” Fazio said.

While some past conspiracy theories have turned out to be true, this study focused on beliefs that are not supported by evidence and are undermined by the evidence that does exist. The researchers noted that a better understanding of the dynamics of conspiratorial thinking could help stop the spread of conspiracist ideation, which is associated with a higher risk for violence and discrimination and poor health choices, among other negative individual and societal outcomes.

“These findings show that we need to be prepared for any additional large-scale events similar to COVID-19 to stem off conspiracist ideation because once people go down the rabbit hole, they may get stuck,” Granados Samayoa said.

Abuses on U.S. bases in Persian Gulf ensnare legions of migrant workers

Defense contractors hire thousands of foreigners. Many are trapped by employment practices banned by the U.S. government.


By Katie McQue

WASHINGTON POST
October 27, 2022 

An office at the U.S. Army's Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, where foreign employees working for defense contractors say they were trapped in their jobs by abusive employment practices. (U.S. Army)

Foreign workers for defense contractors on at least four U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf are trapped in their jobs by abusive employment practices that they say prevent them from returning home or even looking for better work in the region, more than 30 current and former workers said in interviews.

Many of the thousands of migrants employed on Persian Gulf bases have had their passports confiscated, been saddled with onerous debts after paying illegal recruitment fees or been denied “release papers” required under local laws, according to the interviews as well court records and government documents showing that such abuses, which appear to violate U.S. regulations, have been repeatedly flagged in recent years.

The companies that provide food, repair vehicles and supply other services to the U.S. military routinely turn down requests from civilian employees for release papers they need to leave their jobs, more than a dozen workers told The Washington Post and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Under the strict labor laws of most countries in the region, employees who leave jobs without permission have been jailed for “absconding.” In some of these countries, notably Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, defense contractors hold onto their workers’ passports, often restricting the employees’ movement, workers said.

Employment agencies in the workers’ home countries, meantime, frequently charge steep fees to place them in jobs overseas. The fees can run into the thousands of dollars and are often financed with high-interest loans, requiring migrants who are paid as little as $1 an hour to work for several years before they’ve paid off their debts, according to 19 workers for nine contractors and subcontractors in the Persian Gulf.

“Life is not easy,” said a young Bangladeshi food services worker named Mohammed, who works on a base in Kuwait. “My family has problems, and it’s just me working, and I have parents, two brothers, and one of my sisters to take care of.” Mohammed, whose last name is not being published to prevent retaliation by his employer, said he was forced to pay a $6,000 recruitment fee to get a job at the U.S. Army’s Camp Arifjan and had to work two-and-a-half years to pay off the loan his father had taken out to cover the fee.

These practices are widespread among private employers in the Middle East, where the legal status of migrant laborers is routinely tied to that of their employer. But the abuses described by the workers would appear to violate U.S. regulations against human trafficking by government contractors and subcontractors. These federal acquisition regulations ban the kind of recruitment fees detailed by workers at U.S. military bases, seek to bar involuntary servitude, which includes confiscation of passports, and requires contractors to police their subcontractors.

“The Department of Defense promotes the U.S. government’s zero tolerance policy on trafficking in persons,” said Cmdr. Nicole Schwegman, a Defense Department spokesperson, after being presented with the workers’ accounts. “The Department continues to work diligently on combating human trafficking because these activities violate human rights and harm our national security mission.”

The workers interviewed for this story are among the armies of men and women from Asia and Africa who do the manual and semiskilled labor that keeps U.S. military bases abroad running day after day. The U.S. military operates from more than a dozen bases and other installations in the Persian Gulf and neighboring Iraq and has used these locations to wage wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, combat al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, and oppose Iranian activities in the region.

The military has grown deeply dependent on defense contractors and their legions of migrant hires. These workers travel to the Persian Gulf seeking employment opportunities vital for supporting relatives back home, though the pay is often relatively low and the hours long.

Most of those interviewed — like the thousands of other civilian workers on military bases — are employed by regional subcontractors, which in turn mainly work for major American defense companies. These include Vectrus and Amentum, which grew out of the major government contractor AECOM two years ago and acquired defense firms DynCorp and PAE.

In the past five years, the Pentagon has responded to 176 reported instances of labor trafficking on military bases in the Persian Gulf and beyond, in most cases by requiring better monitoring of employment practices, according to State Department reports reviewed by NBC News.

This story was produced as part of a joint investigation by journalists from The Post, ICIJ, NBC, WGBH Boston, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism and the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley.

U.S. soldiers walk near vehicles at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, in 2010.

 (Stephanie McGehee/Reuters)

Release papers and passports

A bus arrives at 4:30 a.m. at a labor camp south of Kuwait City to collect dozens of fatigued workers for their shifts at the U.S. Army’s Camp Arifjan. On only several hours of sleep, they’re transported to the base about 45 minutes away, then queue up with hundreds of others for security checks.

The workers, mainly from South Asia, are employed as mechanics and laborers by Kuwait Resources House (KRH), a large subcontractor for major defense firms at several American military bases in the Persian Gulf, including U.S.-headquartered Vectrus and Amentum. Current and former KRH workers on bases in Kuwait and Qatar interviewed for this story reported earning between $1.52 and $3.70 an hour, according to calculations by ICIJ and The Post based on their monthly wages and hours worked.

Ten current and former workers said many KRH employees cannot seek better-paying jobs, or in some cases, even go home, because the company blocks them from leaving.

“It’s not a good life. There’s not much freedom,” said a 38-year-old mechanic from India, who spoke on the condition that only his nickname, Aryan, be published for fear of retribution. He has worked for the company for six years and is ready to move on. “I am not getting a release. I want to leave,” he said, adding, “There are better companies here I want to work for.”

The mechanic said he and his colleagues have tried to alert managers at Vectrus, the defense firm he’s employed by KRH to work for, but they told him “they can’t interfere in my company.”

Asked by email to comment on specific allegations, including that it denied workers’ freedom of movement, KRH responded, “We would like to assure you that all the allegations you stated in your email are incorrect.” The company did not offer further specifics.

“Since day 1 of our operations, we have been the leader in honoring and abiding by Human Rights in every bit of our business practice. Since our core business is ‘Life Support and HR Solutions,’ Combating Trafficking in Persons has been an essential part of our practice,” the company said. KRH, which reports employing 10,000 workers across the region, added, “Over the years, we have accumulated a reputation that shines with pride on the level of ethical business practice we adopt, as we lead by example to the entire sector in the [Middle East] region.”

Mike Smith, a spokesman for Vectrus, said, “At Vectrus, we value all people and treat them with dignity and respect. We follow all United States labor laws, the laws in the countries where we operate, and demand our subcontractors do the same.”

In interviews, six current and former employees at five defense contractors in the region said their employers often take possession of workers’ passports.

By confiscating workers’ identity documents, contractors wield more control over their employees and guarantee their obedience, said Sam McCahon, a former federal prosecutor who spent nine years in the Middle East as a military contract law specialist and U.S. Army procurement fraud attorney. “If you have my passport, I can’t go work for a competitor or anyone else. I have to stay with you,” McCahon said.

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Even if they could hold onto their passports, several employees said they remain stuck because of a requirement, under the so-called kafala system, that workers obtain “release papers” from their employer before moving to another job.

“The kafala system is abusive precisely because it grants such disproportionate power to employers over migrant workers,” said Michael Page, deputy director in the Middle East and North Africa division at Human Rights Watch. “When employers are allowed to confiscate a worker's passport or deny a migrant worker the ability to change jobs, this undermines not only the worker's power to decide where to work but even the ability to leave abusive situations. At its worst, this reality can even lead to situations of forced labor.”

Two years ago, Qatar introduced reforms stipulating that workers should keep their passports in their own possession and abolishing the use of release papers. But contract workers in Qatar said they are still required to get permission from their current employer before they can move to a new job.

“They always say we will provide your release papers soon, but they never do,” said Sree Kumar from India, who worked for four years for KRH at the huge Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. “One of my friends got a chance for a job with another company, but our company didn’t provide a release letter, and he lost it.”

Dilip Gurung, a 32-year-old warehouse specialist from Nepal, said he had to fight to get permission from KRH, a subcontractor for Amentum in Qatar, before he traveled home in 2019 for emergency surgery to remove a benign tumor from his head.

His requests for permission were repeatedly rebuffed over several days, during which he was forced to work despite excruciating pain, he said. When he was finally allowed to travel, he had to take unpaid leave, he added.

“We have our passport all the time, as that is Amentum's guideline,” said Gurung. “But having our passports on hand doesn't mean we are free to leave.”

'Working in fear': Some private contractors are accused of abusive labor practices on U.S. military bases



Dilip Gurung, a 32-year-old warehouse specialist from Nepal, worked for KRH, a subcontractor for Amentum in Qatar. He poses for a portrait in Danda Gaon, Tanhun District, Nepal, on October 26, 2022.
(Sagar Chhetri/For The Washington Post)

Exorbitant recruitment fees

Gurung’s difficulties began even before he set foot in Qatar. After applying for a job with KRH in 2016, he was ushered by an employment broker into a small office at a recruitment agency in the outskirts of the Nepali capital, Kathmandu, and instructed to hand over 150,000 Nepali rupees, or about $1,400 in cash, he recounted. To get the contract, Gurung was required to pay a recruitment fee equal to five months of his salary as a teacher in Nepal.

“If you don't pay, they will not send you overseas,” Gurung recalled. “Although I knew it wasn't legal, I had no choice.”

He said the recruiter pressured him to declare on video that he’d only paid a small amount in administrative fees, which are legally permissible in Nepal but capped at 10,000 Nepali rupees, or about $93 at that time. Only then was he given a job with KRH.

Charging recruitment fees of hundreds, even thousands, of dollars is commonplace, workers said. In interviews, 19 current and former workers at U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf reported paying fees ranging from $250 to $6,000. Often, the workers are compelled to sell personal assets, such as their vehicles, and take out high-interest loans to cover the fees. Gurung said he took out a loan with an annual interest rate of 36%.

KRH said allegations that its workers paid recruitment fees were incorrect.

Coronavirus forces migrant workers in Persian Gulf to return home

Mohammed, the Bangladeshi food services worker, was 18 years old when a recruiter required him to pay $6,000 for a job at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait. He said he and his close co-workers for a Saudi Arabia-based contractor, Tamimi Global, all had to pay recruiting fees and Tamimi managers “told us not to tell people that we paid.”

To cover the cost, his father, a retired farmer, took out a loan for $4,000 and cashed in his remaining retirement savings, Mohammed recalled. But his family believed it would all be worth it. He said the recruiter promised that Tamimi would pay about $1,300 a month.

Instead, when he arrived in Kuwait in 2017, he was told his starting salary would be $260 a month, he recounted, forcing him to work 2½ years to pay back the loan.

Misfer al-Malki, manager of Tamimi’s human resources and administration department, said the company seeks to comply fully with U.S. laws and regulations and has a compliance level that “meets and exceeds” its contract requirements.

“Tamimi has recruitment procedures and does not take money from staff. We do not deny that there are inappropriate recruitment procedures in the region and that is why we have to be vigilant, but we do everything we can to avoid our staff being caught by them,” he said.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office has concluded that recruitment fees can put workers into “debt bondage,” forced to spend most of their wages paying off the loans and unable to quit potentially exploitative jobs. GAO considers this a feature of labor trafficking.

“We have very clear regulations now saying that you cannot charge recruitment fees,” said Latesha Love, director of international affairs and trade at the GAO. “Holding passports and things of that nature are not something that can be done on contracts with our federal dollars.”

The GAO most recently investigated working conditions at overseas military bases last year. The agency, which is an investigative arm of Congress, called on the Defense Department to address weaknesses in its oversight of contractors and its reporting of internal investigations into human trafficking conducted between 2015 and 2020.

According to nine workers, American contractors on the military bases are aware that their employees have been forced to pay recruitment fees but have not tried to stop the practice.

“One day, we shared with our project manager that we had paid this fee, but he said [the company is] helpless,” said Kumar, the former worker at Al Udeid. “I think it’s a mutual understanding. The American managers know about the fee, and they say nothing. They avoid talking about it.”

McCahon, the former military procurement fraud lawyer, said that charging low-paid migrant workers recruitment fees for jobs on U.S. overseas military bases is an “institutionalized” business practice.

“If that person is indebted to get the job, they’re more malleable, which means essentially, you can do anything you want to them. You can cheat them, abuse them, anything,” McCahon said. The U.S. Constitution, he noted, “prohibits indentured servitude. Yet, we’re not only tolerating it. The U.S. taxpayer actually pays the trafficker.”

Previous public warnings

Federal acquisition regulations require contractors to adopt measures aimed at preventing recruitment agents and subcontractors from engaging in human trafficking and terminate relationships with business partners in breach of anti-trafficking laws.

Love, the GAO official, said Pentagon contracting officials are supposed to be looking for signs of abuses, such as recruitment fees and the confiscation of identity documents. In practice, however, there is little enforcement of the regulations, she said.

“Often, federal agencies have very little visibility into what’s happening at the subcontractor level because the subcontractors don’t report directly back to the U.S. government,” Love said.

Schwegman, the Defense Department spokesperson, said the Pentagon had taken steps in recent years to address labor trafficking, for instance by adding training for procurement personnel and highlighting for military agencies and commands their role in reporting employment abuses. She said these measures came on top of steps, taken in 2013 in response to reported abuses, designed to publicize workers’ rights and enhance oversight.

There has been no lack of public warnings about possible employment abuses by military contractors and their subcontractors.

In 2017, for instance, U.S. military investigators examined allegations that Tamimi, which was hired to feed military personnel in Kuwait, had violated anti-human trafficking rules in its pay and employment practices, and proposed barring the company from receiving future contracts.

While Tamimi rejected the allegations, it signed a compliance agreement with the U.S. Army agreeing, in part, to improve its training programs and hire an independent compliance monitor.

And in March, a U.S. District Court judge in Maryland ruled that 29 Kuwaiti translators could go forward with a lawsuit claiming that two military contractors currently owned by Amentum were responsible for an array of abusive practices — including confiscating the linguists’ passports and aiding in a “Kuwait government manhunt” that put them at risk of arrest if they tried to quit their jobs and leave the country.

Amentum did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In court filings in the translators’ lawsuit, the Amentum units deny wrongdoing.

Some of the oldest concerns go back to the years following the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, when the U.S. military dramatically escalated its presence in the region. In 2006, for example, authorities in India barred Kuwait & Gulf Link Holding Co. — a Kuwait-registered logistics and transportation firm operating on bases in the Persian Gulf — from hiring Indian employees. Indian authorities claimed KGL had lured workers to work in war-torn Iraq by falsely promising they were going to get jobs in Kuwait, according to a U.S. Senate document.

KGL did not respond to multiple requests for comment.


Anil Lama, a former I.T. worker for KGL at an American military installation in Kuwait, poses for a portrait at his residence in Kathmandu, Nepal on October 8, 2022.

 (Uma Bista/For The Washington Post)

Today, KGL’s workers are again sharing complaints about the company, which continues to receive large U.S. military contracts. In interviews, three current and former KGL workers said the employment firms that placed them with KGL forced them to pay illegal recruitment fees. Two of them said that KGL also has prevented some low-paid laborers from leaving their jobs.

“People have been stuck there for years because they can’t get their release papers. The company doesn’t want to pay new laborers more money,” said Anil Lama, a former I.T. worker for KGL at an American military installation in Kuwait.

A 32-year-old Indian man, who said he has worked for KGL as a driver for five years after paying a $1,250 recruitment fee, explained he was afraid to ask the company for his release papers because such requests by his co-workers had already been denied.

“Some of my colleagues have completed eight years of work. Even then, release papers are not given,” he said. “There are many problems.”


Agustin Armendariz and Emilia Díaz Struck of ICIJ; Yousef H. Alshammari of Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism; and Andy Lehren, Molly Boigon, Laura Strickler, Anna Schecter and Courtney Kube of NBC contributed to this article.