Plastic threatens our environment; what governments need to do

Since the 1950s, the production and use of plastic has increased faster than any other material, transforming the way we think and feel about everyday items. It is in our electronics, our vehicles, our food and drink containers, computers and phones, throughout our homes and even our clothes. Imagine a world without plastic. It’s impossible.

In our pandemic world, plastic became even more popular.

The international organization Oceana, which is dedicated to protecting the world’s oceans, reported last month that the Coca-Cola company increased its plastic packaging by almost nine percent, or 579 million pounds, from 2020 to 2021.

This is the opposite direction companies need to move in, to reduce carbon emissions (plastic is made from oil or natural gas) and to prevent more and more plastic from entering into our oceans, which are being decimated due to the chemical alteration caused by mass plastic pollution as small particles constantly enter our water systems (there are 51 trillion microscopic pieces of plastic in our oceans, which weigh 269,000 tons).

Many people take items like plastic food containers and utensils for granted—easy to grab, convenient to store and then tossed away when the food is finished. Plastic containers used for storage, according to a study by the National Zero Waste Council based in Vancouver, can reduce food loss and waste by over 30 percent. We all know the benefits of plastic, but finding a balance is what advocates are asking governments and the private sector to do.

For example, in hospitals and medical offices instruments are packaged in plastic to remain sterilized. Without plastic in these crucial settings, routine medical and dental procedures could result in the spread of bacteria, triggering more emergency procedures alongside expensive medical treatments.

The Global Commitment Progress Report 2022 was released earlier in the year by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, in association with the UN Environment Programme. It monitors international progress on the reduction of plastic use.

“Driven by the goal of tackling plastic pollution at its source, through the Global Commitment and Plastic Pact network, more than 1,000 businesses, governments, and other organisations have united behind a common vision of a circular economy for plastic, in which it never becomes waste,” the report declares.

“Signatories to the Global Commitment, which together account for more than 20% of the plastic packaging market, have set ambitious 2025 targets to help realise that common vision. This fourth annual progress report looks at how the signatories are faring against these targets.”

There was good news… and bad.

“As a group, brands and retailers have significantly increased their total plastic packaging use (+4.3%) in 2021 vs 2020. This increase has outpaced progress on recycled content, leading to a 2.5% increase in their use of virgin plastic compared to 2020, which is back to similar levels as 2018.”

The pandemic has played a big part in this troubling trend.

“Signatories that were most hit by the pandemic restrictions in 2020, such as some fashion brands and on-the-go restaurants, had significantly higher sales — and therefore increased use of plastic packaging — in 2021. This increase also contributed, to a small extent, to the lack of virgin plastic use reduction in 2021.”

Viral videos have circulated of turtles with plastic straws caught in their noses or birds caught in plastic soda casings. In Canada, about 29,000 tonnes of plastic end up in sensitive spaces such as the Great Lakes each year. Another 3.3 million tonnes is thrown out. Less than one tenth of the plastic discarded is actually recycled. According to the Rochester Institute of Technology, approximately 22 million pounds of plastic pollution end up in the Great Lakes every year. Surface water concentration of plastics in the Great Lakes, currently sitting at 1.2 million particles per kilometer, are some of the highest in the world, higher than the concentration in the North Pacific “garbage patch”, a notorious collection of plastic pollution floating in the world’s largest ocean.

“Carbon dioxide is listed as a toxic substance, obviously, because it's a greenhouse gas and lots of other chemicals,” Karen Wirsig, Plastics Program Manager at Environmental Defence, said. “And so the federal government did a science assessment and said, ‘Yes, plastic pollution is killing wildlife and harming habitats,’ and so it does rise to the level of assessment that needs to be listed as toxic under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.”

In 2018, it was decided that provincial governments should extend producer responsibility programs in order to deal with plastic waste since they are the level of government responsible for waste management. In the meantime, the federal government announced that it would follow other nations, including Kenya, Rwanda, several countries in Latin America and many countries across the European Union, in banning single use plastics.

The first part of Canada’s single use plastics ban will come into effect at the end of this year and will include the manufacture and import for sale in Canada of checkout bags, cutlery, foodservice ware, stir sticks and some types of straws. But, according to the prohibition timeline, it will take until December of 2025 for all bans to be in place.

New data from Statistics Canada show that some progress has been made prior to the implementation of the bans. The survey on households from 2019 to 2021, taken every two years, found the number of Canadians using plastic straws is decreasing and those using their own reusable grocery bags is increasing.

In 2019, 23 percent of Canadians reported using a plastic straw at least once a week. In 2021, that number decreased slightly to 20 percent. Three years ago 43 percent of Canadians said they always used their reusable grocery bags when shopping, a number that climbed to 51 percent last year.

But according to Wirsig, the incoming bans do not go far enough toward solving the plastic problem.

“You can't deal with plastic pollution just by addressing the waste problem, you actually have to confront the beginning of the lifecycle of plastic,” she said. “We have to have more reduction strategies. The bans are good to start for reduction, but we need more reduction of harmful plastics and we need a focus on reuse. This is really a place where all of Canada has fallen down on any requirements for reuse of packaging and products.”

Canada has declared the target of achieving zero plastic waste by 2030. Wirsig said this is not possible.

The impact of the bans put in place by the federal government will be relatively small. With all bans in place by 2025, Wirsig said this will only decrease plastic waste by about five percent. Environmental Defence estimates that if the only bans put in place are the ones that have already been announced, Canada will still have up to two million tonnes of plastic packaging waste alone in 2030.

In September, the organization published a scathing report, entitled Recycling Failure, along with a report card that shows the federal government cannot rely on provincial waste management policy to solve the plastic pollution problem. Only two provinces received a passing grade; British Columbia (C) and Prince Edward Island (D+). The remaining provinces and all the territories received failing grades.

The report card is based on six categories: residential waste, non-residential waste, beverage containers, residual product containers, farm and large film, and transparency and reliability. Ontario received an A for residual product containers. Its next highest grade was a C and it received two Fs, a D and a D+ for a total failing grade.

Related video: WION Climate Tracker | Global brands fail to tackle plastic waste? (WION)   Duration 3:22   View on Watch



Globally, about 17 billion pounds of plastic leaks into oceans, lakes and other bodies of water and systems each year from land-based sources, much of it from landfills. It’s the equivalent of about one garbage truck of plastic every minute.

In Ontario, the waste sector is currently responsible for six percent of total greenhouse gas emissions. It is forecasted that Ontario will need 16 new or expanded landfills by 2050 if no progress is made in resource recovery and waste reduction, further increasing the amount of greenhouse gas emissions.

But even if all provinces upgraded to the most ambitious waste management systems, Environmental Defence predicts Canada would still miss its overall target by about 1 million tonnes of plastic waste.

“The federal government can't leave it at the bans and a recycled content requirement and think it's done, this will not get us to zero plastic waste,” Wirsig said.

One of the major gaps highlighted by Environmental Defence is the lack of policy surrounding waste from businesses. Quebec is the only province that plans to put forward a mandate that requires businesses to recycle their waste by 2030. It is also the only jurisdiction that has proposed recycling targets.

“That’s a huge gap,” Wirsig said. “The waste generated at and by businesses directly is more than half of plastic waste in Canada.”

Another problem at the provincial level is the lack of reliable information and targets when it comes to plastic waste. British Columbia, Quebec and Ontario are the only provinces that have plans in place to measure their recycling systems and determine the amount that is collected, sorted and sent for recycling.

Wirsig said there is still much the federal government also needs to do.

“The first very concrete step is to create the fund that was promised in the [federal] election, a $100 million fund, and devote it to scaling up existing local reuse services and building new local reused services where they don't exist,” she said. “The low hanging fruit is obviously takeout containers. There, all kinds of interesting things are happening with refilling and pre-filling grocery containers, for example. So there's lots of room for the federal government to move on this.”

At the local level, Toronto has shown what other municipalities can do. Early in the year the municipality reported 85 million takeaway food containers and 39 million single-use cups are being used by households each year. A group of restaurant owners became part of a pilot program that uses the Inwit app, which allows customers to order food using reusable containers, including non-plastics that can be returned to the restaurant.

Inwit describes itself on its website: “Seven years ago, we were not aware of the adverse effects of our own choices. We became environmentalists by accident, and it was because of single-use plastics that we started to understand and take action. We know firsthand that people who are not taking climate action today are not evil or don’t care. They are just like us seven years ago; waiting for their moment of inspiration.

We believe that reusing in the takeout industry can become the gateway to inspire more people to embark on their own sustainability journey.”

The company calls on citizens, businesses and governments to take action.

“The Inwit community is on the front lines of tackling climate change, inspiring more people, more companies, and our government to put people and the planet first beyond profit and convenience — not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because the stakes are high, we want to leave the world [in which we] lived in better conditions to our kids, our nephews, nieces — and their kids’ kids.”

In other consumer areas, people can transition to goods made from other materials such as wood, silicone or metal, but the solution to plastic pollution is not the elimination of plastic entirely, experts acknowledge. Plastic will continue to play a crucial role in our society and will continue to drive technological advancements. For example, plastic is increasingly being used in cars and other vehicles as a lightweight alternative to metals, helping drive the production of lower emissions vehicles.

“I think what it really means is we use plastic where it is socially useful and necessary,” Wirsig said. “But so the question is, what happens to that plastic at the end of life? When you’re wanting to decommission the vehicle, what happens to the plastic?”

In recognition of this need for a shift in the way we think about plastic, the Chemistry Industry Association of Canada (CIAC) launched the Save Plastic campaign.

“You may not realize just how important plastics are in our daily life, from life-saving medical materials, to the playgrounds that populate our parks. When produced and used responsibly, plastic becomes a fundamental resource in a modern and sustainable future,” reads the campaign website.

The CIAC represents plastic industry leaders and proposes an advancement to their circular economy targets set in 2018. By 2030, the industry is expected to recycle or recover 100 percent of plastic packaging. By 2040, 100 percent of plastic packaging is to be reused, recycled or recovered.

In order to help keep plastic waste out of the natural environment, the CIAC promotes a circular economic approach. A circular economy goes beyond recycling. The goal is not just to design for better end-of-life recovery, but to minimize the use of raw materials and energy through a restorative system.

All levels of government have a role to play in this type of economy. Wirsig alluded to municipalities in British Columbia that have taken a lead on best practices for common plastic items.

Most of the initiatives are focussed on the food industry. Vancouver has implemented a 25 cent fee on takeout cups and Edmonton has passed a bylaw that as of next year will require reusable cups for dine-in at all food establishments.

“I think that's going to spur those restaurants to consider how they can set up systems, because what we're seeing is you need these systems to be widely accessible, convenient and affordable,” Wirsig said.

In working toward a circular economy, the Region of Peel has set the target of a 75 percent waste divergence rate by 2034. This will see 75 percent of waste rerouted away from landfills and reused or recycled in any way possible. Currently the Region has a divergence rate of 50 percent, 14 percent of which is diverted by blue box recycling alone.

The Region is faring better than Ontario which had few policies put in place to meet its divergence goals. In 2004, the province set a goal of a 60 percent waste diversion rate by 2008. It fell far short; as of 2018 (most recent data available), the diversion rate of waste in Ontario was 29 percent, just shy of half of the goal, ten years after the target date.

Since the utter failure, the province has set three interim goals: a 30 percent diversion rate by 2020, 50 percent by 2030 and 80 percent by 2050.

The Region of Peel has its own ambitious plan.

Erwin Pascual, Manager of Waste Planning at the Region of Peel, said the Region supports the federal target of zero plastic waste by 2030. He emphasized the Region’s work in advocating for extended producer responsibility, support for single-use plastic bans and recycled content targets.

The Region has implemented several pilot programs to reduce waste of all kinds such as curbside and residential, building, clothing and textile collection services, a pick up service for household hazardous waste and electronics waste, as well as trials for various methods of enforcing proper participation in Peel’s blue bin recycling and green organics collection programs.

“A key focus of Peel Region’s promotion and education efforts is to create awareness and inform residents of all ages the benefits of practicing the 3Rs,” Pascual wrote in an email. “This includes reducing how much waste is generated in the first place (which often includes plastic), reusing and repurposing items, and recycling where and when we can.”

The responsibility to end the plastic problem is on all levels of government, business and industry… and, ultimately, all of us.

Email: rachel.morgan@thepointer.com
Twitter: @rachelnadia_
Rachel Morgan, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Pointer

Humans became their prey: Disquieting new theory on Canada’s only fatal coyote attack

A team of biologists believe they have solved the enduring mystery as to why a pack of Cape Breton coyotes attacked and killed a Canadian singer-songwriter in 2009.


Taylor Mitchell of Toronto died after being attacked by a pack of coyotes in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, in 2009

Story by Tristin Hopper •  National Post

After harsh conditions deprived the coyotes of their usual food sources of small mammals, the animals appear to have developed a taste for moose — which ultimately led them to begin seeing humans as food.

“They were actually killing moose when they could,” lead author Stan Gehrt, an ecologist at Ohio State University, said in a Monday statement . Once the Nova Scotia coyotes got confident that they could take down unconventional prey, it led “to conflicts with people that you wouldn’t normally see,” added Gehrt.

Taylor Mitchell, 19, was in the midst of a concert tour of the Atlantic Provinces when she was set upon by a group of coyotes during a solo hike through Cape Breton Highlands National Park.

Although nearby hikers saw the unprovoked attack and were able to summon medical help, Mitchell died of blood loss 12 hours later. The Toronto singer remains the only documented adult North American fatality from a coyote attack.

Every year yields a reliable tally of North American bear attacks, and even wolves are known to kill a human roughly every five to 10 years .

But before Mitchells death, the only documented North American case of a coyote killing someone was when a three-year-old was attacked in California in 1981.

This is despite the fact that humans live in close proximity to coyotes all across the continent, and will semi-regularly be nipped by the animals.



A coyote travels through an industrial park in Edmonton in April 2021.© Provided by National Post

But even before the Oct. 2009 attack on Mitchell, coyotes in the Cape Breton Highlands had developed a reputation for being particularly aggressive.

The park has had 32 recent examples of “coyote-human incidents,” including seven where coyotes bit people.

In 2010, another teenager would be attacked just 30 kilometres from where Mitchell had been killed. A 16-year-old girl was sleeping outside when she was awoken in the early dawn hours by a coyote biting her twice on the top of her scalp.

At the time of Mitchell’s death, wildlife experts guessed that the coyotes had become emboldened by exposure to human food and had “lost their fear” of people.

That’s usually the explanation when humans are attacked by a bear or wolf.

Parks Canada, for instance, will routinely euthanize bears that display what they call “food conditioning.” The animals get accustomed to sourcing their meals from campsites and garbage cans, which leads to potentially deadly encounters with humans.

In 2016, grey wolves began stalking and attacking workers at Saskatchewan’s Cigar Lake uranium mine. In one case, a wolf managed to get its jaws around the neck of a 26-year-old before being scared off by security.

The diagnosis in that case was “habituation”; wolves had gotten used to scrounging for human food around the mine without incident, and had decided to take their predation to the next level. “If a person gets attacked, it is likely that it is being tested by the wolf, to see if it might serve as prey,” was how conservation biologist Dennis Murray explained the behaviour of the Cigar Lake wolves to the National Post at the time.

But in the case of the Cape Breton coyotes, the Ohio State paper found that very few of them had any history of scrounging for human garbage.

“We found little evidence that anthropogenic (human) foods were an important part of coyote diets in Cape Breton Highlands National Park,” reads the paper, published in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

Rather, it appeared to be a case of wild animals choosing to eat humans even before they had gotten accustomed to eating human garbage. As the paper put it, the coyotes were able to “circumvent the habituation process altogether and view people as alternative prey.”

The paper — a joint effort by Ohio State, Parks Canada, the Nova Scotia government, and the Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation — spent months between 2011 and 2013 diligently tracking the movements and diets of Cape Breton coyotes.

This included chemical analysis of fur from five coyotes believed to have been involved in Mitchell’s death, and which were euthanized shortly afterwards by park staff.

The typical diet of a Canadian coyote is a selection of small mammals, such as squirrels, mice, snowshoe hares or even juvenile deer. But these animals were in short supply within the “extreme environmental conditions and topography” of Cape Breton Highlands National Park.

Meanwhile, those same harsh conditions were also yielding some particularly colossal snow drifts in the winter.

Moose that became trapped in these drifts likely became the first victims of the coyotes’ switch to taking down larger prey.

By the time of the Mitchell attack, Cape Breton coyotes were routinely taking down moose, which average 1,000 pounds apiece in that part of Nova Scotia. Analysis of two coyotes known to have attacked Mitchell (known as CBH-25 and CBH-26) found that they’d been mostly eating moose meat in the preceding months.

“We suggest that the unprovoked, severe attacks on people in Cape Breton Highlands National Park are at least partially the result of prey-switching by coyotes that had specialized on a very large prey species in the absence of alternative smaller prey,” the paper concluded.

Adding to the coyotes’ boldness was the fact that hunting or trapping is forbidden in the park. “Without these negative stimuli they may not view humans with the fear that typifies the coyote–human relationship elsewhere,” wrote researchers.

The research points towards the Cape Breton coyotes being members of a vanishingly small cohort of wild animals that have actively decided to treat modern humans as just another large prey animal.

When researchers tried to think of a similar example, the closest analogue they could think of was the infamous Man-Eaters of Tsavo, a pair of Kenyan lions that in 1898 hunted and killed more than 100 railway workers.

Oregon governor calls death penalty 'immoral,' commutes sentences for all 17 inmates on death row

Story by Paradise Afshar • Yesterday 

Outgoing Oregon Gov. Kate Brown is commuting the sentences of all 17 people on death row to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, according to a news release Tuesday from her office.

“Since taking office in 2015, I have continued Oregon’s moratorium on executions because the death penalty is both dysfunctional and immoral. Today I am commuting Oregon’s death row so that we will no longer have anyone serving a sentence of death and facing execution in this state,” Brown, a Democrat, said.

Brown also talked about the long wait for victims and their families.

“I also recognize the pain and uncertainty victims experience as they wait for decades while individuals sit on death row – especially in states with moratoriums on executions – without resolution,” she said. “My hope is that this commutation will bring us a significant step closer to finality in these cases.”

The governor will use executive clemency powers to commute the sentences, and the order is set to take effect Wednesday.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Oregon has executed two people since the US Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 and the state reinstated the penalty in 1984. The most recent was in May 1997 when double murderer Harry Moore was put to death by lethal injection.

Brown succeeded Gov. John Kitzhaber, who in November 2011 granted a reprieve to a death row inmate and said no more executions would take place in Oregon. Kitzhaber resigned in February 2015. Brown, who was term-limited, will be replaced by Tina Kotek, a Democrat.

Young gypsy shot by Greek police dies after a week in hospital

The 16-year-old Greek teenager from the Roma community who had been shot by a policeman during a chase for robbing a gas station died Tuesday in a hospital in the Greek city of Thessaloniki.

Clashes between police and protesters in Athens, Greece - 

NIKOLAS GEORGIOU / ZUMA PRESS / CONTACTOPHOTO

 News 360

The victim was seriously wounded in the early morning of December 5 by a police officer on a motorcycle who was chasing him as he fled after allegedly leaving a gas station without paying the bill for 20 euros, according to the Greek newspaper 'Kathimeriní'.

Greek authorities claim that the young man tried to ram the motorcycle-riding officers during the chase. In turn, last week the accused policeman stated during an initial court appearance that he shot the young man because there was a real risk to him and his companions.

The 34-year-old officer has been suspended and has been under house arrest since last Friday on charges of intentional homicide.

Since the day of the shooting, numerous riots against police violence have taken place in the cities of Thessaloniki, Athens and other parts of Greece. These gatherings have often been violent, with members of the Roma community accused of throwing stones, setting fire to garbage cans and opening fire on authorities in a suburb of the Greek capital.

The demonstrations have taken place on the 14th anniversary of the fatal shooting that ended the life of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos during a police operation in 2008. The officer involved was convicted of murder and, since then, annual altercations on that date are usual in the Greek streets against police abuses.

UK
Royal Mail strikes: Workers to stage fresh 48-hour strike with final dates for Christmas brought forward

Story by Hannah Cottrell • Yesterday

Royal Mail workers are set to stage a fresh 48-hour strike on Wednesday, December 14, bringing postal services to a halt in the run-up to Christmas. Members of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) are set to walk out in an increasingly bitter dispute over pay, jobs and conditions, with picket lines mounted outside sorting and delivery offices.

Workers are set to strike on December 14 and 15 and on the few days before Christmas on December 23 and 24. A Royal Mail spokesperson said the CWU striking at the busiest time of year is 'deliberately holding Christmas to ransom for customers, businesses and families'.

Meanwhile, the CWU general secretary accused Royal Mail bosses of 'risking a Christmas meltdown because of their stubborn refusal to treat their employees with respect'. The two sides have held talks in recent weeks but the row remains deadlocked. As a result, Royal Mail has brought forward the final posting dates for Christmas cards due to the industrial action.

READ MORE: Police asked to drive ambulances as paramedics walkout in strike action


CWU general secretary Dave Ward during a protest in Central London© PA

The Royal Mail spokesperson continued, saying: "We are doing everything we can to deliver Christmas for our customers, and would like to thank the increasing number of posties returning to work each strike day, temporary workers and managers from across the business who are helping to keep the mail moving.

"However, this task becomes more challenging as Christmas nears", they said. "Three weeks ago, we made a best and final pay offer worth up to 9 per cent over 18 months. Instead of working with us to agree on changes required to fund that offer and get pay into our posties’ pockets, the CWU has announced plans to ballot in the New Year for further strike action.

"Their misguided belief that further industrial action, in a business already losing more than £1 million a day, will result in an improved pay offer is misleading its members and risking their long-term job security."

Related video: Rail strikes to continue over Christmas after pay offer is rejected (PA Media)
Duration 1:22
View on Watch



Meanwhile, the CWU said it had offered 'simple solutions' to end the dispute, including a back-dated pay deal of 9 per cent over 18 months, a long-term job security commitment from Royal Mail’s chief executive and a period of calm for negotiations on the future direction of the company.

The union said Royal Mail did not offer to meet with the CWU, adding that planned strikes on Wednesday December 14, Thursday December 15, Friday December 23 and Saturday December 24 are set to go ahead.



Members of the CWU carried a coffin reading 'Royal Fail' during their latest protest in a procession from Parliament Square to Buckingham Palace on December 9© PA

CWU general secretary Dave Ward said: "Royal Mail bosses are risking a Christmas meltdown because of their stubborn refusal to treat their employees with respect. Postal workers want to get on with serving the communities they belong to, delivering Christmas gifts and tackling the backlog from recent weeks.

"But they know their value, and they will not meekly accept the casualisation of their jobs, the destruction of their conditions and the impoverishment of their families. This can be resolved if Royal Mail begin treating their workers with respect, and meet with the union to resolve this dispute."

As the last posting dates for arrival for Christmas are brought forward, Post Office branches across the country are set for a busy few days ahead as customers race to ensure cards and gifts arrive on time, with some branches opening for longer hours.

Laura Joseph, Post Office customer experience director said: "As soon as you’ve got your parcels ready to go get them in the post – many Post Office branches are open long hours, and some are open seven days a week so pop into your local branch and get your gifts sent in time for Christmas."The last posting dates for arrival for Christmas Day:

– 1st Class, 1st Class Signed For – December 16

– Special Delivery Guaranteed – December 21

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Musk's Twitter disbands its Trust and Safety advisory group

Yesterday 



Elon Musk's Twitter has dissolved its Trust and Safety Council, the advisory group of around 100 independent civil, human rights and other organizations that the company formed in 2016 to address hate speech, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm and other problems on the platform.

The council had been scheduled to meet with Twitter representatives Monday night. But Twitter informed the group via email that it was disbanding it shortly before the meeting was to take place, according to multiple members.

The council members, who provided images of the email from Twitter to The Associated Press, spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation. The email said Twitter was “reevaluating how best to bring external insights” and the council is “not the best structure to do this.”

“Our work to make Twitter a safe, informative place will be moving faster and more aggressively than ever before and we will continue to welcome your ideas going forward about how to achieve this goal,” said the email, which was signed “Twitter.”

The volunteer group provided expertise and guidance on how Twitter could better combat hate, harassment and other harms but didn’t have any decision-making authority and didn’t review specific content disputes. Shortly after buying Twitter for $44 billion in late October, Musk said he would form a new “content moderation council” to help make major decisions but later changed his mind.

“Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council was a group of volunteers who over many years gave up their time when consulted by Twitter staff to offer advice on a wide range of online harms and safety issues," tweeted council member Alex Holmes. “At no point was it a governing body or decision making.”

Twitter, which is based in San Francisco, had confirmed the meeting with the council Thursday in an email in which it promised an “open conversation and Q&A” with Twitter staff, including the new head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin.

Related video: Musk to Ban Bot Accounts on Twitter (Cheddar News)
Duration 0:25   View on Watch

That came on the same day that three council members announced they were resigning in a public statement posted on Twitter that said that “contrary to claims by Elon Musk, the safety and wellbeing of Twitter’s users are on the decline.”

Those former council members soon became the target of online attacks after Musk amplified criticism of them and Twitter’s past leadership for allegedly not doing enough to stop child sexual exploitation on the platform.

“It is a crime that they refused to take action on child exploitation for years!” Musk tweeted.

A growing number of attacks on the council led to concerns from some remaining members who sent an email to Twitter earlier on Monday demanding the company stop misrepresenting the council's role.

Those false accusations by Twitter leaders were “endangering current and former Council members,” the email said.

The Trust and Safety Council, in fact, had as one of its advisory groups one that focused on child exploitation. This included the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the Rati Foundation and YAKIN, or Youth Adult Survivors & Kin in Need.

Former Twitter employee Patricia Cartes, whose job it was to form the council in 2016, said Monday its dissolution “means there’s no more checks and balances." Cartes said the company sought to bring a global outlook to the council, with experts from around the world who could relay concerns about how new Twitter policies or products might affect their communities.

She contrasted that with Musk’s current practice of surveying his Twitter followers before making a policy change affecting how content gets moderated.

“He doesn’t really care as much about what experts think,” she said.

Matt O'brien And Barbara Ortutay, The Associated Press

Andrea Mitchell Asks Fauci If He Ever Found Out Why Trump Pushed False Covid-19 Cure: ‘Was There A Financial Interest In It?’

Story by Tommy Christopher • Yesterday 

MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell asked retiring infectious disease honcho Dr. Anthony Fauci if he ever found out why then-President Donald Trump pushed false Covid-19 “cure” hydroxychloroquine, asking “was there a financial interest?”

ABOUT HIS LONG CAREER. THE TRIUMPHS AND THE CHALLENGES.
Dr. Fauci: Twitter has become ‘almost a cesspool of misinformation’
View on Watch    Duration 7:52

Fauci has been on something of a weird bookless-book-tour lately, hitting all sorts of media outlets to reminisce about his decades of public service, his years as a reluctant member of the Trump Covid Improv Troupe, his current effort to ignore Elon Musk, and his future getting yelled at by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and his friends.

On Tuesday’s edition of MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports, the veteran NBC News journalist found some different ground to go over, asking Fauci if he thought Trump pimped a fake cure because of a financial stake, and if misinformation cost lives:

ANDREA MITCHELL: So when you hear the president of the United States promoting hydroxychloroquine for COVID.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Right.

ANDREA MITCHELL: And listening to advisors like a doctor from California and his trade advisor, and the government, the federal government spending, according to some reports, $20 million to buy that, stockpile other for COVID. What– what can you do in your role?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Speak up like I did. And it didn’t help much, because he just kept on doing what he wanted to do. But it had the result of creating a phenomenal amount of hostility against me among the people around him, which has spilled over into the people who are very much listening to everything that he has said. And that has made it very uncomfortable, the reason why I’m getting so many threats against me.

ANDREA MITCHELL: Did you ever figure out why they were pushing that hydroxychloroquine?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: You know–

ANDREA MITCHELL: Was there a financial interest in it?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: No. I don’t think it had anything to do with financial, it had to do with just listening to some friend of yours that tells you something, which is completely out of the line of the normal scientific process. The normal scientific process, you look at the data and the data will tell you that either something works or it doesn’t work. And because somebody whispers in your ear– “You know, I gave it to somebody and they did well.” You know, N equals one. It doesn’t– that’s not a scientific study.

ANDREA MITCHELL: Do you think that lives were lost because of the way all of this became so polarized?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Well, if– you know, I– when I say things like that, it gets thrown out of proportion in sound bites. The but fact is vaccines save lives. If you say something or do something to dissuade people from getting vaccinated, then lives will unnecessarily be lost. That’s just a fact.

ANDREA MITCHELL: And masks.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Same thing. You know, masks, physical distancing, all the things that are good public health principles.

Watch above via MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports.The post Andrea Mitchell Asks Fauci If He Ever Found Out Why Trump Pushed False Covid-19 Cure: ‘Was There A Financial Interest In It?’ first appeared on Mediaite.

Colby Cosh: A new look at 1979's mysterious nuclear (we think) explosion

The 'Vela Incident' remains one of the genuine whodunits — and whodunwhat — of the 20th century

Author of the article:Colby Cosh
Publishing date:Jan 23, 2018 

Nuclear explosions create an M-shaped signal on light detectors in the first second or so after they detonate.

There are many names for whatever happened in the South Atlantic on Sept. 22, 1979, but the most typical one is “the Vela Incident.” It is one of the genuine mysteries of 20th-century history — not a contrived mystery like “Who killed the Lindbergh baby?”, but the real deal: a whodunit, combined with a whatwuzzit. At just past midnight on the key date, an American satellite designed to detect nuclear explosions, Vela 6911, “announced” to ground stations that it was pretty sure it had just seen one.

The inferred location of the blast was about halfway between South Africa and Antarctica. This may not seem like an important clue to post-Cold War babies; people forget that South Africa is known to have had the bomb throughout the 1980s. The apartheid regime built a half-dozen warheads for tactical use and regional deterrence against such Communist-influenced neighbour states as Angola. In 1989, during the run-up to South African democracy, the republic voluntarily dismantled its nukes. Over the next decade it joined the major nonproliferation treaties, and even led the creation of a new one, the African Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaty.

The new research paper on the Vela Incident, published in the journal Science & Global Security last month, is not a sensational novelty. Mostly I am mentioning it because it may be nice, in 2018, to imagine a rogue member of the Nuclear Club one day leaving it and becoming a leading anti-nuke sentinel.

South Africa is not necessarily the prime suspect in this whodunit

With all that said, South Africa is not necessarily the prime suspect in this whodunit. Vela 6911 was part of a global grid of satellites designed to help enforce the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which outlawed nuclear testing in the atmosphere (and in space). The satellites’ main instruments for spotting atmospheric nuke tests were arrays of light-detecting photodiodes called “bhangmeters” (whose name is a slightly complicated physicists’ joke about cannabis. Yes, really).

Nuclear explosions create an interesting double-humped or M-shaped signal on light detectors in the first second or so after they detonate. There’s an initial, brief fireball “set off” by X-rays heating the air (and anything else that might be very nearby) to hundreds of thousands of degrees. Then the mechanical shock wave of the explosion, at first opaque, conceals the first fireball.

Cooling as it expands, the shock wave becomes translucent, and there is a “second maximum” of brightness. The resulting M-shaped curve is the same for fission and fusion weapons, can be used to calculate the total energy of the explosion, and is not known to be imitated by any other natural phenomenon.

A test of a 23-kiloton A-bomb on Bikini atoll in the Pacific Ocean July 25, 1946, 

raised a mushroom cloud of radioactivity a mile high.

In the Vela Incident, two independent bhangmeters recorded an M-shaped light signal that sent the White House and the U.S. intelligence community racing madly off in all directions. Well, to be more specific, they went in two opposing ones.

The CIA studied the signal and decided that it was, in fact, the thumbprint of a low-yield nuke. President Jimmy Carter convened a blue-ribbon scientific panel to study the signal: it was led by Jack Ruina, an MIT electrical engineering prof who had once been director of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. This is to say that Ruina had very strong science credentials, and equally impressive deep-state credentials. Ruina’s panel issued what one member called a “Scotch verdict”: it said it could not rule out a natural explanation for the signal.

The new paper by Christopher M. Wright and Lars-Erik de Geer pulls together the many shreds of public-domain knowledge about the physics of the Vela Incident. Some of them have come from material declassified piecemeal, and far from completely, over the intervening decades. The public has only been allowed to scrutinize selected items from a “zoo” of Vela false alarms cited by the Ruina panel as proof that the Incident might have been some kind of micrometeor phenomenon. Meanwhile, Vela readings from the last known atmospheric nuke tests have also been misplaced.

As Wright and de Geer document, even this threadbare evidence does not leave much room to doubt that the incident was a nuke. The panel’s alternate scenarios are pretty contrived, especially given what the human species has learned since about the statistics of very tiny particles that whiz about the cosmos and occasionally smash into satellites.

Wright and de Geer do not dig into the historical literature of Vela, which has been expanding persistently as intelligence-world memoirs and diaries are published or declassified. Even president Carter wrote, not long after his panel had completed its preliminary work, of “a growing belief among our scientists that the Israelis did indeed conduct a nuclear test explosion in the ocean near the southern end of South Africa.”

A growing belief that the Israelis did conduct a nuclear test explosion

There is now a panoply of published remarks by top U.S. spies deriding the White House panel report as a whitewash, and there has even been some sketchy confirmation of Israeli involvement, though it is less clear that South Africa participated. Israel’s membership in the nuclear club is no longer a secret in any way, but is still an unmentionable for the U.S. executive branch.

In 1980 such talk had the potential to start a war. Students of the Vela Incident have, ever since then, been drifting pretty steadily toward the conclusion that it was a nuclear test. But if there is the equivalent of a smoking gun, we still cannot be sure which country or countries held it.

• Email: ccosh@postmedia.com | Twitter: colbycosh

IT NEVER WAS JUST ABOUT ABORTION

A notorious Trump judge just fired the first shot against birth control

Story by Ian Millhiser • Yesterday 

Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee to a federal court in Texas, spent much of his career trying to interfere with other people’s sexuality.


A protester dressed as birth control pills rallies outside the Supreme Court in 2014.© Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

A former lawyer at a religious conservative litigation shop, Kacsmaryk denounced, in a 2015 article, a so-called “Sexual Revolution” that began in the 1960s and 1970s, and which “sought public affirmation of the lie that the human person is an autonomous blob of Silly Putty unconstrained by nature or biology, and that marriage, sexuality, gender identity, and even the unborn child must yield to the erotic desires of liberated adults.”

So, in retrospect, it’s unsurprising that Kacsmaryk would be the first federal judge to embrace a challenge to the federal right to birth control after the Supreme Court’s June decision eliminating the right to an abortion.

Last week, Kacsmaryk issued an opinion in Deanda v. Becerra that attacks Title X, a federal program that offers grants to health providers that fund voluntary and confidential family planning services to patients. Federal law requires the Title X program to include “services for adolescents,”

The plaintiff in Deanda is a father who says he is “raising each of his daughters in accordance with Christian teaching on matters of sexuality, which requires unmarried children to practice abstinence and refrain from sexual intercourse until marriage.” He claims that the program must cease all grants to health providers who do not require patients under age 18 to “obtain parental consent” before receiving Title X-funded medical care.

This is not a new argument, and numerous courts have rejected similar challenges to publicly funded family planning programs, in part because the Deanda plaintiff’s legal argument “would undermine the minor’s right to privacy” which the Supreme Court has long held to include a right to contraception.

But Kacsmaryk isn’t like most other judges. In his brief time on the bench — Trump appointed Kacsmaryk in 2019 — he has shown an extraordinary willingness to interpret the law creatively to benefit right-wing causes.

This behavior is enabled, moreover, by the procedural rules that frequently enable federal plaintiffs in Texas to choose which judge will hear their case — 95 percent of civil cases filed in Amarillo, Texas’s federal courthouse are automatically assigned to Kacsmaryk. So litigants who want their case to be decided by a judge with a history as a Christian right activist, with a demonstrated penchant for interpreting the law flexibly to benefit his ideological allies, can all but ensure that outcome by bringing their lawsuit in Amarillo.

And so, last Thursday, the inevitable occurred. Kacsmaryk handed down a decision claiming that “the Title X program violates the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.”

Kacsmaryk’s decision is riddled with legal errors, some of them obvious enough to be spotted by a first-year law student. And it contradicts a 42-year-long consensus among federal courts that parents do not have a constitutional right to target government programs providing contraceptive care. So there’s a reasonable chance that Kacsmaryk will be reversed on appeal, even in a federal judiciary dominated by Republican appointees.

Nevertheless, Kacsmaryk’s opinion reveals that there are powerful elements within the judiciary who are eager to limit access to contraception. And even if Kacsmaryk’s opinion is eventually rejected by a higher court, he could potentially send the Title X program into turmoil for months.

Kacsmaryk’s opinion is incompetently drafted and makes several obvious legal errors

Kacsmaryk’s opinion makes a number of legal errors, some of them egregious.

The Constitution, for example, does not permit litigants to file federal lawsuits challenging a government program unless they’ve been injured in some way by that program — a requirement known as “standing.” But Alexander Deanda, the father in this case seeking to stop Title X-funded programs from offering contraception to minors, does not claim that he has ever sought Title X-funded care. He does not allege that his daughters have ever sought Title X-funded care. And he does not even allege that they intend to seek Title X-funded care in the future.


Thus, this case should have been dismissed for lack of standing. As the Supreme Court held in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife (1992), the plaintiff in a federal lawsuit must show that they’ve been injured in a manner that is “actual or imminent” and not “conjectural” or “hypothetical.” But Deanda has offered nothing more than conjecture that, if Title X continues to operate as it has for decades, one of his daughters might, at some point in the future, obtain contraception. Kacsmaryk nevertheless allowed his suit to proceed.

Additionally, Kacsmaryk places an astonishing amount of weight on a Texas state law which provides that parents have a right to consent to their child’s “medical and dental care.” But the Constitution states explicitly that federal law is “the supreme Law of the Land,” and when state laws prevent a federal law from operating as Congress intended — including the federal law creating the Title X program — then the state law must yield.

If the law worked any other way, then states would have the power to fundamentally alter federal welfare programs. Republican state lawmakers who believe that the Medicare or Social Security eligibility age should be 75 — or 125, for that matter — could pass a law imposing this new age requirement, thus destroying Congress’s power to create universal programs that benefit all Americans regardless of whether they live in a red state or a blue state.

Kacsmaryk attempts to weaponize the Constitution against birth control

The idea that parents have a constitutional right to shape their child’s upbringing — and that this right undermines government-funded contraceptive care — has been around for nearly half a century. It’s just never gained any real traction in federal court.

In Doe v. Irwin (1980), a federal appeals court case, the plaintiffs brought a similar challenge as Deanda against a state-operated family planning clinic that served both adults and teenagers. Doe acknowledged that a line of Supreme Court decisions stretching back to the 1920s establish that parents have a limited constitutional right “to the care, custody and nurture of their children.” At the same time, however, Doe held that “as with adults, the minor’s right of privacy includes the right to obtain contraceptives.” And so the plaintiffs’ claims in Doe placed these two constitutional rights in tension.

But the court found an easy way to relieve this tension. In each of the Supreme Court’s previous parental rights cases, “the state was either requiring or prohibiting some activity” — that is, the government used its coercive power to either require a child to take an action their parents did not like, or forbid the child from taking an action their parents wanted the child to take.

A program like Title X cannot violate this rule against coercion because there is nothing coercive about it. The federal government provides grants to health providers who voluntarily offer family planning services to their patients. And those providers, in turn, offer their services to patients who voluntarily seek out contraceptive care. No one is required to receive reproductive health care services funded by Title X.

This distinction between coercive government programs which compel certain behaviors, and welfare programs which merely fund voluntary activity, is implicit in the Constitution’s text. The Supreme Court (somewhat controversially) found the right of parents to shape their children’s upbringing in the Constitution’s due process clause, which provides that no one may be deprived of “liberty” without “due process of law.” But it’s impossible to deprive someone of liberty by creating a voluntary program that no one is required to participate in. “Liberty,” by definition, means the freedom to do as you choose.

To all of this, Kacsmaryk offers a hodgepodge of half-formed arguments that layer several additional pages onto his opinion without presenting much legal reasoning. One of his primary arguments rebutting Doe, for example, relies on the fact that the Supreme Court’s parental rights decision in Troxel v. Granville (2000) “does not rely on a heavy distinction between ‘voluntary’ and ‘compulsory’ programs.” But Troxel involved a coercive state law governing who is allowed to interact with a child against their parents’ wishes — so there was no reason for Troxel to discuss voluntary programs because such a program was not before the Court.

Similarly, he claims that “the common law held minors were incapable of giving consent to make important life decisions.” But English and early American law permitted minors to consent to sex as early as age 12, a fact that is simultaneously deeply upsetting and completely inconsistent with Kacsmaryk’s implication that 17-year-olds historically did not have control over their sexuality.

That leaves him with a policy argument against the rule announced in Doe. Kacsmaryk claims that limiting the scope of parents’ constitutional rights to cases involving actual coercion would lead to “absurd results,” such as preventing “parents from becoming aware of what books their children are reading in school and deny[ing] them the right to exempt their children from an offensive reading curriculum,” or preventing parents from intervening if a doctor provides care that is genuinely harmful.

But even if you assume that parents have a right to exempt their children from public school curriculums, a mandatory school assignment is a coercive act — so decisions like Doe are consistent with a rule allowing parents to exempt their children from certain school assignments.

Similarly, Kacsmaryk’s decision reaches far beyond the unlikely circumstances when a family planning clinic prescribes medically harmful treatments to teenagers. According to Kacsmaryk, “parental consent does not depend on the particular form of contraception or the environment in which the contraception is distributed.” So his decision would even prevent a public university from leaving out a basket of free condoms that anyone, including students who are not yet 18, can take from as they choose.

Obviously, questions about teenage sexuality are fraught. But the bottom line is that the people’s elected representatives in Congress debated these difficult issues, and they chose to enact a Title X program that provides funding that Kacsmaryk finds objectionable. It is simply not a judge’s job to short-circuit this democratic process of determining how the law should approach teenage sexuality. Nor is it Kacsmaryk’s job to impose his own well-documented prudishness on a federal program like Title X.

So what happens to Title X now?

Although Kacsmaryk claims that Title X “violates the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children,” he has not yet ordered the federal government to halt the program. His opinion concludes by requiring the parties in Deanda to submit proposals by this Thursday laying out just what action Kacsmaryk should take against the federal government.

But Deanda’s lawyers have already signaled that they want an aggressive injunction that could temporarily shut down Title X, and permanently harm teenagers’ ability to obtain reproductive care.

In their complaint, these lawyers ask Kacsmaryk to prohibit the federal government from “funding any family-planning project in the United States that fails to obtain parental consent before distributing prescription contraception or other family-planning services to minors.” Should Kacsmaryk issue a such a sweeping order, which he could very well do given his past record, that could force the federal government to hit pause on the entire Title X program. To comply with such an order, Title X could have to build systems to determine which reproductive health providers give parents a veto power over medical care provided to their teenaged children.

There is a decent chance that Kacsmaryk will eventually be reversed by the Supreme Court — among other things, the standing problem in this case is so glaring that it may be hard for Deanda’s lawyers to convince five justices that they are allowed to bring this case in the first place. But it may be a while before that happens. Kacsmaryk’s decision will appeal first to the exceedingly conservative Fifth Circuit, which has a history of rubber-stamping outlandish decisions handed down by Kacsmaryk and similarly minded judges.

In the short term, in other words, Kacsmaryk could create a great deal of chaos for reproductive health clinics, which may lose an important source of funding for months or longer.

FORTEAN PHENOMENA

'It looks like baby Nessie!' Mystery sea creature washes up on Dorset beach

Story by Jessica Warren For Mailonline • Yesterday 

A mystery creature found washed up on a British beach has been dubbed a 'mini Loch Ness Monster' after photos of its remains left people baffled.

Lindsay Freeman said she spotted what 'looked like a sea monster' while on the beach in Poole, Dorset, and could not figure out what it was.

She said: 'I was walking on the beach at the time. It caught my eye because it was so unusual looking and large.

'I couldn't think of an animal that had a tail like a shark, but also legs like a turtle. It also looked like it had little arms and a very strange head.

'It looked like a sea monster.'


A mystery creature found washed up on a British beach has been dubbed a 'mini Loch Ness Monster' after photos of its remains went viral

© Provided by Daily Mail


Lindsay Freeman said she spotted what 'looked like a sea monster' while on the beach in Poole, Dorset

© Provided by Daily Mail

She continued: 'I thought it was very cool and wanted to know more.

'I sent an email to my family first and when we couldn't figure it out, it just ate at me — I wanted to know what it was; it had to have an explanation.

'I've never encountered something like this.'

Ms Freeman spotted the remains in November, but only shared her images online last week, where she attracted a flurry of bemused responses.

Several said it was a 'baby Loch Ness Monster' taking a break from the Highlands.

One commenter took a guess at a Liopleurodon, a prehistoric predator of the deep last seen some 150 million years ago.

Another suggested it was a facehugger, the parasitic movie monster from the 1979 flick, Alien.

And one self-proclaimed marine biologist said it was a sea cucumber.


One person suggested it was a Liopleurodon, a prehistoric predator of the deep last seen some 150 million years ago

© Provided by Daily Mail

'I thought it was some kind of strange shark with legs,' said Ms Freeman.

'It was definitely smooth like a fish or water animal. Friends and family guessed it was a dogfish, turtle without a shell, or the Loch Ness Monster. None [of these answers] seemed satisfying.

'Online, there were lots of suggestions like dogfish, turtle, salamander, lizard, sea monster, Loch Ness monster.

'Once we posted it, we got a flood of funny and serious responses — it seemed to capture many people's imaginations.'

But some of those commenting may have spotted the real answer.

Several suggested it was a ray of some sort, perhaps with its fins or 'wings' missing.


Rob Deaville, project manager for the UK Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme, said it looked like 'the remains of a skate or a ray'. 

File image© Provided by Daily Mail

Rob Deaville, project manager for the UK Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme, agreed that it appeared to be an elasmobranch — a grouping that includes rays and sharks.

He said: 'I'm not an expert in elasmobranch identification, but to my untutored eye, this looks like the remains of a skate or a ray.

'It looks like there are claspers next to the tail and eyes dorsally on the top of the head.

'I assume the pectoral fins have been removed and the rest of the body discarded.'

For Ms Freeman too, it's the answer that makes the most sense.

She said: 'There was some suggestion of how it might have lost its wings — like it was caught by fishermen and eaten.

'I am very curious to know how it ended up in its current state.'