It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, January 03, 2023
Grace Millane's mum reaches summit of Mt Kilimanjaro in memory of daughter
Auckland reporter Jan 03 2023
LAWRENCE SMITH/STUFF
Gillian Millane pictured outside the High Court in Auckland following her
daughter’s death. She is pictured with her husband, David Millane,
and police detective inspector Scott Beard.
The mother of British tourist Grace Millane has reached the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro on a climb to honour her late daughter and her husband, David Millane.
Gillian Millane reached the peak, which is 5895 metres above sea level, this week.
Photos posted to Instagram showed her posing at the summit, wearing long pants and a jacket, along with gloves, sunglasses and a beanie.
She was accompanied by her husband’s brother Martin Millane, sister Heather Gammer and her friend Jason Bedding.
Gillian Millane threw her support behind White Ribbon after her daughter died “so some mum doesn't have to go through this or some father doesn't have to go through what I go through”, she earlier told Newshub.
They have also raised $9294 for St Luke's Hospice and $4975 for Widowed and Young.
Elephants: Covid and ethics reshape Thailand's tourism industry
PublishedShare
Image caption,
Kwanmueang and his mahout Lek have returned to their home town as the tourism industry changes
By Jonathan Head
South East Asia correspondent
As he ambles in for his annual health check, Kwanmueang's size takes your breath away.
Nearly three metres high at the shoulder, weighing at least four tonnes, and with spectacular tusks that curve together until they almost touch, the 18-year-old Thai bull elephant is an imposing sight.
Yet he and his keeper, or mahout, Sornsiri "Lek" Sapmak, are in trouble.
They used to make a living by having Kwanmueang take part in ceremonies to ordain new monks, or dress up as a war elephant for re-enacting historic battles. All that stopped during the Covid lockdowns.
More elephants are used for tourism in Thailand - over 3,000 - than anywhere else. Unlike other countries with captive populations, those in Thailand are nearly all privately owned. So the collapse of tourism during the pandemic has had a devastating impact on the elephants and their owners, who no longer earn enough to look after them.
Even as tourism starts to recover, another threat hangs over this unique industry. Ethical concerns over how captive animals are kept and trained are prompting many foreign visitors to boycott the elephant shows, which were once a staple of tour groups, raising questions over whether elephant tourism can ever go back to what it was before Covid.
Lek and Kwanmueang have come back to Lek's home village in Surin province - a region whose people are famed for their skill in keeping, training, and in the past capturing, elephants.
Image caption,
Elephants are everywhere in Surin
Lek is not alone. Hundreds of other elephants have returned to Surin from tourist hot spots like Phuket and Chiang Mai, where they made money by performing tricks or giving rides to foreign visitors.
Walking through these villages is a disarming experience. Nearly every house has one or more elephants chained up in their front yards, or resting under trees. You get used to seeing the huge animals plodding along the road, their mahouts straddling their broad necks, and when driving you learn to take care to move around them.
Boonyarat "Joy" Salangam owns four elephants, which she and her partner brought back from Phuket when tourism dried up in 2020. One is a playful baby, penned in with its mother in an enclosure Joy built in front of her house.
"Covid stopped everything," she says. "The mahouts, owners and elephants have all been unemployed. In the tourist camps the females are kept apart from the bulls, but here we have all been hanging out together, and the elephants have been having sex. We don't force them. They do it in their own time. So the population is increasing."
Joy says she thought about selling her baby elephant to raise funds - they can fetch as much as a luxury car - but worried about how well he would be looked after. Joy has lived with his mother, who is 39 years old, nearly all of her life, and inherited her from her grandparents.
Image caption,
Elephants are expensive animals to care for - needing vast amounts of food and water each day
The mahouts too may live for decades with the same elephant from when they are both young, sometimes choosing to sleep with them, taking them to lakes or rivers to bathe in the evening, and keeping a close eye on their health. That has been a challenge under Covid.
Elephants are expensive. An adult needs to eat 100-200kg (220-440lb) of food a day, and drinks up to 100 litres (22 gallons) of water. Without any other income, owners like Joy have been livestreaming their animals on social media, while appealing for donations.
Sometimes this is done at home, as the elephants play or bathe, or they get a friend to ride a motorbike alongside them to film them on their evening walks. Viewers can pay online for the elephants to earn baskets of bananas by performing tricks, but this is not ideal for their health.
Their diet should mainly be different kinds of leaves and grass, but with so many elephants coming back to the area it is hard to find enough for them.
"We are finding they have digestive problems, because of the change in diet," says Nuttapon Bangkaew, a vet giving free check-ups offered by Elephant Kingdom, a project started seven years ago to improve the welfare of elephants in Surin.
"When the mahouts or elephant owners come back home, they don't have any income. So, they don't have money to buy grass or food for them. They have to do these social media livestreams to make money, but this causes health problems."
Elephants are native to Thailand, but the wild population has shrunk from around 100,000 a century ago, to perhaps only 3,000-4,000 today. In the past large numbers were captured and used in the logging industry, but when that was banned in the late 1980s to protect what remained of the country's forests, they started being used to entertain tourists instead.
In the earliest shows, they demonstrated their skill with logs. But these expanded, as Thailand's tourism boomed, to offering rides, or antics such as having the animals paint or play football. The campaigning group World Animal Protection (WAP) estimates that before Covid elephants generated up to $770m (£626m) a year for Thailand.
WAP is one of a number of groups trying to end the use of elephants for entertainment, arguing that it is unnatural, and always involves cruel training techniques. Many tourists are already seeking more ethical ways to experience elephants in Thailand. Some tour groups in Europe and North America will no longer send clients to elephant camps which include riding or bathing.
So a new niche has emerged in the eco-tourism industry to meet these concerns.
Saengduean "Lek" Chailert, a pioneer in ethical elephant tourism, opened the Elephant Nature Park, north of Chiang Mai, in the 1990s - both as a refuge for injured animals and to explore better ways to allow tourists and elephants to interact.
"We wanted to go fully ethical, to focus on conservation. So we decided to stop the programmes of elephant baths and feeding for tourists," she said.
That cost them half their bookings. And, she adds, tour operators said they couldn't send clients to them because everyone "wants to touch and hug the elephants, they want to put their hands on them".
Image caption,
Thailand's captive elephants would not be able to live independently in the wild
But today, Lek says, there are signs everywhere in Chiang Mai advertising "no bull-hooks, no chains, no riding".
"I checked in Koh Samui - before there were so many camps doing elephant riding. Now there are only two players left. In Phuket, only a few places are left, and in Chiang Mai, just two places."
However, ethical elephant tourism has its limits. Out of more than 200 camps which were operating before the Covid shutdown, only 11, including Lek's, get the WAP's approval.
Lek has a large plot of land, around 100 hectares (250 acres), along the Mae Taeng river. That is just about enough space for the 122 elephants she has - 45 of them rescued from bankrupt businesses during Covid - to be able to wander freely without being chained.
Other camps do not have that option. One, also in Chiang Mai, which advertises "ethical elephant tours", does allow bathing with humans. It says that because it does not have the means to build a sufficiently large enclosure it has to chain them in the evening, for the safety of the elephants and humans.
Image caption,
Some elephants are chained up to stop them wandering - something rights groups criticise
Some in the industry say this is all right; that there needs to be a more balanced approach between the abuses which used to characterise the industry and the demand of animal rights groups that all elephant entertainment should end.
"Riding elephants can be part of a system for taking care of them," says Theerapat Trungprakan, who heads the Thai Elephant Alliance Association, a group of elephant owners and business operators.
"They get to go to different places, going to a waterfall, for example, where they can drink the best quality water, or swimming there. It also increases the safety for the elephant to go with humans because there are dangers like pesticides or electricity cables beyond an elephant's judgement."
He describes some of the arguments made by animal rights groups as emotional and melodramatic, and believes that ethical sanctuaries can be less healthy, because without humans being paid to ride them the elephants get fewer opportunities to take long walks.
There are two debates now hanging over the future of Thailand's captive elephants. One is over what humans should and should not be allowed to do with them. The other, larger question is over what practical options there are for supporting such a massive population of large and long-lived animals.
"I have a wish list in my head, and on top of the wish list is to end the captivity of all wildlife, but we just know that that's not going to happen," says Edwin Wiek, one of the most prominent anti-trafficking campaigners in Thailand.
Image caption,
Edwin Wiek has worked with wildlife in Thailand for two decades
He started the Wildlife Friends Foundation of Thailand 21 years ago to rescue animals that were injured and kept illegally. He has 24 rescued elephants that roam freely in a 16-hectare corral.
"The ideal scenario would be having elephants semi-wild, like we keep them here, in large natural enclosures where they can hang around, bathe, run or forage for food, as they would in nature."
But he realises that would be a costly project with few takers given Thailand is home to 3,000 captive elephants.
"I'm afraid that the majority of elephants, three-quarters of them at least, will still need to find alternative income. And that means there will still be a lot of places where elephant rides, elephant bathing and feeding by tourists will be part of daily routine."
This is all the more likely to happen when tourists from markets like China, Russia and India start travelling to Thailand again, as they tend to enjoy the old-fashioned elephant entertainment shows more, which are often included on their package tours.
What Edwin Wiek believes should happen is for the breeding of domestic elephants to stop - so that the population falls to a level where they can all be kept in those ideal, semi-wild conditions, visited by the smaller number of tourists willing to pay just to see, not touch them.
Then, he says, the government could turn its attention to managing a growing wild population by creating corridors that allow them to move between Thailand's national parks and fragments of forest without coming into conflict with humans.
But Thailand has no strategy in place for that. In fact, regulation of domestic elephants is a muddle, divided between three ministries which do not co-ordinate with each other.
So the future of these magnificent creatures is left largely with their owners, many of them still in precarious financial shape.
The mahouts are counting the days until the tourists come back in the numbers they used to, but also worry that the only business many of them know may be threatened by changing tastes.
Bringing her elephants back to Surin from Phuket cost Joy more than $2,000. She says she cannot afford to return there until she is sure the shows are getting big crowds again.
"Right now it is very difficult for us, because we don't have enough money. The elephants and humans are both unemployed. Will there still be shows? I think there will, but not so many, because some foreign tourists think we, those who keep elephants, do not love them, that we torture them with bull-hooks to make them perform. I think things will change."
Mexico’s Supreme Court elects first female president
The court selected Norma Pina in a 6-to-5 vote on Monday, elevating a figure who has clashed with Mexico’s president.
Mexican Supreme Court Justice Norma Pina has clashed with the administration of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador over energy policy [File: Alejandro Cegarra/Bloomberg]
Published On 3 Jan 20233 Jan 2023
Mexico’s Supreme Court has elected a female president to lead the nation’s highest judicial body for the first time.
Following a six-to-five vote on Monday, Justice Norma Lucia Pina was sworn in for a four-year term as president of the court, which she has promised to keep independent.
“Judicial independence is indispensable in resolving conflicts between the branches of government,” Pina said on Monday. “My main proposal is to work to build majorities, leaving aside my personal vision.”
Pina’s election could bring the court into greater confrontation with the administration of Mexico’s left-wing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, whom Pina has sparred with over issues such as energy policy.
Already, Lopez Obrador’s relationship with the nation’s highest court is strained. The president has been outspoken in challenging the Supreme Court, particularly after the court blocked a number of his policies.
In November, for example, Lopez Obrador accused the court of siding with white-collar criminals when it struck down part of his “jail, no bail” policy, which required mandatory pre-trial detention for defendants accused of crimes like tax fraud. “What tremendous shamelessness,” he said, denouncing the justices.
Mexico’s Supreme Court holds elections for a new president every four years. With outgoing Chief Justice Arturo Zaldivar set to finish his term on December 31, Lopez Obrador had thrown his weight behind another justice, Yasmin Esquivel, in the hope of seeing a more sympathetic leader elected to lead the Supreme Court.
But Esquivel’s candidacy was overshadowed by scandal when a December news report alleged that she had plagiarised her college thesis. Esquivel’s paper, presented in 1987, was reportedly identical to one submitted a year earlier, though she maintains the earlier thesis copied her work.
The public university where Esquivel obtained a bachelor’s degree is still investigating the case.
Lopez Obrador attacked the allegations against Esquivel as politically motivated. He said on Monday that the country’s judicial system had been “eclipsed by money, by economic power”.
Pina’s election, meanwhile, was welcomed by members of the opposition, with conservative politicians like Kenia López Rabadán applauding her appointment.
“Faced with a president who violates the Constitution, now more than ever the Court must show independence, impartiality, objectivity and professionalism,” López Rabadán wrote on Twitter.
Some officials close to Lopez Obrador have also welcomed Pina’s election.
“Now is the time of human rights, the time for women,” said Senator Olga Cordero, Lopez Obrador’s former interior secretary, in a post on social media.
Pina, who will oversee the country’s entire judicial branch, has defended Mexico’s efforts to transition to renewable energy. That has put her at odds with Lopez Obrador, who promoted a plan to bring the energy sector under the control of the national power utility Comision Nacional de Electricidad (CFE) and the state oil firm Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex).
Accusing his predecessors of implementing policies that favoured private companies, Lopez Obrador had sought to make greater state control over Mexico’s energy sector a cornerstone of his economic agenda.
But his ambitions have faced barriers in Mexico’s Supreme Court. The court invalidated key portions of his energy plan, including one that gave CFE priority in connecting power plants to the energy grid.
In its ruling, the court invoked a constitutional obligation to cut the state’s carbon footprint.
Lopez Obrador’s energy policies have also brought him into dispute with the United States, which complained that Mexico’s policies put US-based companies at a disadvantage and violate the region’s trade agreements. Canada has made similar claims.
The international dispute led to the resignation of Mexico’s economy minister in October, amid fears that the complaint could result in Mexico facing punitive tariffs.
SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES
Remote Florida Archipelago Closes After Hundreds of Migrants Arrive
Dry Tortugas National Park will close for “several days” so that authorities and medical workers can evaluate, care for and transport some 300 - 500 migrants, park officials said.
Dry Tortugas National Park closed on Monday after 300 migrants arrived over the past couple of days.
A remote archipelago and national park off the coast of Key West, Fla., was closed Monday after a group of around 300 migrants arrived by boat on the islands’ shores, park officials said.
The cluster of mostly uninhabited islands, known as the Dry Tortugas National Park, is about 100 miles north of Havana and is known for its crystalline waters and coral reefs. But over the past few days, the islands have become a different kind of refuge.
In addition to the 300 migrants who arrived on the archipelago, more than 160 other migrants have arrived in other parts of the Florida Keys over the past several days, according to the local and federal authorities. The officials did not specify countries of origin but said in a statement that the park and region had recently “seen an increase in people arriving by boat from Cuba.”
The influx of migrants began around New Year’s Eve, the authorities said, and come amid a surge in seaborne migration. In the one-year period ending in September, the United States Coast Guard apprehended more than 6,000 Cubans, compared with close to 840 migrants the previous year, the authority said in a recent statement.
The archipelago temporarily closed starting at 8 a.m. on Monday, so that the authorities and medical workers could evaluate, care for and transport the migrants to Key West, Fla., park officials said. The park’s own responders would provide food, water and basic medical attention to the migrants until the arrival of the Department of Homeland Security, they added.
“The effort now is to try to get them transferred off the island via boat to mainland Key West and the Florida Keys, so they can then be transferred to federal law enforcement agents,” Lt. Cmdr. John Beal, a spokesman for the Coast Guard’s Seventh District, said of the migrants.
“They’re uninhabited remote islands that don’t have the infrastructure to support them,” he said, adding that local, state and federal authorities were coordinating to get food and water to the archipelago, which is usually staffed by just a few rangers.
Federal authorities said that the migrants would be removed from the islands and processed to determine their legal status to remain in the United States or to be repatriated to their country of origin.
The Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, which oversees the Florida Keys and its islands, described the influx of migrants over the weekend as a “mass migration crisis.” The office accused federal authorities, who in some cases were expected to arrive only the next day, of a sluggish response. “This federal failure is creating a humanitarian crisis,” the sheriff’s department said in a statement posted to Facebook on Monday.
The park was expected to be closed for several days, officials said, an action that they said was “necessary for the safety of visitors and staff because of the resources and space needed to attend to the migrants.”
Park officials said that all closures would “remain in place until further notice” and that during that time all ferries and seaplanes would be suspended.
FOREVER CHEMICALS
Despite 3M's phase-out, problem of cleaning up PFAS remains
by Chloe Johnson, Star Tribune
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain
3M announced in mid-December that it's phasing out a family of harmful chemicals, but they're not going away.
The "forever chemicals," known collectively as per- and polyfluorinated substances or PFAS, are used in everything from carpeting to nonstick pans to dental floss. The chains of carbon-fluorine bonds are excellent at repelling stains, grease and water, and even snuffing out dangerous fuel fires. But they also don't break down in the environment, and they linger in people's bodies for years.
Research has linked the chemicals to developmental and immune problems, fertility issues and some cancers.
Maplewood-based 3M, which is facing a cascade of lawsuits over the PFAS it helped pioneer in the last century, said it would stop making and using them by 2025, including at its plant in Cottage Grove.
In the view of Rainer Lohmann, director of the University of Rhode Island's STEEP lab and an authority on PFAS contamination: "The nightmare hasn't really stopped."
Researchers and environmental advocates said the persistence and global scope of the pollution from the chemicals will pose a cleanup challenge for years to come. They also worried new manufacturers could step in to fill a gap left by 3M, and they said the company should contribute to environmental cleanup.
"While it is great that they are moving away from these chemicals finally, after pressure, after liability, after pressure from government regulators … they certainly should not be left off the hook for accountability," said Melanie Benesh, vice president for government affairs with the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization.
3M has already been engaged in cleanup efforts in connection with legal cases and environmental enforcement. It paid the state of Minnesota $850 million to settle a lawsuit over natural resource damages in 2018, and before that it had to excavate contaminated material from several dumps used by its chemical plant in the east metro. The company also entered into a consent agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency this November to test and treat drinking water in a 10-mile area around its chemical plant in Cordova, Illinois.
It also faces continuing scrutiny around its Cottage Grove plant, where there's an open investigation into its water discharges by the EPA and Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. 3M first revealed the investigation to investors in 2020.
MPCA spokeswoman Andrea Cournoyer declined to comment on the inquiry.
In an email, she wrote that the agency "welcomes" 3M's plan to stop production and that it "will continue to hold 3M and other entities accountable for their PFAS pollution, as appropriate."
Sean Lynch, a spokesman for 3M, also declined to comment on the investigation.
He wrote in an email that the company "will continue to fulfill its commitments to water stewardship, as well as remediation of PFOA and PFOS at certain locations where we manufactured or disposed of these materials."
New technologies are being tested to clean up PFAS—including a machine designed to concentrate the chemicals in foam on top of water, which the MPCA is using in the east metro.
But there are still few known ways to destroy the chemicals, and they're so routinely found that researchers often refer to a "background level" that's present in the blood of most people.
"Any place we do find it, we basically know it was put there by someone or some process we created," said Matt Simcik, a professor of environmental chemistry at the University of Minnesota who has studied PFAS contamination for decades.
3M is still coping with the legacy of two of the oldest and best-studied formulations of the chemicals, PFOS and PFOA. The company announced in 2000 that it would phase them out. But other companies, such as DuPont, didn't until much later. The chemicals are routinely found around the planet today. One recent study revealed such high levels in rainwater that they exceeded limits set for drinking water by the EPA.
"PFOS was very much a 3M product, and we're still worrying about it 20 years after they phased it out," Lohmann said.
The contamination problem is a more complex one than other prominent contaminants, such as PCBs, Simcik said. The hazardous organic chemicals were used widely in electronics, finishes and plastics until their manufacture was banned in the United States in 1979. They tend to stick to particles, so over time some of the PCBs left in the environment in places like the Great Lakes have settled into soils and been covered, Simcik said.
"That big chunk is still down there and buried, so it's not a problem," he said.
That's not the case with PFAS, which move readily through water and keep coming into contact with people and animals.
And then there's the question of what could replace the chemicals. Simcik and Lohmann both worried about what the properties of new chemicals could be.
3M has not divulged how it will replace the chemicals that provide $1.3 billion in annual sales.
Asked whether the company would do health or safety testing on PFAS replacements, Lynch wrote that "3M is committing to innovate toward a world less dependent upon PFAS. 3M's products are safe for their intended uses."
The other main manufacturer in the United States is Chemours, a spin-off of DuPont, which has used several formulations of PFAS in its line of Teflon products.
Asked whether the company was considering stepping away from PFAS, spokeswoman Cassie Olszewski wrote in an email, "Chemours is committed to fluorine chemistry and its power to enable world-changing technologies that help solve some of the world's most challenging problems."
