What to expect from Alberta Premier Smith's mostly-familiar cabinet
Story by Lisa Johnson • Sunday, June 11, 2023

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith poses for a picture with members of her cabinet on Friday, June 9, 2023, at Government House in Edmonton.

© Provided by Edmonton Journal

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s cabinet may be full of familiar faces, but it signals she will focus on her fight with Ottawa and that new fringe candidates don’t control her government, experts say.

University of Calgary political science professor Lisa Young told Postmedia the appointment of Brian Jean to the energy file and Rebecca Schulz to the environment ministry suggest Albertans can expect the newly-elected UCP government to focus on the province’s fight against federal energy policies.

Smith has long called Ottawa’s looming emissions goals “unachievable,” including the potential 42 per cent emissions cap on the oil and gas industry by 2030 and goal to get to a net zero power grid by 2035.

“She’s gearing up for that fight,” said Young, adding that being combative with Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on energy and environment policy is the one thing that everyone in an often-divided UCP caucus can agree on.

Young noted both Jean and Schulz played the role of surrogates during the election campaign, often attacking NDP policy at news conferences in place of Smith. Jean and Schulz also came the closest to winning the UCP leadership last fall after Travis Toews didn’t seek re-election in May. They came in third and fourth, respectively.

Schulz’s history includes negotiating a $3.8-billion child-care deal with Ottawa, while Jean, from Fort McMurray, is known for fighting hard for local oil and gas sector interests.

“(Smith has) decided to make them essentially a team to fight Ottawa. I think we’re gonna see the good cop bad cop routine,” said Young.

Rural voices will have a seat at the table in prominent portfolios, too, including Drumheller-Stettler’s Nate Horner, who was appointed to finance.

‘It’s a career ender’: LaGrange gets challenging health file

Adriana LaGrange, who has represented Red Deer-North since 2019, will move to health from education after facing criticism on heated issues from funding for children with disabilities to a controversial K-6 curriculum.

Lori Williams, political scientist at Mount Royal University, called it questionable, and noted LaGrange will have a lot of work to do to repair relationships with health care workers.

“There is money to be spent, but that relationship with healthcare workers — the ability to recruit or to attract healthcare workers — has been materially damaged by their treatment under the UCP government.”

“I wonder if this was a sign of weakness that (Smith) couldn’t get anybody else to take it, because it’s a career ender,” Williams said.

Shifting LaGrange to health may raise the eyebrows, particularly for those with concerns about her staunchly pro-life position, but it is a nod to UCP voters outside of the province’s big cities, Young said.

“The biggest issues in health care aren’t in Calgary and Edmonton, arguably. They’re in Red Deer and Lethbridge and in all of the smaller centres where the emergency rooms are closed more often than they’re open,” said Young.

For its part, United Nurses of Alberta president Heather Smith focused on the importance of front-line workers being heard in a news release Friday, but also noted that LaGrange will understand the “enormous pressure and challenges the nurse staffing shortage has put on hospitals like the Red Deer Regional Hospital.”

‘It was about assuring people’: new candidates shut out

None of the 12 newly-elected UCP representatives will sit on the front benches when the legislature convenes in October.

Smith’s cabinet of 25, down from 27, represents more than half of the UCP’s elected caucus of 49. However, the legislature will need to elect a speaker, who cannot vote, and Lacombe-Ponoka member-elect Jennifer Johnson, who ran under the UCP banner, is expected to sit as an independent after transphobic comments from her became public.

Peter Singh, along with newcomers Myles McDougall and Eric Bouchard, are the only Calgary MLAs to be shut out of executive council.

Young noted that McDougall and Bouchard appeared to win their nominations with some support from right-wing third party advertiser Take Back Alberta, credited with helping take down former premier Jason Kenney.

At the same time, Jason Nixon is back at the executive council table after being shut out by Smith in October.

“He had a Take Back Alberta target on him,” said Young, referring to the bitter battle in Rimbey-Rocky Mountain House-Sundre that saw Nixon’s rival disqualified by the UCP.

“It was about assuring people in and outside of Alberta that the Take Back Alberta folks, about whom a fair bit of publicly has been generated , aren’t the ones influencing her government,” said Williams.

With such a large cabinet, Smith might be able to avoid a vote of confidence, and reduce the risk of the party splintering, Young said.

“They kind of have to vote with you once they’re in cabinet,” said Young, noting parliamentary secretary roles, which also come with a pay bump, have yet to be handed out.

lijohnson@postmedia.com

twitter.com/reportrix

Indian wrestler accuses gov’t of silence over sexual abuse probe

India’s Vinesh Phogat, who has accused wrestling body chief of sexually abusing her, has slammed the pace of probe into allegations.

Phogat, right, is one of seven female athletes to have lodged a police case against Singh accusing him of sexually harassing them 

File: Jason Cairnduff/Reuters]

Published On 11 Jun 2023

Vinesh Phogat, a two-time Olympian who has accused Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) president Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh of sexually abusing her, said she has been hurt by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s silence on the issue.

Indian wrestlers, including Olympic medallists Sakshi Malik and Bajrang Punia, have been protesting for months seeking the arrest of Singh – a member of parliament from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Phogat is one of seven female athletes to have lodged a police case against Singh accusing him of sexually harassing them. In an interview with the Reuters news agency on Saturday, the 28-year-old wrestler criticised the pace of a police inquiry into sexual harassment accusations against Singh.

“I have only felt a deep sense of humiliation since I mustered the courage to protest,” Phogat said in her first interview since she and fellow wrestlers were forced out of a protest site in the capital New Delhi by the police last month.

Singh has denied allegations of making sexual advances, groping and threatening female athletes if they refused to meet him alone.

Delhi Police have filed two cases against Singh, including one under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act.

Phogat, who is the first Indian female wrestler to win both the Commonwealth Games and Asian Games gold, claims that during training camps and tournaments Singh would use “every possible way to single out young athletes and grope them repeatedly”.

“It was the same disgusting pattern over and over again and I am among the victims,” she said at her residence in northern Haryana state.

In her police complaint, seen by Reuters, Phogat said she contemplated suicide after the “mental trauma” but felt reinvigorated after a 2021 meeting with Modi, who promised to look into the complaints by the female wrestlers.

“It’s been emotionally draining, the PM has not said anything about this case,” Phogat said.

She said the accusers had also complained to sports minister Anurag Thakur in “greater detail”.

“But he [Thakur] was not just interested in listening to my concerns…he was busy on his phone when I was talking to him,” said Phogat.

Thakur and Modi’s office were not immediately available for comment.

Phogat claims that during training camps and tournaments Singh would use “every possible way to single out young athletes and grope them repeatedly” 

[File: Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters]

‘Politically motivated’

A lawyer and close aide to Singh said all the allegations were fake and fabricated by women to tarnish the chief’s career. Singh has dubbed the allegations against him as “politically motivated”.

“The fact that no one was listening to us forced me and others to start a public protest as we wanted the nation to know how top athletes were being mistreated,” Phogat said.

It's been emotionally draining, the PM has not said anything about this case

BY VINESH PHOGAT, WRESTLER

The wrestlers took to the streets in January but withdrew the protest after Singh was stripped of all administrative power at the WFI.

They resumed their protest on April 23, but several were briefly detained and the protest site was forcibly cleared on May 28.

Images of the athletes being dragged away and carried off in buses went viral, sparking criticism from top athletes and opposition politicians.

The wrestlers also threatened to throw their medals into the Ganges – India’s holiest river – before agreeing to meet with home affairs minister Amit Shah and later with the sports minister.

Thakur, the sports minister, subsequently said the police would complete their investigation by June 15 and requested the wrestlers not to demonstrate until then.

“We wanted Singh to be dragged out of his home, but because he is a powerful man he is roaming around and we are being told to sit at home,” an emotional Phogat said.

Singh is scheduled to hold a public rally in his political constituency on Sunday.

The International Olympic Committee has condemned the detainment of the wrestlers and criticised the “lack of results” in the investigation.

Images of the athletes being dragged away and carried off in buses went viral, sparking criticism from top athletes and opposition politicians

 [Altaf Qadri/AP Photo]

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA, REUTERS

As a woman is jailed, UK urged to reform ‘outdated’ abortion laws

Public anger rises after a judge decided to prosecute a woman who secured pills for a late-term abortion.

Protesters hold banners during an Abortion Rights Solidarity demonstration in London in July, 2022

 [File: Henry Nicholls/Reuters]

Published On 13 Jun 2023

Women’s rights groups, politicians and medics are calling on the British government to reform abortion laws after a woman was jailed for taking pills to end her pregnancy after the 24-week limit.

The 44-year-old mother of three was sent the medicine by post during a COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, a scheme that was introduced during the pandemic because many in-person services were closed due to social distancing measures.

A court heard this week that she misled the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) about how far along in the pregnancy she was, in order to secure the pills.

On Monday, she was sentenced to 28 months in prison after admitting to terminating her pregnancy when she was between 32 and 34 weeks pregnant.

Abortions in Britain are legal before 24 weeks and must be carried out in clinics after 10 weeks of pregnancy.

The prosecution said the woman searched “how to hide a pregnancy bump”, “how to have an abortion without going to the doctor”, and “how to lose a baby at six months” on the internet between February and May 2020.

She also pleaded guilty to an alternative charge relating to a law that is more than 160 years old – Section 58 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861.

She will serve half her sentence in prison and the remaining time under licence, supervised by probation.

Calls demanding an end to a law being described as outdated are growing.

Dame Diana Johnson, chair of the Commons Home Affairs Committee, urged the government to “step up” and decriminalise abortions.

Harriet Wistrich, head of the Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ), questioned the legislation and the prosecution of the woman.

“What possible purpose is served in criminalising and imprisoning this woman when at most she needs better access to healthcare and other support?” Wistrich said. “She is clearly already traumatised by the experience and now her children will be left without their mother for over a year.”

Chiara Capraro, head of Amnesty International’s women’s human rights programme, described the decision as “shocking and quite frankly terrifying”.

“Access to abortion is essential healthcare and should be managed as such.”

Former chief crown prosecutor for the northwest of England, Nazir Afzal argued that it was not in the public interest to prosecute.

Citing public feeling towards laws restricting abortions and her mitigating factors, he told the BBC: “Had I been involved, had I been doing this particular case, I would not have prosecuted it.

“This whole terrible event took place during the pandemic and people were making some terrible choices during that period that perhaps they regret now. And I think that’s one of the things I would have factored in, in relation to this particular case.”

Protesters hold signs as they attend an Abortion Rights Solidarity demonstration, in London, Britain [File: Henry Nicholls/Reuters]

The judge presiding over the case, Justice Edward Pepperall, said: “This case concerns one woman’s tragic and unlawful decision to obtain a very late abortion.

“The balance struck by the law between a woman’s reproductive right and the rights of her unborn foetus is an emotive and controversial issue. That is, however, a matter for Parliament and not for the courts.”

But some took to social media to share their outrage over the conviction, with one woman saying the decision by the Crown Court was “depraved” and a “burning injustice”.

Nadia Whittome, a politician with the main opposition Labour Party, tweeted: “No woman should be in prison for making decisions about her own body. This shocking case highlights the urgent need to change the law. Abortion is healthcare. It must be decriminalised, now.”

BPAS tweeted: “No woman can ever go through this again. We need abortion law reform in Great Britain NOW.”

Dame Diana, who has previously tried to repeal 1861 legislation, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think Parliament has a role now to look at reforming our abortion laws. There’s no other country in the world, as I understand it, that would criminalise a woman in this way.”

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES

Abortion law reform: a question of safety?

Jailing of woman who took abortion pills after legal limit leads to calls to scrap ‘archaic’ 1861 legislation

HARRIET MARSDEN

THE WEEK UK
13 JUN 2023

Campaigners clash during an abortion rally in London last year
Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Campaigners, healthcare organisations and some MPs are calling for reform of UK abortion law after a woman was jailed for terminating her pregnancy after the legal limit during the first national lockdown.
Repeal the Eighth: how have abortion services changed in Ireland five years on?
The debate around abortion buffer zones
The end of home abortions

Carla Foster, a mother of three, was between 32 and 34 weeks pregnant in May 2020 when she took abortion pills designed for terminations in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. The foetus was stillborn.

Foster, 44, was initially charged with child destruction, which she denied, said the i news site. In March this year, she pleaded guilty to “administering drugs to procure abortion, contrary to the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act”, which still criminalises abortion in the UK and carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. Foster was sentenced to 28 months, and ordered to serve half the sentence in prison.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) argued that Foster provided false information during her remote medical appointment, saying she was seven weeks pregnant, according to Sky News.

Foster obtained the medication via the so-called “pills by post” scheme, introduced during lockdown for women to carry out abortions up to 10 weeks at home. It was made permanent last year despite opposition from some religious groups who raised concerns about a lack of safeguarding or on-hand doctors.

‘Apply the law as provided’

In sentencing at Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court, Judge Edward Pepperall rejected appeals from health organisations for a non-custodial sentence, saying it was the court’s duty to “apply the law as provided by Parliament”.

Cases like this are “exceptionally rare… complex and traumatic”, a CPS spokesperson told BBC News. “Our prosecutors have a duty to ensure that laws set by Parliament are properly considered and applied when making difficult charging decisions.”

The Abortion Act of 1967 legalised abortions in England, Scotland and Wales within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy. A termination can take place after 24 weeks if “the mother's life is at risk or if the child will be severely disabled”, said i news.

But the Victorian-era law was never repealed, “meaning that parts of it still apply – for example when a woman carries out an abortion over the time limit”, said the BBC. “The law is framed in a way that means abortion is not a right”, said Sky News.
‘Desperate need for legal reform’

“It makes a case for Parliament to start looking at this issue in detail,” Caroline Nokes, Conservative MP and chair of the Women and Equalities select committee, told BBC Radio 4’s “World Tonight” programme. Cases like this “throw into sharp relief that we are relying on legislation that is very out of date”.

The case also underscores the “desperate need for legal reform in relation to reproductive health”, said Chiara Capraro, women’s human rights director at Amnesty International UK.

“No other healthcare procedure has such a status,” Labour MP Stella Creasy tweeted. “We need urgent reform to make safe access for all women in England, Scotland and Wales a human right.”

Creasy plans to table an amendment to the new Bill of Rights, similar to the one she had passed in 2019, which made abortion a human right in Northern Ireland.

Without reform of this “archaic law”, Clare Murphy, chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), told BBC Radio 4’s “Today” programme, more women and girls would face “the trauma of lengthy police investigations and the threat of prison”.

‘Enough is enough’: A UK union rep fighting from the picket line

For Mark Dollar, a family man and Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast, strike action against National Highways is not about the last 12 months, but the last 12 years.

Mark Dollar, the representative of the Public and Commercial Services Union for the National Highways, at a picket in Exeter, UK

 [Lexie Harrison-Cripps/Al Jazeera]

By Lexie Harrison-Cripps
 Al Jazeera  9 Jun 2023

Surrey, United Kingdom – Wearing a luminous yellow vest stamped with the words “PCS” and “Public and Commercial Services Union”, Mark Dollar, 50, stood on the pavement of an industrial estate in southwest England one January morning. Next to him, outside the National Highways office, three other picketers held furiously flapping PCS flags and red placards announcing an “official picket”.

Their conversation flowed from work frustrations to gossip, periodically interrupted by beeps and waves from passing car and truck drivers as they pulled into the surrounding car parks.

This was just one of many pickets for Dollar, who is the PCS trade union representative employed by the National Highways – a government-owned company tasked with keeping 4,500 miles (7,242km) of Britain’s arterial roads and motorways safe, clear and moving. PCS describes itself as “the largest trade union in the civil service, representing workers in the public sector as well as commercial and private sector workers who work on government contracts”.

Following a PCS ballot in November last year, members across 124 business units – including National Highways – voted in favour of industrial action, hoping to achieve a 10 percent pay rise, improved pensions benefits and job security.

“Members are angry,” PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka said in a press release. “They helped to keep this country running during the pandemic, and in return, have been treated appallingly by this government. With inflation now at 11.1 percent, it is inconceivable that they are expected to cope with yet another real terms pay cut.”

The outcome of the vote came on the back of a civil service pay freeze announced by the then chancellor of the Exchequer, now prime minister, Rishi Sunak, in 2020 and his later failure to deliver his promised “fair and affordable pay rises” in 2021.

“You have to take a stand because being meek and reasonable and not voting in favour of action, goes precisely nowhere,” Dollar said about the ballot.

As National Highways PCS representative, the ballot meant Dollar had a six-month mandate to organise industrial action, creating maximum effect using the minimum number of workers, he explained. By keeping the action small, he planned to use PCS funds to compensate workers for their loss of earnings on strike days, but with the UK government refusing to engage with the strikers, Dollar had a fight ahead.

Mark Dollar gave a talk at a joint union rally at the Exeter Corn Exchange 

earlier this year 

[Lexie Harrison-Cripps/Al Jazeera]

‘Not your classic trades union rep’

Dollar admits that he is not “your classic trades union rep”. He was privately educated, his father and grandmother had significant roles in the UK’s Conservative Party, and he counts “a senior Conservative councillor” in his friendship group. Yet, he says he remains “fiercely left wing”.

As a teenager, he dreamed of joining the British Army’s Parachute Regiment and then trying out for the elite UK Special Forces. He joined the Ministry of Defence-sponsored youth organisation, the Combined Cadet Force, reaching the top rank of warrant officer before reading combined arts at the University of Plymouth, specialising in theatre production and military history.

However, Dollar had to put his military plans to one side when his girlfriend at the time, Paula, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. They married when Dollar was just 21, but “with a very sick wife, travelling around the world, jumping out of aeroplanes, meeting new and interesting people … wasn’t an option”, he said with a trace of sadness in his voice.

Dollar found work at National Highways, then known as the Highways Agency, and not giving up entirely on his military dream, he joined the Royal Signals Army Reserves, a branch of the British Army for part-time civilian soldiers.

Paula died just three years later.

It would be another decade before he would meet his current wife, Shaunne. When asked how they met, Dollar tried to suppress a giggle. He smiled sheepishly as he confessed that they met “at a live action role play event”, which he describes as “Medieval Reenactment meets Lord of the Rings, or perhaps Dungeons & Dragons”. Although his “favourite description however is ‘cross-country pantomime’ … with combat”, he would later write in one of our email exchanges.

Dollar and members of ASLEF Union after a joint union rally in Exeter

 [Lexie Harrison-Cripps/Al Jazeera]

The makings of a union man

Speaking over Zoom from his home in Exeter earlier this year, Dollar explained how he ended up joining the PCS Union and why he believes it is important.

In the years after joining the Highways Agency, he became increasingly frustrated with management, both in relation to his own stagnating career and also after witnessing other colleagues “being bullied by managers who acted with impunity”, he said.

“I didn’t think my union was doing enough … so I wrote some fairly damning articles,” Dollar said, referring to a newsletter he created for employees in his office.

Although the Union was initially good-natured, after a “couple of years” Dollar said they asked him to stop publicly criticising them, and instead work with them.


So he did just that.

Six years after he first joined the Highways Agency, Dollar became the representative for the southwest, joining the national executive committee of the PCS Union. His first goal was to eliminate workplace bullying.

Over the next few years, he worked to “stamp out the antagonistic, anti-trade union attitudes of management”, he explained, but said, “PCS was never, you know, particularly radical or antagonistic or aggressive”.

Referring to the stigma that is normally associated with unions in the UK, Dollar believes that people are living in the past and they think that all trade unions are the same, he said. “The problem is, people don’t remember the Public and Commercial Services Union, they remember the miners’ strike,” he said, in reference to the coal miners’ strikes in the 1970s, which caused the government to declare a state of emergency, and the violent confrontations between police and strikers in the 1980s.

Dollar stands in the audience during a union rally 

[Lexie Harrison-Cripps/Al Jazeera]

In the last three years, Dollar has created a new employer relationship framework agreement, signalling a new way that management and staff can work together.

“I even played golf,” he said during one of our calls, a trace of humour in his voice, before self-deprecatingly adding that consistently losing games to management may be the reason for the improved relationship with his union.

There is no trace of a “them and us” sentiment in Dollar’s opinions of management. For instance, Dollar’s response to the executive director, Nick Harris, earning more than seven times the median staff remuneration in the accounting year 2021-22 (355,124 pounds or $434,189), was that “he has responsibility for over 100 billion pounds [$122bn] of assets. Most people with that responsibility in the private sector would be on considerably more.”

His frustration lies squarely with the government, which a PCS spokesman said in May, had “refused to negotiate”.

The Cabinet Office told Al Jazeera earlier in the year that “discussions will continue” but that “the PCS Union’s demands would cost an unaffordable 2.4 billion pounds [$2.9bn] which risks stoking inflation and prolonging the cost of living pain for all workers” – an argument Dollar does not agree with “not least because it fails to take into consideration the amount already earmarked for pay anyway, but also the idea that it is ‘unaffordable’”, he said.

In the latest government concessions offered this month, Jeremy Quinn MP, the Minister for the Cabinet Office, met with PCS to discuss redundancy terms, job security and pay rises, including individual lump sum payments of £1,500 ($1,865) each. In a PCS press release on June 5, the Union said it plans to meet with the Cabinet Office to confirm that “payment is made to all members”. On behalf of National Highways PCS members, Dollar has been working on this “flat out since [the announcement]”, he said.

Despite Dollar’s opinions of the UK government, he remains positive about the National Highways management team, which he believes is “walking a tightrope between ministers and the staff representatives”.

“I’m loath to criticise them,” he added, crediting management with understanding “the importance of employee relations and [doing] their level best to put the best pay deal they possibly could on the table but they were hamstrung when the government didn’t give them the cash to make it better.”


Dollar respects international tactics, calling the French – who have been holding massive strikes against pension reform – the “most effective strikers anywhere on the planet”. But he is “not advocating that PCS should turn up in London, go set fire to half of it, or invade Harrods … but at the same time we do need to work out ways of being more effective against a totally intransigent government”, he said.

At a union rally, a man holds a sign criticising the UK Conservative Party 

[Lexie Harrison-Cripps/Al Jazeera]

Some hard days

Dollar is rarely without a smile on his face. Last year, he even good-naturedly appreciated the irony of having to call off planned industrial action when the picket materials were delayed due to a postal workers’ strike.

When it finally happened in Bristol, southwest England, a selection of road traffic operators and regional operations centre staff stood outside for three hours during a bitingly cold December day, accompanied by a black Alsatian called Prince, also kitted out in a luminous yellow vest.

On the picket line, Dollar swapped quips with other picketers about the weather while showing no signs of being affected by the cold, that was no match for his army fatigues, Norwegian National Guard hat and chunky-knit black wool sweater. As it started to rain, he explained how he and his family have been affected by the rising cost of living and real-terms pay cuts.

“We have to make very careful decisions about putting the heating on,” he said. “We’re extremely careful about when we run appliances. And I’m not saying that everybody deserves to have some kind of carefree energy but it really does start playing on your mind more,” he said.

Dollar was joined that day by James Davies, the regional secretary for PCS for the southwest, who told Al Jazeera, “we aren’t asking to live the life of luxury, we just want to live without having to go to the food banks”, while stamping his feet in a futile attempt to stay warm. “Some of our members can’t even come to work because they can’t afford to fill up their cars with petrol or afford after-school clubs for their children.”

Despite Dollar’s optimistic outlook, when pressed, he confessed that his job involved difficult moments. He is responsible for the union’s hardship fund that distributes money to the most deserving. Not only do workers lose pay for the days that they are on strike, but some have also been further penalised by losing extra managerial responsibilities, he said.

Workers can apply to the hardship fund for compensation, but with limited resources, Dollar and the committee must be systematic in ensuring the money is used “wisely and fairly for the benefit of the people who are really struggling”, he said, before adding, “I wish I could pay every single penny that these people are asking for.”

Children colour while the audience listens to speakers at a joint union rally in Exeter [Lexie Harrison-Cripps/Al Jazeera]

Dollar’s hardest days come from feeling unable to help the members he represents. “I’m 50 percent lawyer, 50 percent counsellor,” he said. “Some days when you’ve got a really emotional member who’s got a lot to get off their chest and is crying down the phone … it’s a problem when they’re bringing up stuff you can’t help them with as it’s outside the remit of the union.”

“My wife can usually tell when I’ve had a really rough day,” he said, before seemingly attempting to steer the conversation back into positive territory by stoically adding that after a few minutes of “decompression”, he can turn his attention back to his family.

By April, little had changed. The PCS said the “industrial landscape in the UK remains bleak with double-digit inflation, pay held way below inflation and a government resolutely ignoring strike action in the hope it will all just go away”.

Dollar’s six-month mandate ended at the beginning of May. In the ballot, National Highways was seven votes short of reaching the required 50 percent voter turnout, meaning that they will no longer be striking, however, with such a close vote, Dollar is hoping for a repoll, he said in a WhatsApp message.

Even without industrial action, Dollar’s responsibility towards the members he represents will continue and it is clear that they value the work he does.

During the Exeter picket, Dollar had to step away for a few minutes leaving three picketers standing on the pavement near the entrance to the industrial estate.

Surrounded by flapping PCS flags and various items of “official picket” paraphernalia, two women in bobble hats and down jackets, and a man in a hooded sweatshirt, started a conversation about how Dollar and the union had helped their cases.

“He’s so intelligent.”

“He’s lovely, isn’t he.”

“He’s so bloody good … he fought [my issue] all the way for me.”

Mark Dollar stands with other PCS members at a picket line in Exeter 

[Lexie Harrison-Cripps/Al Jazeera]

Eight quick questions for Mark Dollar:

1. What does going on strike mean for you? It means our members have had enough and are prepared to take a stand against their standard of living falling even further.

2. What’s the one thing you wish people understood about why you are striking? I wish people understood that it’s not just about the last 12 months, it’s about the last 12 years of real-terms pay cuts, attacks on our terms and conditions and constant belittling in the media by the ruling party. Enough is enough, now we are fighting back.

3. If your strike demands were met, what would it change for you? It would start, and only start, to reverse some of the harm done by years of pay cuts and attacks on our working conditions, pensions and redundancy pay. It might even stabilise the workforce and make the company and the public sector a more attractive place to work.

4. What do you think of the way strikers are portrayed in the media? It depends on which media. The right-wing media want to paint every striker as a hard-left political dinosaur from the 1970s intent on a Soviet-style state. Everyone else has the sense to realise strikers are ordinary people, working people, having to use the last resort of industrial relations in order to make themselves heard.

5. Do you think the general public supports your strike? Yes, I do, not only from polling that a number of sources have carried out but also by the support we have received on the picket lines. The public see us for what we are; we are them, we are members of the public, we are taxpayers, we are the people on their street, we aren’t wealthy former bankers in subsidised bars in Westminster totally out of touch with reality.

6. What advice would you give to people striking elsewhere or considering striking? Believe in yourselves, spell out your cause clearly, and try to bring the public with you. Don’t be afraid to challenge authority; there’s a lot more of us than there are of them, and they know it.

7. When it comes to striking – who inspires you and why? I think Mick Lynch has become an inspiration to many trade unionists recently. And you can’t argue with how effective the late Bob Crow was for his members. But when it comes to protests against seemingly overwhelming odds, it’s difficult to look any further than The Suffragette movement.

8. Do you have a favourite chant, song or banner? None of those as it happens, but I am quite fond of the PCS Balloon that appears at marches in London; you struggle to miss it in the crowds!

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA

Why Shin Bet may be used to police Palestinian areas in Israel

PM Netanyahu is strongly considering deploying the internal security service to police Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, centre, instructed security agencies to prepare for Shin Bet to take on crime-fighting responsibilities at a meeting on June 11, 2023 [Menahem Kahana/Reuters]

By Nils Adler
13 Jun 2023

Israel is considering deploying its internal security service to combat crime in Palestinian neighbourhoods in Israel.

Israel’s Shin Bet, or Shabak as it is known in both Hebrew and Arabic, is the internal intelligence service and one of the three branches of the Israeli General Security Service.

After a meeting with top officials on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office instructed authorities to prepare for the agency to become involved in fighting criminal activity.

“Despite the difficulties, the capabilities of the Shin Bet must be harnessed in the war against the mob families in the Arab community,” Netanyahu was reported to have said at the meeting, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Here is what you need to know:
Is Shin Bet already active in Palestinian neighbourhoods in Israel?

“The idea that the Shin Bet is not involved in the Palestinian community in Israel is false,” Amjad Iraqi, senior editor of +972 Magazine, told Al Jazeera.

Netanyahu chairs a cabinet meeting on June 11, 2023 [Menahem Kahana/Reuters]

The agency is “very actively gathering intelligence. They have informants and collaborators and are constantly monitoring Palestinian citizens all the time,” he explained.

Sawsan Zaher – a lawyer and director of the social and economic rights unit at Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel – shares this view. “The Shabak is already involved, secretly, in a lot of issues among Palestinian citizens in Israel because they are and have been viewed since the establishment of the state in 1948 as an enemy and as a security threat,” she told Al Jazeera.


The latest discussions are merely a continuation of an “increasingly draconian shift of the Israeli security establishment” to control the Palestinian community further, Iraqi explained.
What powers does Shin Bet have that police do not?

Shin Bet has access to a number of advanced intelligence-gathering facilities that the police are not permitted to use.

These include Pegasus spyware, which can infiltrate a mobile device either through a text message that users click or, more recently, through “zero-click attacks”.

Messages, chats, phone calls, contacts and emails can be monitored by spyware.

Shin Bet can also use wide-reaching, secretive and violent interrogation methods on its prisoners, preventing them from seeing their lawyers and ignoring due process.

Is this proposal likely to go ahead?

There has been opposition within the Israeli government to deploying Shin Bet in Palestinian neighbourhoods in Israel.

According to Haaretz, Israeli officials argued that the current laws do not allow mobilising Shin Bet and its agents against citizens of Israel and do not allow National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir to approve administrative detentions.

The Middle East Monitor, a nonprofit press monitoring organisation, reported that senior security officials feel that it could divert vital manpower and resources from ongoing operations.

The Times of Israel also reported the head of Shin Bet opposed the proposals in a meeting with the prime minister’s office.

Gali Baharav-Miara, Israel’s attorney general, also argued that an active role in policing would risk revealing Shin Bet’s investigative methods in court if they were to convict anyone.

Netanyahu has so far appeared to ignore these objections. A decision is expected in the coming weeks.

What kind of crimes would Shin Bet be asked to tackle?

The issue of crime and homicides has plagued the Palestinian community inside Israel, referred to as the 1948-occupied territory or the occupied interior by Palestinians, who have long suffered from discrimination and lower standards of living there.

Crime has shot up this year with The Times of Israel reporting the number of Palestinians killed by violence in Israel at 102, compared with 35 at the same point in 2022.

Many also accuse the police of deliberate neglect. Zaher said the police force has “intentionally not been doing its role as an enforcement authority, so they can have the Shabak enter”, which, she explained, allows for an “implementation of security tools” and would “further restrict liberties”.

Iraqi explained that there is a deep-rooted mistrust of the Israeli police in these areas: “At the heart of all this is the truth that Palestinian citizens – even those demanding some form of law enforcement – cannot trust the police, cannot trust the security services, because they’re entirely political instruments that are projected by the state to impose their own kind of control or their own kind of violence.”

Palestinian lawyer and political analyst Ziad Abu Zayed believes “there is no real chance to fight the crime under the current Kahanist police inspector, who believes that killing each other is an ‘Arab tradition’”.

In April, Israeli Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai was recorded as saying Palestinians “murder each other. It’s in their nature,” in a private conversation with Ben-Gvir.

Enerhoatom Chief Warns Russian Forces May 'Worsen' Situation Caused By Dam Breach

The reactors at Ukraine's Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant have been shut down, but they still need water to keep them cool and prevent a nuclear disaster.

June 12, 2023
By RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service

The head of Ukraine's Enerhoatom nuclear generating company says he is concerned that Russian forces still occupying Ukraine's Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant may "worsen the situation even further" after last week's destruction of the Kakhovka dam that jeopardized water supplies and put Europe's largest nuclear station in peril.

Petro Kotin, president of Enerhoatom, told RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service on June 12 that the water level in the Kakhovka water reservoir has fallen to the so-called dead mark -- 13.3 meters -- where "technically it is no longer possible to secure water flow for the cooling pond at the nuclear power station."



While the situation "is not dangerous," Kotin said the Russian forces remaining at the nuclear plant "can commit any other crime to worsen the situation even further, which is my main concern."

"The only way to reach complete security and safety at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant is to de-occupy, demilitarize the facility, and hand it back under the control of its legitimate operator: Enerhoatom," Kotin added.

The dam, part of a major water system in Ukraine that provides fresh water, transportation, and irrigation for hundreds of thousands, was breached last week, flooding large swathes of land and forcing many from their homes amid Russia's war against Ukraine, which has accused Moscow of destroying the dam.

Russia has put the blame on Kyiv for the disaster.

The Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper River also forms a reservoir that provides the cooling water for the nuclear power station located about 150 kilometers upstream. The plant's reactors have been shut down, but they still need water to keep them cool and prevent a nuclear disaster.

The dam has been under Russian control since the early days of the invasion.

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director Rafael Grossi said earlier on June 12 that he is en route to Ukraine where he'll meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and present an assistance program for the "catastrophic" flooding sparked by the breach of the dam.

He said he's also heading to the Zaporizhzhya plant to assess the situation and to conduct a rotation of the IAEA Support and Assistance Mission to Zaporizhzhya "with a strengthened team" in the wake of the incident.

Be ‘proactive’: California’s worsening fires are a warning to temperate world

BY SAUL ELBEIN - 06/12/23 5:05 PM ET

A plume of smoke and flames rise into the air as the fire burns towards Moro Rock during the KNP Complex fire in the Sequoia National Park near Three Rivers, California on September 18, 2021. – Firefighters battling to protect the world’s biggest tree from wildfires ravaging the parched United States said September 17 that they are optimistic it can be saved. Crews are battling the KNP Complex fire, comprised of the spreading Paradise and Colony fires, which have so far consumed 4,600 hectares (11,400 acres) of forest since they were sparked by lightning a week ago. 

(Photo by Patrick T. FALLON / AFP) 

In the last 20 years, California’s northern forests have experienced a stark increase in lands burned by fire. Now scientists have a better idea why.

The culprit is a familiar one — human-caused climate change, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, according to findings published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

But other aspects are new. The paper presents for the first time a portrait of fires in an alternate California in which human-caused climate change hadn’t happened.

And by comparing that world to our own, it offers a sobering warning for any ecosystem — notably Canada and the Western U.S. — in which temperature, not the availability of trees, is the primary factor limiting the size of fires.

Fossil fuel burning expanded vulnerable forests

In those regions, lead author Mario Turco told The Hill, the impact of a century of burning fossil fuels has vastly expanded the amount of forest vulnerable to fire.

That relationship portends a grim future, he noted. California’s coming fires could burn up to 50 percent more land than the fires of today.

Those specific prescriptions focus on the pine forests of Northern and Central California. But Turco emphasized that similar dynamics were at work in the record Canadian wildfires that clogged the air of the U.S. Northeast last week.

In Canada, the amount of land burned by fire thus far this season is now 13 times the national average — only a couple of weeks into what was traditionally considered to be the fire season.

“What is happening in Canada this month is something strange because there are not so many analogs in the past,” Turco told The Hill.

California, by contrast, offered the scientists a golden setting for a natural experiment. In addition to its long history of big blazes — in particular, the enormous fires in the summers of 2018, 2020 and 2021 — California has unusually good data around fires.

Unlike many other fire-prone areas, California’s state agencies have been collecting rigorous data on the extent of fire in the state for decades.

That data shows that the 10 largest wildfires in California history also happened in the last 20 years, with those fires getting bigger and more powerful later in that period. (Half occurred in 2020 alone, and eight since 2017.)

But while the increased scale of the problem is clear — as is the fact that it has come alongside an implacable rise in both global temperatures and the burning of fossil fuels — it has historically been difficult to untangle how much human-caused climate change, specifically, has contributed to California’s current fire problem.

Simulation shows scope of problem

To answer that question, the team simulated an alternate California that had experienced only natural climate variation since 1996.

While the scientists didn’t make this point explicitly, this experiment amounted to a rough simulation of an alternate past: one in which people rapidly stopped burning fossil fuels once their role in climate change was discovered.

Off-ramps from the current crisis into such an alternate world appear early. As NASA notes, the Swedish scientist who first predicted the relationship between rising levels of carbon dioxide — the major byproduct of burning — and rising temperatures first published in 1896.

That relationship was confirmed as early as 1938, when British engineer Guy Callendar linked the world’s use of fossil fuels to a slight — but already statistically significant — rise in temperatures; by 1956 U.S. Office of Naval Research was already promulgating “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change.”

But even in a world where such scientific work had led to an early, widespread and total move away from fossil fuels, climate change would not stop. The sun’s power would still fluctuate, as would the distance — thanks to an orbital wobble — between it and Earth, each of which would impact how much heat reached the surface.

And down on Earth, changes in terrestrial processes — like volcanic eruptions and the spread or contraction of forests — would also have led to broader changes in the climate.

 

A home burns as the Dixie fire jumps Highway 395 south of Janesville, Calif., Aug. 16, 2021. Two insurance industry giants have pulled out of the California marketplace, saying that wildfire risk and the soaring cost of construction prompted them to stop writing new policies in the nation’s most populous state. 

(AP Photo/Ethan Swope, File)

Humans caused threefold rise in burned lands

But on that alternate Earth, natural variations in the climate wouldn’t be enough to produce the dramatic rise in burned areas that California has experienced over the past 30 years, the PNAS paper found.


In fact, the scientists wrote, our world was accelerating away from that nature-only paradigm. The historical record shows that California has had nearly twice as big an increase in burned land — 1.7 times, to be exact — between 1971 and 2021 as it would have under purely natural cycles.

And the magnitude of that difference was increasing, they wrote. Human-caused climate change has led to a “remarkable” threefold increase in burned lands between the latter half of that period — 1996 and 2021 — and the equivalent period over on nature-only Earth.

That has been a pivotal period for climate change — not only in terms of its rise as political issue, but also in the acceleration of the forces driving it. (More than half of the carbon discharged into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial revolution came from fires lit — in fireplaces, power plants and internal combustion engines — since 1990.)

What role does forest management play?

One major question rests outside the scope of the paper: the role of “forest management” — or mismanagement — on the fire problem.

Since the 2018 fire that leveled Paradise, Calif., state and federal officials have faced harsh criticism for their decades-long policy of suppressing low-grade wildfires that might otherwise have cleaned fuels from the forest — sowing the ground for the unstoppable fires of the present.

Conservative politicians have appealed to similar management concerns to explain away the impacts of climate change, as in Donald Trump’s 2018 claim that California faced such bad fires because — unlike the forest nation of Finland — the state didn’t “rake” its forests.

To Trump’s defense — and despite the bemusement those remarks caused on both sides of the Atlantic — the Finnish forestry sector really does use giant mechanized rakes to pull flammable tree residues out of its forests after they have been cut.

That real geographic difference, however, conceals an even more important historical one. Such tree residue — which is now burned in district-level power-plants — could once have been safely left to decompose in place, before climate change heated up the forests.

“Trump has a point,” fire ecologist Matthew Hurteau wrote in a 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post. “The U.S.could get away with poor management, until global warming.”

Reinforcing that idea, the PNAS study didn’t find any historic change in forest management that was big enough to explain the size of the jump in the amount of California that now burns, Turco said.

The one place that scientists did find such a connection was Europe — where they found that forest policy had led to a striking decrease in the amount of land burned, even as human-caused climate change pushed in the opposite direction.

That might not be entirely good news, Turco said. “It means that the tool of fire management — where basically they try to suppress all fires — is working. But that doesn’t mean it will work in the future climate.”

On the one hand, because the climate itself was heating up and drying out European forests, leading to a greater capacity for fire. On the other hand, because with each wildfire stopped too early, “we are creating more fuel to be burned in the future.”

That rising climatic pressure towards bigger wildfires makes it more important “to focus not only on suppression, but also on preparedness, proactive action, proactive management,” he added

That’s something the Biden administration Forest Service has staked out as a priority. The agency sees the decades of forest mismanagement of forest fuels as a serious and systemic problem they are spending billions to fix.

Turco said those steps are important, even if blunting the speed of human-caused climate change is the main imperative.

“It’s quite dangerous to say ‘climate change is responsible for all the problems of the forest fires in California — so it’s not important to have a good plan,’” he added. “Because this is not true.”

Why the EPA’s new carbon emissions rules will win in court

BY ETHAN BROWN, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 06/12/23 

THE HILL

FILE – Steam billows from a coal-fired power plant Nov. 18, 2021, in Craig, Colo. The Supreme Court on Thursday, June 30, 2022, limited how the nation’s main anti-air pollution law can be used to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. By a 6-3 vote, with conservatives in the majority, the court said that the Clean Air Act does not give the Environmental Protection Agency broad authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that contribute to global warming. 

(AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)


With the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) releasing tough new carbon emissions standards and the state of West Virginia’s promising a rematch in court, one might think the EPA has gone rogue. It hasn’t.

On April 12, the EPA unveiled new vehicle emissions standards that would mandate auto manufacturers lowering the carbon dioxide emissions from their vehicles to a company-wide average of 82 grams per mile by 2032. Only a month later, the EPA announced new emissions standards for power plants, requiring natural gas plants to capture 90 percent of their emissions by 2035 and coal plants to capture 90 percent by 2030 (unless they have set plans to retire).

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey has already expressed a desire to sue the EPA on both rules, setting up the potential for high-profile cases akin to last summer’s West Virginia v. EPA, in which the Supreme Court overturned the Obama-era Clean Power Plan. But unlike the Clean Power Plan, these new emissions standards are right in line with past legal precedents. The EPA neither overreached nor underreached. If the conservative Supreme Court justices were to strike down these new standards, they would be contradicting the very decision they made last summer.

While the EPA’s “toughest rules yet” may sound doomed before the high court, the EPA merely executed its duties under the Clean Air Act. As an executive agency, the EPA does not make new laws. Its job is to enforce existing laws. The Clean Air Act mandates that the EPA establish regulations that protect public health from harmful source air pollutants, as long as there is a “reasonably available control measure,” or technologically and economically feasible way to reduce emissions from that particular pollutant. As such, the EPA must remain on the lookout for new innovations that could efficiently lower air pollution and update its rules accordingly.

The inclusion of carbon dioxide in the EPA’s regulatory scope came about due to the Supreme Court’s 2007 ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA. The Court found that the Clean Air Act required the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide as a climate-warming pollutant. However, economically feasible carbon dioxide regulation presents some challenges, since carbon emissions currently exist across nearly every sector. The EPA can’t just phase out carbon dioxide the way it might for a more obscure harmful pollutant — it has to carefully interpret the Clean Air Act to determine its precise obligation in the much larger space of climate policy.

This is where last summer’s Supreme Court decision in West Virginia v. EPA provided further clarity. In the 2015 Clean Power Plan, the EPA attempted to regulate the entire electric grid as if it were one source of carbon emissions, proposing a strategy called “generation shifting” whereby the electric grid would shut down coal and gas plants and shift toward solar and wind farms. While such a transition would prove beneficial to the climate, the Supreme Court found that the Clean Air Act did not give the EPA the authority to regulate power plants out of existence. The Clean Air Act instructs them to regulate emissions at each source, not across the entire electric grid.

Following the West Virginia v. EPA verdict, the agency has meticulously worked within the court’s guidelines. It has concentrated on “regulating emissions at the source” — tailpipes, power plants, etc. The new rules are technology-neutral, recommending ideas such as electric vehicles, carbon capture and storage, and green hydrogen, while allowing companies to make their own decisions. In addition, the EPA projects over $1 trillion in economic benefits from the tailpipe rule and $64 to 85 billion in economic benefits from the power plant rule.

Of course, these regulations have their flaws. The standards are quite restrictive, may be difficult for some companies to meet and would require the use of technologies that are not yet developed at the necessary scale. And anytime an agency issues a regulation, a future president can repeal it and replace it with their own version, leaving these standards vulnerable. Since decarbonization will take decades to achieve, it is worrisome to rely too heavily on policies without broad, bipartisan support.

But the EPA doesn’t have the power to impose taxes, invest in new technologies, or create new innovative approaches to climate legislation. Its job is to enforce the Clean Air Act. The court rulings on Massachusetts v. EPA and West Virginia v. EPA,coupled with rapid technological developments, resulted in the EPA having a mandate to create standards in line with the ones recently proposed.

If the agency didn’t do that, it could have faced trouble as well. Massachusetts v. EPA arose specifically because the EPA was neglecting to regulate carbon emissions. And after proposing the far less stringent Affordable Clean Energy Rule in 2019, an appeals court vacated the law in 2021, stating that the agency fundamentally misunderstood the Clean Air Act. It is quite literally against the law for the EPA to refuse to make these standards or make them more relaxed than the Clean Air Act intended.Feehery: The limits of bipartisanshipPress: Doom for Don: Trump is political toast after indictment

Some experts have suggested that, rather than questioning the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act, a legal challenger could argue that these clean energy and transportation technologies are “unproven.” But none of the questions surrounding these technologies are substantial enough to strike down the new standards. In fact, leading auto manufacturers such as Ford and GM have voluntarily set ambitious targets to transition to electric vehicles; natural gas giants such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips have made large investments in carbon capture; and coal company Peabody Energy touts carbon capture as a “win-win” solution. Energy and auto companies already support the technologies necessary to fulfill the EPA’s requirements. Challenging these technologies’ feasibility in court would run completely counter to the industries’ own behavior.

While some observers have caused a stir by branding the EPA as a history-defying trailblazer marking new territory for the climate movement, in reality these new standards are nothing more than an agency doing its job. That’s remarkable — even exciting — in the sense that clean energy and electric vehicles have become economically feasible to the point of prompting these stringent emissions rules. But the standards themselves align with the law and clearly follow last summer’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA. If the six justices who signed the West Virginia decision last summer still believe in their verdict, the EPA should have no problem fending off a challenge and getting back to work.

Ethan Brown, a writer and commentator for Young Voices, is the creator and host of The Sweaty Penguin, an award-winning comedy climate program presented by PBS/WNET’s national climate initiative “Peril and Promise.” Follow him on Twitter @ethanbrown5151.

Romanian Prime Minister Transfer Moves Forward Following Settlement Of Teacher Strike

Romanian Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca, of the National Liberal Party, will step aside for coalition partner Marcel Ciolacu of the Social Democratic Party, a move delayed for three weeks due to the nation’s teacher strike, which appeared to be settled on June 12.

BUCHAREST -- Romanian Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca on June 12 submitted his resignation as part of a scheduled plan to swap premiers following the 2020 parliamentary elections that left the two leading parties with near-equal strength.

Ciuca, of the National Liberal Party (PNL), will step aside for coalition partner Marcel Ciolacu of the Social Democratic Party (PSD), a move delayed for three weeks due to the nation’s teacher strike, which appeared to be settled on June 12.

Catalin Predoiu will serve as interim prime minister until Ciolacu is able to form a government. Predoiu was a former justice minister who had previously served as an interim prime minister for three days in February 2012.

The PNL and PSD had agreed that the PSD would replace the PNL at the helm of government at the halfway point of the term. The next parliamentary election is scheduled for late 2024.

But the switch was delayed by three weeks due to a teacher strike in the country, with Ciolacu saying he did not want to take office before an agreement was reached with the teachers’ unions.

On June 12, the unions accepted a government offer for an average 25 percent salary increase.

"Considering that this conflict in the education sector has been ended, today the moment has come when I am ending my activity as prime minister of Romania," Ciuca said.

Ciolacu's resignation from the leadership of the Senate -- a post that Ciuca will assume -- the allegation of ministries, and the installation of the government is expected to take place at the end of the week.

Ciolacu hailed the smooth transfer of power and congratulated the coalition partner for "keeping its word" over the deal, which stipulated the change at the midway point of the term.

The main ministries that are the subject of negotiations include the Transport and Development ministries, which will finalize in 2024 multiple projects with electoral impact in local and county communities.

The Finance, Environment, Energy, Interior, European Funds, and Justice ministries are also the subject of discussion.

Ukraine refugees could boost Europe's GDP

by Matt Shipman, North Carolina State University

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

New research suggests the influx of Ukrainian refugees across Europe will improve long-term gross domestic product (GDP) for European countries that invest in infrastructure and other capital improvements. However, countries receiving Ukrainian refugees will likely face significant costs in the short term.

"The economic impact of the Ukrainian refugee crisis across Europe will vary significantly, depending on which part of the workforce you look at," says Luca David Opromolla, co-author of the study and the Owens Distinguished Professor of International Economics in North Carolina State University's Poole College of Management and College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

"It's important for us to understand these potential impacts so that governments and industries can make informed decisions about policies and investments in the face of an ongoing humanitarian crisis. Ideally, studies like this one can help to minimize social disruption and ultimately improve long-term outcomes for both refugees and the countries providing them with refuge."

When the researchers began their study, there were more than 7 million refugees from Ukraine after the invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces. (The number is now more than 8 million.) More than 4 million of those refugees were of working age, and largely distributed throughout Europe.

To assess the economic impact of Ukrainian refugees, the researchers first collected data from several sources. Data on labor market skills and employment status was drawn from the 2018-19 European Labor Force Survey. Production and trade data was drawn from the most recent World Input-Output Database. Data on Ukrainian refugees' skill, age, employment status, and country of destination came from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The researchers used that data to run an empirical analysis, guided by a theoretical model, that allowed them to study the impact of the Ukrainian refugees on production, international trade, and migration flows across 23 European countries, all of which are members of the European Union.

The model also determined the impact on household consumption, which served as a proxy for the welfare of residents in those 23 countries. In addition, the researchers were able to use the model to assess the impact that various levels of capital investment would have on all of those outcomes.

The researchers found there will be different impacts on three different parts of the workforce: low-skill labor, high-skill labor and owners of capital.

"Low-skill workers largely benefit in the short term because most of the refugees from Ukraine are high-skill workers," Opromolla says. "The refugees are not competing with low-skill workers, they're effectively complimenting them and making them more productive."

For the same reasons, high-skill workers will not benefit in the short-term—Ukrainian refugees will compete with them for high-skill jobs. However, this isn't necessarily true in the long term.

"Owners of capital benefit in the short and long term," Opromolla says. "In the short term, this is because there is increased competition for high-skill labor, and increased access to high-skill labor means there is increased demand for capital. If you own the capital, you benefit from this. What's more, if you see increased production in the long term, you benefit from that too."

The extent to which the GDP of individual countries will benefit from the presence of Ukrainian refugees in the long term depends in large part on the extent to which those countries are able to invest in capital structures. Capital structures are factors other than labor that influence production, such as infrastructure, manufacturing equipment and so on. The more a country's government and private sector are able to invest in capital structures, the better able that country will be to take advantage of its increased access to high-skill labor.

"If a country does see investment in capital structures, and there is a resulting increase in production, that will benefit the high-skill labor in that country," Opromolla says. "In which case, you will effectively see benefits across the workforce from the presence of Ukrainian refugees."

The research is published in the journal AEA Papers and Proceedings.

More information: Lorenzo Caliendo et al, Labor Supply Shocks and Capital Accumulation: The Short- and Long-Run Effects of the Refugee Crisis in Europe, AEA Papers and Proceedings (2023). DOI: 10.1257/pandp.20231077

Provided by North Carolina State University