MAYBE BY 2100

UN goal of achieving gender equality by 2030 is impossible because of biases against women, UN says

Story by The Canadian Press •

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. goal of achieving gender equality by 2030 is impossible to attain because of deeply rooted biases against women around the world in heath, education, employment and the halls of power, the United Nations said in a report Thursday.

“The world is failing women and girls,” UN Women, the agency promoting gender equality, and the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs said in “The Gender Snapshot 2023” report.

According to the U.N.’s findings, “ active resistance to gender equality and chronic under-investment are key factors in slow progress and, in some cases, reversals of gains already made.” It said “unequal access to sexual and reproductive health, unequal political representation, economic disparities and a lack of legal protection, among other issues, prevent tangible progress.”

Assistant Secretary-General Maria-Francesca Spatolisano told a news conference launching the report that gender equality is becoming “an ever increasingly distant goal." She pointed to recent setbacks for women and girls living in fragile and conflict-affected countries, the impact of climate change, and “active resistance to gender equality and chronic underinvestment” that are slowing and in some cases reversing progress.

The report assessing the progress for women in achieving the 17 U,N. goals for 2030 on issues ranging from poverty and education to climate change and human rights paints a grim picture of the gender gap, and the “lackluster commitment” globally to equality for women.

On a key goal of eradicating extreme poverty, the report said, one in every 10 women today, or 10.3%, lives on less than $2.15 a day – the extreme poverty level. If current trends continue, it said, 8% of the world’s female population, 342.4 women and girls, will still be living in extreme poverty in 2030, most in Sub-Saharan Africa.

While overall access to education is rising for girls and boys, the U.N. report said millions of girls never enter a classroom or complete their education, especially in conflict areas. The goal calls for every child to receive quality secondary school education, yet in Afghanistan, it said, the Taliban rulers have banned education for girls beyond elementary school.

“In 2023, up to 129 million girls and young women may be out of school globally,” the report said. “At current rates of progress, an estimated 110 million will remain out of school in 2030.”

As for the goal of decent work, the report said less than two-thirds of women aged 25 to 54 – 61.4% -- were in the labor force in 2022 compared to 90.6% of men, and the women were paid far less.

“In 2019, for each dollar men earned in labor income, women earned only 51 cents,” it said.

In jobs critical to the future in science, technology and innovation, the report said, “ongoing gender barriers limit women’s roles,” which is evident as the field of artificial intelligence takes off.

“In 2022, inventors listed on international patent applications were five times less likely to be female than male,” it said. “In 2020, women held only one in three research positions worldwide and only one in five science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) jobs.”

And in getting seats at decision-making tables, the report said, globally women hold only 26.7% of parliamentary seats, 35.5% of local government seats, and only 28.2% of management positions at work.

As for the goal promoting peace, the report said, conflicts are escalating around the world and “a shocking 614 million women and girls lived in conflict-affected contexts in 2022, 50% higher than in 2017.”

The report by UN Women and ECOSOC warned that the continuing failure to make the achievement of gender equality a priority will put the achievement of all 17 goals “in peril.”

It called funding for programs promoting gender equality and the empowerment of women “inadequate, unpredictable and inconsistently distributed among countries,” saying between 2020-2021 this government aid amounted to “a mere 4% of total bilateral aid, a notable decrease from 5% in previous years.”

The report said an estimated $6.4 trillion per year is needed across 48 developing countries – covering nearly 70% of the population in developing countries -- to achieve gender equality in key areas including ending poverty and hunger and supporting more equal participation of women in society by 2030.

The report said an estimated $6.4 trillion per year is needed across 48 developing countries – covering nearly 70% of the population in developing countries -- to achieve gender equality in key areas including ending poverty and hunger and supporting more equal participation of women in society by 2030.

If government expenditures stay on their current trajectory, it said, there will be an annual shortfall of $360 billion – which the U.N. is appealing for.

Edith M. Lederer, The Associated Press

Canadian Natural expects Trans Mountain expansion project to be delayed -letter

Story by By Nia Williams •

FILE PHOTO: FILE PHOTO: A pipe yard servicing government-owned oil pipeline operator Trans Mountain is seen in Kamloops© Thomson Reuters

By Nia Williams

(Reuters) - Canadian Natural Resources Ltd, a major shipper on the Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion (TMX), expects the project will be delayed until at least the second quarter of 2024, the company said in a letter to Canadian regulators on Thursday.

Trans Mountain Corp (TMC), the Canadian government-owned corporation building the long-delayed project, has said the expanded pipeline will start shipping oil late in the first quarter of next year.

Canadian Natural said it expected the pipeline's start date to be delayed because TMC is asking regulators for a route deviation on a 1.3-km (0.8 mile) section just south of Kamloops, British Columbia.

"Although Canadian Natural hopes for an earlier Commencement Date, unfortunately, it is probable that the Commencement Date will be delayed into Q2 or later in 2024," the letter to the Canada Energy Regulator (CER) said.

TMC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

TMX will treble the flow of oil sands crude from Alberta to Canada's Pacific Coast to 890,000 barrels per day, but the expansion has been dogged by years of regulatory delays and environmental opposition.

It was bought by the Canadian government in 2018 to ensure it got built, but has seen costs quadruple to C$30.9 billion. TMC is currently locked in a dispute with oil shippers over higher-than-expected tolls.

Canadian Natural's submission to the CER was one of a number of letters from TMX shippers, including Cenovus Energy and Suncor Energy, filed on Thursday.

The companies argued TMX's proposed interim tolls are excessive and called for a review of why the cost of the pipeline escalated so much during construction.

(Reporting by Nia Williams; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

Enbridge, Divert break ground on renewable fuel facility in Washington

Story by The Canadian Press •



CALGARY — Canadian pipeline giant Enbridge Inc. and U.S.-based food waste management company Divert Inc. have broken ground on their first joint project to be built under the terms of a US$1 billion infrastructure agreement announced earlier this year.

The two companies are investing approximately US$100 million in the first of what is expected to be several projects across the U.S. that will convert food waste into non-fossil fuel, renewable energy.

The first facility, for which a groundbreaking ceremony was held Thursday afternoon, will be built in Longview, Washington and will be the first of its kind in the state. It will accept wasted food from retail food customers, agricultural food producers, industrial food manufacturers, restaurants and others and convert it into renewable natural gas, or RNG.

"When we started looking at who we wanted to partner with in this space, Divert really stood out because they have kind of mastered ... diverting wasted food," said Caitlin Tessin, vice-president of strategy and market innovation for Enbridge.

"The fact that it doesn't just go into a landfill really attracted us to the Divert partnership because it's not just about decarbonized gas — there's a really strong social and community benefit to what they're doing," Tessin added.

Enbridge, which bought a 10 per cent stake in Divert earlier this year for US$80 million, is one of a number of traditional fossil fuel companies that have been investing in RNG as concerns about climate change intensify.

According to the World Biogas Association, organic waste from food production, food waste, farming, landfill and wastewater treatment are responsible for about 25 per cent of human-caused global emissions of methane, a harmful greenhouse gas.

But it's possible to harness the methane from organic waste to create an environmentally friendly alternative to traditional natural gas that can be used for home heating, cooking, and even fuelling vehicles.

Divert — which uses a patented "depackaging" process and anaerobic digestion technology in its facilities — already operates 10 sites across the U.S., working with nearly 5,400 retail stores to process more than 2.3 billion pounds of wasted food annually.

Enbridge will help to finance the Longview facility, and will transport the fuel produced there to customers in the Washington area via Enbridge's already existing natural gas pipeline network.

"RNG is a drop-in fuel replacement for traditional gas," Tessin said, adding replacing traditional gas with RNG helps to lower Enbridge's overall carbon footprint.

"It (allows us) to utilize the billions of dollars of infrastructure we already have."

The Longview facility is expected to be fully operational in 2024. Enbridge says it will be able to offset up to 23,000 metric tonnes of CO2 a year, the equivalent to removing 5,000 gas-powered cars from the road annually.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 7, 2023.

Companies in this story: (TSX:ENB)

Amanda Stephenson, The Canadian Press

What are biofuels and why is it so confusing whether they are a source of clean energy or not?



BENGALURU, India (AP) — India, the current president of the Group of 20 industrialized and developing nations, has proposed a global biofuel alliance that seeks to accelerate the development of sustainable biofuels to support the global energy transition.

The alliance is likely to get an official announcement at the G-20 summit that opens this week in New Delhi, and it's expected that more than 15 countries will sign up to be part of the alliance.

The United States, Canada and Brazil are among a few of the countries expected to join India in such an alliance.

WHAT ARE BIOFUELS?

Any fuel produced from agricultural produce or organic waste is a biofuel.

Humans have used biofuels since time immemorial — for example, burning wood and manure for cooking, heating and light.

They've gained popularity in recent decades for their potential to deliver cleaner energy than some other sources.

Biofuels are categorized based on their source, with each category known as a “generation.” First-generation biofuels are derived from food crops like corn and sugar cane, second generation from inedible vegetation and agricultural waste and third-generation from algae.

Popular types of biofuels such as ethanol, biodiesel and biogas can be produced from any of these sources and are classified based on the source from which they are produced. For example, ethanol produced from farm-grown corn is classified as first-generation ethanol.

ARE BIOFUELS ALWAYS A SOURCE OF CLEAN ENERGY?


Not always. It depends on how it's produced. A biofuel made from waste or inedible vegetation, with renewable energy to power the production, would have little or no greenhouse gas emissions, making it a clean fuel. But when crops are grown explicitly to produce biofuels — such as making ethanol from corn, soybeans, sugar cane or palm — all the fertilizers and fossil fuels needed to grow, cultivate and process the fuel give it a much larger carbon footprint.

“If you look at the full life cycle of producing biofuels, it’s many times not clean,” said Lydia Powell, an energy policy analyst at the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, who has followed developments related to biofuels for over two decades.

Biofuels can also mean land that could have produced food is instead being used for energy. And they can add to deforestation when land is cleared for their production.

Powell noted Europe's imports of palm oil from Indonesia and other East Asian countries to make biodiesel for cars and trucks. Those imports dropped sharply after European Union regulations banned the sale of palm oil and other commodities when they could be linked to deforestation.

"They were destroying natural forests to plant palm trees so you produce oil to export to Europe. When you destroy forests, you destroy large chunks of carbon sinks,” Powell said.

Those issues have clouded the picture of exactly how sustainable biofuels are, and led to skepticism of them as a clean energy option.

WHAT ARE BIOFUELS USED FOR?

Transportation, including passenger vehicles, but also transport — trucking, shipping and aviation.

Once they're made, experts say, biofuels have advantages over pure fossil fuels by contributing little to no emissions at the tailpipe. The same can't be said of the gasoline and diesel they are blended with.

But there's a hope that the biofuels might completely replace fossil fuels in the future in aviation and in certain kinds of ships. And if the biofuels were derived from organic waste and inedible crops grown on wasteland — not on land reserved for food production, or on deforested land — it would be cleaner.

“They are one option among a larger set of solutions,” said Jane O’Malley of International Council on Clean Transportation, a Washington-based independent nonprofit.

O’Malley, whose research includes fuel life cycles and exhaust emissions, said the key is to use the right kind of biofuel for the right purpose. O'Malley said it's essential for countries using biofuels for transportation to move as quickly as possible to producing them with little or no emissions.

Experts say biofuels can also contribute to employment and energy security, especially if the crops used to produce them are locally grown.

____

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

Sibi Arasu, The Associated Press

Hurricane Lee forecast to rapidly become strongest storm of the year so far

Story by Digital Writers •

VIDEO
The Weather Network
Hurricane of the year? Lee's quick intensification Thursday is turning heads 
Duration 1:05   View on Watch

Lee quickly moved up the ranks, becoming the 14th named storm of the season, then strengthening into a hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean on Wednesday. According to the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC), this will be an "extremely dangerous" hurricane to watch.

Although there is little to no impact to land in the short term, Lee's development is interesting. Rapid intensification has been a topic with hurricanes over the past couple of years and this one is doing just that.

Visit The Weather Network's hurricane hub to keep up with the latest on tropical developments in Canada and around the world


Hurricane Lee forecast to rapidly become strongest storm of the year so far© Provided by The Weather Network

Early Tuesday, Lee was a tropical depression with a projection to become a Category 4 hurricane within five days –– the first time since five-day forecasts started in 2000 that a storm will intensify that quickly from a tropical depression. That is just a forecast statistic, so we will see how quickly Lee develops with time.

Lee is forecast to reach major storm status by Friday.

It will become a long-lasting storm as it tracks north of the British Virgin Islands towards the western Atlantic. Swells generated by Lee are likely to cause life-threatening surf and rip current conditions.

Lee will be a storm to watch as it has the potential to bring impact to land into late next week. It is still too early to predict how and if this hurricane will impact parts of the Atlantic coast of the United States and Canada, but The Weather Network is closely monitoring its development.


Rapidly developing Lee expected to fast-track into a major hurricane© Provided by The Weather Network

Stay tuned to The Weather Network for the latest forecast updates on Tropical Storm Lee.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Canada Bread banned from federal contracts over price-fixing scheme

Story by Jake Edmiston •

Loaves of Canada Bread Co. Ltd. Dempster's multigrain bread are displayed for sale as an employee stocks shelves at a grocery store in Vancouver.© Provided by Financial Post

Canada Bread Co. Ltd. has been added to the federal government’s list of banned suppliers for its role in one of most notorious price-fixing conspiracies in Canadian retail history.

Canada Bread — one of the country’s biggest commercial bakeries, behind brands such as Dempster’s and Villaggio, among others — in June pleaded guilty to four counts of price fixing and received a $50-million fine — the first major development in the case since news of the scheme first emerged in 2017. On Aug. 22, two months after the guilty plea, the federal government banned Canada Bread from bidding on government contracts for 10 years.

The move means Canada Bread can no longer supply bread and rolls to the Department of National Defence, though the reputational harm could be the tougher blow. Even before that decision, credit rating agency DBRS Morningstar said Canada Bread’s situation was a cautionary tale of how unethical business conduct can “erode consumer confidence” and hurt a company’s overall credit risk profile.

Canada Bread is now one of just five companies on the federal government’s list of “ineligible and suspended suppliers ” — a program that started in 2015 as a way of keeping unethical players away from the public purse.

“It’s not surprising,” said Robin Shaban, co-founder of the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, an Ottawa think-tank that focuses on competition policy reform. “If I was working in federal government procurement, I would totally blackball them.”

Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC), the department that maintains the list, said the government will not do business with any companies that are convicted of certain offences , including bid rigging, bribery and price fixing.

PSPC spokesperson Jeremy Link said the government is committed to taking action “against improper, unethical and illegal business practices and holding companies accountable for such misconduct.”

In a statement, Canada Bread said it respects the government’s policy on ineligible suppliers and is “working within such policy.” The company has been controlled by Mexican baking giant Grupo Bimbo S.A.B. de C.V. since 2014. In court documents earlier this summer, the company said it only learned about the price-fixing activity in 2017 when the Competition Bureau, a federal law enforcement agency, executed a search warrant against Canada Bread.

The court documents said the bureau found that a senior officer at Canada Bread co-ordinated two wholesale price increases between 2007 and 2011 with executives at the company’s main competitor, Weston Foods — a major commercial bakery controlled at the time by George Weston Ltd., which also controls Canada’s largest retailer, Loblaw Cos. Ltd.

In 2017, the bureau granted immunity to Loblaw and Weston in exchange for their co-operation with the investigation. The immunity appears to have kept those companies off the government’s banned supplier list, since neither company was charged with one of the crimes that makes a supplier ineligible.

Grupo Bimbo said it fully co-operated with the investigation, handing over documents that were not seized during the bureau’s raid. The company has publicly said the offences happened before Grupo Bimbo took over the bakery, when Canada Bread was majority owned and controlled by Maple Leaf Foods Inc.

“Grupo Bimbo is considering all legal options against those responsible for the conduct at issue,” the company said in a statement in June.

Maple Leaf Foods has said it was not aware of “any wrongdoing by Canada Bread or its senior leadership during the time that we were a shareholder.”

In exchange for Canada Bread’s co-operation, the bureau recommended leniency in sentencing. Ontario Superior Court Judge Maureen Forestell said Canada Bread’s fine of $50 million was below the maximum since the company’s co-operation and guilty plea saved “considerable time and costs.”

The judge said she took the bureau’s approach to leniency into consideration, since “much of the conduct would go undetected” without participants coming forward to confess in exchange for an easier sentence. Still, the $50-million fine was the highest on record, the bureau said.

“Effectively, this was a fraud on the public,” Forestall said in her reasons for sentencing. “These offences affected millions of consumers.”

Bureau spokesperson Sarah Brown said the agency isn’t involved in decisions about the government’s list of banned suppliers. But the bureau has previously advocated that anyone who gets immunity or leniency from the bureau shouldn’t be barred by the government.

In recommendations published late last year, the bureau said the threat of landing on the list could make it harder for a potential whistleblower to take a leniency or immunity deal.

As of now, only companies with immunity can avoid the list, according to John Pecman, the former head of the Competition Bureau who established the immunity and leniency program.

“We worked closely with Procurement Canada to ensure the immunity applicants would be excluded,” he said.

But parties who receive leniency — a lower tier in the bureau’s program — end up on the list because they’ve been convicted of one of the crimes that the government considers to be a red flag for suppliers.

“That’s one of the consequences,” Pecman said. “It’s part of your penalty.”

Canada Bread settles years-long price-fixing allegations

Investigation into infamous bread price-fixing scheme isn't finished

Inside the damning allegations of Canada’s bread price fixing scandal

Government records show that Canada Bread has supplied products to the defence department and Fisheries and Oceans Canada since 2008. The most recent supply contract was valued at $10,925 for Canada Bread Atlantic Ltd. to supply “miscellaneous food, food materials and food preparations” in July 2018.

In another contract, valued at $25,000, Canada Bread Co. Ltd. is listed as supplying fruits and vegetables to defence department between late 2016 and early 2017, according to a government database of contracts worth more than $10,000. In the fall of 2016, Canada Bread also had a deal to provide bread and rolls to the defence department. The database categorizes that contract as a “standing offer.”

— With files from Christopher Nardi and Barbara Shecter

UCP WAR ON  RENEWABLES
New questions for wind, solar in Alberta create more confusion for industry: advocate

Story by The Canadian Press •



EDMONTON — New information requirements for Alberta power generators including wind and solar projects will create further problems for a booming renewables industry that government policy has already slowed, said an industry advocate.

"They introduced more questions than answers," said Jorden Dye of the Business Renewables Centre, a group that links generators and purchasers of renewable power.

On Wednesday, the Alberta Utilities Commission released a series of interim information requests that those proposing new projects will be required to answer. The requests apply to all proposals, including renewable projects already under a six-month approval moratorium imposed by the United Conservative Party government.

The pause is supported by some landowners as well as municipal districts and counties but has also been criticized by municipalities, energy economists and business leaders.

During the six months, the commission is to hold an inquiry into how to regulate Alberta's renewables industry — the largest in the country and responsible for billions of dollars in investment, millions of dollars in taxes and thousands of jobs. While the inquiry is underway, power proposals must answer the commission's interim requirements.

The commission did not immediately respond to a request for an interview.

Dye said the commission's questions around land use, agricultural impacts and reclamation are reasonable. Some are already part of the approval process; others the industry is willing to answer.

Others seem arbitrary, he said.

Proponents must "list and describe pristine viewscapes … on which the project will be imposed," the commission says. "Describe mitigation measures available to minimize impacts from the project on these viewscapes."

That's not very clear, said Dye.

"It's too vague to be actionable. How can you submit information on your impact on pristine viewscapes if pristine viewscapes are not defined in any way?"

Other questions infringe on decisions by individual landowners, Dye said.


cbc.ca Why some in rural Alberta support a move that puts a pause on renewable power projects
4:40

cbc.ca Federal government unveils electric grid decarbonize plan
2:02

Global News 'Unconstitutional, irresponsible, unrealistic': Prairies reject feds' net-zero energy plan
1:46


"These are deals between private landowners. That farmer knows the best use of that land — they're aware of the effects (of power generation)."

Dye said other industrial and energy developments are not subject to similar requirements.

"I do feel the renewables industry has been singled out."

Commission spokesman Richard Goldberger said in an email that many of the new requests simply restate questions that applicants would have had to answer anyway.

"The interim information requirements bring this information-gathering exercise to the front-end of the proceeding," he wrote.

Goldberger wrote formalizing the information requests will ensure all applicants are treated the same.

"Gathering uniform information from active applications will help proceeding panels understand the potential impacts of individual applications and will also inform consideration of these issues in the inquiry."

Opposition New Democrat energy critic Kathleen Ganley said the interim information requests have muddied already murky waters.

"Interim rules don't create certainty," she said.

She pointed to letters received by the commission from renewable energy companies warning Alberta's investment reputation is at risk.

One company, Renewable Energy Systems, said “the moratorium will result in severe uncertainty among investors, jeopardizing billions of dollars of investment in Alberta.”

Aira, a subsidiary of a large multinational infrastructure company, said the pause endangers its plan for a billion-dollar solar farm.

“The regulatory delay places undue burden on the project economics, placing investment and jobs in jeopardy … further delay and uncertainty related to the pause could jeopardize the project and all of the benefits it will bring to Alberta.”

Ganley said the pause, which was announced without consultation with industry, affects Alberta's overall reputation as a place to do business.

"(The United Conservatives) have changed the rules suddenly and without warning, putting at risk a whole bunch of people's investments and capital. That's going to have long-term effects."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 7, 2023.

Bob Weber, The Canadian Press

Inside the Burning Man ‘mudpocalypse,’ where Silicon Valley CEOs, investors, and billionaires faced off against the powers of nature’s wrath

Alexandra Sternlicht
Wed, September 6, 2023 

As rain pelted the Burning Man "playa" on Friday night, turning the desert plateau into a giant mud pit, the festival's official radio station told attendees to cancel their party plans and hunker down.

"Don’t party" was the message, with the implication of avoiding drugs and alcohol, recalls one attendee describing the surreal experience as one of the world’s most celebrated bacchanals, frequented by DJs, artists, and tech billionaires, suddenly turned into a potential natural disaster zone.

By Tuesday, many of the 70,000 Burning Man attendees were back home, or on their way, after washed-out roads were reopened and a multiday travel ban in and out of the area was lifted. Many of the attendees Fortune spoke with rejected news reports that described them as having been stranded victims or in danger. (One person died at the event, though the cause is under investigation.)

But if nothing else, the deluge provided a high-profile display of the collision between nature and some of the world's most well-heeled revelers, including Google cofounder Sergey Brin, actor Chris Rock, and Kimball Musk, the brother of Tesla CEO Elon Musk—who was apparently not present this year, but who tweeted his praise for Burning Man on Sunday: "hard to describe how incredible it is for those who have never been."

Twitch cofounder Justin Kan posted on Instagram about having survived, and thrived, during the “hardest Burning Man I’ve been to in 10 years.” Crypto entrepreneur and former child actor Brock Pierce, health tech platform founder Adrian Aoun, and ex-Twitter manager Esther Crawford were reportedly among the many other Silicon Valley notables at this year's event.

Snorting drugs in soggy yurts

For many, the festival organizers’ calls for sobriety and restraint were interpreted loosely.

Inside a soggy yurt somewhere on the playa on Friday night, Richard, his wife, and friends sat on a tarp snorting lines of ketamine and cocaine, and popping MDMA pills, until their Bluetooth speaker died.

A longtime Burning Man attendee who asked to use a pseudonym, Richard normally plots his drug experiences at the festival very carefully. This year he had planned to do MDMA only on Friday night following a Shabbat dinner and concert by his favorite artist Paavo Siljamäki, concluding in a sunrise wedding.

But with the wild weather, all of that was canceled. The muddy conditions made it impossible for Richard and other attendees to navigate the Playa by foot or by bike. Instead, they went on a bender.

“Friday was definitely like, fuck it, let’s do whatever we want to do. If anything, let’s do more to overcompensate for the fact that we’re not out on the playa seeing things,” says Richard.

Other attendees shared similar tales of making do, without the usual extravaganza of music, art, and invitations into other camps.

“There wasn’t much else to do,” said another attendee in response to Fortune’s inquiry about drug and alcohol consumption at the muddy festival. “People were at their camps doing what people do when they get bored."

A sign reading "Shit Could Be Worse" as campers sit in a muddy desert plain on September 3, 2023, after heavy rains turned the annual Burning Man festival site in Nevada's Black Rock desert into a mud pit. Tens of thousands of festivalgoers were stranded September 3, in deep mud in the Nevada desert after rain turned the annual Burning Man gathering into a quagmire, with police investigating one death. Video footage showed costume-wearing "burners" struggling across the wet gray-brown site, some using trash bags as makeshift boots, while many vehicles were stuck in the sludge.

 (Photo by Julie JAMMOT / AFP) 

Attendees typically use bikes to navigate the four-square-mile expanse of desert that constitutes the Playa, an ancient lake bed in Black Rock Desert, Nevada, located about a three-hour drive from Reno. With flooded grounds and ankle-deep mud, it was impossible to cycle, and even walking was an ordeal that required putting plastic bags over shoes.

Relegated to mud-drenched tents, yurts and RVs, many people wanted to leave but were unable to do so without getting stuck. One attendee who managed to make it credited his Range Rover for his salvation.

“Just managed to escape Burning Man mudpocalypse,” wrote one attendee on Instagram, posting a picture of his SUV. “Thankful for my Range Rover.”

Even celebrity attendees like Diplo and Chris Rock were forced to slog for miles in the mud before being able to hitch rides out of the desert. “No one was making it out of burning man they didn’t believe we would walk 6 miles in the mud,” wrote Diplo in an Instagram Story, appearing to post from a private plane with mud on his face.

All of this has swept the internet into a Fyre Festival–esque episode of schadenfreude. “What fascinates me about Burning man is how many rich people have never let go of their dream of being cool, but rather than being willing to change in any way they pay for certain products and events and try to project coolness despite being unhappy and unsatisfied,” tweeted one user

A wet camp at Burning Man

Still, a number of attendees with whom Fortune spoke characterized this year’s festival as the best one yet (though many of these revelers departed ahead of schedule).

“Everyone was in it together,” says venture capitalist Sheel Monhat, who left the festival on Sunday. “It is pretty egalitarian; like, no one really has special treatment.”

Of course, the communal spirit was sometimes tinged with the hard-nosed practicality of the tech industry. Longtime venture capitalist Bill Tai told the Wall Street Journal that he decided to break camp and leave on Friday, just as the skies began to threaten the festival.

"As an investor," Tai told the paper, "I ALWAYS plan out a decision tree for how things may unfold."

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Turkey rescuers preparing complex effort to retrieve ill American from Morca Cave

Phil Helsel and Liam Woods
Thu, September 7, 2023 

Rescuers in Turkey are preparing a complex effort to reach an American who has fallen ill and has been trapped in the Morca Cave since Saturday, officials said.

As of Tuesday, caver Mark Dickey, 40, was at a campsite around 3,400 feet from the entrance, according to the Turkish Caving Federation, which is assisting in the rescue.

The Hungarian Cave Rescue Service said it received a call Saturday saying a caver inside the around 4,100-foot deep cave was suffering gastrointestinal bleeding and needed help.

Dickey’s condition is stabilizing, the bleeding has stopped, and he is able to walk with assistance, the federation said in a statement Wednesday, but he needs a stretcher to be removed from the cave complex.

Mark Dickey. (via Facebook)

“The operation is logistically and technically one of the largest cave rescues in the world, involving 150 rescuers,” said the caving federation, which is working with Turkey’s government.

Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority, part of the Interior Ministry, said it had teams on standby and was working in coordination with the Turkish Caving Federation.

Rescuers were setting up rope lines Wednesday as part of the rescue effort.

Dickey is an instructor with the National Cave Rescue Commission, and he has been for 10 years, said Gretchen Baker, the group's national coordinator. He was co-leading an expedition to find and map a new passage in the cave, she said.

He fell ill at a depth of around 3,674 feet, the Turkish Caving Federation has said, before being moved to the group's base camp at around 3,412 feet.

Dickey is being cared for by doctors and is with his fiancée, Jessica, who is also a caver, his parents, Andrew and Deborah Ann Dickey, said in a statement. They declined to be interviewed.

“Mark is strong, but he needed his fellow cavers, including, of course, the doctors, to allow a devastatingly scary situation to turn positive,” they said.

"Our prayers are being answered and we cannot express how much that means, and will always mean, to us," they added.

Units of blood were delivered to Dickey this week, according to the Turkish Caving Federation. It said the operation to remove him and the stretcher was expected to be complex and lengthy. Morca Cave is the third-deepest cave in Turkey, it said.

While Dickey's condition has improved, it could be days before he can reach the entrance.

"It’s still expected to take quite a few days to get him all the way out of the cave, as it’s such a difficult and technical cave and he is so far deep in it right now," Baker said in an email Wednesday evening.

It takes around 15 hours for an experienced caver to reach the surface in ideal conditions, the Turkish Caving Federation has said.

The Morca Cave is in southern Turkey in the Taurus Mountains.

The National Cave Rescue Commission said on Facebook early Thursday ET that multiple rescue teams are working.

"More cave rescue teams are arriving, and they are dividing the cave up into sections. Different teams are helping to rig those sections," the group said.

Syria's US-backed Kurdish forces hope to end weeklong clashes with militia in the 'next 24 hours'

HOGIR AL ABDO
Tue, September 5, 2023

FILE - A US military vehicle on a patrol in the countryside near the town of Qamishli, Syria, on Dec. 4, 2022. Syria's U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led forces on Tuesday, Sept. 5, 2023 pushed deeper into the last stronghold of Arab tribesmen who have taken up arms against them in eastern Syria as a spokesperson said they hoped to end the dayslong clashes there in the “next 24 hours.” 

(AP Photo/Baderkhan Ahmad, File) 

DEIR EL-ZOUR, Syria (AP) — Syria's U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led forces on Tuesday pushed deeper into the last stronghold of Arab tribesmen who have taken up arms against them in eastern Syria. A spokesperson said they hoped to end the dayslong clashes there in the “next 24 hours.”

The fighting, which broke out eight days ago in the oil-rich province of Deir el-Zour along the Euphrates River, has so far killed at least 50 people, including several civilians, and wounded dozens. Hundreds of U.S. troops have been based in eastern Syria since 2015 to help battle the Islamic State group.

The violence has pitted the Syrian Democratic Forces against the tribesmen and former allies of the the Arab-led militia known as the Deir el-Zour Military Council. It was sparked by the arrest last month of the militia's leader, Ahmad Khbeil, better known as Abu Khawla, accused by SDF of “multiple crimes and violations,” including drug trafficking.

SDF spokesperson Farhad Shami told The Associated Press that the Kurdish-led forces have cleared three towns in the province previously seized by the militia. “What's left is (the town of) Ziban," he said. "We are hoping to end tensions there in the next 24 hours."

Shami said some 100 armed men are estimated to be in Ziban, along with suspected cells of the Islamic State group. Now rivals, the SDF and the militia were allies in the war against IS.

A Britain-based opposition war monitor, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said that the leader of a pro-Iran Arab tribe fighting against the SDF had called on his tribesmen and others to “free Deir el-Zour from the despicable Kurds”.

The Syrian government in Damascus has criticized the Kurdish-led SDF for its close alliance with the United States in the war against Islamic State militants and for forming what authorities describe as an autonomous enclave in eastern Syria. Meanwhile, Turkey and Turkish-backed oppositions groups in Syria's northwest routinely clash with the SDF.

Ankara claims the SDF is allied with Turkey’s outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which has led an insurgency within Turkey since 1984 that has killed tens of thousands of people. Ankara has declared the PKK a terrorist group.

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Associated Press writer Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut contributed to this report.

Unions seek gains in hostile territory: ‘If you change the South, you change America’

Olivia Olander
Wed, September 6, 2023 

James Pollard/AP Photo

Unions and their allies are ramping up efforts to convert an extraordinarily challenging demographic: low-wage workers in the anti-union South.

They’re trying unorthodox approaches that they hope can reverse decades of organizing failures. That includes organizing employees across different workplaces, wooing workers to join labor groups without traditional shop-by-shop elections and in some cases, taking direct strike action on employers.

The Union of Southern Service Workers, an SEIU-backed group, is organizing low-wage workers from across the service industry. The National Domestic Workers Alliance, a non-union membership organization, is mapping blue-leaning Southern jurisdictions, such as Miami-Dade County, that could be open to enacting a floor of labor standards for homecare. That effort has already led to the passage of “Bill of Rights” legislation in 10 states and four cities. And the Southern Workers Assembly, an advocacy group for both union and non-union workers, is trying to educate and organize workplaces across the region.

“The innovation that the Southern service workers are showing all of us is a really important way to create a future where the unions are growing,” SEIU President Mary Kay Henry said in an interview.

Even in arguably the most union-friendly climate nationwide in decades, however, these efforts face daunting odds.

The South has what a dozen organizers and experts characterized as a regional culture that has long proven resistant to collective bargaining. Workers lack deep union ties and corporations often relocate South to avoid organizing campaigns. Many political leaders are openly hostile to unions. The region is a stronghold for so-called right-to-work laws, which make it harder for unions to take root since employees can’t be required to pay dues, as well as laws making it more difficult or illegal for public sector workers to bargain.

Southern Workers Assembly and its allies oppose all state laws making it harder to organize workers. But so far Michigan has been the only state to repeal a right-to-work law in decades.

That hostility has caused some unions to focus their efforts on direct engagement with workers rather than seeking legislative changes that would make it easier to unionize workers.

“We don’t have the density, nor do we have the leverage” in the South as in cities up north, said Edgar Fields, president of the Resale, Wholesale and Department Store Union Southeast Council, which represents workers in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina.

The union is behind the organizing campaign at an Amazon facility in Bessemer, Ala., and Fields said it’s seeing increased interest from Southern workers in expanding campaigns such as those targeting REI — which recently found success at a handful of stores up north — to the region.

So far there’s little evidence that these fledgling efforts are reversing decades of high-profile setbacks in the region, including two recent failed unionization votes at that Alabama Amazon facility and United Auto Workers’ defeats at Volkswagen and Nissan plants in Tennessee.

Union skeptics like Patrick Semmens, vice president of the National Right to Work Foundation, say organized labor should look inward to explain low unionization rates rather than blaming legislative or regional factors.

“If union membership is as worthwhile a product — and union officials claim it is — then they shouldn't have so much difficulty convincing workers to choose that,” Semmens said.

But with state labor law victories few and far between, union organizers and their allies point to some other indications that low-wage Southern workers are more receptive to their pitches in the current climate. The Southern Workers Assembly, for example, has grown from seven active local assemblies to 12 since April.

Unions in recent years have won high profile organizing victories at national retailers long hostile to organizing campaigns like Starbucks and Trader Joe's. In addition, this summer saw a marked increase in strikes: More than 200,000 workers at large companies participated in work stoppages in July, compared to 126,500 in all of 2022, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Yet it comes after decades of decline. Union membership rates plummeted in the second half of the 20th century and have been hovering under 11 percent since 2016, according to the BLS. Of the 11 states with union membership rates under 5 percent last year, seven were in the South; no Southern state was among the 20 that had rates above 10 percent.

Organizing service workers brings particular challenges. U.S. labor law is generally structured around a model in which workers must unionize facility by facility; that’s why Starbucks workers need to hold votes at individual stores that at times involve fewer than a dozen employees.

Service jobs, which are often low-wage, also see high rates of turnover that can far outpace the time it takes the National Labor Relations Board to facilitate union contracts and address unfair labor practices.

“Time is not on the side of workers,” said D. Taylor, president of the hospitality union UNITE HERE, which successfully organized 12,000 service workers in the South in the mid-2010s and is continuing those efforts. “They have to pay rent.”

That’s why labor groups are trying out new tactics to convince workers about the benefits of collective bargaining. Workers can remain members of the Union of Southern Service Workers, for example, even if they switch jobs.

“What I'm incredibly excited about is the vision,” SEIU’s Henry said of USSW. In bringing together fast food workers, homecare workers and retail workers, the new union challenges “the legacy of racism and the corporate power” that have been the “dominant theme in those states for far too long,” she said.

Naomi Harris, one of the cofounders of USSW and a Waffle House employee in Columbia, S.C., went on strike with her coworkers in July seeking better working conditions. The Waffle House workers didn’t file for a union election with the NLRB, but instead simply demanded changes like better equipment and stopping a policy that automatically deducted meal charges from wages.

“The spotlight is on that corporation, and now you have the public’s eyes,” Harris said of the campaign. “So you have no choice but to do what they need to do: meet our demands.”

But whether Waffle House will ultimately acquiesce to the workers’ requests remains to be seen. The company has agreed to at least one demand — fixing the location’s air conditioning system — and the negotiations are ongoing, a USSW spokesperson said.

In a statement, Waffle House spokesperson Njeri Boss said the company is proud to address worker concerns.

“Our senior management team has met with our associates at the Columbia, SC Unit, some who took place in the short strike and some who did not,” Boss said. “We’ve already carried out work on most of the issues that were discussed, and we are working on others.” (USSW disputed that Waffle House had moved on any demand other than AC.)

The challenges in organizing retail workers are compounded in the South by the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow laws, said Jennifer Sherer, a senior state policy coordinator at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. Southern industry interests’ successful push to exclude agricultural and domestic workers from federal labor relations law had an outsized impact on Black people in the South, Sherer said.

That meant those workers were excluded from minimum wage and overtime protections. While domestic workers now must be paid at least minimum wage, live-in home workers still don’t have overtime protections.

“Domestic workers were intentionally cut because at that time they were primarily Black women,” said Hillary Holley, senior director for civic engagement at the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

Among the recruitment tactics employed by NDWA: talking with nannies at parks and courting home care workers from bus stops. The organization is advocating for a domestic workers’ “Bill of Rights” guaranteeing a floor of protections, including benefits afforded to employees under federal labor law.

Washington, D.C., recently became the latest city to enact such protections, while national legislation will be reintroduced this month, NDWA spokesperson Daniela Perez said.

The pandemic also brought a collective reckoning to service workers as business closures gave them time to reflect on their conditions, organizer Jen Hampton said. A three-decade veteran of food service, Hampton is now the leader of Asheville Food and Beverage United and the Western North Carolina Workers Assembly.

Hampton said she encountered local food service workers who thought it was literally illegal for them to organize in North Carolina. She attributes that erroneous belief to widespread anti-union sentiment among people in her community and a state law restricting bargaining among public employees.

“We just stopped saying the U-word for a while,” Hampton said of the early organizing efforts. But now after more than two years of organizing, her efforts have grown from a local Facebook group to a trade union affiliated with Restaurant Workers United, she said.

Union organizers expressed optimism that bringing in workers from the places least friendly to unions could have impacts on workers nationwide. A Treasury Department report released late last month said boosting union power benefits the middle class and the economy overall.

National labor legislation — most notably, the Democratic-backed Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would make it easier for more workers to organize and allow the NLRB to levy fines against employers — has stalled in Congress. UNITE HERE’s Taylor said that means it’s time for unions to take bigger risks on larger groups of workers and new sectors in the South.

“If you change the South, you change America,” Taylor said.