How do plants determine where the light is coming from ?

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF LAUSANNE

Plants have no visual organs, so how do they know where light comes from? In an original study combining expertise in biology and engineering, the team led by Prof Christian Fankhauser at UNIL, in collaboration with colleagues at EPFL, has uncovered that a light-sensitive plant tissue uses the optical properties of the interface between air and water to generate a light gradient that is 'visible' to the plant. These results have been published in the journal Science.

The majority of living organisms (micro-organisms, plants and animals) have the ability to determine the origin of a light source, even in the absence of a sight organ comparable to the eye. This information is invaluable for orienting oneself or optimal positioning in the environment. Perceiving where light is coming from is particularly important for plants, which use this information to position their organs, a phenomenon known as phototropism. This enables them to capture more of the sun's rays, which they then convert into chemical energy through the process of photosynthesis, a vital process which is necessary for the production of nearly all of the food we eat.

Although the photoreceptor that initiates phototropism has long been known, the optical properties of photosensitive plant tissue have until now remained a mystery. A multidisciplinary study published in Science, combining the expertise of the teams of DrSc. Christian Fankhauser (full professor and director of the Integrative Genomics Centre in the Faculty of Biology and Medicine at UNIL), DrSc. Andreas Schüler (head of the Nanotechnology for Solar Energy Conversion group at EPFL's Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory) and UNIL's Electron Microscopy Centre uncovered a surprising tissue feature allowing plants to detect directional light cues.

"It all started with the observation of a mutant of the model species Arabidopsis thaliana, the thale cress, whose stem was surprisingly transparent", explains Christian Fankhauser, who led the research. These plants failed to respond to light correctly. The UNIL biologist then decided to call on the skills of his colleague Andreas Schüler from EPFL, in order to further compare the specific optical properties of the mutant versus wild type samples. "We found that the natural milky appearance of the stems of young wild plants was in fact due to the presence of air in intercellular channels precisely located in various tissues. In the mutant specimens, the air is replaced by an aqueous liquid, giving them a translucent appearance", continues the researcher.

But what purpose do such air-filled channels serve? They enable the photosensitive stem to establish a light gradient that can be "read" by the plant. The plant can then determine the origin of the light source. This phenomenon is due to the different optical properties of air and water, which make up the majority of living tissue. “More specifically, air and water have different refractive indices. This leads to light scattering as it passes through the seedling. We have all observed this phenomenon when admiring a rainbow", explains Martina Legris, a postdoctoral fellow in Prof Fankhauser's group and co-first author of the study.

Thanks to their research, the scientists have revealed a novel mechanism that enables living organisms to perceive where the light is coming from, enabling them to position their organs such as leaves in a way that optimizes light capture for photosynthesis. The study also provided a better understanding of the formation of air-filled intercellular channels, which have a range of functions in plants, in addition to the formation of light gradients. Among other uses, these channels promote gas exchange and also make it possible to resist hypoxia (reduction in the quantity of oxygen) in the event of flooding. Their development from the embryonic stage to adulthood, is still very poorly understood. Genetic resources used in this study will be useful to better understand the formation and maintenance of these intriguing structures.

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JOURNAL

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.adh9384 

ARTICLE TITLE

Air channels create a directional light signal to regulate hypocotyl phototropism

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

24-Nov-2023

 

How do temperature extremes influence the distribution of species?

McGill biology researchers found that there are patterns regarding the importance of temperature in determining where species live, shedding light on their sensitivity to climate change

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MCGILL UNIVERSITY

As the planet gets hotter, animal and plant species around the world will be faced with new, potentially unpredictable living conditions, which could alter ecosystems in unprecedented ways. A new study from McGill University researchers, in collaboration with researchers in Spain, Mexico, Portugal, Denmark, Australia, South Africa and other universities in Canada, investigates the importance of temperature in determining where animal species are currently found to better understand how a warming climate might impact where they might live in the future.

To find out, the researchers tested the role of temperature as a factor that could limit a species’ potential habitat range. They compared the temperatures and areas where 460 cold-blooded animal species currently live to the temperatures and areas where they could live based on their tolerance to temperatures.

They found that, unlike species living in the ocean, land animals such as reptiles, amphibians and insects have habitat ranges that are less directly impacted by temperature. The higher a species is in latitude, the lower its tendency to live in areas near the equator with temperatures they could tolerate, the researchers say. This means that, instead of tolerance to temperature, negative interactions with other species – like with competitors or parasites – could be what keep these species away from this potential habitat.

“It was not surprising to find that temperature doesn’t always limit species ranges, but what was surprising was that, despite the complexity, we found general patterns in the role that temperature plays across species,” said lead author of the study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution and PhD student in the Department of Biology, Nikki A. Moore.

“This research helps us to understand general patterns in how sensitive the distributions of different cold-blooded animal species might be to changes in temperature, which will help us to predict how the global distribution of species will change because of climate change.”

A pattern that predicts species distribution

The pattern that Moore and colleagues found helps resolve two conflicting hypotheses about the distribution of life on earth.

“While it had long been thought that species ranges are less limited by temperature and more limited by species interactions in the tropics, the new work shows that higher-latitude species are increasingly excluded from their potential ranges in the tropics, supporting the idea of a trade-off between broad thermal tolerances and performance in the tropics,” said Moore.

While these results provide insights into the sensitivities of species in different realms and across latitudes to climate change, the next step for this research is to test these predictions using actual observations of species range shifts, the researchers say.

The researchers say predicting and testing how species distributions respond to temperature requires on good observations of where species live. Anyone can get involved in contributing to our knowledge of species distributions through citizen science, using applications such as iNaturalist.

About the study

Temperate species underfill their tropical thermal potentials on land by Nikki A. Moore et al., was published in Nature Ecology and Evolution.

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JOURNAL

Nature Ecology & Evolution

DOI

10.1038/s41559-023-02239-x 

ARTICLE TITLE

Temperate species underfill their tropical thermal potentials on land.

 

Autonomous excavator constructs a 6-meter-high dry-stone wall

Peer-Reviewed Publication

ETH ZURICH

 

IMAGE: 

THE MENZI MUCK PICKS AND SCANS EACH BOULDER TO BE PLACED IN THE CORRECT POSITION, CIRCULARITY PARK IN OBERGLATT, EBERHARD AG, 2021-2022

view more 

CREDIT: © GRAMAZIO KOHLER RESEARCH, ETH ZURICH, EBERHARD AG. PHOTO: MARC SCHNEIDER.

ETH Zurich researchers deployed an autonomous excavator, called HEAP, to build a six metre-high and sixty-five-metre-long dry-stone wall. The wall is embedded in a digitally planned and autonomously excavated landscape and park.

The team of researchers included: Gramazio Kohler Research, the Robotics Systems Lab, Vision for Robotics Lab, and the Chair of Landscape Architecture. They developed this innovative design application as part of the National Centre of Competence in Research for Digital Fabrication (NCCR dfab).

Using sensors, the excavator can autonomously draw a 3D map of the construction site and localise existing building blocks and stones for the wall’s construction. Specifically designed tools and machine vision approaches enable the excavator to scan and grab large stones in its immediate environment. It can also register their approximate weight as well as their centre of gravity. An algorithm determines the best position for each stone, and the excavator then conducts the task itself by placing the stones in the desired location. The autonomous machine can place 20 to 30 stones in a single consignment – about as many as one delivery could supply.

 

The Menzi Muck picks and scans each boulder to be placed in the correct position, Circularity Park in Oberglatt, Eberhard AG, 2021-2022.

The Menzi Muck picks and scans each boulder to be placed in the correct position, Circularity Park in Oberglatt, Eberhard AG, 2021-2022.

Drone view of the autonomous excavator HEAP, Circularity Park in Oberglatt, Eberhard AG, 2021-2022

Computational planning and stone placement using the autonomous excavator HEAP, Circularity Park in Oberglatt, Eberhard AG, 2021-2022.

CREDIT

© Gramazio Kohler Research, ETH Zurich, Eberhard AG. Photo: Ryan Luke Johns.

Reference

Johns RL, Wermelinger M, Mascaro R, Jud D, Hurkxkens I, Vasey L, Chli M, Gramazio F, Kohler M, Hutter M: A framework for robotic excavation and dry stone construction using on-site materials, Science Robotics, 22 November 2023, DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.abp9758

 

Further information

https://gramaziokohler.arch.ethz.ch/web/d/forschung/382.html

https://rsl.ethz.ch/robots-media/heap.html

https://girot.arch.ethz.ch/events-conferences/robotic-embankment-prototype

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JOURNAL

Science Robotics

DOI

10.1126/9758 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

A framework for robotic excavation and dry stone construction using on-site materials

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

22-Nov-2023

 

How certain media talk about AI may have everything to do with political ideology

Virginia Tech researchers investigate the impact of partisan media sentiment on reports about AI.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

VIRGINIA TECH

 

IMAGE: 

ILLUSTRATION BY ANDY SANTOS FOR VIRGINIA TECH.

view more 

CREDIT: ILLUSTRATION BY ANDY SANTOS FOR VIRGINIA TECH.

Even as artificial intelligence (AI) becomes embedded into every fabric our daily lives — from language translation to virtual personal assistants — it continues to be a divisive issue. As its reach expands, Virginia Tech researchers are seeking to understand which sections of society might be more receptive to AI and which sections may be more averse to it.

In the recently published research “Partisan Media Sentiment Toward Artificial Intelligence,” authors from the Virginia Tech Pamplin College of Business – Angela Yi, Shreyans Goenka, and Mario Pandelaere – examined the varied reactions to AI by analyzing partisan media sentiment. Their work was published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

The researchers found that articles from liberal-leaning media have a more negative sentiment toward AI than articles from conservative media. In other words, liberal-leaning media tend to be more opposed to AI than conservative-leaning media.

This opposition can be attributed to, according to the findings, liberal-leaning media being more concerned with AI magnifying social biases in society, such as racial, gender, and income disparities, than conservative-leaning media. The researchers also examined how media sentiment toward AI changed after George Floyd’s death.

“Since Floyd’s death ignited a national conversation about social biases in society, his death heightened social bias concerns in the media,” said Yi, a Ph.D. student in the marketing department. “This, in turn, resulted in the media becoming even more negative towards AI in their storytelling.”

Implications for policymakers and beyond

According to Goenka and Yi, their findings may have important implications for future political discussions around AI. Becaise media sentiment can serve as an indicator of public sentiment which, in turn, can impact policymakers’ stances, the partisan media differences observed may subsequently lead to differences in public opinion toward AI.

“Media sentiment is a powerful driver of public opinion, and oftentimes policymakers look toward the media to predict public sentiment on contentious issues,” said Yi. “Perhaps the next step in our research is to see how social media conversations surrounding AI change as a function of the partisan differences we see in our paper.”

How the data was collected

To examine partisan media sentiment toward AI, the researchers compiled a collection of articles written about AI from several media outlets. The partisan sentiment for each outlet used was determined by using the ratings found on the Media Bias Rating Chart from AllSides, a company that measures the perceived political bias of content on online written news outlets. A mix of liberal-leaning outlets, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, and more conservative-leaning outlets, such as The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, were sourced.

From there, the researchers downloaded articles from the selected outlets based on certain criteria, including the usage of specific key terms, such as “algorithm” or “artificial intelligence,” as well as a date range from May 2019 through May 2021.

With a dataset of over 7,500 articles, they performed an emotional tone analysis on each story using an automated text analysis tool. Through this tool, they were able to capture the emotional tone of each article, which is calculated by the difference between the percentage of positive emotion words and the percentage of negative emotion words in a text. This difference is then standardized on a scale of 0 to 100 to produce the emotional tone measure.

Goenka, assistant professor of marketing, stressed that this research is descriptive rather than prescriptive, and no stance is being taken as to the right way to discuss AI.

“We are not stating whether the liberal media is acting optimally, or the conservative media is acting optimally,” he said. “We are just showing that these differences exist in the media sentiment and that these differences are important to quantify, see, and understand.”

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JOURNAL

Social Psychological and Personality Science

DOI

10.1177/19485506231196817 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Partisan Media Sentiment Toward Artificial Intelligence

‘You can walk around in a T-shirt’: how Norway brought heat pumps in from the cold

Ajit Niranjan
Thu, 23 November 2023 

Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty Images

When Glen Peters bought a heat pump for his home in Oslo he wasn’t thinking about the carbon it would avoid.

Convenience played a role; a fireplace was too much of a hassle – the effort of having to buy, prepare and store the wood – and the wall-mounted radiators are too dusty. “They’re a pain in the ass to clean,” said Peters (who is actually a climate scientist).

But the main factor, according to Peters, who had recently swapped to underfloor heating, was money.

In most of Europe, fitting a heat pump is one of the most powerful actions a person can take to reduce their carbon footprint. But in Norway, where clean-yet-inefficient electrical resistance heaters have long been common, upgrading to a heat pump is often a purely financial decision – one to which Peters came late. Two-thirds of households in this Nordic country of 5 million people have a heat pump, more than anywhere else in the world.

For many years, Norwegians and their neighbours heated their homes with fossil fuels. But during the 1973 oil crisis, when prices shot up, the country’s political leaders made a conscious choice to promote alternatives, and, unlike their counterparts elsewhere, they did not back away from that decision once the crisis eased. Denmark rolled out an extensive district heating system. Norway, Sweden and Finland moved more towards heating with wood or electricity. They began to price carbon in the 1990s, and a mix of grants and taxes tipped the balance further away from oil long after the crisis was over.

In the Netherlands, during the 1973 oil crisis, cars were periodically banned in Amsterdam in order to save petrol. 

Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

“Norway ensured early on that fossil-fuel heating was the most expensive option, making heat pumps cost competitive,” said Dr Jan Rosenow from the Regulatory Assistance Project, a thinktank that works to decarbonise buildings. “They did this by taxing carbon emissions from fossil heating fuels. That’s been the key to incentivise heat pump adoption.”

Norway also trained up a workforce to install them. While the devices themselves can be churned out of factories en masse, fitting them into homes can be fiddly and easy to mess up. In much of Europe, experts say, the lack of a skilled workforce is one of several bottlenecks holding the heat pump industry back.

“The reason we have big growth is that it works,” said Rolf Hagemoen, the head of Norway’s heat pump lobby. “If you have lots of customers who have complaints and bad experiences with heat pumps, they will tell all their neighbours it doesn’t work.”

There are signs that the opposite also holds true. Ole Øystein Haugen, a retired metalworker who lives just outside Oslo, convinced three of his neighbours to get ground-source heat pumps after he got one himself seven years ago. The device heats his swimming pool as well as his home. It takes a little longer to heat the water in the spring than with the old oil burner, said Haugen, but “that’s the only negative thing”.

At its core, a heat pump is just like a fridge or an air-conditioner. The machine does not generate the desired heat itself but instead moves it from outside to where it is needed. They have been around for decades, with the first heat pump built in 1856 by Peter von Rittinger, an Austrian scientist, and used to dry out salt in a marsh. By the 1930s, the Swiss used them to take heat from rivers and lakes and a couple of decades later the Americans used them to draw heat out of the ground.

Heat pumps’ efficiency has been increased over decades, partly because of the early adopters in Nordic countries who tinkered away to the point where a modern version can deliver three to five units of heat for every unit of electricity used to power it. An efficient gas boiler, on the other hand, can only produce as much heat as the energy contained in the fuel being burned. In other words, a heat pump will have a smaller carbon footprint than a gas boiler even when plugged into an electricity grid dependent on high-emitting suppliers.

Kent Eilertsen is a maintenance engineer at the Norwegian postal service Posten Bring and looks after two heat pumps in a sorting terminal in Tromsø, 137 miles (220km) north of the Arctic Circle. “It works very well in the cold,” said Eilertsen. The devices can become less efficient when temperatures drop below -15C, he added, but new versions still run at -20C or -25C.

That is not what we hear in other countries. Coming from the UK, which sold fewer heat pumps last year than anywhere else in Europe, and living in Germany, where the unassuming grey boxes have become unlikely fodder in a fierce culture war, I find the Nordic acceptance of clean heat particularly hard to wrap my head around. Powerful campaigns against heat pumps have been run in parts of the UK and German press, which continue to argue that the devices are inefficient and break down in cold weather. Some of the campaigning has been linked to gas lobby groups.

The popularity of heat pumps across Nordic countries should be enough to dispel that myth – Sweden and Finland join Norway at the top of rankings of heat pumps per 1,000 household. Studies show the same thing. In mildly cold climates, a standard air-source heat pump produces two to three times as much useful heat as the energy needed to run it, and the ratio only drops below two in temperatures far below freezing.

The Norwegians also benefit from well-insulated houses. “When I was a kid we either sweated like pigs in summer or froze to death in winter,” said Peters, who grew up in Australia. “Norway is very different and quite luxurious in the sense that in the middle of winter you can just walk around in your T-shirt and it’s 20- plus degrees in your house.”

The Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, and the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, are shown a heat pump during a visit to renewable energy company in Slough, Berkshire. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA

For now, heat pumps are still, in most countries, pretty small scale. The global stock meets only about 10% of the heat used in buildings, according to the International Energy Agency, and their needs to almost triple by the end of the decade to be on track for net zero emissions by 2050. Despite a boom since the recent energy crisis, when fossil gas prices soared, sales in parts of Europe and elsewhere suggest that goal is still well off-track.

Norway’s success is not easy for countries to replicate. It is one of the wealthiest on the planet, so citizens can more easily afford the higher upfront cost of a heat pump. Norway also makes cheap, renewable electricity from hydropower dams, which lowers the monthly bills for people running a heat pump.

But with European governments continuing to subsidise fossil fuels – and setting carbon prices well below the cost of polluting – the Nordic experience shows that politicians in much warmer countries could opt to clean up their heating systems.

UK

Matters of life and death: Sunak faces mounting danger at Covid inquiry

Peter Walker Deputy political editor

GUARDIAN
Sat, 25 November 2023 


It was the first time the Covid inquiry had heard directly from Rishi Sunak and things went immediately awry for the prime minister: his claim in a witness statement that no one had raised concerns about a flagship pandemic policy was immediately contradicted by the government’s former chief scientific adviser.

Monday’s tussle over the “eat out to help out” scheme, in which Sir Patrick Vallance responded to an extract read out from Sunak’s statement, which has yet to be published, was arguably more embarrassing than damaging.

But with the prime minister scheduled to appear in person soon, the dangers are piling up. More and more details are emerging about the role of the man referred to disparagingly by one scientific adviser as “Dr Death the chancellor”.

The perils fall into two broad camps. The first is the narrative emerging from a range of evidence and testimony that Sunak’s Treasury was, in the words of Boris Johnson, as recorded in Vallance’s diary, “the pro-death squad” – that is to say, so intent on prioritising economic reopening that it put public safety at risk.

Much of this centres around eat out to help out: a brief but lavish £850m scheme in summer 2020 to incentivise people to go in person to cafes and restaurants; a scheme the inquiry has been told was imposed without any consultation, leaving Vallance and others “blindsided”.

The second danger is arguably more acute: an emerging suggestion that the prime minister was not only reckless in seeking to sideline advisers but could now be trying to cover up this failure.

It is worth noting that however badly Sunak’s apparently gung-ho approach to reopening the economy might land with some voters, it could equally win him plaudits among anti-lockdown Conservative MPs, plus certain rightwing newspapers and TV channels.

Sunak could thus be minded to unapologetically present himself as the voice of economic and social reality, an attempted counterweight to restriction-obsessed scientists.

If he does, there is certainly no lack of evidence to back this up. Witness after witness has stressed Sunak’s keenness to lift restrictions, exemplified by the “Dr Death” moniker, used in a private message by Prof Dame Angela McLean, who has since replaced Vallance as chief scientific adviser.

Vallance’s diary repeatedly showed his apparent annoyance with the then chancellor, one extract saying Sunak made “increasingly specific and spurious arguments” against new restrictions. It also recalled Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former aide, summarising Sunak’s view as “just let people die and that’s OK”.

A particularly eye-opening extract recounted Sunak telling a virtual meeting on economics that his job was “all about handling the scientists, not handling the virus”, not realising Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, was on the call.

To defend all of this would involve justifying eat out to help out, a proposal which, studies have suggested, might have been responsible for up to a sixth of new infection clusters that summer as well as causing an increase in Covid deaths among the Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities, heavily represented in the hospitality industry.

One point of near-unanimity among scientists speaking to the inquiry has been incredulity at the idea of paying people to mingle in public spaces when months of previous advice had urged the opposite.

John Edmunds, a professor of infectious disease modelling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said he was “still angry” at the plan, adding: “This was a scheme to encourage people to take an epidemiological risk.”

In his testimony, Vallance said eat out to help out “completely reversed” public health messaging. “It’s quite likely that had an effect on transmission,” he said. “In fact it’s very difficult to see how it wouldn’t have had an effect on transmission, and that would have been the advice that was given, had we been asked beforehand.”

It was during this exchange that Andrew O’Connor KC gave the inquiry the first view of Sunak not filtered through someone else’s recollections, reading out the snippet from the prime minister’s evidence.

When eat out to help out was running, and in the run-up to its launch, “I do not recall any concerns about the scheme being expressed during ministerial discussions, including those attended by the CMO [Whitty] and CSA [Vallance]”, Sunak said in his statement, which will be released in full after he has spoken.

Asked if this was accurate, Vallance was polite but clear. “I think it would have been very obvious to anyone that this was likely to cause – well, inevitably would cause – an increase in transmission risk, and I think that would have been known by ministers,” he said, adding he would be “very surprised” if Sunak had not known it.

All this must be put into context. Sunak has not, like Johnson, been portrayed during the inquiry as a borderline-sentient hologram of a leader who failed to grasp basic science and would adopt the view of whoever he last spoke to; nor, as with Matt Hancock, has he been dismissed as congenitally untrustworthy.

Also, Sunak faces more immediate worries, everything from a stagnating economy to high net migration figures and an increasingly restive Conservative party.

But with an election looming and defeat increasingly likely, Sunak will be thinking about whatever thin legacy the history books will grant him. “The man who killed an unknown number of Britons by recklessly ignoring expert advice” is not the political epitaph he will want. If he gets it wrong at the inquiry, it might nonetheless be the one he gets.

UK

Recruiters 'headhunting' underperforming employees to avoid expensive payouts

Fran Ivens
Fri, 24 November 2023 

Some bosses use reverse recruitment to move on unwanted staff - praetorianphoto/E+

Companies are increasingly using recruiters to get rid of staff by the backdoor to cut their workforces and skirt around employment law.

“Reverse hiring” works when a manager asks an external recruiter to “headhunt” an employee out of the business and place them elsewhere.

Employers cannot dismiss staff without good reason under British law. Currently, a worker can only make a claim for unfair dismissal after two years of employment. The Labour Party has said it wants to cut this down to just one day.

One city recruiter, Evan Jowers, a partner at Lateral Link, said law firms were among those using “reverse hiring” to downsize.

He said a slowdown in business since the start of last year and over-hiring during the pandemic has led some corporate firms to increase the pace at which they get rid of staff.

Mr Jowers said: “There has been a rise in reverse hiring in major law firms because of lay-offs in the industry since the third quarter of 2022 up until now.”

The practice is also understood to be prevalent in the financial services sector, media, real estate and energy.

Reverse hiring is also used to remove underperforming staff and side-step any formal internal processes.

Often the employee will be blind to the process, which typically results in the recruiter netting two lots of fees and the employer saving on potentially thousands in severance pay.
‘A settlement could cost a fortune – there’s an easier way to move them on’

One recruiter, who works at an agency specialising in professional services, said: “It’s quite a cunning way of getting people out the door if they’ve already passed probation. Certain firms that we work with would rather pay for a recruitment agency than have to pay for a severance package.”

A senior leader at an energy consultancy firm added: “There are people who are not performing badly enough that you have to sack them, so it would likely be exiting a company with a settlement and that could cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. It’s easier to pass their details to a recruiter with the aim of moving them along.”

He added: “If someone is underperforming you have to put them on an improvement plan, have regular meetings, and provide them with additional support. If you follow the policies it is months and months before anything happens so people are trying to shortcut the process.

“There is a bit of ‘once they move on it’s not my problem’.”

Another recruiter said it can also be a savvy plan for businesses that need to make layoffs but want to avoid a negative impact on their share price if they are a public company and as a means of avoiding negative press.

However, employers are also warned of the legal ramifications.

The main legal risk for the employer is being found to be in breach of “trust and confidence” said Jeremy Coy, an employment senior associate at firm Russel Cooke.

He said: “They could claim constructive dismissal but they won’t have a good claim if it was less than two years after they joined.”

Chernobyl vodka a ‘strange propaganda exercise’, says victims’ charity


Madeleine Ross
Fri, 24 November 2023 

The Chernobyl Spirit Company produces apple schnapps and vodka from fruit and grain grown in the so-called ‘Zone Two’ - HO/AFP/Getty Images

Vodka produced in the abandoned zone at Chernobyl has been labelled a “propaganda exercise” by a victims’ charity.

The Chernobyl Spirit Company, a social enterprise which creates apple schnapps and vodka from fruit and grain grown in the so-called “Zone Two”, sells the drinks to tourists and in the UK. It launched pear and plum versions of its schnapps in 2022.

While previous scientific inquiries have found that the liquor does not contain radiation, the drinks have faced criticism from victims’ charities for making light of the risk of radiation poisoning.


Linda Walker, executive director at the Chernobyl Children’s Project, which works with people who have disabilities caused by the accident, said the spirit production was “inappropriate”.

She pointed out victims of the disaster are still suffering long-term health effects from the fallout of the 1986 disaster.

Ms Walker said: “It’s just such a bizarre thing to do. It’s so easy to grow apples, apples are grown everywhere, absolutely all over the place in Belarus and Ukraine.

“To choose to grow them in the area heavily contaminated by Chernobyl, it’s to make a point,” adding: “It’s a very strange propaganda exercise.”

Following the explosion in 1986, a 36-mile wide exclusion zone was created around the site’s radioactive core - Petr Shelomovskiy

Ms Walker said health problems continue in the region, especially in areas where people were hunting and eating contaminated foods.

She explained: “Especially where people were either hunting and eating wild boar and rabbits, or people were eating the food from the contaminated area.

“That’s continued to cause all sorts of health problems in both children and adults.”

It comes after some 1,500 bottles of the apple schnapps were seized by prosecutors in Ukraine in 2021, and were only released after a thorough investigation.

It is thought the bottles were taken as a result of confusion over whether the right tax had been paid on the spirits.

The company’s vodka was launched in 2019 and the drinks are made by the Palinochka Distillery in Ukraine before being shipped to the UK.

The profits from the alcohol are put back into communities who were impacted by the 1986 nuclear disaster.

Chernobyl Spirit’s 2022 accounts reveal that it made a profit of more than £10,000, after making a donation of £15,000 to the Ukrainian war effort.

Portsmouth University’s Professor Jim Smith started the social enterprise in 2019 - Getty Images/AFP

Professor Jim Smith, of Portsmouth University, who started the social enterprise in 2019, said scientific evidence suggests the levels of radiation in mammals and fish in the area were not higher than in similar places nearby.

He said: “You could grow apples safely and eat them, in many areas in this semi-abandoned area. You could grow all sorts of crops safely. The farmers know the crops, they know the kind of fertilisation they need to make crops which are below the Ukrainian limit and well below the EU and UK limits.”

The professor added the Narodychi District, where the crops are grown, is contaminated to a “very low level”, and “no more contaminated than Cornwall with natural radiation”.

He added that the area was suffering from very low investment, meaning there was a poor level of healthcare and a lack of jobs for the population that remains.

Following the explosion in 1986, the Soviet Union created a 36-mile wide exclusion zone around the radioactive core.

A new concrete sarcophagus was placed over the site in 2016, reducing the remaining radiation in the nearby area, but the authorities have struggled to decide what to do with the abandoned land.

Ukraine is planning to build one of Europe’s largest wind farms in the exclusion zone, powering 800,000 homes in and around Kyiv.

Recommended

‘I was expelled at 14 – but by 26 I was splurging £2,000 on caviar’

Russian dissident journalist warns no country — not even the US — is safe from fascism after Ukraine war

Erin Snodgrass
Fri, November 24, 2023 

Russians march in the Victory Day military parade to celebrate 78 years since World War II.AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky

A Russian dissident journalist who suffered a suspected poison attack last year says no country is safe from fascism.


Elena Kostyuchenko said she never believed Russia would descend into full-on war.


"If I could send a letter in the past to myself, I would say: 'Be alarmed,'" she said.

A Russian opposition journalist who was forced to abandon her reporting in Ukraine soon after Russia invaded due to an assassination threat against her is warning other global citizens to be wary of the warning signs of fascism within their own countries before those warning signs turn to war.

"I honestly believe no country is immune from fascism," Elena Kostyuchenko told Insider.

The dissident journalist and gay rights advocate made a name for herself as the youngest ever staff member at Novaya Gazeta, the famed Russian independent newspaper known for its defiant investigative journalism amid an increasingly hostile Russian media landscape.


Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Novaya was shuttered and Kostyuchenko was forced to flee Ukraine amid credible threats that a Chechen subdivision of Russia's internal military force had orders to capture and kill her near Mariupol.

More than a year later, Kostyuchenko is still seeking answers as to how her country descended into full-on war.

While promoting her new book "I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country" last month, Kostyuchenko spoke to Insider about her journalism career; the suspected poisoning attack she suffered in Germany last fall, and the rise of fascism in Russia and beyond.

Her book, she told Insider, was an effort to track how the seeds of fascism in Russia flourished into a brutal war.

"Russia didn't become a fascist country on the 24th of February 2022," Kostyuchenko said. "It was going on long before that."

The country has a long and varied authoritarian history and President Vladimir Putin's two-decade regime has been marred by a litany of human rights abuses. But much of the world, including many Russian and Ukrainian citizens were still taken by surprise when Russian tanks rolled into Kyiv in February 2022.

Even as someone who professionally investigated Russia's numerous and noted injustices, Kostyuchenko said she never expected her country would start a war.

"I Love Russia" by Elena Kostyuchenko is out this week.Courtesy of Penguin Random House

"I was so sure that we are immune because for Christ's sake, we fought the fascists. My grandfather did," Kostyuchenko said. "We have whole movies telling us how fascism works, why it's so dangerous, and how it goes from a nice narrative to mass murders. I was totally sure we were immune."

She suggested a creeping nostalgia for the old Soviet days has bred fertile ground for a new wave of Russian fascism — not so dissimilar from American political slogans that harken back to the "good 'ol days."

The US was listed as a "backsliding democracy" for the first time in a 2021 report on the state of global democracy from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. The annual report, which looked at the year 2020, found America had fallen victim to "authoritarian tendencies."

"With what's happening in the world, with this turn toward global authoritarianism and the tendencies you also have in your country, it's not safe," Kostyuchenko said, referencing the US.

She said her book is a handy guide not only for people looking to understand modern-day Russia and the war, but for anyone curious about how easy it is to "lose your country."

"If I could send a letter in the past to myself, I would say: "Be alarmed. Be alarmed. Don't be afraid to be hysterical. Be hysterical if you see your country is going into the darkness," Kostyuchenko told Insider.

Russia's defeat in Ukraine is vital, not only for Ukraine's survival, but for the state of the world, she said.

"If Russia, God forbid, wins in Ukraine — without even accounting for how many people would be killed — it would mean that fascism grew stronger and that a next war will follow," Kostyuchenko said.

"Fascism is an expansive ideology," she added. "You build fascism not just inside your country. No, it's expansive. And it means that a next war will follow and a next war will follow and it will be a nightmare"

Wilders' win sets 'textbook' example for European populist right: analysts

Tom BARFIELD and Cecile FEUILLATRE
Fri, 24 November 2023

PVV leader Geert Wilders stunned observers by claiming first place in the Dutch vote (JOHN THYS)

Anti-EU, anti-immigration firebrand Geert Wilders' surprise victory in the Dutch general election this week shows right-wing populism's success in gobbling up support from traditional conservative parties and taking its pet themes mainstream, experts said.

Whether in power -- often in coalition -- in countries including Italy, Hungary or Slovakia, or steadily gaining, as in France, Germany and Spain, momentum appears on the side of far-right parties.

"Election after election, we're seeing the far right win immense successes," French MEP Raphael Glucksmann told broadcaster France 2 on Friday.

"The European Union is in danger of death from within and without," he warned.

In recent months, observers "were very focused on elections in large countries in the EU... Spain this summer or Poland in October" where populists suffered setbacks, said French political scientist Thierry Chopin.

"(But) the reasons that explain the strength or even the rise of far-right parties in some European countries have not gone away," added Chopin, a researcher at France's Jacques Delors Institute.

Rooted in nationalism and opposition to immigration, the rise of far-right parties began in the late 1970s, surging in 2015 when hundreds of thousands of Syrians fleeing civil war arrived across the continent.

Geert Wilders' career has been built on anti-Islam rhetoric.

Italy's Giorgia Meloni mostly campaigned on anti-immigration themes.

And Sweden is governed by a coalition supported by the far-right that promises to reduce arrivals.

France, Germany and Spain's politics are often dominated by rows about identity and immigration.

- Anti-elites -

In the Netherlands, the traditional centre-right VVD party "had no power to set the terms of debate on Wilders' preferred themes", said Johannes Hillje, a German electoral strategist and author of "Propaganda 4.0: how far-right populists do politics".

"Other parties in the conservative spectrum across Europe have lost their hegemony on the right."

Chopin pointed to classic themes of populist right politics in Wilders' campaign -- anti-elite rhetoric that breaks with bipartisan consensus, fears about immigration and cultural change, and questioning of welfare and redistribution.

"Times of economic and social insecurity favour far-right parties," said Gilles Ivaldi, a researcher at Paris' Sciences Po university.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the groups "mobilised a lot of people based on fear, frustration and rejection of the health measures... banking support" for the future, he added.

The Netherlands was also "a textbook example of how not to deal with the radical right", as other parties and the media took their policy positions mainstream, Hillje said.

In the Netherlands, VVD leader Dilan Yesilgoz left the possibility of a coalition with Wilders open before the election, only to rule out being a junior partner when he won.

"Everything they did made Wilders stronger and contributed to his electability," Hillje argued.

- Increasingly mainstream -

Wilders and Italian premier Meloni have followed the "de-demonisation" strategy of French far-right figurehead Marine Le Pen, moderating their rhetoric when it looks electorally useful.

"It's not that they've changed their positions, but they express them a little differently to be more appealing, to overcome the emotional barrier to the middle ground," Hillje said.

Meloni has backed Ukraine and trimmed her hostility to the EU, with one French diplomat recently telling AFP she had been "a welcome surprise" on international issues.

"(But) in domestic politics she's doing just what she promised, cutting welfare benefits, taking a hard line against refugees," Hillje pointed out.

"All these parties signal respectability. They have learned or are learning how to exercise power," Ivaldi said -- while cautioning against handing them "a democratic blank cheque".

Many mainstream conservative parties are also absorbing far-right ideas or considering cooperation.

Politicians from Germany's CDU sometimes openly mull regional coalitions with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), while France's right-wing Republicans often try to outdo the far-right National Rally (RN) in shows of toughness against migrants.

At the European level, "an alliance between the far right and the (centre-right) European People's Party (EPP) is not impossible", Ivaldi said.

"That would be a big shift... on migration policy but also on the environment" given far-right denials of climate change.

Ivaldi nevertheless warned against overstating the common ground between far-right parties in different European countries.

"There are very clear fault lines" on support for or hostility to Russia, economics and values, he said.

"Fundamentally, what holds these right-wing populists together is shared enemies and things they all reject, like migration or ambitious climate policies," Hillje said.

"There are conflicts within this camp that will not lead to unified policy, and that may be the hope for the mainstream camp in Europe".

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