Glasgow climate negotiators seek to resolve 4 key challenges

By FRANK JORDANS

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FILE - Delegates gather inside the venue on another day at the COP26 U.N. Climate Summit in Glasgow, Scotland, Nov. 3, 2021. The U.N. climate summit in Glasgow gathers leaders from around the world, in Scotland's biggest city, to lay out their vision for addressing the common challenge of global warming. (AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali, File)


GLASGOW, Scotland (AP) — As this year’s U.N. climate talks go into their second week, negotiations on key topics are inching forward. Boosted by a few high-profile announcements at the start of the meeting, delegates are upbeat about the prospects for tangible progress in the fight against global warming.

Laurent Fabius, the former French foreign minister who helped forge the Paris climate accord, said the general atmosphere had improved since the talks began Oct. 31 and “most negotiators want an agreement.”

But negotiators were still struggling late Saturday to put together a series of draft decisions for government ministers to finalize during the second week of the talks.

“People are having to take tough decisions, as they should,” Archie Young, the U.K.’s lead negotiator, said Saturday.

Here’s the state of play in four main areas halfway through the U.N. climate talks in Glasgow:

TOP RESULT FROM THE CONFERENCE

Each Conference of the Parties, or COP, ends with a general statement. It’s as much a political declaration as a statement of intent about where countries agree the effort to combat climate change is heading.

A flurry of announcements at the start of the COP26 talks in Glasgow on issues including ending deforestation, cutting methane emissions, providing more money for green investments and phasing out the use of coal could be reflected in this final declaration. Even though only some countries signed on to each of those deals, others would be encouraged to add their signatures at a later date.

Affirming the goal of keeping global warming at or below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, compared to pre-industrial times, is also seen as important. With greenhouse gas emissions continuing to rise, host Britain has said it wants the Glasgow talks to “keep 1.5 C alive.” One way to achieve that would be to encourage rich polluters in particular to update their emissions-cutting targets every one or two years, rather than every five years as now required by the Paris accord.

MONEY MATTERS TO COMBAT CLIMATE CHANGE

Rich countries pledged to mobilize $100 billion each year by 2020 to help poor nations cope with climate change. That target was likely missed, much to the frustration of developing nations.

Restoring goodwill and trust between rich and poor countries on this issue requires a clear commitment on raising financial support starting from 2025. Addressing the thorny question of who is to pay for the losses and damages that nations face as a result of global warming they aren’t responsible for is likewise important, but agreement there could be elusive, observers say.

“It’s about finance, finance, finance, finance,” said Fabius.

CARBON TRADING: A TRICKY NUT TO CRACK

Many negotiators and observers at climate conferences roll their eyes when they hear the words “Article 6.”

The section dealing with rules for carbon markets has become one of the trickiest parts of the Paris climate accord to finalize. Six years after that deal was sealed, countries appear to be making headway though and there’s even talk of a breakthrough on the issue that so frustrated negotiators in Madrid two years ago.

Observers say Brazil and India may be willing to drop demands to count their old — but others say worthless — carbon credits amassed under previous agreements. The price for this might be that rich nations grant poor countries a share of proceeds from carbon market transactions to adapt to climate change. This has been a red line for the United States and the European Union until now.

A deal on Article 6 is seen as crucial because many countries and companies aim to cut their emissions to “net zero” by 2050. This requires balancing out any remaining pollution with an equal amount of carbon they can reliably say is captured elsewhere, such as through forests or by technological means.

TRANSPARENCY AND RIGOR IN NATIONAL EMISSIONS-CUTTING TARGETS

The Paris Agreement lets governments set their own emissions-cutting targets, and many of them are in the distant future.

Verifying that countries are doing what they committed to, and that their goals are backed up by realistic measures, is tricky. China in particular has bristled at the idea of having to provide data in formats set by other nations. Brazil and Russia, meanwhile, have resisted demands to lay out in greater detail the short-term measures they’re taking to meet their long-term goals.

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Ice on the edge of survival: Warming is changing the Arctic

By SETH BORENSTEIN

today

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FILE - Broken blocks of sea ice emerge from under the hull of the Finnish icebreaker MSV Nordica as it sails through the Victoria Strait while traversing the Arctic's Northwest Passage, Friday, July 21, 2017. The Arctic is warming three times faster than the rest of the planet and is on such a knife’s edge of survival that the 2021 U.N. climate negotiations in Scotland could make the difference between ice and water at the top of the world in the same way that a couple of tenths of a degree matter around the freezing mark, scientists say. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)

While conducting research in Greenland, ice scientist Twila Moon was struck this summer by what climate change has doomed Earth to lose and what could still be saved.

The Arctic is warming three times faster than the rest of the planet and is on such a knife’s edge of survival that the U.N. climate negotiations underway in Scotland this week could make the difference between ice and water at the top of the world in the same way that a couple of tenths of a degree matter around the freezing mark, scientists say.

Arctic ice sheets and glaciers are shrinking, with some glaciers already gone. Permafrost, the icy soil that traps the potent greenhouse gas methane, is thawing. Wildfires have broken out in the Arctic. Siberia even hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius). Even a region called the Last Ice Area showed unexpected melting this year.

In the next couple of decades, the Arctic is likely to see summers with no sea ice.

As she returns regularly to Greenland, Moon, a researcher with the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, said she finds herself “mourning and grieving for the things we have lost already” because of past carbon dioxide emissions that trap heat.

But the decisions we make now about how much more carbon pollution Earth emits will mean “an incredibly large difference between how much ice we keep and how much we lose and how quickly,” she said.

The fate of the Arctic looms large during the climate talks in Glasgow — the farthest north the negotiations have taken place — because what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. Scientists believe the warming there is already contributing to weather calamities elsewhere around the world.

“If we end up in a seasonally sea ice-free Arctic in the summertime, that’s something human civilization has never known,” said former NASA chief scientist Waleed Abdalati, who runs the University of Colorado’s environment program. “That’s like taking a sledgehammer to the climate system.”

What’s happening in the Arctic is a runaway effect.

“Once you start melting, that kind of enhances more melt,” said University of Manitoba ice scientist Julienne Stroeve.

When covered with snow and ice, the Arctic reflects sunlight and heat. But that blanket is dwindling. And as more sea ice melts in the summer, “you’re revealing really dark ocean surfaces, just like a black T-shirt,” Moon said. Like dark clothing, the open patches of sea soak up heat from the sun more readily

Between 1971 and 2019, the surface of the Arctic warmed three times faster than the rest of the world, according to the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program.

An iceberg delivered by members of Arctic Basecamp is placed on show near the COP26 U.N. Climate Summit in Glasgow, Scotland, Friday, Nov. 5, 2021. The four ton block of ice, originally part of a larger glacier, was brought from Greenland to Glasgow by climate scientists from Arctic Basecamp as a statement to world leaders of the scale of the climate crisis and a visible reminder of what Arctic warming means for the planet. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

 

The result?

“The Arctic isn’t just changing in temperature,” Abdalati said. “It’s changing in state. It’s becoming a different place.”

The 2015 Paris climate agreement set a goal of limiting the warming of the Earth to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures, or, failing that, keeping it under 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). The world has already gotten 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer since the late 1800s.

The difference between what happens at 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees can hit the Arctic harder than the rest of the world, University of Alaska Fairbanks climate scientist John Walsh, a member of the Arctic monitoring team. “We can save the Arctic, or at least preserve it in many ways, but we’re going to lose that if we go above 1.5.”

The Arctic itself has blown past 2 degrees Celsius of warming, Stroeve said. It’s approaching 9 degrees Celsius (16 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming in November, she said.

For John Waghiyi Jr., the Arctic is not a number or an abstraction. It’s been home for 67 years, and he and other native Bering Sea elders have watched the Arctic change because of warming. The sea ice, which allows humans and polar bears to hunt, is shrinking in the summer.

“The ice is very dangerous nowadays. It’s very unpredictable,” said Waghiyi of Savoonga, Alaska. “The ice pack affects us all, spiritually, culturally and physically, as we need to have it in order to keep harvesting.”

The ice is “at the core of our identity,” said Dalee Sambo Dorough, international chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, representing 165,000 people in several nations.

This isn’t just a problem for people living in the Arctic. It spells trouble for regions much farther south.

An increasingly large number of studies link Arctic changes to alterations of the jet stream — the river of air that moves weather from west to east — and other weather systems. And those changes, scientists say, can contribute to more extreme weather events, such as floods, drought, the February Texas freeze, or more severe wildfires.

Also, the melting of ice sheets and glaciers can add considerably to rising sea levels.

“The fate of places like Miami are tied very closely to the fate of the Greenland,” said David Balton, director of the U.S. Arctic Executive Steering Committee, which coordinates U.S. domestic regulations involving the Arctic and deals with other northern nations. “If you live in Topeka, Kansas, or if you live in California. If you live in Nigeria, your life is going to be affected. ... The Arctic matters on all sorts of levels.”

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Read stories on climate issues by The Associated Press at https://apnews.com/hub/climate.

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

EXPLAINER: How warming affects Arctic sea ice, polar bears

By SETH BORENSTEIN, CAMILLE FASSETT and KATI PERRY

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This 2020 photo provided by Polar Bears International shows a polar bear in Churchill, Manitoba, Canada during migration. At risk of disappearing, the polar bear is dependent on something melting away on our warming planet: sea ice. (Kieran McIver/Polar Bears International via AP)

Majestic, increasingly hungry and at risk of disappearing, the polar bear is dependent on something melting away on our warming planet: sea ice.

In the harsh and unforgiving Arctic, where frigid cold is not just a way of life but a necessity, the polar bear stands out. But where it lives, where it hunts, where it eats — it’s disappearing underfoot in the crucial summertime.

“They have just always been a revered species by people, going back hundreds and hundreds of years,” said longtime government polar bear researcher Steve Amstrup, now chief scientist for Polar Bear International. “There’s just something special about polar bears.”

Scientists and advocates point to polar bears, marked as “threatened” on the endangered species list, as the white-hot warning signal for the rest of the planet — “the canary in the cryosphere.” As world leaders meet in Glasgow, Scotland, to try to ramp up efforts to curb climate change, the specter of polar bears looms over them.

United Nations Environment Program head Inger Andersen used to lead the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which monitors and classifies species in trouble. She asks: “Do we really want to be the generation that saw the end of the ability of something as majestic as the polar bear to survive?”

THE STATE OF SEA ICE

Arctic sea ice — frozen ocean water — shrinks during the summer as it gets warmer, then forms again in the long winter. How much it shrinks is where global warming kicks in, scientists say. The more the sea ice shrinks in the summer, the thinner the ice is overall, because the ice is weaker first-year ice.

Julienne Stroeve, a University of Manitoba researcher, says summers without sea ice are inevitable. Many other experts agree with her.

Former NASA chief scientist Waleed Abdalati, now a top University of Colorado environmental researcher, is one of them.

“That’s something human civilization has never known,” Abdalati said. “That’s like taking a sledgehammer to the climate system and doing something huge about it.”

The warming already in the oceans and in the air is committed — like a freight train in motion. So, no matter what, the Earth will soon see a summer with less than 1 million square kilometers of sea ice scattered in tiny bits across the Arctic.

The big question is when the Arctic will “look like a blue ocean,” said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Maybe as early as the 2030s, most likely in the 2040s and almost assuredly by the 2050s, experts say.

The Arctic has been warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. In some seasons, it has warmed three times faster than the rest of the globe, said University of Alaska at Fairbanks scientist John Walsh.

That’s because of something called “Arctic amplification.” Essentially, white ice in the Arctic reflects heat. When it melts, the dark sea absorbs much more heat, which warms the oceans even more quickly, scientists say.

THE POLAR BEAR CONNECTION

There are 19 different subpopulations of polar bears in the Arctic. Each is a bit different. Some are really in trouble, especially the southernmost ones, while others are pretty close to stable. But their survival from place to place is linked heavily to sea ice.

“As you go to the Arctic and see what’s happening with your own eyes ... it’s depressing,” said University of Washington marine biologist Kristin Laidre, who has studied polar bears in Baffin Bay.

Shrinking sea ice means shrinking polar bears, literally.

In the summertime, polar bears go out on the ice to hunt and eat, feasting and putting on weight to sustain them through the winter. They prefer areas that are more than half covered with ice because it’s the most productive hunting and feeding grounds, Amstrup said. The more ice, the more they can move around and the more they can eat.

Just 30 or 40 years ago, the bears feasted on a buffet of seals and walrus on the ice.

In the 1980s, “the males were huge, females were reproducing regularly and cubs were surviving well,” Amstrup said. “The population looked good.”

With ice loss, the bears haven’t been doing as well, Amstrup said. One sign: A higher proportion of cubs are dying before their first birthdays.

Polar bears are land mammals that have adapted to the sea. The animals they eat — seals and walruses mostly — are aquatic.

The bears fare best when they can hunt in shallow water, which is typically close to land.

“When sea ice is present over those near-shore waters, polar bears can make hay,” Amstrup said.

But in recent years the sea ice has retreated far offshore in most summers. That has forced the bears to drift on the ice into deep waters — sometimes nearly a mile deep — that are devoid of their prey, Amstrup said.

Off Alaska, the Beaufort Sea and Chukchi Sea polar bears provide a telling contrast.

Go 30 to 40 miles offshore from Prudhoe Bay in the Beaufort Sea “and you’re in very unproductive waters,” Amstrup said.

Further south in the Chukchi, it’s shallower, which allows bottom-feeding walruses to thrive. That provides food for polar bears, he said.

“The bears in the Chukchi seem to be faring pretty well because of that additional productivity,” Amstrup said. But the bears of the Beaufort “give us a real good early warning of where this is all coming to.”

THE FUTURE

Even as world leaders meet in Scotland to try to ratchet up the effort to curb climate change, the scientists who monitor sea ice and watch the polar bears know so much warming is already set in motion.

There’s a chance, if negotiators succeed and everything turns out just right, that the world will once again see an Arctic with significant sea ice in the summer late this century and in the 22nd century, experts said. But until then “that door has been closed,” said Twila Moon, a National Snow and Ice Data Center scientist.

So hope is melting too.

“It’s near impossible for us to see a place where we don’t reach an essentially sea ice-free Arctic, even if we’re able to do the work to create much, much lower emissions” of heat-trapping gases, Moon said. “Sea ice is one of those things that we’ll see reach some pretty devastating lows along that path. And we can already see those influences for polar bears.”


VIDEO
Second Quote_2.mp4 from AP Enterprise and Investigations on Vimeo

MULTIMEDIA PRESENTATION

Arctic sea ice is disappearing and it’s harming polar bears (apnews.com)


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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Fassett, a data journalist based in Oakland, California, is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered topics.

Yazidis still displaced in their own country

Years after the Yazidi massacre by the "Islamic State," tens of thousands of survivors still aren't able to return home. In Iraqi Kurdistan, a German aid worker is trying to help these refugees.

The Mam Rashan camp is bigger than a town, with some 1,500 families living there

A wide gravel road extends into the distance and blurs into the horizon. To the left is a sea of corrugated metal containers and electric poles — beyond that, nothing. This is where the Mam Rashan camp ends.

The refugee camp in the Nineveh district of the autonomous Kurdistan region is like a small town. Over 1,500 Yazidi families live here. Jan Jessen, a German journalist and development aid worker, is a regular visitor to the area in northern Iraq.

German aid worker Jan Jessen (left) is a regular visitor to the region

Today, he's meeting up with Mezafar Berges Matto, a friendly Yazidi man in his late 30s who seems much older. He and his family were just able to escape "Islamic State" (IS) terrorists and have been living in Mam Rashan since December 2015.

They sit in their living room, a small 10-square-meter area about the size of a car parking space with a walnut-colored PVC floor and an unpleasant blue light filtered through cigarette smoke. As a group of wide-eyed children turn up — some belonging to Berges Matto, some from nearby homes — his wife serves tea and water.

'They wanted to force us to change religion'

When Jessen asks Berges Matto to recount his story, the man clasps his hands together, breathes deeply and nods. Silence falls over the room as he recounts how his family were living in a village in Sinjar when IS militants turned up.

"They came and captured us. They wanted to force us to change religion," he explains, saying it was a miracle that he and his family were able to escape into the mountains.

They were lucky. According to the US-based NGO Yazda, some 12,000 people were kidnapped or killed in the first week of what the UN has characterized as the Yazidi genocide in August 2014.

Thousands were forced to flee, and many died as a result. IS fighters killed older people, along with those who were too weak to flee and those who refused to convert to Islam. They kidnapped and indoctrinated children. Boys were trained to become IS fighters, and women and girls were sold into sexual slavery. Thousands of Yazidis are still missing. Many mass graves have been found, but not all of them have been exhumed.

At the camp, children try to keep themselves distracted with soccer and other activities

But the "Islamic State" was driven out in 2017, so why have some 300,000 displaced Yazidis still not been able to go home? To find out, DW traveled west to Sinjar, a predominantly Yazidi region before the IS invasion.

The landscape changes drastically as the SUV arrives in the section controlled by Baghdad. Barbed wire, watchtowers and machine guns line the road, which runs through a barren landscape of empty houses, bombed-out cars and mountains of rubble and plastic waste. It feels like another country.

Checkpoints appear every 200 meters (219 yards) or so — and the car is stopped at every other one. Sometimes that means waiting for hours. Jessen gets out of the car to smoke a cigarette, calm despite the presence of soldiers armed with US-made M16 assault rifles and Russian-made Kalashnikovs. Hand grenades and other ammunition hang out of their vest pockets, which are decorated with skulls.

Eventually, the soldiers let the car pass, the decision to stop travelers seemingly made at random.

Various factions are operating in the volatile region of northern Iraq

Sinjar's volatile security situation keeps many away

"There are different problems in different regions," explains Thomas Schmidinger, a political scientist and cultural anthropologist who conducts research on ethnic and religious minorities in the Middle East.

The situation is particularly tense in Sinjar, which is crowded with various militias belonging to different factions: the People's Protection Units (YPG), which is affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), recognized by the US and the EU as a terrorist organization; the Popular Mobilization Forces, supported in part by Iran; the peshmerga, the Kurdish branch of the Iraqi forces; and numerous other representatives of the Iraqi army. At the same time, Turkey regularly bombs the area, which is home to Kurdish insurgent groups who have demanded separation from Turkey.

The volatile security situation is the main reason not all Yazidis want to come back. And for many survivors, it's simply unthinkable to come back to a place inhabited by their tormentors. "Quite a few supporters and even active IS fighters [were] living in the Arab villages and towns near the Yazidi settlements, and some of them still live there," says Schmidinger.

NEW HOPE FOR YAZIDI WOMEN TORTURED BY IS FIGHTERS

Hoping for help

Perwin Ali Baku escaped the Islamic State after more than two years in captivity. The 23-year-old Yazidi woman was captured together with her 3-year-old daughter. "I don't feel right," she says, sitting on a mattress on the floor of her father-in-law's small hut in a northern Iraq refugee camp. "I still can't sleep and my body is tense all the time."

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Projects to help people 'start anew'

But a few families have returned to the town of Sinun to the north of Sinjar — which, according to Schmidinger, is somewhat safer. Caritas-Flüchtlingshilfe Essen, the refugee NGO for which Jessen works, set up a greenhouse project here last year.

"We are trying to set up projects to make it easier for people to start anew if they come back," he explains, blinking into the afternoon sun with the Sinjar Mountains behind him. Nearby, hoses distribute water among the greenhouses, where mostly cucumbers and herbs grow under white tarpaulin.

"The people coming back do not have jobs. The infrastructure is broken, and the security situation is difficult. But most of all they do not have jobs," said Jessen.

The greenhouse project is to show the returning Yazidis that it's possible to make money growing plants. A family can earn as much as $150 (€130) with one greenhouse — and they can eat their own produce as well.


Thousands of Yazidi children are looking for a brighter future

'I just want to survive'

But what's really necessary is a political solution to the conflict, says Schmidinger. "All the local actors have to agree. Otherwise, there will not be a peaceful solution for Sinjar."

Mezafar Berges Matto and his family plan to stay in Mam Rashan until the political situation back home is clearer. They feel safe here, even if they don't have much space.

Ajad, who is 10, is dressed like children everywhere, in an FC Barcelona tracksuit and sporting a digital watch. But he has a very specific dream: "I just want to survive," he says with a shy smile.

This article has been translated from German

Dearborn, Michigan, elects its first Arab American mayor

A Michigan city considered to be the center of Arab America has finally elected its first Arab-American mayor.

© Courtesy Jaafar Issa Abdullah Hammoud, the son of Lebanese immigrants, was born and raised in Dearborn, Michigan.

By Alaa Elassar, CNN 4 hrs ago

Abdullah Hammoud, the son of Lebanese immigrants, was born and raised in Dearborn, where he was elected mayor on Tuesday. With the victory, he also becomes the city's first Muslim mayor.

Dearborn is home to one of the largest Arab-American communities in the United States. Dearborn's population is about 42% Arab, according to Census figures. But more recent surveys suggest the city could be more than half Arab.

Despite the city's large Arab community, it has never been led by an Arab- or Muslim-American.

"It's just a humbling experience. It's humbling that in this town, people are willing to vote for someone based on the direction in which they lead, not in the direction in which they pray," Hammoud, 31, told CNN. "It's humbling because it shows that someone like me, who has a name like Abdullah Hussein Hammoud, doesn't have to change or shy away from their identity to achieve success."

Hammoud is serving his third term as state representative for Michigan's 15th District, which includes Dearborn. He was first elected in 2016 and has since been re-elected twice.

He will take office as mayor in January.

"It is a huge deal for the Arab community in Michigan and nationwide," Sally Howell, director of the Center for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, told CNN. "The symbolic capital of Arab America, Dearborn, Michigan, finally has an Arab American mayor to speak on behalf of this unique population. Representation matters."

Hammoud says he is ready to get to work and immediately begin tackling issues that affect his city, including climate change.

"There's a clock on the wall, and there's the question of when is the next heavy rain that's going to set in that's going to lead into the next catastrophic flooding, similar to what we experienced in the past summer when nearly 20,000 homes experienced some type of flooding," Hammoud said.

"We have to immediately start adjusting the climate crisis by putting forth bold and innovative proposals," he said.

Hammoud will also work to reduce taxes and assist residents in combating the health and economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, according to his campaign website.

Hammoud says he hopes his win sends a message to Dearborn's youth -- especially those who are targeted because of their differences -- that nothing is out of reach.

"Never shy away from who you are," he said. "Be proud of your name, be comfortable in your identity, because it'll take you places if you work hard, you're passionate and you inspire people."

'Her heart was beating too' - Poles protest against strict abortion law

WARSAW (Reuters) - Thousands of people gathered in cities across Poland on Saturday to protest against strict abortion laws after a pregnant woman's death reignited public debate on the issue in one of Europe's most devoutly Catholic countries.

© Reuters/DAWID ZUCHOWICZ People protest after a death of Izabela, a 30-year-old woman in the 22nd week of pregnancy with activists saying she could still be alive if the abortion law wouldn't be so strict in Warsaw

A ruling by Poland's Constitutional Tribunal that abortion on the grounds of foetal defects contravened the constitution came into effect in January, triggering a near total ban on pregnancy terminations and widespread protests.

© Reuters/DAWID ZUCHOWICZ People protest after a death of Izabela, a 30-year-old woman in the 22nd week of pregnancy with activists saying she could still be alive if the abortion law wouldn't be so strict in Warsaw

People holding candles and carrying banners saying 'not one more' and 'indifference is complicity', marched through dozens of towns and cities on Saturday, according to organisers, including Pszczyna, southern Poland, where the woman lived.

Activists say the death of Izabela, a 30-year-old woman in the 22nd week of pregnancy whose family said died of septic shock, was a result of the ruling.

Izabela went to hospital in Pszczyna in September after her waters broke, her family said. Scans had previously shown numerous defects in the foetus. But doctors refused to terminate the pregnancy while the foetus still had a heartbeat.

© Reuters/MARCIN STEPIEN People protest after a death of Izabela, a 30-year-old woman in the 22nd week of pregnancy with activists saying she could still be alive if the abortion law wouldn't be so strict in Lodz

When a scan showed the foetus was dead, doctors decided to perform a Caesarean. The family's lawyer, Jolanta Budzowska, said Izabela's heart stopped on the way to the operating theatre and she died despite efforts to resuscitate her

.

© Reuters/KRZYSZTOF CWIK People protest after a death of Izabela, a 30-year-old woman in the 22nd week of pregnancy with activists saying she could still be alive if the abortion law wouldn't be so strict in Wroclaw

'Her heart was beating too' read slogans on banners and in information shared by protest organisers.

"...the anti-abortion law in Poland kills Polish women. It is cruel, it is terrifying," a woman attending a protest in Pszczyna said in a comment aired by a private broadcaster TVN24.

"It is inhuman and I hope that this situation will contribute in some way, so that Polish women will not have to die," she added.

On Saturday, the news website Onet.pl published an interview with a husband of another woman who he claimed died in June in similar circumstances.

The government says the court ruling was not to blame for Izabela's death, rather an error by doctors. Poland's health minister Adam Niedzielski pledged to issue guidelines to make it clear when terminations were legal.

"I asked the National Consultant for Gynecology and Obstetrics to issue such guidelines...that will be unambiguous about the fact that the safety of a woman, in such a case as happened, is a reason to terminate the pregnancy," he told private radio RMF FM.

© Reuters/DAWID ZUCHOWICZ

 People protest after a death of Izabela, a 30-year-old woman in the 22nd week of pregnancy with activists saying she could still be alive if the abortion law wouldn't be so strict in Warsaw

Poland's president proposed changing the law last year to make abortions possible in cases where the foetus was not viable. In September a draft bill introducing a total ban on abortion was submitted to parliament by a group of citizens.

"...let's finally change the law that kills women, deprives families of mothers, wives and sisters," Agnieszka Dziemianowicz-Bak, a left-wing lawmaker, was quoted as saying ahead of protests by news agency PAP.

(Reporting by Anna Koper; Editing by Rosalind Russell)

Poles protest mother's death blamed on abortion law




Poles protest mother's death blamed on abortion law'Not one more,

' shouted thousands of demonstrators in the capital Warsaw (AFP/Wojtek Radwanski)

Bernard OSSER
Sat, November 6, 2021, 

Tens of thousands of people demonstrated Saturday in Warsaw and dozens of other Polish cities to denounce a nine-month-old abortion law blamed for claiming the life of a pregnant mother, organisers said.

The 30-year-old woman died of septicaemia in a Polish hospital after her 22-month-old foetus died in her womb, the family's lawyer Jolanta Budzowska tweeted.

She was, she added, the first victim of the near-total ban on abortion.

Izabela, married for 10 years and a mother of a nine-year-old child, agonisingly described her worsening condition in text messages made public since her death in late September.

"Not one more," shouted thousands of demonstrators in the capital Warsaw who protested outside the Constitutional Court and the health ministry.

"I am here to make sure that no woman's life is put at risk any more," Ewa Pietrzyk, a 40-year-old Warsaw resident, told AFP as she held a photo of Izabela. "The current legislation is killing women."

Women's rights groups said they organised similar demonstrations in around 70 other Polish towns and cities.

Izabela's family issued a statement saying doctors at the hospital in the southern town of Pszczyna "took a wait-and-see attitude," which it attributed to "the rules in effect limiting the possibility of a legal abortion".

The pregnant mother recalled the limbo she was in with a baby she said weighed 485 grammes, just over a one pound, according to text messages that were made public.

"For now, thanks to the law on abortion, I must remain lying down," she said.

- 'It's dreadful' -

"And there's nothing they can do. They will wait until (the baby) dies or until something starts, and if not, I can, great, expect septicaemia," Izabela wrote in a text to her mother.

"My fever is increasing. I hope that I don't have septicaemia, otherwise I will not make it," the pregnant mother said.

"It's dreadful. And I have to wait," she said.

According to the nationalist government running the country, the woman's death had nothing to do with the new law.

Two doctors at the hospital in Pszczyna were suspended after Izabela's death, and the town's prosecutors have launched an inquiry.

Poland's Constitutional Court last year sided with the Catholic country's populist right-wing government to rule that terminations over foetal defects were unconstitutional.

This resulted in a further tightening of already heavy restrictions on abortions, which came into effect in late January.

Rights group say that several thousand women have sought their help to seek abortions, more often that not abroad.

In October, a coalition of 14 rights groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said that as a result of the court ruling "women, girls, and all pregnant people have faced extreme barriers to accessing legal abortions".

The NGOs called on the European Commission to immediately implement a mechanism that could see Poland denied funds from Brussels for not respecting "EU values".

The Constitutional Court, which the EU says has had its independence stripped away, is currently at the centre of a separate row with Brussels after a controversial ruling earlier this month against the supremacy of the bloc's laws.

bo/lc/jj

50 years after the Attica prison riot, a new documentary takes viewers inside 'the yard'

Patrice Gaines 

The images are haunting: In black and white film and photographs, naked men, most of them Black, some of them bloodied, all stand in a prison yard with their hands on their heads as white uniformed guards point weapons at them.

© Provided by NBC News

Moments like this fill the new documentary “Attica,” by MacArthur Fellow and Emmy-winning filmmaker Stanley Nelson. The film, premiering Saturday on Showtime, tells the story of the bloodiest prison rebellion in U.S. history, five decades after it happened. The protest’s leaders insisted on bringing journalists and filmmakers into “the yard,” meaning that 50 years later Nelson’s documentary includes actual footage from the rebellion and the state’s brutal retaking of the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York in 1971.

“We’ve only screened the film four times, and every time the audience sits in stunned silence,” Nelson said. “It’s not a film you can applaud for. I think the best description of the film for me was from someone who said that it was not a film, that it was an experience.”

This is exactly the kind of reaction co-director and producer Traci A. Curry — who tracked down 16 mm film, photos and survivors — had hoped for.

“I don’t think you should be able to walk away without knowing the wanton disregard that the state had for these human beings,” Curry said.

Curry likened the experience of the prisoners with the experience of watching the documentary: “They know at some point it will end probably in violence, but even they think maybe, just maybe this will work out.”

Because it has been 50 years since the Attica rebellion, there are generations who have never heard about the uprising, aside from a character in the movie “Dog Day Afternoon” chanting “Attica! Attica!” and all the imitations that have followed

.

© Showtime Image: A still from

“I showed it to my nephew and his girlfriend, and they said, ‘I thought they were going to win,’” Nelson said.

Prisoners were angry and frustrated over living conditions. They were fed subpar food and subjected to poor sanitation, like being issued one roll of toilet paper per month. They endured beatings, racial epithets and barbaric medical treatment. Regular punishment included being stripped naked and being kept in a cell for days. Muslims were denied the right to worship. In the film, men describe “goon squads” of guards who beat inmates and dragged them away in the middle of the night.

But eventually, the rising tensions turned into a five-day siege involving nearly 1,300 inmates and more than 30 hostages in September 1971.

Once inmates took control of the prison, they set up camp in the area called “the yard.” Film footage shows Vietnam veterans teaching inmates how to make tents and a latrine. An inmate who was a nurse erected a medical station.

On the first day of the siege, guard William Quinn, one of the hostages, was severely beaten. Some inmates put Quinn on a stretcher and called for an ambulance.

© Showtime Image: A still from

James Asbury, who was 20 years old and serving five months in the prison on a parole violation, is interviewed throughout the film. He told NBC News he has not been able to watch the entire documentary.

“I have looked at it until I can’t look anymore,” Asbury said. “I suffer from PTSD. I’ll never forget it, but I try to put it to rest. There are so many things that trigger memories of the abuse.”

Today, he lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with his wife of 27 years, their daughter and three grandchildren. Health issues forced him to retire from his work at a drug treatment center. He’s had a kidney transplant and has diabetes.

“Some days the stress from that experience makes me want to just lay down,” he said.

Yet, Asbury revisited the trauma of Attica for a one purpose.

“I was willing to do anything to keep hope alive that prison reform will become a reality in my lifetime,” he said

.

© Showtime Former inmate James Asbury said he suffers from PTSD after the siege at Attica. (Showtime)

In addition to the stories of the inmates, the filmmakers show the lives of the people who worked at Attica through photos and interviews with their families. Co-producer Curry said she spent months tracking down people — including former inmates, the relatives of guards and former Attica guards — and worked to build relationships of trust with them.

Still, former corrections officers she contacted declined to participate in the project. The prison was a major employer in the area, and it employed generations of families. All the guards were white; the majority of the prisoners were Black and Latino.

“It was my intention to have people touched by every part of this story,” Curry said.

The inmates gave their demands to a group of hand-picked outsiders who formed the observers committee and became mediators.

But then corrections officer William Quinn died. Outside the prison, townspeople were gathering with worried families of hostages. They demanded an end to the siege. Meanwhile, the committee members pleaded with Gov. Nelson D. Rockefeller to come to the prison, if only to approve of the negotiations.

Rockefeller refused.

On Day 4, committee members, believing any hope of negotiating a peaceful resolution had ended, asked the inmates to surrender. They refused without a promise of amnesty for all those involved in the protest.

Negotiators left, distraught. Clarence Jones, then the editor and part-owner of the New York Amsterdam News, recalled in the film that inmates handed him notes with names and phone numbers of people to call in case they died.

On the fifth day, inmates described a green gas overwhelming them and limiting their vision. They were told to put their hands in the air.

Then pop, pop, pop, pop, pop — unrelenting gunfire started.

John Johnson, a Black reporter who had been chosen as an observer inside by inmates, recalled being outside the facility and having two guards running toward him shouting a racial slur and pointing guns. Johnson shouted back, “Don’t shoot!”

© Showtime Image: Reporter John Johnson (Showtime)

Asbury said the inmates were punished as soon as the gunfire ceased.

“We were forced to run a gauntlet with National Guards and prison guards standing on each side with billy clubs, pickaxes, pipes and all kinds of long sticks,” Asbury told NBC News. “It looked like 30 to 40 of them lined up down the hallway with glass on the floor from windows. We were barefoot and naked. If you fell, they beat you until you could get up or until you were unconscious, and they picked you up and dragged you to the cell.”

In total, 43 people died during the siege: 32 prisoners and 11 hostages, including Quinn. The other 10 hostages who died were killed as the state police retook the prison under Rockefeller's orders. Among the slain prisoners was L.D. Barkley, 21, who famously declared to the media, "We are men!"

Eventually the state of New York settled lawsuits and awarded the surviving hostages and the families of the people killed $12 million. It gave the same amount to 502 surviving prisoners who were victims of violence.

“I was almost beaten to death,” Asbury said. “But they said the extent of my injuries were not that bad.”

He received $6,000.

ITS OK TO DRIVE TO KILL DEMOCRATS

Republicans in 15 states look to 'Hit and Kill' laws to defend those who drive into protests

Shari Kulha 

Over the past few years, with the Trump presidency and the increase in disruptive protests, a small movement that began in 2017 has been gaining strength in Republican states. They either have passed or are looking to pass laws that give drivers who hit someone in a crowd a certain amount of immunity, on the premise that a driver is but one person in a sea of people whose emotions may be heightened enough to make them unpredictable — putting the driver, not the crowd, at risk.

© Provided by National Post A man tries to drive through the crowd during a June protest in Seattle against racial inequality after the death of George Floyd.

After a summer of nationwide racial injustice protests, Republicans in 11 states moved to introduce a flurry of “hit and kill” bills in hopes of cracking down on protesters in the leadup to and in the immediate aftermath of the contentious 2020 presidential election.

Iowa, Oklahoma and Florida so far have passed laws this year that say if a driver unintentionally hits protesters with their vehicle, they may not be prosecuted, the Boston Globe outlines in a special report on the issue.

Most of those proposals followed the many demonstrations following George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis last year. But it was a personal incident that prompted the governor of Iowa — the next state south — to act.

Kim Reynolds had just passed the More Perfect Union Act, aimed at protecting citizens from most chokeholds and from police misconduct.
Former police officer Derek Chauvin sentenced to 22-1/2 years for George Floyd murder
St. Louis couple who aimed guns at anti-racism protesters pardoned by Missouri governor

But then, about three weeks after the Floyd death, and leaving an engagement north of Des Moines, Reynolds was being driven out through a crowd of Des Moines Black Liberation Movement protesters, who had followed her there. They had waited on the main road on to which her SUV would emerge. One protester stood right in her lane.

“I’m going to stand here and the car’s going to stop and we’re all going to yell and make Kim Reynolds hear us and maybe she’ll roll down her window,” Jaylen Cavil, then 23, told the Boston Globe that he had thought at the time.

Reynolds’ driver inched along, and struck Cavil as he apparently walked in front of the SUV. Cavil turned at the last second and the vehicle just bumped his hip, stopping only when state police stepped in. Cavil was uninjured but his sense of right and wrong was damaged.

“He could have stopped. He could have turned,” Cavil said of the driver. “He just kept going straight.”

© MANDEL NGAN / AFP via Getty Images Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds: As long as they were not acting with reckless or wilful misconduct, drivers were granted immunity from lawsuits. SHE IS GIVING THE ALT RIGHT WHITE POWER HAND SIGN AKA THE CHEF BOYARDEE

This was the fifth such protest incident in Iowa since the George Floyd killing. It prompted a twist in Governor Reynolds’s stance. The Republican-controlled state legislature wrote up, in 24 hours, and unanimously pushed out, a new police-supportive bill called the Back the Blue Act.

Reynolds told a crowd assembled for the official announcement of the new legislation that for “the thousands of Iowans who have taken to the streets calling for reforms to address inequities faced by people of colour in our state, I want you to know this is not the end of our work. It is just the beginning.” Few of the protesters in the crowd would have guessed that that “work” would in fact work against them.

As long as they exercised “due care” and were not acting with “reckless or wilful misconduct,” drivers were now granted immunity from lawsuits in Iowa if they injured anyone with their vehicle “who is participating in a protest, demonstration, riot, or unlawful assembly or who is engaging in disorderly conduct and is blocking traffic in a public street or highway,” the newspaper reported. That is, if the protest did not have a permit. If it did have a permit, they were not considered rioters. But few such impassioned protests come together far enough in advance to allow organizers time to go through government bureaucracy for approval — and, in any event, are generally intended to be disruptive. Participating now puts these people at risk of being bowled over if a driver knows he or she has immunity.

© Getty Images file Protesters march in New York City last year after the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky. If New York state had a so-called “hit and kill” law, a nervous driver could head straight into this crowd while trying to leave the area, injure people, and not be charged.

The increasingly unstable mix of protesters and vehicles has provoked more legislative reaction that some say is indicative of disdain for liberal protesters and their perspectives — Black Lives Matter or otherwise.

A Boston Globe analysis found 139 U.S. instances of what researchers call vehicle rammings between Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020 and Sept. 30, 2021 that caused 100 injuries and killed at least three. Drivers had a range of motivations — racial hatred of protesters, anger about traffic backups, or fears of being stuck in a crowd. The paper found that less than half the driver incidents resulted in charges, and many of those were simply misdemeanours or traffic citations.

“There’s this kind of vigilantism that’s returning,” Nick Robinson, a senior legal adviser at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, told the newspaper. The centre has tracked a sharp increase in legislative proposals in the U.S. to restrict the right to peacefully protest. “If we deem these protesters to be rioters,” Robinson is quoted as saying, “we’re going to take the law into our own hands. And if that means injuring them with our vehicle or killing them with our vehicle, we have an expectation that the state will protect us. That’s just a recipe for disaster.”

Though Republicans have also brought driver immunity bills in Tennessee, Florida, North Carolina, Texas and Rhode Island, observers believe it hasn’t been a result of nationwide co-ordination; the language in the bills has varied and many, as in Iowa, were triggered by local events. And it isn’t to say Democratic states always approve of the demonstrators but have as yet not passed such bills.

Tennessee state Representative Matthew Hill, one of the bill’s sponsors, seemingly underplaying the reasons behind such incidents, said “We don’t want anyone to be hurt, but people should not knowingly put themselves in harm’s way when you’ve got moms and dads trying to get their kids to school.”

Some judges have been blocking these laws. A federal judge in September stopped Florida from using the driver immunity provision, saying Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “anti-riot” law — the Combating Violence, Disorder, and Looting and Law Enforcement Protection Act — as a way to stop violent protests was unconstitutional. He found the law “vague and overbroad” and amounted to an assault on First Amendment rights as well as the Constitution’s due process protections.

DeSantis vowed to fight. “I guarantee you we’ll win that one on appeal,” he said.

Such earnestness over the issue scares activist Francesca Menes, chair of the Black Collective, a Miami group working to increase political consciousness and economic power of Black communities.

“It’s going to encourage people to want to hit people” with their vehicles, Menes told the Boston Globe. “People are going to be in their big trucks with their big Confederate flags to make it very visible to us … that they are willing to run us over and we cannot sue them for damages.”

In Oklahoma as well, Republican lawmakers pushed through a bill despite contrary voices. And back in Iowa, Republican state Senator Julian Garrett of Indianola, a suburb of Des Moines, liked his state’s mandate.

“We’ve got to stop this law-violating,” the Boston Globe quoted Garrett as telling his colleagues as they debated the Back the Blue Act in May. “We’ve got to stop this criminal activity if we possibly can.”

Garrett said he didn’t think a driver should be liable if they “accidentally run into somebody … who was out violating the law.”

But that young man who was knicked by Governor Reynolds’s car says the new law lends courage to already-stressed and frustrated citizens.

He saw repeated posts on social media of “the same Grand Theft Auto gif of someone getting flattened by a car, with the words, ‘I can’t wait for your next protest,’” the Boston newspaper quoted Jaylen Cavil. “I think it emboldens people.”

Mandryk: CP's lawsuit likely to add to Sask. disdain for railway

Murray Mandryk 

© Provided by Leader Post 

The recent CP lawsuit against the Saskatchewan government could be a costly, but it is the kind of thing that can also unite us.

At a time when Saskatchewan feels like it’s flying apart at the seams, we may have just rediscovered what’s historically bonded us together.

What may that be, you ask?

Our love of flat, open spaces? Believe it or not, not all Saskatchewanians are enamoured with living 365 days a year in cold, barren flatness … which is why we escape to Arizona’s warm, barren flatness.

The Riders? You’re more likely to find an agoraphobic in Saskatchewan than someone who will openly admit to not being a Rider fan. But not everyone cares about football.

Our love of farming and farmers? Maybe don’t get city people going on their true feelings toward today’s farmers. (See: Saskatchewanians who winter in Arizona.)

The weather? No. (See: Saskatchewanians who winters Arizona.)

But there has always been one force that was messing with Saskatchewan even before Day 1 on Sept. 1, 1905. Evidently, it continues to mess with us to this very day.

The Canadian Pacific Railway. The damn CPR. From many peoples, strength? Nope. Our provincial motto should really be: Multis e gentibus, rancidus CPR.

Rich. Poor. Rural. Urban. Left. Right. Country, rock or rap. New Canadian. First Nation. Old stock. Throughout our history, there has been nothing quite so unifying in this landlocked province as our collective disdain for this national railway.

So consider how absolutely glorious it is in these troubled times of division and anger to be brought together by the collective repulsion over a CPR lawsuit saying it should never ever have to pay a dime of taxes to the province.

Through a fantastic story by Leader-Post legislative reporter Arthur White-Crummey, we learned this week that Canadian Pacific Railway is suing the Saskatchewan government for $341 million because it feels a 141-year-old contract with the Canadian government means it is exempt from paying provincial taxes.

How earth-shattering is this story in Saskatchewan? Well, for the briefest of moments, an entire province stopped saying “Damn Trudeau.”

Lawyers for Canadian Pacific argued in Regina’s Court of Queen’s Bench this week that an 1880 contract incorporated in the 1881 CPR Act exempts the corporation from any provincial income, sales, fuel and capital taxes associated with its historic main line. While CP has paid this unconstitutional tax for a century, it — generously — is suing only to recoup taxes paid since 2002.

Most of the above is written tongue in cheek, but shelling out a third of billion dollars will have what Finance Minister Donna Harpauer described as “significant” impact on a provincial budget already struggling with pandemic costs and growing public debt.

“It’s unfair to the taxpayers of the province, because then they have to bear the brunt,” Harpauer told White-Crummey.

The court will now weigh both the tax law and constitutional complexity (the 1905 Saskatchewan Act required adherence to the CPR Act), but just as interesting is the not-so-dormant collective animosity the suit has stirred up in Saskatchewan’s court of public opinion. Truly, this is something only the CPR could do.

“The irony is that they hate (the CPR) but pretty much every town in southern Saskatchewan exists because of the railroads,” said Craig Baird, podcaster and historian who produced a series this summer on how the railroads developed Canada.

Baird, a former reporter with the Leader-Post, agreed the animosity toward the Canadian Pacific was spawned by the rather generous 25 million acres granted by the Canadian government that accompanied the tax exemptions, but it goes beyond this.

It was the railway’s absolute power that dictated where towns would be located and what they would be named followed by decades of control over everything from communities shipping out their wheat to getting their mail that’s defined the relationship.

It’s a historical reminder this province has always encountered shared difficulties — problems we’ve gotten past through consensus and collective response.

If this lawsuit can remind us of the importance of that, God bless the CPR.

Mandryk is the political columnist the Regina Leader-Post and the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.

Civilian probes of sexual misconduct cases ‘appropriate and necessary’: top military officials

Amanda Connolly 

© Provided by Global News

 Canadian armed forces flag pictured in Trenton, Ontario on Tuesday May 11, 2021. 

THE CANADIAN PRESS IMAGES/Lars Hagberg

Transferring military sexual misconduct cases to civilian authorities is a decision that is now "appropriate and necessary" given the growing lack of confidence in the Canadian military's handling of investigations involving its own, say the two most senior military justice system officials.


In a joint statement issued on Friday afternoon, the military provost marshall and the director of military prosecutions said the allegations emerging over recent months of sexual misconduct against senior military leaders has provoked a "crisis of public confidence in the military justice system."

That statement noted that, in the view of the two officials, military police investigators and prosecutors are "fully capable of investigating and responding to allegations of criminal and disciplinary offences, including sexual assault and other criminal offences of a sexual nature under the Criminal Code."

But they noted that they "are keenly aware that the proper functioning of any justice system relies on public confidence."

"The increasing lack of public confidence in the military justice system is a real and pressing concern," the statement added. "Consequently, exercising our authority as independent actors, we will implement Mme. Arbour’s interim recommendation immediately."

READ MORE: Military must transfer sexual misconduct cases to civilians: Anand

The provost marshall and director of military prosecutions said they believe a "greater emphasis" on civilian investigations and prosecutions for sexual assault and criminal sexual offences "is now appropriate and necessary."

"Canadians can be assured that the military justice system stands ready to act where the civilian criminal justice system is unable or declines to exercise its jurisdiction in these matters," they added.

READ MORE: Sajjan out as defence minister; Anita Anand takes helm of embattled military amid misconduct crisis

Defence Minister Anita Anand announced Thursday that she has “accepted in full” a recommendation from former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Louise Arbour that civilians, and not military investigators, should handle military sexual misconduct cases.

Arbour was appointed in the spring to lead an external review into how best to fix the issue, described by experts as an existential “crisis” for the military.

While the problem has existed for decades, it is under renewed and intense condemnation following exclusive reporting by Global News that began in February 2021.

New women's minister says focus on men in order to combat gender-based violence

OTTAWA — Freshly appointed Women and Gender Equality Minister Marci Ien says as part of her effort to combat gender-based violence she intends to place a lens on men to understand why it happens in the first place.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

She said the issue is among her priorities for the department because it is "clearly unacceptable," and she wants to not only support women but focus on men to figure out the root causes of the problem.

"There is another part of this equation, and that is why does the violence happen," she said in an interview with The Canadian Press. "If we're going to end it, we have to understand why it's happening in the first place."

The minister said her department will continue to conduct research on gender-based violence so that they understand the issue, identify gaps and find areas of improvement.

She also said that she sees Women and Gender Equality Canada as a "nucleus" that connects with all other ministries, because gender equality is at the centre of each one.

Ien made the remarks when asked about how she fits into efforts to address the gendered effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, given that other ministers have also been involved in the file.

In March the federal government launched a task force to address the unique challenges faced by women during the pandemic, led by Chrystia Freeland, finance minister, and Mona Fortier, who was then minister of middle-class prosperity but is now president of the Treasury Board.

Gender equality advocates have been sounding the alarm on a rise in gender-based violence during the pandemic, a trend which the United Nations has referred to as a "shadow pandemic."

Andrea Gunraj, vice-president of public engagement at the Canadian Women’s Foundation, said a national action plan to address violence specifically against Indigenous women and girls as well as two-spirit, transgender and non-binary people is important.

"This is a long-standing thing that Indigenous communities have been asking for," Gunraj said. "We've had many reports, we've had many recommendations, now's the time to act on it."

Advocates have been calling for the federal government to put in place stable funding for programs that work to end gender-based violence.

Katherine Scott, senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, said she is looking for more details regarding how the national action plan will co-ordinate responses at all levels of government.

Scott, who is the centre's director for gender equality and public policy work, said she is not just looking for a transfer of funds from the federal government to the provinces.

"We're looking for a collaborative, meaningful plan that tracks outcomes and commits to reporting publicly every year about reducing levels of violence among women and others fleeing violence," she said.

Gunraj said when it comes to national action on gendered violence, it's time to look at the full picture of how those solutions are funded.

Citing her past experience as a journalist, Ien said she has been aware of the lack of funding for women’s organizations doing this work.

“They were critically underfunded and frankly, undervalued by previous governments,” she said.

A report by Women’s Shelters Canada from 2019 surveyed hundreds of women's shelters across the country, finding that 74 per cent of respondents said that inadequate funding was a major challenge, while only five per cent said it was not an issue.

The report also showed that 61 per cent of shelters had not received an increase in operational funding from their main government funder for at least two years, and that one in five had not received a funding increase in 10 years or more.

Gunraj said while services that focus on prevention and intervention are considered the most effective at alleviating the problem, "they have always gotten the smallest slice of funding compared to the government-led bodies that have addressed things only after they've already happened."

By contrast, said Gunraj, billions have been set aside for policing, prosecution and prisons, even though research shows these responses are not as effective in addressing gendered violence.

Gunraj noted that gender-based violence tends to be under-reported, pointing to Statistics Canada data that in 2016 indicated 70 per cent of people who experienced spousal violence and 93 per cent who experienced childhood abuse had not spoken to authorities.

She also highlighted work by University of Ottawa professors Rakhi Ruparelia and Elizabeth Sheehy that showed when racialized women report violence, their experiences are often taken less seriously in the criminal law system and their perpetrators receive less harsh punishments.

"I think if we were to switch that funding model and supercharge those organizations that do it right, and those bodies that do it right, I think we would see a shift."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 4, 2021.

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This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Facebook and Canadian Press News Fellowship.

Erika Ibrahim, The Canadian Press