Farmers could forgo harmful fertilisers by growing black-eyed peas, scientists say

Lamiat Sabin
Thu, January 20, 2022

Joel Sachs, UCR professor of evolution and ecology, with black-eyed peas crops (Joel Sachs/UCR)

Growing black-eyed peas could eradicate the need for expensive and environmentally-damaging fertilisers for gardening, research from a US university has confirmed.

Legumes such as black-eyed peas, also known as cowpeas, are a unique category of crops in that they attract “substantial amounts” of nitrogen that is essential for also growing other plants.

They do this by forming a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria called rhizobia.

Rhizobia is attracted to the plant through chemicals the legumes crop emits through the roots. Then the roots form tumour-like nodules that protect the bacteria and supply them with carbon, for which the plant receives nitrogen to turn into ammonia.

The most prominent black scientist of the early 20th century – agriculturalist and inventor George Washington Carver – had popularised, researched, and taught on the growing of black-eyed peas, peanuts, soybeans, and sweet potatoes to improve soil conditions.

George Washington Carver in 1910 (WikiCommons)

Now, scientists led by plant pathologist Gabriel Ortiz, of University of California Riverside (UCR), have said that modern-day farmers could forgo the use of costly and environmentally-damaging fertilisers by planting legumes.

Dr Ortiz said: “When the plant senses it is going to die, it releases the bacteria into the soil, replenishing it.

“Growers could alternate seasons of legumes with other crops, leaving the soil full of nitrogen-fixing bacteria that reduce the need for fertiliser.”

A black-eyed peas plant’s ability to attract the beneficial bacteria isn’t diminished by modern farming practices, the UCR research shows.

Joel Sachs, UCR professor of evolution and ecology, said: “In fact, some of the strains in the experiment appear to have gained more benefit from bacteria than their wild ancestors.”

He added: “To make agriculture more sustainable, one of the things we need to do is focus on the plant’s ability to get services from microbes already in the soil, rather than trying to get those services by dumping chemicals.”

When already-madenitrogen fertiliser is applied to plants at a rate faster than it can be used, the excess can end up in the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas or washed out into lakes, rivers and seas.

In the aquatic system, nitrogen feeds “harmful algal blooms” – rapid accumulations of algae that typically turn the water green – that use up all the oxygen and end up killing fish.

The UCR experiments involved 20 different types of black-eyed peas, and “point toward a genetic basis for their symbiotic abilities” – the researchers said.

The research results have been published in the biology journal Evolution.

KURGAN CIVILIZATION

Ancient 'scepters' were actually straws for communal boozing, researchers say

Tom Metcalfe
Tue, January 18, 2022

Silver and gold tubes unearthed in an ancient tomb in southern Russia and long thought to be ceremonial staffs were, in fact, the earliest-known drinking straws, used by people 5,000 years ago to sip beer from a communal jar, according to research published Tuesday.

The practice mirrors a ceremonial method of drinking beer used by the Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia, a thousand miles to the south from where they were found, and it suggests that trade in the early Bronze Age included ideas as well as commodities, archaeologists say. The discovery also underlines the importance of beer to ancient peoples.

The objects were discovered more than 100 years ago during excavations of a burial mound near the Russian city of Maikop, just north of the Caucasus Mountains, but no one had advanced the idea that they were ancient drinking tubes before now.


“It never occurred to anyone,” said Viktor Trifonov, an archaeologist at the Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences, based in St. Petersburg, who is the lead author of a study of the objects published Tuesday in the journal Antiquity.

Schematic drawing of the set of

The ornate tubes, four of them decorated with bull figurines, were unearthed in 1897 from a large “kurgan” — a type of burial mound — beside the remains of a man thought to have been a king. The kurgan was filled with riches, including what was left of a garment decorated with semiprecious stones and gold, precious metal cups, weapons and tools. The remains of two women were also found in chambers of the tomb.

The objects now revealed to be drinking tubes were found lying beside the man’s body; the other items were lined up against the walls of the burial chamber.

The archaeologist who led the 19th century excavation described the mysterious objects as “scepters” — ceremonial staffs wielded by rulers — and they were put on display at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg with other finds from the Maikop kurgan.

Later, archaeologists theorized that they might be poles for a canopy held by servants during a funeral procession; another speculated that they might symbolize arrows that had killed a mythical bull, which was represented by the figurines.

But none of the explanations sounded right to Trifonov, who knew about the Sumerian practice of drinking beer through long tubes and had a hunch that these might have been used for the same purpose.

“The idea of reinterpreting the ‘scepters’ first came to me about a decade ago,” he said in an email. His initial suggestions, however, found no support, so he started the latest study a few years ago to see whether he could find more evidence.

His team focused its attention on what looked like a “strainer” of narrow slits in the ends of each of the tubes. Some Sumerian drinking tubes unearthed at archaeological sites had similar strainers made of small perforations at the end to filter out chaff and other impurities.

So when analysis of a residue found in the slits of one of the Maikop tubes revealed ancient barley starch, as well as pollen grains and phytoliths — microscopic deposits of silica from plant cells — Trifonov and his colleagues knew for sure that the “scepters” were, in fact, tubes for drinking beer.

“Everything else fell into place,” he said.

Trifonov and his team suggest that the Maikop people who built the kurgan used the tubes to drink beer from a communal vessel. A pottery jar was also found in the kurgan, large enough to provide each of eight drinkers — there are eight tubes — with about seven pints of beer.

Trifonov said it seems likely that this way of drinking beer was part of aristocratic ceremonies the Maikop people had adopted from Mesopotamia. Although the Maikop tubes are the earliest to have been found, the practice is shown on Sumerian seals that are at least 1,000 years older.

Archaeologist Mara Horowitz, an assistant professor at Purchase College in New York who was not involved in the latest study, broadly agreed with the interpretation by Trifonov and his colleagues.

“Having a whole set of metal straws placed in the Maikop kurgan is an extraordinary find,” she said.

The discovery shows how such practices could spread between ancient people who were great distances apart, she said.

“It’s very exciting to see the degree of connectivity across the Caucasus at this early date,” she said. “It is in the 3rd millennium B.C. that we have movements of culture and people across the Caucusus in both directions, with major effect on regional cultures.”

Horowitz also said the bull figurines on four of the drinking tubes could have been positioned so that the drinkers saw each figurine from the side.

“With four bulls on straws in the jar at once ... it would look like a procession of little bulls going around in a circle,” she said. “That’s really kind of adorable.”

Image: alamy.com

KURGAN PEOPLE CULTURE The Kurgan people culture existed during the fifth, fourth, and third millennia BC, they lived in northern Europe, from N.Pontic across Central Europe. The word “kurgan” means a mound or a barrow in Türkic. Kurgan culture is characterized by pit-graves or barrows, a particular method of burial.

KURGAN PEOPLE CULTURE | DENEMELER

esvat.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/kurgan-people-culture/

US-backed fighters chase IS gunmen near prison in Syria



SyriaThis photo provided by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces shows some Islamic State group fighters, who were arrested by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces after they attacked Gweiran Prison, in Hassakeh, northeast Syria, Friday, Jan. 21, 2022. IS attacks have been on the rise in recent months in both Iraq and neighboring Syria, where the group once set up a self-styled Islamic caliphate before being defeated by an international coalition. 

(Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, via AP)More

BASSEM MROUE
Sat, January 22, 2022

BEIRUT (AP) — Kurdish-led fighters advanced slowly Saturday under the cover of U.S.-led coalition air power in Syria's northeast. Intense clashes with Islamic State group militants took place around a prison where thousands of extremists were held, officials said.

Fighting broke out Thursday night when IS unleashed its biggest attack in Syria since the fall of its “caliphate” three years ago. More than 100 militants assaulted the main prison holding suspected extremists in the northeastern city of Hassakeh, sparking a battle with U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters that has so far left dozens dead.

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces lost 17 fighters killed and 23 wounded since the fighting began, spokesman Farhad Shami tweeted Saturday. Dozens of IS gunmen were also killed.


Despite their defeat in Syria nearly three years ago, IS sleeper cells have carried out deadly attacks against SDF as well as government forces on the west bank of the Tigris River in eastern Syria.

The group’s territorial control in Syria and Iraq, where they once declared their “caliphate” was crushed by a years-long U.S.-backed campaign. But its fighters continued with sleeper cells that have increasingly killed scores of Iraqis and Syrians in past months.

The U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces brought more reinforcements into Hassakeh in an attempt to regain control of areas taken by IS, residents said. More civilians fled the areas of fighting as sounds of explosions echoed in the city and black smoke billowed from the Gweiran Prison area on the southern edge of Hassakeh.

Hassakeh Gov. Ghassan Khalil told Syrian state media that some 4,000 civilians have fled to areas controlled by Syrian government forces in the city and its suburbs. He told state TV that authorities set up three shelters for the displaced and mosques were also asked to open their doors for those who were forced to leave their homes.

Hassakeh-based journalist Adnan Hassan said in the early afternoon, a large SDF force consisting of scores of fighters, Humvees and vehicles carrying heavy machineguns arrived in the areas to boost the anti-IS operations.

SDF fighters “succeeded in thwarting the attempt to free the prisoners but it is not clear when they will have the situation under full control,” Hassan said.

Gweiran Prison is the largest of around a dozen facilities run by U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish forces holding suspected IS fighters. Gweiran holds more than 3,000 inmates, including IS commanders and figures considered among the most dangerous.

“The battles are taking place on the edge of the prison,” SDF spokesman Siamand Ali told The Associated Press, adding that most of the prison is under their control apart from a small part that is held by rioting prisoners. He added that fighting is also ongoing in the nearby Zuhour neighborhood, where IS fighters were holed up.

Ali said SDF fighters and U.S.-led coalition aircraft targeted a technical academy building where dozens of "Daesh terrorists took positions.” Ali, who used an Arabic acronym to refer to IS, said SDF fighters are advancing slowly in order to protect the lives of civilians as IS gunmen are holed up in alleys and in residential homes.

He said the SDF's elite anti-terrorism unit and commandos are leading the operations that intensified Saturday night in neighborhoods east of the prison, where scores of IS fighters are holed up. He said SDF officials are at the same time trying to convince rioting detainees to surrender, because a confrontation inside the prison "could have grave consequences” due to the large numbers of detainees.

Ali said some 45 IS gunmen were killed in the fighting and dozens of prisoners who fled were recaptured.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, said that since Thursday night, 89 people have been killed, including 56 IS gunmen, 28 Kurdish fighters and five civilians. The Observatory added that SDF fighters were using loud speakers to call on IS fighters to surrender but the extremists refused.

On Friday, the SDF’s top military commander, Mazloum Abadi, said IS mobilized “most of its sleeper cells” to organize the prison break.

The militants, armed with heavy machine guns and vehicles rigged with explosives, attacked Thursday evening, aiming to free their comrades.

Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said Friday the U.S. used airstrikes to support the SDF.

On Friday an SDF spokesman said they recaptured 104 militants who escaped from the prison. But he said the total number who had broken out was not determined.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the prison break on its Aamaq news service Friday, describing it as ongoing. Freeing convicts and imprisoned comrades has been a main tactic of the group. During their 2014 surge that overwhelmed territory in Iraq and Syria, IS carried out multiple prison breaks.

At its height, the Islamic State group’s self-styled caliphate covered a third of both of Iraq and Syria. The ensuing war against them lasted several years, killed thousands, and left large parts of the two neighboring countries in ruins. It also left U.S.-allied Kurdish authorities in control of eastern and northeastern Syria, with a small presence of several hundred American forces still deployed.

Afghanistan: UN pressures Taliban over missing women's activists

One of the two women who went missing in Afghanistan had posted a video of herself as men, allegedly from the Taliban's intelligence department, are heard pounding on her door. But the Taliban say the video is fake.


Afghan women's rights activists continued to fight for their rights under the Taliban regime

The United Nations said it was concerned about the disappearance of two Afghan women's rights activists. Taman Zaryabi Paryani and Parawana Ibrahimkhel were reportedly abducted from their homes by the Taliban on Wednesday night.

"We urge Taliban to provide information on their whereabouts & to protect rights of all Afghans," the UN's Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said in a statement on Twitter.

Activist films distressing video

One of the activists managed to film a harrowing video apparently from her home in Kabul.

The video shows a visibly scared Paryani, as men claiming to be from the Taliban's intelligence department, pound on the front door.

According to local broadcaster Aamaj News, Paryani was disconnected shortly after sharing the video with the network.

Ibrahimkhel apparently went missing on the same night.

Paryani was among a group of women who had protested the forced wearing of the hijab.

A witness told the AP news agency that ten armed men had carried out the nighttime raid. The witness said that four people were taken, including Paryani.

The Taliban have dismissed Paryani 's video as a fake, with a spokesman for police in Kabul, Mobin Khan, saying it was a "manufactured drama."

UN experts say women are being 'erased'

On Monday, a panel of UN human rights experts said the Taliban's leadership was "institutionalizing large-scale and systemic gender-based discrimination and violence against women and girls."

According to the panel, there have been a series of restrictive measures that target women since the militant group's takeover of Afghanistan.

"Today, we are witnessing the attempt to steadily erase women and girls from public life in Afghanistan, including in institutions and mechanisms that had been previously set up to assist and protect those women and girls who are most at risk," the panel of experts said in a statement.

On Friday, two local employees of NGOs operating in rural Afghanistan told the AFP news agency that the Taliban threatened to shoot them if they did not wear burqas.

The Taliban had given its assurances they would uphold women's rights shortly after seizing power. The Islamist group has continued trying to garner recognition from the global community. To date, no country has recognized its government.

Taliban storm Kabul apartment, arrest activist, her sisters

KATHY GANNON
Thu, January 20, 2022

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The Taliban stormed an apartment in Kabul, smashing the door in rresting a woman rights activist and her three sisters, an eyewitness said Thursday. A Taliban statement appeared to blame the incident on a recent women's protest, saying insulting Afghan values will no longer be tolerated.

The activist, Tamana Zaryabi Paryani, was among about 25 women who took part in an anti-Taliban protest on Sunday against the compulsory Islamic headscarf, or hijab, for women. A person from the neighborhood who witnessed the arrest said about 10 armed men, claiming to be from the Taliban intelligence department, carried out the raid on Wednesday night.

Shortly before she and her sisters were taken away, footage of Paryani was posted on social media, showing her frightened and breathless and screaming for help, saying the Taliban were banging on her door.

“Help please, the Taliban have come to our home . . . only my sisters are home,” she is heard saying in the footage. There are other female voices in the background, crying. “I can’t open the door. Please . . . help!”

Associated Press footage from the scene on Thursday showed the apartment's front door, made of metal and painted reddish brown, dented and left slightly ajar. The occupants of a neighboring apartment ran inside their home, not wanting to talk to reporters. An outer security door of steel slats was shut and padlocked, making it impossible to enter Paryani’s apartment.

The witness said the raid took place around 8 p.m. The armed men went up to the third floor of the Kabul apartment complex where Paryani lives and began pounding on the front door ordering her to open the door.

When she refused, they kicked the door repeatedly until it opened, the witness said. “They took four females away, all of them were sisters,” the witness said, adding that one of the four was Paryani, the activist.

The witness spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing Taliban reprisal.

The spokesman for the Taliban-appointed police in Kabul, Gen. Mobin Khan, tweeted that Paryani's social video post was a manufactured drama. A spokesman for the Taliban intelligence, Khalid Hamraz, would neither confirm nor deny the arrest.

However, he tweeted that “insulting the religious and national values of the Afghan people is not tolerated anymore” — a reference to Sunday's protest during which the protesters appeared to burn a white burqa, the all-encompassing traditional head-to-toe female garment that only leaves a mesh opening for the eyes.

Hamraz accused rights activists of maligning Afghanistan's new Taliban rulers and their security forces to gain asylum in the West.

Since sweeping to power in mid-August, the Taliban have imposed widespread restrictions, many of them directed at women. Women have been banned from many jobs, outside the health and education field, their access to education has been restricted beyond sixth grade and they have been ordered to wear the hijab. The Taliban have, however, stopped short of imposing the burqa, which was compulsory when they previously ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s.

At Sunday's demonstration in Kabul, women carried placards demanding equal rights and shouted: “Justice!” They burned a white burqa and said they cannot be forced to wear the hijab. Organizers of the demonstration said Paryani attended the protest, which was dispersed after the Taliban fired tear gas into the crowd of women.

Paryani belongs to a rights group known as “Seekers of Justice," which organized several demonstrations in Kabul, including Sunday's. The group's members have not spoken publicly of her arrest but have been sharing the video of Paryani.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch criticized the crackdown, saying that since taking over Afghanistan five months ago, the Taliban “have rolled back the rights of women and girls, including blocking access to education and employment for many."

“Women’s rights activists have staged a series of protests; the Taliban has responded by banning unauthorized protests,” the watchdog said in a statement after Sunday's protest.

The Taliban have increasingly targeted Afghanistan's beleaguered rights groups, as well as journalists, with local and international television crews covering demonstration often detained and sometimes beaten.

Also Thursday, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a statement asking the Taliban to investigate a recent attack on a documentary film maker Zaki Qais who said two armed men, who identified themselves as Kabul police officials, entered his home and beat him. One tried to stab him, according to Steven Butler, the CPJ's Asia program coordinator.

"Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers must immediately launch an investigation to identify and bring to justice those who attacked journalist Zaki Qais,” said Butler. “The Taliban’s continued silence on these repeated attacks on journalists undermines any remaining credibility of pledges to allow independent media to continue operating.”

Last week the CPJ sought information on an attack on another Kabul-based journalist, Noor Mohammad Hashemi, deputy director for the non profit Salam Afghanistan Media Organization, who was beaten up by three unidentified men.

This Year Marks the 75th Anniversary Since Former Scientists Created the Doomsday Clock

David Grossman, Courtney Linder
Fri, January 21, 2022

Photo credit: Tony Craddock - Getty Images

For the third year in a row, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has decided to keep its Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight.

The Doomsday Clock isn't updated on a set time frame, but rather, as events dictate. You can thank the pandemic, climate change, the rise of misinformation, and the threat of nuclear war for this update.

This year marks the 75th anniversary since former Manhattan Project scientists created the Doomsday Clock in 1947.

Life as we know it is still on the brink of disaster.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nonprofit organization made up of scientists and global security experts, has published a new statement deriding the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic and expressing concern about nuclear weapons, misinformation, and climate change.

☢️ You like nuclear. So do we. Let's nerd out over it together.

The organization announced for the third year in a row that it is keeping its figurative Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight—the closest we've come to a symbolic apocalypse since the first tests of the hydrogen bomb in 1953. This year also marks 75 years since the organization began tracking our inevitable demise.

"Steady is not good news," Sharon Squassoni, a research professor at George Washington University's Institute for International Science and Technology Policy and a co-chair on the Bulletin's Science and Security Board, said during a press briefing on Thursday. "In fact, it reflects the judgment of the board that we are stuck in a perilous moment, one that brings neither stability nor security."

The experts cited a lack of progress and coordination in the fight against climate change, the ongoing pandemic and evolution of troubling new variants, and North Korea's continued efforts to develop nuclear weapons. They also blamed use of technology in misinformation and disinformation campaigns; the development of hypersonic weapons by the United States, Russia, and China; recent space junk-generating ASAT tests; and deteriorating talks between the world's superpowers.

Photo credit: EVA HAMBACH - Getty Images

Still, the 2022 statement from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists did offer up a few positive developments, citing a return to the Paris Climate Accord and the Iran Nuclear Deal, and the extension of New START arms control agreement. "A more moderate and predictable approach to leadership and the control of one of the two largest nuclear arsenals of the world marked a welcome change from the previous four years," they wrote.

But it was not enough to move the dial backward. While the reason for the Doomsday Clock's slow march toward societal ruin is, frankly, pretty obvious, there's another question you may have. What is this metaphorical clock all about, anyway?
Enter the Atomic Era

The year was 1945, and the atomic bomb had just changed the boundaries of science forever. Like the advent of the machine gun, tank and airplane, the atomic bomb changed the shape of warfare. Unlike previous weapons, however, the bomb threatened to destroy the whole human race.

There was no concrete way to measure or or explain the atomic bomb in comparison to more traditional arms, so a group of scientists—among them, Albert Einstein, Hy Goldsmith and Manhattan Project alums J. Robert Oppenheimer and Eugene Rabinowitch—determined the public needed a nontechnical magazine to become fully aware of such dangers. Enter the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. "To say the Bulletin was founded on a shoestring would be to describe it as overdressed at birth," declared a 1949 issue of the magazine.

The transition from government scientists working with a wartime budget to struggling magazine editors was not an easy one. The magazine started as a six-page black-and-white newsletter, and by 1947, its publishers had come up with enough funds—by taking on debt and taking donations—to print a full issue.

To actually put the magazine out, Goldsmith turned to Martyl Langsdorf, the wife of fellow Manhattan Project veteran Alexander Langsdorf. Speaking to the History Channel for an episode of Modern Marvels, Langsdorf recalled that "he gave no instructions, except that it can't cost much ... All the scientists felt an urgency to explain what had happened with the bomb, and because of the extreme urgency, I remember, a clock seemed to be important."

Photo credit: Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

"The hands of the clock of doom have moved again," wrote Rabinowitch in 1953. "Only a few more swings of the pendulum, and, from Moscow to Chicago, atomic explosions will strike midnight for Western civilization." Rabinowitch's writing has a style of tension and doom fitting the atomic era, and the name stuck.

The Doomsday Clock isn't updated on a set time frame, but rather, as events dictate. In fact, the most recent move is only the 23rd in the clock's 70-year history. When Rabinowitch wrote those fateful words in 1953, he placed the clock at 2 minutes to midnight, the closest it had ever been.

The Doomsday Clock went backwards when the SALT and ABM treaties were signed in 1972, and then forward again in 1998, when both India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons. The clock moved as far back as 17 minutes in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, almost enough time to squeeze a TV show before the end of the world.

This focus on nuclear came about because, current publisher Rachel Bronson notes, in "1947 there was one technology with the potential to destroy the planet, and that was nuclear power." The ways humanity has invented to destroy itself have multiplied since then, and in 2007, the Doomsday Clock began to consider climate change as "a dire challenge to humanity."

The Doomsday Clock is one of the rarest things available to scientists: an easily recognizable icon that can grab a passerby with no scientific background. In short, it's exactly what Rabinowitch and Goldsmith wanted.

Inside Finland's Plan to End All Waste by 2050

Lisa Abend
Thu, January 20, 2022

A scene at Fortum Waste Solutions Oy's circular economy facility in Häme, Finland on Dec. 14. In the facility, waste material collected from regular households is converted to clean plastic through Fortum’s Eco Refinery—an automated sorting plant 

Credit - Ingmar Björn Nolting for TIME

On a drizzly December morning that turned Helsinki’s ice-slicked streets even more treacherous, 11-year-old Minh Anh Ho sat safely indoors, hunched over a microscope. The rest of her classmates were occupied with different tasks: interviewing the mayor for the local news station, overseeing the electric company, stocking the shelves of the local grocery store. But as a researcher for a company called Borealis that repurposes plastic, she was busy analyzing the sheet of cling film that lay beneath her lens. “I think it’s a really important job,” she said. “Plastic takes a really long time to disappear, so it would be good to come up with something else to do with it and not just throw it away.”

Yrityskyla, the learning center where Ho and her class were spending the day, is designed to introduce Finnish schoolchildren to working life. In one of 13 centers spread throughout the country and sponsored by a consortium that includes the Confederation of Finnish Industries and the Finnish government, they run a simulacrum of a town, with each student performing a job in a different business (all of them based on real-life companies), from banking to health care to fashion design. The program was launched in 2010, and today roughly 83% of all sixth-graders go through it each year. And since 2017, their day at Yrityskyla has included not just experiential lessons on entrepreneurship and progressive taxation but also, as Ho’s “job” makes clear, the circular economy.

The control room inside Fortum Waste Solutions Oy's circular economy facility

Ingmar Björn Nolting for TIME

As natural resources diminish and the climate crisis grows more acute, the notion of a circular economy has been gaining traction around the globe. Most modern economies are linear—they rest on a “take, make, waste” model in which natural resources are extracted, their valuable elements are transformed into products, and anything left over (along with the products themselves when they are no longer useful) is discarded as waste. In contrast, a circular economy replaces the extraction of resources with the transformation of existing products and essentially does away with the notion of waste altogether.

Read More: Could Amsterdam’s New Economic Theory Replace Capitalism?

A growing number of governments, from the municipal to the international, have thrown their weight behind the idea. The E.U. launched its action plan for the transition to a circular economy in 2015, then updated it in 2020 as part of the Green Deal to include initiatives that encourage companies to design products—from laptops to jeans—so that they last longer and can be more easily repaired. In February, the European Parliament passed a resolution demanding additional measures that would allow it to adopt a fully circular carbon-neutral economy by 2050. Some member states, including the Netherlands, have also drafted similar plans at the national level.

Among them, Finland stands out for the comprehensiveness of its approach. Back in 2016, it became the first to adopt a national “road map” to a circular economy—a commitment it reaffirmed last year by setting targeted caps on natural-resource extraction. Like other nations, Finland supports entrepreneurship in creative reuse, or upcycling (especially in its important forestry industry), urges public procurements that rely on recycled and repurposed materials, and seeks to curb dramatically the amount of waste going to landfill.

Marja Oesch practices regeneration on her Finnish farm, with the help of cattle.

 She hopes to put back as much into the land as she takes out

Ingmar Björn Nolting for TIME

But from the beginning, the country of 5.5 million has also focused closely on education, training its younger generations to think of the economy differently than their parents and grandparents do. “People think it’s just about recycling,” says Nani Pajunen, a sustainability expert at Sitra, the public innovation fund that has spearheaded Finland’s circular conversion. “But really, it’s about rethinking everything—products, material development, how we consume.” To make changes at every level of society, Pajunen argues, education is key—getting every Finn to understand the need for a circular economy, and how they can be part of it.

A pilot program to help teachers incorporate the notion into curriculums in 2017 “just snowballed,” says Pajunen. “By the end of the two years, 2,500 teachers around the country had joined the network—far more than we had directly funded.”

Since then, studying the circular economy has taken on a life of its own, starting with the youngest. In December, Neulanen kindergarten director Liisa Woitsch sat on the floor with some of her young charges, a broken wooden chair and a large cartoon cutout of a fox. Unscrewing a dangling leg from the chair, Woitsch asked the children, “Do we just throw it away now, or can you think of anything else that can be done with it?” One boy clamored to the seat and, pounding rhythmically, declared it a drum. Another brought the detached leg to his lips. “It can be a trumpet!”

It’s an uplifting change from the catastrophe and dystopia that often characterizes education about sustainable development, says Anssi Almgren, who helped design the curriculum for the city of Helsinki. “Children have so many great ideas, and we wanted to enable them to think about solutions.”

In a nation whose education system, considered by many to be the best in the world, rests heavily on experiential learning (and not at all on homework, which is practically nonexistent), the solutions-based approach of studying circular economy adapts to all levels of formal education. In one online course developed for high school, for example, students engage in an advanced version of Woitsch’s kindergarten class, taking apart broken items like ballpoint pens or electronics and mulling over new purposes for their materials.

By the time kids reach university, their grounding in circularity is strong enough that they can apply the principle to advanced research. At Metropolia University of Applied Sciences, students collaborate on projects designed to solve real-world problems. One group on an engineering course spent the fall investigating how Helsinki could foster neighborhoods where individual blocks could—by establishing repair workshops, gardens and composting sites—build their own mini circular economies.

University students in Helsinki present research on new business 

models for energy company St1, during a Dec. 14 class

Ingmar Björn Nolting for TIME

The concept is also making its way into adult education. In 2018 Marja Oesch was trying to figure out what to do with her life. She had grown up on a farm 88 km north of Helsinki, and wasn’t convinced that farming held much opportunity, either for herself or for the environment. “It was basically a monoculture,” the 26-year-old says of her family’s 100-hectare farm, where they primarily grew grain, having previously raised cattle. “The soil had become more compacted, and we were using more and more fertilizers. I could see the problem, but I didn’t know how to solve it.”

When she learned of a course in regenerative agriculture organized by an environmental NGO called the Baltic Sea Action Group, she enrolled. She soon realized she could help tackle the climate crisis and biodiversity loss on the farm itself.

A year ago, she bought out her parents and began changing the farm’s model. She still grows wheat and barley, but when she plants those grains in the spring, she seeds them with 15 varieties of cover crops to help rebuild the depleted soil and support biodiversity on the farm. She’s also introducing new crops into rotation, and recently added six cows whose only job at present is to eat: by grazing and fertilizing the soil with their manure, they too contribute to the health of the land. “Before, I was only thinking about yield—how much can I harvest in this one field,” she says. But now her perspective has broadened to include putting back as much as taking out. “Every time I have to make a decision now,” Oesch says, “I think about how it affects the soil and the organisms in it, and down the line that will bring other changes that I think will make the farm healthier. But the most important change is your mindset.”

Is Finland as a whole achieving that particular transformation? By some measures, yes: a recent poll showed that 82% of Finns believe the circular economy creates new jobs, and several Finnish cities have developed road maps of their own. Its forestry industry has taken steps to reinvent itself, a key move as a full 28% of domestic energy consumption now comes from wood-based fuels. Renewables—including wood, though burning it does release carbon—surpassed fossil fuels for the first time in 2020.

Students at Yrityskylä Learning Environment in Helsinki on Dec. 13. Through the tablets, students are able to access their schedules and job tasks

Ingmar Björn Nolting for TIME

Meanwhile, the number of successful young companies employing circular measures seems to expand every month. Many are working to convert sidestreams from the forestry industry into new materials like bioplastics, paperboard and textiles. But in the birthplace of Nokia, just as many seem to be aimed at tech. Swappie, a company that refurbishes iPhones, for example, is one of Finland’s most successful recent startups. In 2016, its founders, then all in their 20s, embarked on a mission to make used phones—which then made up only 5% of the global market—as common as used cars (which make up 50% of all cars sold). “After researching the market, we realized that the main obstacle was quality,” CEO Sami Marttinen explains. “People didn’t trust the quality of refurbishers. So that’s what we built the company on.”

Swappie handles every step in-house at its Helsinki facility, from receiving the used phones to diagnosing and repairing them to sending out the perfectly functioning refurbished ones and marketing them through traditional advertising and a well-targeted influencer campaign. The company’s holistic approach is working: it has increased its revenue from half a million euros in its first year to 98 million in 2020, and augmented its capacity with a second factory in Estonia. Many of its 1,100 employees come from around the world, drawn, Marttinen says, “by the sense of purpose.” And although the company’s research suggests that many of its customers buy Swappies simply because they get guaranteed quality for a lower price, for some of its clientele that same sense of purpose has made owning a Swappie cooler than getting a new phone.

It’s not all small startups either. The state-owned Fortum—the country’s leading energy producer and, by revenue, Finland’s largest company—is already working within a circular model. It transforms waste into energy through incineration, as well as into new materials: discarded household plastic, for example, is processed at its plant in Riihimaki into clean pellets that can be remade into any kind of plastic.

The company currently is a major greenhouse-gas emitter, largely due to its fossil-fuel-energy subsidiary, Uniper, but is looking ahead to the endgame of the transition to a carbon-neutral economy. Once fossil fuels are phased out and replaced with renewables, Kalle Saarimaa, vice president of Fortum Recycling and Waste, explains, the raw materials for energy will no longer be scarce; sun and wind, unlike coal and oil, are free. But something that is abundant today—cheap plastic and other hydrocarbons made from petroleum—will then become scarce. “Where are those hydrocarbons going to come from when fossil fuels are phased out?” he asks. “A lot of people right now are working to replace them with bioplastics. But what happens to bio if you do that? There won’t be any trees left on the planet.” (Wood is a leading source of bioplastic.) Instead, the company is developing innovative technology to generate those hydrocarbons from the carbon dioxide emitted in the energy-production process. “We see it as the future of recycling,” Saarimaa says—“the way to get carbon circular.”

Finland still has a long way to go. Although the amount of waste going to landfill has decreased so dramatically in the past two decades as to be almost negligible, Finns are actually producing more waste per capita than they were a few years ago—they’re just turning it into something else. “In that sense, we are still living in the linear model,” says Sitra’s project director for circular economy, Kari Herlevi. “We’re better at recycling, but we have not been able to turn the tide fully.”

The Yrityskylä learning program was launched in 2010, and today roughly 83% of all sixth-graders go through it each year for experiential lessons on the circular economy. Pictured in blue is the town hall, next to "Think Corner"

Ingmar Björn Nolting for TIME

In downtown Helsinki, the three chef-owners of Nolla have discovered much the same. When they first opened the restaurant in 2018, they trumpeted its zero-waste philosophy, with drinking glasses made from elegantly repurposed juice bottles and a popular dip flavored with a syrup made from the kitchen’s vegetable trim. Cooks had to track any discard that couldn’t be repurposed—including food that came back from the dining room uneaten on each plate—before emptying it into the composter. But they discovered that the public wasn’t necessarily with them. “They would think that we were cooking with waste, or that we were going to feed them food that had gone bad,” co-owner Luka Balac says. “So now we’re just a restaurant. We are still doing all the same things, but if you don’t know about it”—gesturing around the packed dining room, Balac estimates that only about 60% of their guests do—“you’re just going to think you had a nice meal.”

Entrepreneur Amanda Rejstrom has seen a major recent shift toward the idea of a circular economy, but notes that older Finns can be more skeptical. “Finland was very poor well into the 1950s, but it developed very quickly after that,” she says, with generations of Finns focused on expanding industry. “It’s very hard for people to understand that their lives’ work, or the life’s work of their parents, could in any way be a bad thing.”

Rejstrom inhabits the dilemma: she sits on the board of her family’s company, which produces injection molding. But she is also the founder and CEO of Spark Sustainability, which a few months ago launched an app called Carbon Donut. It allows users to track their carbon footprint, tailors suggestions to them for how to curb it, and links them to circular businesses that can help. The app so far has 15,000 users, most of whom, she says, are urban, highly educated and in their 20s. “They are the generation that learned about circular economy and climate change and all the other environmental problems in school, and have a different approach to nature than older generations who saw it more in terms of its monetary potential.”

Finland is seeking to position itself as a model for other countries; to that end, Sitra has published guidelines to help other nations develop their own circular-economy road maps, and has begun collaborating with the African Development Bank to further steps toward circularity across that continent. But its unique combination of small population, political will, a muscular entrepreneurial culture and that strong education system suggests that any country seeking to follow in its footsteps is going to need to look beyond merely phasing out landfills and funding cool startups to a bigger, more holistic picture. “From the feedback we’ve received, it’s clear that the education part resonates internationally,” says Sitra’s Herlevi. “And from the beginning we have thought of it as the backbone of our strategy. But [education] is part of the overall Finnish way of operating, and it’s not like you can just take it and implement it as a separate thing.”

Nor is it a strategy that works overnight. Even in Finland, the focus on changing a society by educating its young takes time. It worked that way for Tina and Karin Harms. A lawyer who identifies herself as “very aware of sustainability issues,” Tina, 47, was unfamiliar with the term circular economy, even though, as someone who restores furniture as a hobby and has long tried to reduce her family’s consumption, she was already practicing it in some ways.

Her middle child Karin, age 19, on the other hand, says she has been familiar with the circular “practically all my life.” She first learned of it in primary school and had the message reinforced in middle school—her class went to Yrityskyla, for one—and it forms part of the curriculum at her current high school. Like most of her friends, she has a refurbished phone and buys most of her clothes at secondhand shops. She’s also vegan, and has persuaded the rest of the family to recycle. “We started five years ago, and before that we weren’t doing it,” Karin says. “But then I said we really need to, we all need to contribute to fighting climate change.”

Tina recalls balking at first. Although the family did recycle its newspaper and bottles, separating plastics required an extra effort that she found inconvenient. But today, they have what she laughingly describes as “virtually a plastic recycling center” in their basement. “I think that if you have a teenager with very strong feelings about something,” she reflects, “it’s very demotivating if we older ones don’t show that we’re ready to make the extra effort to change.”

—With reporting by Eloise Barry/London

Talgo trains sat idle in a Milwaukee facility now heading to Nigeria

Ricardo Torres, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Fri, January 21, 2022

Talgo Inc. quality control employee Mary Slottke walks past coach train cars in the process of being built at Talgo Inc. in 2011. Talgo was retained to build trains for Amtrak's Hiawatha line after a $810 million federal stimulus grant to establish a Madison-to-Milwaukee line.

The train cars were supposed to run on a rail stretching from Milwaukee to Madison, but now they're heading to Nigeria.

Lagos Gov. Babajide Sanwo Olu toured the Talgo facility in Milwaukee with Acting Mayor Cavalier Johnson earlier this week.

“A train is not something you can just go on the shelf and pick up. We are very lucky to get brand new trains," Sanwo Olu said.

Talgo, a Spanish train-maker with a US headquarters in Seattle, built the two 10-car high speed trains that have been sitting idle for years in Milwaukee. The trains plan to be shipped to Lagos within the next two months.

Johnson welcomed Sanwo Olu to Milwaukee, but he would have preferred to have found a use for the trains in Wisconsin.

"It is a little bittersweet," Johnson said in a statement. "I am sending my congratulations to the Governor of Lagos State in Nigeria, but also a little disappointed that we missed out on the opportunity to have those train sets operating here in Milwaukee and in Wisconsin."

Sanwo Olu said the trains will provide a "source of livelihood for our citizens" by helping move people to jobs and around the state.

"It is about ensuring that we can build our economy; people can move from one location to another and businesses can grow," Sanwo Olu said in a statement.

With a population of roughly 27 million people, Lagos is one of the largest cities in Africa.

According to the release, there are about 6 million individuals in Lagos with daily transportation needs.

The Talgo trains will run on the Lagos Metro Red Line which is about 23 miles long with 11 stations. The red line is expected to be operational by the end of 2022 with roughly 500,000 daily passengers.

"For us, it is important that our trains are utilized," Antonio Perez, Talgo USA CEO and president, said. "It doesn’t make any good for the trains that we built to be stored and kept without passengers riding them."

In 2009, Wisconsin received $810 million in federal stimulus grant to establish a Milwaukee-to-Madison high speed rail line using Talgo trains under Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle. The project was killed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker defeated Doyle in 2010.

Talgo sued the state and in 2015, the state settled for $60 million.

In 2014, the Michigan Department of Transportation issued a request for proposals for ready-to-operate trains that can reach speeds of 110 mph. It was thought the trains in Milwaukee could go to Michigan but no deal was ever finalized.

Later in 2014, two high-speed Talgo trains were sent to Beech Grove, Ind. but those trains were not part of the 2009 deal.

Op-Ed: Anti-vaccine patients vent anger on healthcare workers like me. It takes a toll on care


Venktesh Ramnath
Thu, January 20, 2022,

As hospital workers risk their lives to fight the pandemic, some COVID-skeptic patients and families vehemently claim that healthcare workers are "poisoning" and "punishing" people. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

As a pulmonary and critical care physician in Southern California treating hospitalized patients with COVID-19, I am noticing a rising tension. Beyond just being overwhelmed, we are now part of the collateral damage.

I recently asked a security guard to accompany me and an ICU nurse to meet the family of an unvaccinated 42-year-old firefighter who refused to accept that COVID-19 caused his respiratory failure. Adamantly refusing intubation despite worsening over weeks, it was only when his oxygen levels precipitously dropped and he complained of excruciating breathlessness that he accepted a breathing tube.

A dozen irate family members and friends now demanded answers. Because of visitation restrictions to limit contagion, they awaited me in lawn chairs outside the hospital. Through my N95 mask, I tried to explain in simple terms what was happening to their loved one. They hectored with incessant questions about test results, accusations of mistreatment and demands for therapies like vitamins, ivermectin and sedatives.

Warning repeatedly “not to lie,” they recorded me with their camera phones. I tiptoed through a minefield of distrust. My careful medical explanations and efforts to connect empathically never landed. After 45 minutes, the three of us walked back into the hospital. The nurse, an ICU veteran of 20 years, sighed and said: “I can’t believe they attacked you like that.”

Once it would have been unbelievable, but it’s becoming all too common. Endless months of rancor from COVID-skeptic patients and their families takes a psychological toll on front-line healthcare professionals. I’m seeing a new casualty: Worn down, many practitioners are compromising long-standing practice norms.

Among patients who disbelieve the experts about COVID-19, there is a familiar pattern. They get sick. They end up in the hospital with severe COVID-19 illness. They initially demonstrate a nonplussed defiance, which morphs into utter helplessness when they progressively worsen.

A 43-year-old woman insisted “it’s just the flu” right up until she was begging to be intubated when oxygen masks failed to alleviate the panic caused by low oxygen levels. I pleaded with a 40-year-old man to accept my recommendations for care, only to have him grip my hand, look squarely in my eyes and say: “Feel my grip? I am strong. I am a man. Let me push through this.” (He went on to accept intubation but died several weeks later.)

Navigating the Kubler-Ross stages of traumatic grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance — has always been part of providing critical care. But it’s a different challenge when patients are being wheeled into the hospital because of their deep denial of what we do know about the pandemic. It’s a different challenge when their family and friends conflate their misgivings about the science with our sincere efforts to help.

Incredulous families summarily deny that COVID-19 (and absence of vaccination) could be responsible for the critical illnesses I see every day. Patients and their relatives vehemently claim that healthcare workers and hospitals are “poisoning” and “punishing,” as if part of an Orwellian plot, leading to belligerent, abusive behaviors against staff.

Many providers have become inured to uninformed rebuffs of medical recommendations, including vaccination. Educational efforts have devolved into counterproductive debates.

Far from “heroes” or even compassionate advocates for health, providers are viewed as biased technicians with dubious motives locking loved ones behind hospital doors.

One response to this emotional onslaught is, understandably, attrition. Most veteran ICU nursing staff where I work have left, replaced by temporary assignment nurses from across the country. Some physicians who have become ostracized by the very communities they serve now contemplate nonclinical work or early retirement.

Among those of us still in the trenches, some medical professionals are now breaking traditional practice norms. Providers are resorting to less evidence-based practices, desperate to help and also to avoid another conflict. By opening the door to “try everything,” they have become unwitting supporters of anti-science movements, placing additional stress on others who promote well-established, proven practices.

Another understandable but disappointing strategy is to avoid tough prognostic conversations. Providers may avoid a confrontation with someone by not relaying the bad news about where a patient’s deteriorating condition is headed. This perpetuates false hopes of recovery and can leave patients clamoring for more and more treatment — which the provider knows would only amplify and prolong suffering, and which would detract attention from patients with higher probabilities of improvement.

There are no simple solutions, but there are many pieces to the puzzle: We healthcare providers must set realistic expectations early and throughout hospitalization. Hospitals must provide more palliative care, social work and other supportive services for patients and families. More and better public health messaging must combat medical misinformation. Medical systems and healthcare workers need more resources, more security, more public belief that we are all on the same side against a common viral enemy.

And to my colleagues who have been on the front lines: I am with you. If you need to step away, we understand and we thank you for everything you’ve done to carry us through this pandemic. Those of you who can come to work again tomorrow, please do, because we need you — not only to fight the virus, but also to uphold the principle that we share to do no harm.

Venktesh Ramnath is medical director of critical care and telemedicine outreach at UC San Diego Health.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

Intel’s $20 Billion Ohio Chip Hub Will Be World’s Largest


Ian King
Fri, January 21, 2022

(Bloomberg) -- Intel Corp. plans to spend $20 billion on a chipmaking hub on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, which the company expects to grow to be the world’s biggest semiconductor-manufacturing site.

The chipmaker will begin construction of two fabrication plants on a 1,000-acre site in the town of New Albany, which it expects to be operational by 2025, Intel said Friday. The plan will rely on the most advanced technologies and result in an increased American share of the global chip supply chain, the company said.

The project will be the largest single private-sector company investment ever in Ohio, according to the governor, and will generate more than 20,000 jobs in the state, including 3,000 direct Intel positions earning an average of $135,000 a year, plus benefits.

For Intel, the move is a step toward regaining its manufacturing prowess, something the long-dominant processor maker has lost in recent years. Intel shares rose 1.9% in New York on Friday morning.

Intel Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger has been vocal about the need to build more chip factories in the U.S. and Europe, areas where manufacturing of the vital electronic components has declined precipitously. He’s argued that a rebalancing of production is needed to reverse the industry’s increasing concentration in East Asia.

Gelsinger has pointed to the pandemic-induced supply-chain crunch and increasing geopolitical tension between China and the U.S. as evidence that Western governments need to find cash to persuade chipmakers to relocate.

Intel is committing to building in Ohio using its own funds and hoping that the U.S. federal government will deliver on planned resources aimed at supporting an expansion of semiconductor manufacturing, Gelsinger said in an interview. Congress is currently considering funding of the CHIPs Act, a proposal to offer about $50 billion in incentives to companies willing to locate chip production in the U.S.

“We are putting our chips on the table,” he said. A build-out of the new Ohio location “will go bigger and faster with the support of the CHIPs Act.”

The Biden administration and Congress have struggled for more than a year to ease a semiconductor shortage gripping a wide range of U.S. industries, with few tangible results for those efforts. Even as he’s taken a hit for all the broader supply-chain troubles across the economy, President Joe Biden has been slow to press for passage of legislation called the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, which includes CHIPs. But he and other officials, including Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, have emphasized the overall need to boost domestic output.

“I want other cities and states to be able to make announcements like the one being made here today,” Biden said Friday at the White House, with Gelsinger by his side. “And that’s why I want to see Congress pass this bill right away and get it to my desk.”

Gelsinger said Intel chose the location from among 30 to 40 prospective sites. The state was competitive in the incentives and other support it’s willing to offer, he said. The availability of potential employees from local universities, military veterans and the relatively cheap cost of labor at a time of wage inflation were also factors, he said. State officials haven’t disclosed the incentives offered to Intel to land the project.

Adding Ohio to its list of locations -- an area not traditionally an area associated with the technology industry -- supports the greater geographical diversity that Gelsinger has championed. Intel is also looking at sites in Germany, Italy and France for new factories, test and assembly plants, and research and design centers, Bloomberg has reported.

Putting some of Intel’s billions of dollars in capital expenditure to work in a new location for the company -- it currently has plants in Oregon, Arizona and New Mexico -- may help bolster Gelsinger’s appeal for taxpayer money. That in turn will help cushion some of the drag on profitability caused by his ambitious plans to muscle in on the business of outsourced chipmaking, an area dominated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Samsung Electronics Co. Gelsinger has called his approach the “IDM 2.0” strategy, building on Intel’s integrated device manufacturing model.

This year Intel’s CEO has budgeted a record amount of spending on new factories and equipment. But, highlighting the massive and growing cost of state-of-the-art chipmaking, TSMC and Samsung are planning to raise the stakes even higher.

TSMC has set aside more than $40 billion for capital expenditures this year. That compares with Intel’s plan to spend up to $28 billion. South Korea’s Samsung will likely announce its plans on Jan. 27 in its earnings release. Analysts, on average, predict a company wide budget of about $36 billion.

“We continue to view Intel’s investment in U.S. production as a costly but necessary part of their IDM 2.0 strategy,” Wells Fargo & Co. analyst Aaron Rakers said in a note to clients. “We expect investors to be focused on the gross margin implications of what appears to be a significantly increasing capital intensity at Intel over the coming years.”

Intel’s gross margin, the percentage of sales remaining after deducting the cost of production, has narrowed to well below the 60% level that it had delivered for years, an indication of its former dominance of the industry. Gelsinger has said that’s because the company is in “investment mode” and he predicted that the indicator would expand again when the chipmaker returns to technology leadership.

VMware Staff Blast Hire of AWS Manager Who Faced Probe



Joe Williams
Thu, January 20, 2022

(Bloomberg) -- VMware Inc. employees are sharply criticizing the company’s decision to hire a former Amazon Web Services executive who was subject to an internal investigation over alleged discriminatory comments.

VMware told staff on Tuesday that Joshua Burgin, a former general manager at Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud unit, would join as a senior leader in the Palo Alto, California-based company’s developer and application platform division, known internally as DAP. He is slated to report to general manager Ajay Patel.

“A diverse candidate slate was met while conducting a thorough and rigorous interview process for this position,” Patel wrote in an internal announcement to employees. “The process included internal and external candidates, including multiple women who were targeted in the search for this role and part of the interview process.”

Burgin worked at AWS for more than seven years before departing in December. In 2019, he faced an internal investigation over alleged discriminatory comments made to a Black female employee. The inquiry led to a recommendation that Burgin be fired, the news site Protocol reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Amazon told the news outlet it “conducted a thorough investigation” into the allegations and “took what we believe was the appropriate corrective action.” Burgin remained at the company after the inquiry.

The announcement of Burgin’s hire at VMware spurred an immediate blowback from employees, who questioned why the software company would choose to extend an offer to an individual who had been subject to such an investigation in an earlier role, according to screenshots of companywide chat messages viewed by Bloomberg.

“It is insulting that he is hired despite our claim to want to improve DE&I,” an employee wrote, referring to diversity, equality and inclusion efforts. “It is insulting that he would be presented to us as someone who has a commitment to these initiatives as if we might not find out.”

In statement, a VMware spokesperson said the company “cannot comment specifically about Joshua’s prior experience at AWS.”

“We conducted due diligence that included extensive interviews with former colleagues, as we do with new senior-level hires. Through this process, it became apparent that Joshua treats everyone with respect and has a strong, demonstrated commitment to building inclusive and well-represented teams,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.

Burgin couldn’t be reach for comment. VMware spun off Nov. 1 as an independent company from Dell Technologies Inc.

The staff pushback was so severe to the hiring announcement that VMware held an all-hands call Thursday to address the complaints, said people familiar with the incident, who asked not to be identified talking about internal company discussions. Employees weren’t allowed to ask questions verbally on the call, which lasted about an hour. Instead, VMware required that questions be submitted in writing. Following that discussion, a second, unpublicized, call was held that eventually grew to roughly 80 employees as workers shared the link with one another, the people said.

On the first call, Patel acknowledged the AWS investigation, but told employees he wasn’t able to discuss specifics due to legal reasons, the people said. Patel also told employees that VMware was unaware of the allegations against Burgin when it first offered him the job. Once it was brought to the company’s attention, VMware halted the offer, conducted additional background checks and held conversations with several “character witnesses,” including “at least four women,” the people said.

Patel urged employees to give Burgin a chance, stressing his strong commitment to diversity and inclusion issues. Executives, including Patel and vice president Craig McLuckie, also said they would “stake their reputation” on the hire, according to the people.

“I understand that there will be a bias to expect the worst and am not going to ask you to take what we say at face value,” McLuckie wrote in a companywide chat responding to employees. “At the end of a very extensive process we feel he is the right person to lead the team.”

However, Patel also told employees that should the company decide to continue to move forward with Burgin’s hire, he would release in 10 days protocols to address employee concerns, one of the people said.

That didn’t satisfy employees, who continued to vent about the hiring decision.

“The repeat statement of ‘We need to give him a chance and let the process work’ is discouraging,” another employee wrote in the companywide chat. “I don’t know if Joshua will work out or not. But I now feel very strongly that our current leadership has failed us.”

LGBTQ dating ban at BYU probed in federal investigation




 Lorenzo Larios, left, and Danny Niemann chant "gay rights" as they join a student protest outside the student center at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah on March 4, 2020. The U.S. Department of Education has opened a civil-rights investigation into how LGBTQ students are disciplined at Brigham Young University, a private religious school. The complaint under investigation came after the school said it would still enforce a ban on same-sex dating even after that section was removed from the written version of the school's honor code, the Salt Lake Tribune reported. 

(Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune via AP, File)More


Thu, January 20, 2022, 

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — The U.S. Department of Education has opened a civil-rights investigation into how LGBTQ students are disciplined at Brigham Young University, a private religious school.

The complaint under investigation came after the school said it would still enforce a ban on same-sex dating even after that section was removed from the written version of the school's honor code, the Salt Lake Tribune reported. Students can be punished for holding hands or kissing someone of the same sex, harsher discipline than that faced by heterosexual couples at the school operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

BYU removed its written ban on “homosexual behavior,” in early 2020, prompting students to publicly come out as members of the LGBTQ community. But the school clarified a few weeks later that same-sex dating is still prohibited, even if it's no longer expressly written in the honor code. It also bans things such as alcohol consumption, beards and piercings.

Students protested the apparent reversal, saying they felt tricked into coming out. The federal investigation from the department's Office for Civil Rights started late last year under Title IX, the law that protects against discrimination on the basis of sex in schools.

A university spokeswoman acknowledged the investigation but said in a statement that BYU is within its rights to enforce the church’s policies against same-sex relationships and does not anticipate any further action.

“BYU is exempt from application of Title IX rules that conflict with the religious tenets of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” Carri Jenkins said in a statement.

The church has softened its approach in recent years but maintains doctrinal opposition to same-sex marriage and sex outside of marriage.

A Department of Education spokesperson confirmed an investigation was opened in October, but declined to comment further. As a private religious school, BYU does have religious exemptions from Title IX related to sexuality and gender expression.

Federal scrutiny like this is rare at church-owned schools, and typically happens only in places where there are believed to be potential systemic or serious issues, said Michael Austin, a BYU graduate and vice president at the University of Evansville, a private Methodist school in Indiana.


 A protester joins several hundred students gathered near The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints church headquarters on March 6, 2020, in Salt Lake City, to show their displeasure with a letter that week that clarified that "same-sex romantic behavior" is not allowed on campus at BYU. The U.S. Department of Education has opened a civil-rights investigation into how LGBTQ students are disciplined at Brigham Young University, a private religious school. The complaint under investigation came after the school said it would still enforce a ban on same-sex dating even after that section was removed from the written version of the school's honor code, the Salt Lake Tribune reported. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)

“It’s really significant that investigators are stepping in now,” he told the newspaper. The new investigation appears to be about whether those exemptions allow faith-based discipline for LGBTQ students even if the behavior is not directly related to education or expressly prohibited in its written honor code.

The school’s president argued those exemptions do apply, and everyone who attends or works at BYU agrees to follow the honor code and “‘voluntarily commit to conduct their lives in accordance with the principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ,’” according to a letter Kevin Worthen wrote to the Department of Education in November 2021.

In a response obtained by the Tribune, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights affirmed the school does have some religious exemptions but the department had to investigate whether the complaint it received falls under those exemptions.

LGBTQ rights have been a major issue in recent years at the school located in Provo, Utah. A lawsuit filed by several students last year alleges discrimination, with one recent graduate who is a lesbian alleging she lost her job at the school because she didn’t look “feminine enough” to her boss.

The institution has also banned protests near its large letter “Y” posted on a mountainside after protesters lit the letter with rainbow colors. Last fall, a top-ranking church leader publicly criticized faculty members and students who challenge the faith’s teachings on same-sex marriage.