Thailand’s festival honoring rivers also pollutes them

By TASSANEE VEJPONGSAyesterday

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A Thai family places krathongs, small boats made of corn and decorated with banana leaves and flowers, into a Ong Ang canal during Loy Krathong festival in Bangkok, Thailand, Friday, Nov. 19, 2021. Thais believe that the candle-lit boats launched during the charming and popular Loy Krathong festival can carry the year's misfortunes away with them, but workers must clean up the waterways afterward to keep them from getting clogged and polluted. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)


BANGKOK (AP) — Thais flocked to rivers and lakes on Friday evening to release small floats adorned with flowers and candles in an annual festival honoring the goddess of water, with thousands of the tiny boats ending up clogging and polluting the country’s waterways.

Within hours, workers began trawling the rivers to fish out the offerings, as paying tribute to the divinity is increasingly proving to be ecologically hazardous.

The Loy Krathong festival allows believers to symbolically float their misfortunes away on “krathongs” and start another year of life with a clean slate. The festival is celebrated on the night of the full moon of the 12th lunar month, which traditionally marks the end of the rainy season.

Thon Thamrongnawasawat, a leading Thai marine biologist, said getting people to stop using harmful materials such as polystyrene foam — Styrofoam — for their floats remains the priority because they cause the most damage to the water and aquatic life. The number of endangered sea creatures found dead ashore, which he believes stems from the problem of ocean trash in Thailand, doubled from 2017 to 2020.

Activists have noted a change in people’s behavior over decades, pointing to rising awareness of the damage krathongs cause. The total number of krathongs collected in Bangkok has fallen from over 900,000 in 2012 to just over 490,000 last year, and there has been an even sharper reduction in the number of floats made of Styrofoam, from 131,000 to under 18,000 over the same period.

Even so, some conservationists advocate a more radical solution.

“We need to revolutionize the practice, allowing the ecosystem of the waterways to be restored,” said Tara Buakamsri, Thailand country director for the environmental group Greenpeace. “We should not release any floats, because even if they are made from natural materials, the amount of them exceeds what rivers can naturally deal with.”

“We depend on clean water for our livelihood and the aim of Loy Krathong should be to protect and rejuvenate our rivers without putting anything in them.”

Sales of materials for krathongs have been slow this year due to the pandemic, said Nopparat Tangtonwong, a vendor at Pak Klong market, famous for selling flowers.

“COVID-19 causes the economy to be sluggish, so people prefer saving their money and floating online instead,” she said.

At the same time, children are uninterested in banana-leaf floats, the main natural alternative to Styrofoam, she said. “They prefer fancy floats made of ice-cream cones and bread because they can feed the fish at the same time.”

Such an approach is not helpful, said Wijarn Simachaya, president of Thailand Environment Institute. “If you float somewhere with no fish, those floats will cause pollution in the water. It is difficult to collect them, too, as the bread absorbs the water and sinks into the river. ”

“In addition, the sellers usually put chemical colors in those floats, which is harmful to the water,” he said.

Banana leaves are the best krathong material because they do not decompose too quickly, and once collected, can be used for making fertilizer, Wijarn said.

“Doing a virtual Loy Krathong celebration is another good solution to avoid environmental damage, especially during the COVID-19 outbreak, but I don’t think it can satisfy people’s lifestyle, as they still want to enjoy the festival,” he said.

Late Friday night after people floated their cares away, municipal workers come out to scoop up a sea of floats that drifted along canals and down the Chao Phraya River before they decomposed and contaminated the water.

Dozens of small boats traveled along the river, each carrying about half a dozen people with hand-held nets. The boats then took their catch to a moored mothership, where it was dumped into a large shredding machine, compacted and hauled away by garbage trucks for landfill in a waste dump.

“We hope that this year the numbers of krathongs made with Styrofoam will continue to decrease and will be less than last year. And we will finish our cleanup operation before 5 o’clock in the morning,” said Chatree Wattanakhajorn, a top Bangkok official.

 

Worker collect small floating krathong from Chao Phraya River during Loy Krathong festival in Bangkok, Thailand, Friday, Nov. 19, 2021. As Thais flocked to waterways Friday to release small floats adorned with flowers and candles in an annual festival honoring the goddess of rivers, they also pile trash that clogs drains and canals and pollutes the country's rivers. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

A Thai woman prays before floating a krathong, a small boat made of corn and decorated with banana leaves and flowers, into a Ong Ang canal during Loy Krathong festival in Bangkok, Thailand, Friday, Nov. 19, 2021. Thais believe that the candle-lit boats launched during the charming and popular Loy Krathong festival can carry the year's misfortunes away with them, but workers must clean up the waterways afterward to keep them from getting clogged and polluted. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

Catholic Church finally offers apology

The Roman Catholic Church is responding to renewed criticisms after it was revealed that the church had managed to avoid many commitments to pay residential school survivors as part of the 2005 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA).

That agreement, in which the federal government offered a formal apology and compensation to residential school survivors, also obligated the Catholic Church to pay survivors $29 million and offer another $25 million as “in-kind” donations.

However, a 2015 investigation by CBC and the Globe and Mail unearthed court documents that demonstrated how the church managed to reduce its payment to only $1.2 million. It was able to get out of fundraising obligations after only raising $4 million out of the pledged $25 million.

The church said it had nonetheless donated $25 million in “in-kind” donations, which included addiction treatment and scholarships, but also questionable items such as Bible study groups and routine travel expenses to send clergy to remote communities.

The Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations and others are calling for a criminal investigation. Part of the concern is over the fact that the Catholic Church in Canada does not have one centralized body. Thus, the legal obligations from the IRSSA were against a corporation formed to represent the Catholic Church in the legal proceedings.

That corporation was dissolved after 2015, which means no central Catholic entity remains that is responsible for reparations to residential school survivors. The Anglican, Presbyterian and United churches, also parties to the IRSSA, respected their financial obligations – but the Catholic Church ran most of Canada’s residential schools.

All of this was settled behind the scenes in a 2015 court case, in which federal government officials alleged that the church had spent more than $6.4 million of the fund meant for survivors on legal and administrative fees and other expenses.

The documents were only unearthed in early October after CBC News and the Globe and Mail won a judicial order to expose the contents of that court case. A further Globe and Mail investigation revealed that the Catholic Church across Canada had combined assets of $4.1 billion, while receiving yearly donations of $886 million, making it the largest charity in the country.

Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, director of the University of British Columbia’s Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre, told CBC News that the documents showed that the Catholic Church had betrayed survivors, but also that the federal government and courts allowed them to get away with it.

“From the get-go, this was not something survivors sat in the room and agreed to. Survivors were outside of this,” she said. Turpel-Lafond noted that the Canadian government could re-open the court case.

After calls to boycott Catholic mass, a petition to end the church’s tax-exempt status, calls by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for the Catholic Church to take responsibility, and churches burned down after the unearthing of mass graveyards on the grounds of former residential schools, Catholic bishops from across the country finally issued a public apology to residential school survivors on September 24.

“We, the Catholic Bishops of Canada, gathered in Plenary this week, take this opportunity to affirm to you, the Indigenous Peoples of this land, that we acknowledge the suffering experienced in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools,” the statement on behalf of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) read.

“Along with those Catholic entities which were directly involved in the operation of the schools, and which have already offered their own heartfelt apologies, we, the Catholic Bishops of Canada, express our profound remorse and apologize unequivocally.”

The CCCB also pledged a renewed fundraising effort to raise $30 million over five years, encouraging local parishes to participate. They pledged that funding would be determined locally, in consultation with Indigenous communities in each region.

Assembly of First Nations National Chief RoseAnne Archibald said in a statement that she welcomed the apology. “However, I am disappointed that the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops did not take the long overdue step of passing a motion/resolution to formally invite the Pope to Canada to offer his apology to First Nations and Indigenous survivors and intergenerational trauma survivors here on Turtle Island,” Archibald added.

The CCCB told the Nation that the bishops recently committed to engage with the Pope on a potential visit to Canada and highlighted that a delegation of Indigenous leaders would be granted a papal audience from December 17-20 at the Vatican.

“While we cannot speak for the Holy Father, we are confident in his understanding of the ongoing and historical trauma caused by residential schools, as well as his commitment to playing a constructive role in the healing and reconciliation journey,” the CCCB said in a statement.

The bishops’ organization said that it believed that the Catholic parties to the IRSSA had met their obligations, but that they recognized there was “widespread disappointment” with the fundraising campaign, and that they were confident their renewed fundraising pledge would be successful in “achieving its financial goal and in delivering meaningful contributions to Indigenous communities and residential school survivors.”

The Pope had said in June that he was pained by the discovery of children’s remains at residential schools but did not offer an apology at the time, despite offering similar apologies for the church’s role in colonialism and sins committed in Bolivia against Indigenous communities there.

Benjamin Powless, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Nation

'The city almost feels dead': Afghanistan's only music school completes its exit


ZOHRA FEMALE ORCHESTRA (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images file)

Yuliya Talmazan and Mushtaq Yusufzai
Thu, November 18, 2021
The last two of more than 270 students, faculty and staff from Afghanistan’s only music school have left the country in the wake of the Taliban takeover, the institution's founder said on Thursday.

“It was extremely emotional,” the Afghanistan National Institute of Music’s founder and director Ahmad Sarmast said of students he greeted at the airport in Doha on Tuesday. “They just couldn’t stop crying and I was crying together with them.”

More than 100 students and faculty were able to escape to the Qatari capital in October, but Sarmast, 59, and others had been working to evacuate the remaining 200 students and staff who were missing some paperwork.

Ahmad Sarmast hugs Zohra and Farida, both aged 13, as they arrived in Doha, Qatar. (Omar Nashat)

“I am very relieved,” he told NBC News over the the telephone. “It’s good to see them happy, and also hopeful about the future.”

The 272 evacuees, including the all-female Zohra orchestra, will continue on to Portugal next, where they were granted asylum, the school’s officials said in a statement. They plan to resume the school’s activities there.

Sarmast’s students and faculty are the lucky ones.

Thousands of Afghans have been trying to flee the country since the United States and its allies withdrew their forces in August, seeking to escape repression, violence and a crumbling economy. But musicians face an especially difficult time under the austere fighters, whose interpretation of Islam has led them to outlaw music altogether in the past.

While the departures could be lifesaving for the students and faculty themselves, they are a blow to a decadeslong international effort to foster the best and brightest of the country’s musicians.

Since the school was founded in 2010, its male and female students have performed around the world — a symbol of progress in modern Afghanistan.

After the invasion in 2001 and the previous Taliban government’s departure, music thrived in Kabul and other parts of the country.

But the Taliban’s return in August has thrown a blanket of silence over much of the country.

Although music has not been formally banned, people in capital Kabul are cautious: Cafés and restaurants only play music inside, and even then — quietly. Less music is played on radio and TV. Wedding halls have stopped playing live music altogether, according to several wedding hall owners who spoke to NBC News.

“When I speak with my friends and family in Kabul, they say that music is very rare,” said Arson Fahim, a pianist who escaped the Afghan capital shortly before the Taliban takeover. “They say that without music, the city almost feels dead.”

While Afghanistan has a rich, centurieslong music tradition, and the Quran does not explicitly prohibit music or make it “un-Islamic,” the Taliban are using their extremist interpretation of Islam to justify erasing history and identity, of which music is a mainstay, historian Mejgan Massoumi at Stanford University said.

“It will be devastating for the Afghan people to attempt to silence voices and souls,” Massoumi said.

But Taliban commanders have told NBC News that listening to music is against Islamic law. While they have not issued an overarching ban on all music since their takeover in August, they have raised awareness about the “evils of music,” Taliban spokesman Bilal Karimi said.

When they were first in power between 1996 and 2001, the Taliban banned all music outright. But this time around, trying to project a more moderate image, the group has stayed away from issuing a sweeping ban.

Despite promises of moderation, the Taliban have unleashed a brutal crackdown since returning to power as they try to consolidate control over the fractious country and force Afghans to adhere to their strict interpretation of Islam.

That has left many Afghan musicians paralyzed with fear — uncertain about whether they will ever be able to play music again.

The United Nations special rapporteur on cultural rights, Karima Bennoune, said she has received reports of attacks on musicians in Afghanistan, destruction of musical instruments, closure of institutions associated with music and musicians forced to flee, making her “gravely concerned” about the safety of Afghan musicians.

Pianist Arson Fahim, 21, left Kabul for the U.S. just 2 weeks before the Taliban took over the Afghan capital to study music in the U.S. (Isabela Balena )

“Musicians are terrified,” said Katherine Butler Schofield, senior lecturer in South Asian music and history at U.K.’s King’s College London. “They are in hiding. They have buried and destroyed their instruments. They have silenced themselves.”

Many have tried to leave the country, including during the chaotic evacuation of Western forces at the end of August. Until this week, the students and staff of Afghanistan’s most prominent music school were among them.

Sarmast said that his school’s activities were suspended as the Taliban took over the country. He said his students and faculty had targets on their backs because they promoted coeducation, with boys and girls not only learning music, but touring together.

We were “on the forefront of promoting democratic values through music,” he said.

Sarmast said the Taliban have given him reassurances that the school premises will be safe — until further notice from their senior leadership. But no students or staff have been allowed to enter, he added, and one of the school campuses has been turned into a military barrack.

Fahim, a pianist who graduated from the school earlier this year, left for the U.S. just two weeks before Kabul fell to the Taliban to study at Massachusetts’ Longy School of Music of Bard College.

AFGHANISTAN-YOUTH-TALIBAN-CONFLICT-TALKS

 (Wakil Kohsar / AFP via Getty Images file)

He said he considers himself enormously lucky, but he has been riddled with worry about his former colleagues in Kabul and the school that he said changed his life.

“It was everything to me. It was like home,” Fahim, 21, said from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He said he never thought the school, along with hundreds of Afghan musicians, could be silenced.

“Can you imagine not being able to do what you love, having to hide and being in danger because of something as beautiful as music?” Fahim said.

Sarmast said 13 years of his life’s painstaking work, building and promoting his school, had been ripped away when the Taliban marched into Kabul in August.

“Unexpectedly, all that is gone,” he said.

While he is now concentrating on trying to rebuild the school in Portugal, he still hopes to return to Kabul one day to resume his work there — as naive as it may sound, he admitted.

“If my safety is assured and I get the freedom to run a music school, I am going back to Afghanistan,” Sarmast said. “I do have hope.”

Could oral antiviral pills be a game-changer for COVID-19? An infectious disease physician explains why these options are badly needed


Patrick Jackson, Assistant Professor of Infectious Diseases, University of Virginia
Fri, November 19, 2021

If authorized, molnupiravir could be a key oral treatment to help keep COVID-19 patients out of the hospital. Plyushkin/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Nearly two years into the pandemic, it has become starkly clear that we need better treatments for COVID-19 for people in the earlier stages of disease.

Two new antiviral drugs could soon be the first effective oral treatments for COVID-19 to help keep people out of the hospital. An advisory committee to the Food and Drug Administration plans to review the data supporting molnupiravir – a pill made by Merck and partner Ridgeback Therapeutics – on Nov. 30, 2021.

And in early November, Pfizer released preliminary results for its antiviral pill, Paxlovid, another potentially promising tool for COVID-19 treatment. On Nov. 16, Pfizer formally requested emergency use authorization of the oral pill from the FDA.


If these drugs get authorized in the coming weeks, they could be an important new treatment option for people with COVID-19, especially for those at high risk in the early stages of infection. The ability to treat COVID-19 with a pill rather than an injection or infusion means more people can be treated faster.

As an infectious diseases physician and scientist at the University of Virginia, I have helped care for hundreds of people with COVID-19. I’ve also helped conduct clinical trials to find new treatments. Molnupiravir and Paxlovid would fill a need that hasn’t been met by other COVID-19 drugs, which are either difficult to administer or only suitable for patients in the hospital.

Here’s a preview of why these new antiviral drugs are important, how they work and how they could be used.

Filling a gap in treatment

Researchers have so far found just a few drugs that are effective for the treatment of COVID-19. Until now, only antiviral monoclonal antibodies could be used to treat patients who are not hospitalized. However, these antibody drugs – which work by blocking the virus from entering cells – have to be given in a monitored setting like a doctor’s office.

And many patients who could benefit from monoclonal antibodies don’t have access because administration sites aren’t located nearby. They are also not affordable for many people outside the U.S. In the U.S., monoclonal antibodies are free to patients under emergency use authorization but could ultimately become far more expensive if and when they receive full approval by the FDA.

Early data suggests that both molnupiravir and Paxlovid are effective new drugs that patients can take at home to prevent complications of COVID-19 – which could be particularly beneficial for those at high risk of severe disease. Once authorized, these pills will allow patients to be treated earlier in the course of infection, at the point when antiviral drugs are more effective. By stopping the virus from growing in the body early on, the drugs can prevent the inflammation that causes severe COVID-19.

Although oral antiviral pills could be a major step forward in treating COVID-19, vaccines still offer the best protection from the virus. Prostock-Studio/iStock via Getty Images Plus

How molnupiravir and Paxlovid work

Molnupiravir works by causing the virus to record inaccurate genetic information. SARS-CoV-2 stores its instructions for making new viruses in a strand of RNA. Inside the cell, the virus makes copies of the RNA and then continues to make duplicates of those copies. When a patient takes molnupiravir, the drug masquerades as one of the key molecules in RNA and gets incorporated into the strands that the virus produces. When an RNA strand containing molnupiravir gets copied in turn, the virus makes errors in the copy. Over multiple rounds of copying, molnupiravir forces more and more mistakes until the virus is no longer able to function – a phenomenon in virology called “error catastrophe.”

Paxlovid uses a different mechanism to prevent the virus from replicating. SARS-CoV-2 creates proteins that are needed to build new viruses as one long string, called a polyprotein. But the polyproteins have to be chopped into smaller parts by a viral enzyme called a protease in order to become active. Paxlovid blocks the virus’s protease from doing this job, thereby preventing the virus from completing its life cycle.

How COVID-19 pills would be used

There are currently two primary forms of treatment for COVID-19 in the U.S.: antiviral and anti-inflammatory medications. Antiviral drugs stop the virus from growing in the body and are given within the first few days of symptoms to prevent severe disease. Anti-inflammatory drugs moderate the immune response and are used to help sicker patients who need oxygen.

Molnupiravir and Paxlovid were studied in separate clinical trials with similar designs. In both studies, the drugs were tested in outpatients with risk factors for severe COVID-19 who were at an early stage in their illness. Both studies also looked at how likely patients were to either die or be hospitalized. However, neither study has yet been peer-reviewed.

Molnupiravir reduced the risk of death or hospitalization by about 50% in non-hospitalized adult patients with mild to moderate COVID-19 when treated within five days of symptom onset. Paxlovid reduced this risk by about 89% for patients treated within three days of symptoms and 85% for patients treated within five days. Importantly, no patients who took either drug died in the studies. Because the drugs were not studied head to head, it’s difficult to say whether one will be better than the other in the real world. In early November, Britain became the first country to approve molnupiravir for use.

Molnupiravir did not help hospitalized patients recover faster from COVID-19. It is likely that Paxlovid would also not be useful at the point of hospitalization. Most patients who are in the hospital with COVID-19 are sick because of unregulated inflammation and not because the virus is still replicating in their bodies.

If and when these drugs get authorized in the U.S., they will probably be used for the same higher-risk patients who are eligible for monoclonal antibodies today. Monoclonal antibodies may still be used, though, for pregnant people, people on dialysis and some immune-compromised patients.

The U.S. has already purchased millions of doses of both molnupiravir and Paxlovid in anticipation of their authorization. However, the pills will only be useful if people also have access to cheap, fast and accurate COVID-19 tests, which are currently in short supply. If COVID-19 is diagnosed too late, patients will already be outside the window of time when antiviral drugs can be helpful.

Other antiviral drugs are in development, including an oral form of the first COVID-19 drug, remdesivir and long acting injectable monoclonal antibodies.

Researchers are also working on repurposing existing drugs to treat COVID. Inhaled steroids like budesonide and an antidepressant called fluvoxamine are particularly promising.

While it’s exciting to see new treatments for COVID-19, prevention is still the best strategy. The COVID-19 vaccines continue to be the most effective tool for helping to end the pandemic.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Patrick Jackson, University of Virginia.

Read more:

What is herd immunity? A public health expert and a medical laboratory scientist explain


Why vaccine doses differ for babies, kids, teens and adults – an immunologist explains how your immune system changes as you mature

Patrick Jackson receives funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Ivy Foundation. He is affiliated with Indivisible Charlottesville.

Archeologists dug up MOCAD site: Here's what they found



Alanna Williams, Detroit Free Press
Thu, November 18, 2021,

Pieces of a clay pot. An old medicine bottle.

These random household items, plucked from the grounds of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) by Wayne State history sleuths, will be transformed into works of art.

MOCAD partnered with Wayne State University’s Anthropology Department to conduct an excavation on the museum’s grounds as part of an ongoing art exhibit entitled "All Monsters" by Chicago native Jan Tichy.

The exhibit is located in Mike Kelley's "Mobile Homestead," a full-scale replica of Kelley's 1950s ranch-style home in Detroit. Kelley, who died in 2012, worked with a variety of media and is considered to be one of Detroit's most influential artists. He asked that the ground floor rooms of the home be used as a community gallery and gathering space.

Crystal Palmer, youth program coordinator for MOCAD, said the exhibit is inspired by Kelley's band, Destroy All Monsters, and the fact that "Mobile Homestead" explored themes similar to Tichy’s pieces.

“So he did this whole series called 'Educational Complex,' where he was building models, very, very precise models of schools that he had been to since elementary all the way to his college career because the sites were very formative for his art, career, and knowledge,” Palmer said. “Yet it was also a place where he experienced all forms of trauma. So he's kind of weaving these, his own personal narratives into these buildings, these structures, and this is kind of like a branch off of that 'Educational Complex' body.”

Kelley's childhood memories were not the only traumas to take place on this land, however. The plot where "Mobile Homestead" sits is adjacent to the site of what was once a women’s prison and a place that housed homeless women and children, said Krysta Ryzewski, a professor of anthropology at WSU.

The professor said Tichy wanted to incorporate the land’s history into his piece.

“He thought that archaeology might be a really interesting way to connect with the art that's on display in his part of the homestead,” Ryzewski said. “So we thought it might be a way to dig underground and bring up the stories of this property and the people who used to live here and utilize the space and many of those people are not known to Detroit's history.”

The artifacts will be used by MOCAD’s Teen Council to create new pieces, but before that can happen, Ryzewski said, WSU’s Anthropology Department will document them.

By studying these findings, a new narrative of what took place on the land emerges, Ryzewski said.

“We are literally excavating other histories that have been rendered inaccessible because of the changes to the landscape and Detroit over time.”

Tichy’s "All Monsters" will be on display until Jan. 23.

For more information visit MOCAD’s official website.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Archeologists dig up Detroit museum site: Here's what they found

Rocket Lab's Electron booster splashes down in the Pacific Ocean



Aria Alamalhodaei
Wed, November 17, 2021

Rocket Lab’s reusability program advanced one more step on Wednesday night when the company recovered the booster from its Electron launcher for the third time.

The successful mission comes after a period of delays due to weather, but all went according to plan, with the “Love at First Insight” mission taking off at 8:39 p.m. EST from the company’s launch facility on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula. Separation occurred at around 8:41 p.m. EST with the first stage splashing down at around 9:24 p.m. EST, according to a tweet from Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck.

Rocket Lab has successfully recovered the first-stage booster twice in its history — the only other company besides SpaceX to achieve reusability. The first successful recovery took place November 2020 and then again in May 2021, though that latter mission resulted in the destruction of the payload.

Like those flights, this booster made a splashdown via parachute. But the recovery included an additional element: The presence of a helicopter, which hovered near the splashdown area to track and observe the booster as it made its descent. While the helicopter didn’t actually do anything related to the recovery, its presence is significant, as it indicates that Rocket Lab is also a step closer to executing its ultimate reusability plan: using a parachute to slow the velocity of the booster and capturing it midair with a helicopter.

The Electron sent two BlackSky Earth geospatial imaging satellites to low Earth orbit, part of a rapid five-launch agreement on behalf of BlackSky between Rocket Lab and launch services provider Spaceflight Inc. These satellites were originally scheduled to go to LEO in August, part of a three-launch schedule that ended up being delayed due to a small resurgence of the coronavirus in New Zealand and subsequent lockdown measures.

The two BlackSky satellites will join seven others already in orbit, as the geospatial intelligence company aims to grow its constellation to 14 satellites by the end of this year. Earlier this year, two BlackSky satellites were lost due to a significant anomaly that occurred shortly after the Electron’s second stage ignited.

This mission marks Rocket Lab’s 22nd Electron launch and the fifth mission this year.

Rewatch the launch here:
youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-sVCWo_xpE

Spain faces its past in mass graves bill. Will it be enough?

SPANISH ANARCHISTS & REVOLUTIONARIES MASSACRED IN SPANISH CIVIL WAR

MANU FERNÁNDEZ and JOSEPH WILSON
Fri, November 19, 2021,

GUADALAJARA, Spain (AP) — Carnations in hand, 94-year-old Julio López del Campo has come decade after decade to mark the spot where he believes the body of his brother, Mariano, was tossed into a pit along with other victims of the brutal regime of Francisco Franco in Spain.

“They took him to the prison in Guadalajara and in 1940 he was shot,” Julio said at the site next to a cemetery chapel. “I have come here every year since. I bring carnations and leave a few. I will keep coming until my strength gives out.”

More than 70 years on, the mass grave in Guadalajara, a small city just east of Spain’s capital, Madrid, has finally been dug up, and 26 bodies were recovered. Julio now hopes that a genetic test will confirm that Mariano's remains are among them.


The Guadalajara exhumation was carried out by volunteer associations who, along with some of Spain’s regional authorities, have led the fight to recover the missing and return them a shred of the dignity they have been denied for over half a century.

Until now, there has been little or no help from Spain’s central authorities, and families have seen time running out as a generation quickly fades away. But now there is some hope.

A bill is working its way through parliament that Spain’s left-wing coalition government says will deliver on its pledge to respond to the plight of families. The bill aims to improve on a 2007 Law for Historical Memory which experts and activists agree fell way short of emptying the hundreds of still-untouched mass graves.

The bill faces hurdles on both sides in parliament. The minority government needs the backing of smaller left-wing parties who want it to go further. Meanwhile, right-wing parties are vowing to vote against it.

If it passes, the law will recognize the families of victims have the “right to the truth” and will make the central government responsible for the recovery and identification of the missing. To help do so, it establishes a national DNA bank as well as an office to support families.

Like tens of thousands of others, Mariano disappeared after returning home from fighting for Spain’s Second Republic that Franco's right-wing military uprising destroyed in the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War. He turned himself in to police and, despite promises that he would not be harmed, was never seen again. He was 23.

Only 19,000 bodies of an estimated 114,000 victims of Franco's regime during and after the war have been recovered in the four decades since the dictator’s death. Spain’s government calculates that it is likely only 20,000 bodies are still in a condition to be found.

The president of the association that carried out the exhumation in Guadalajara and others across Spain is skeptical that the new law will achieve justice.

“These are just words that won’t lead to acts,” Emilio Silva, the president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, told The Associated Press.

The bill "talks about the truth, but it focuses on the victims and says nothing about the executioners; it talks about justice, but does not force anyone to face trial; it talks about reparation, but is not going to give anything back to the families of the dictatorship’s victims,” said Silva, whose grandfather was also buried in a mass grave.

In the past two years, the government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, the leader of Spain’s Socialist Party, has dedicated 5 million euros ($5.6 million) to finance 300 exhumations of mass graves and it has budgeted another 5.5 million euros for more exhumations next year.

But for Silva, the law won’t stop what he calls the “clientele politics” that has plagued efforts to recover bodies, because it won’t oblige future governments to dedicate funds to exhumations. The previous government of the conservative Popular Party, which is currently leading the opposition, cut off all central funds for exhumations when in power from 2011-18.

The Popular Party has already warned that it would replace the new law once back in power because, in the words of lawmaker Macarena Montesinos, it “seeks to destroy our legacy of concord" that crossed ideological lines and made possible Spain's 1978 Constitution when democracy was restored.

One of the highlights of the bill is the creation of a new State Prosecutors’ Office for Human Rights and Democratic Memory. The government ministry that oversees the protection of Spain’s Democratic Memory said in an email that the office will “guarantee the right to investigate the human rights violations during the (Spanish Civil) War and Dictatorship.”

Experts, including the United Nation’s Committee on Enforced Disappearances, say that this new figure, however, will be hamstrung as long as Spain does not amend its 1977 Amnesty Law. That law freed thousands of political prisoners of Franco's regime but also prevented the prosecution of any politically motivated crime prior to that date.

The law was a critical part of Spain’s peaceful transition to democracy following Franco’s death in 1975. It is still defended by right-wing political parties and some center-left Socialists who want to preserve the initial foundation of Spain's parliamentary monarchy, but others see it as a bar to justice for the families of the victims.

This week, a group of small left-wing regionalist and separatist parties presented an amendment to the new bill that would overturn the Amnesty Law as well as strip Felipe VI of his title as Spain's King. They argue that the monarchy is also a vestige of the dictatorship since Felipe's father, Juan Carlos, was put back on the throne by an aging Franco.

The amendments have little chance of passing, but the Socialists and the junior member of their governing coalition felt pressured enough to tweak their own bill by adding language that they say will allow for the prosecution of war crimes or acts of genocide carried out by Franco's regime without reforming the Amnesty Law. Critics argue that won't be enough.

The sensitive negotiations in parliament point to the heart of a debate in Spain about the role of the monarchy, which for many is seen as another keystone of democracy's return in the late 1970s. Franco had hoped to maintain his regime by restoring Juan Carlos to the throne. Instead, the king provided support to the country's fragile moves toward democracy after Franco's death, never more so when he was key in defusing an attempted military coup by reactionaries in 1981.

Margalida Capellà, Professor of International Public Law at the University of the Balearic Islands and expert in historical memory, said that while the new law would be a big step forward, Spain won’t be able to have a reckoning with its past until Juan Carlos's son Felipe and its prime minister take an important symbolic step.

“Reparation won’t be complete until the Head of State and the Head of the Government ask for forgiveness,” Capellà said. “During the dictatorship its victims were of course not treated as such, but during democracy it has (also) taken a long time for them to earn that recognition and what has happened to their families has been a disaster. That is the original sin of Spain’s democracy.”

___ Joseph Wilson reported from Barcelona.

A volunteer works next to skull of a victim before his exhumation inside a mass grave at an excavation of A.R.M.H., Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory at the cemetery in Guadalajara, Spain, Friday, Oct. 8, 2021. For decades, family members of the tens of thousands victims of Francisco Franco's brutal regime in Spain have had little help from central authorities to recover their loved ones from the country's hundreds of mass graves. Some aid should finally be on its way as a bill makes its way through Spain's Parliament that the left-wing government promises will finally make the state responsible for the exhumation of the missing.

 (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

Monkey-brain study with link to China's military roils top European university





Thu, November 18, 2021
By Kirsty Needham and Stine Jacobsen

SYDNEY/COPENHAGEN (Reuters) -A Chinese professor at the University of Copenhagen conducted genetic research with the Chinese military without disclosing the connection, the university told Reuters, in the latest example of how China's pursuit of military-civilian technology is tapping into Western academia in the strategically sensitive area of biotechnology.

The professor, Guojie Zhang, is also employed by Shenzhen-based genomics giant BGI Group, which funds dozens of researchers at the university and has its European headquarters on the university's campus.

Zhang and a student he was supervising worked with a People's Liberation Army (PLA) laboratory on research exposing monkeys to extreme altitude to study their brains and develop new drugs to prevent brain damage – a priority the PLA has identified for Chinese troops operating on high plateau http://eng.mod.gov.cn/news/2021-02/09/content_4878887.htm borders.

Zhang co-published that paper https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6956719 with a PLA major general in January 2020. At the time the study was published, the university was "not familiar with the fact that the paper also included authors from Chinese military research institutions," Niels Kroer, head of its biology department, told Reuters in an email.

Zhang confirmed that he did not inform the university of the link because the university didn't require researchers to report co-authors on scientific papers to it, which the university confirmed. BGI said the study with the PLA lab "was not carried out for military purposes" and brain research is a critical area for understanding human diseases. China's government science academy said http://www.kiz.ac.cn/gre/gre7/gre73/201912/t20191223_5467586.html the study had national defence and civilian benefits on the Tibetan plateau.

Concerns about China's fusion of military and civilian technology, and about universities transferring sensitive technology to China that could help its military, have grown in the United States in recent years. Washington agreed https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/09/29/u-s-eu-trade-and-technology-council-inaugural-joint-statement last month to work with the European Union on the issue under a new joint technology and trade council. A U.S. Department of Defense report on China's military power this month flagged concern over Beijing using biotechnology to enhance its soldiers' performance.

The Danish incident, reported here for the first time, shows how China's pursuit of biotechnology with a military use has also become an issue for universities in Europe.

The European Commission says it is developing guidelines on "tackling foreign interference" at higher education institutions; a 2020 report https://leidenasiacentre.nl/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Towards-Sustainable-Europe-China-Collaboration-in-Higher-Education-and-Research.pdf from the Leiden Asia Centre, an independent group affiliated with Leiden University in the Netherlands, found at least five countries in Europe had concerns about the risks of research collaboration with China. Some universities, including Copenhagen, have long had close science ties to China.

Copenhagen university and two large Danish foundations who funded some of Zhang's work said they discovered China's military was involved only after one of the foundations saw it had been credited, incorrectly, with financing the monkey study. The work was funded by the Chinese government and military, the paper said.

The discovery came as Denmark's intelligence agency, PET, warned https://ufm.dk/en/publications/2021/files/er-din-forskning-i-fare-en.pdf 

Danish universities in May of the national security risks of being unwittingly involved in foreign military research, citing "a number of espionage activities and other foreign interference," and a student who co-authored research into 5G technology with an engineer from a Chinese military university. It declined to comment on specific cases.

The Chinese Academy of Science, where Zhang also has a genetics lab, said http://www.kiz.ac.cn/gre/gre7/gre73/201912/t20191223_5467586.html of the study at the time that brain damage and death caused by high altitude on the Tibetan plateau had severely hindered "national defence construction."

Denmark's Ministry of Higher Education and Science declined to comment on the altitude study, but said export control rules apply to some technology that can be used for both civilian and military purposes. The Danish Business Authority said most types of gene technology are not on its export control list.

The ministry said it had launched a broad review of the risks of international research cooperation, led by top university heads, to conclude at the start of next year.

The University of Copenhagen expects the review of "ethical and security policy limits" for collaboration will result in new rules for universities - and greater focus on the risks, its deputy director for research and innovation Kim Brinckmann told Reuters in an email.

"We are very proud to have Prof. Zhang ... as one of our very highly performing researchers," he said. The university did not respond to a question about how much funding BGI provides it.

China's foreign ministry said it urged Danish institutions to "abandon ideological prejudice and end groundless accusations and smears," and treat their research cooperation rationally "to accrue positive energy in the development of bilateral relations and practical cooperation."

ALTITUDE

Zhang and the head of the PLA laboratory for high-altitude research, Major General Yuqi Gao, designed the study, which also lists BGI founders Wang Jian and Yang Huanming as co-authors. BGI's other joint research with Gao has involved soldiers in Tibet and Xinjiang, Reuters reported in January.

That report was cited by two U.S. senators who called in September for BGI to be sanctioned by the United States as a military-linked company. Gao's research has directly improved the ability of China's rapid-advance plateau troops to carry out training and combat missions, according to the Chinese military's official news service http://www.81.cn/zghjy/2015-12/11/content_6811003.htm

China's Academy of Military Medical Sciences launched a four-year plan in 2012 for troops to acclimatise and adapt to the low-oxygen Tibetan plateau. That plan said BGI was working with Gao's lab to test soldiers arriving in Tibet and identify genes linked to altitude sickness, which does not affect Tibetans. It said preventing altitude sickness helped to "manage border areas where ethnic minorities gather," and had far-reaching economic and political significance.

BGI told Reuters the research with the military university aimed to understand the health risk for all people travelling to and working at high altitude.

"The project using BGI's technology studied the changes of the pathophysiology and genomics of the human body at very high altitudes," a BGI spokesman said. "In China, many military institutions ... carry out both civilian and military research," he added.

Gao wrote https://mmrjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40779-018-0150-0#author-information in 2018 that high altitude disease "is the main reason for reduced combat effectiveness and health damage of soldiers at high altitudes and influences the results of war on the highland plateau," and noted that drugs could be used in an emergency for the rapid deployment of soldiers.

China's military has recently increased http://www.mod.gov.cn/v/2021-11/01/content_4898183.htm live fire drills in Tibet after border clashes with India.

DEEP TIES

The University of Copenhagen has one of Europe's oldest genetics institutes, and it is BGI's biggest international research partner by count of science papers.

The ties run deep. Two former BGI chief executives, BGI's chairman, and the founder of its animal cloning programme previously studied or worked at Copenhagen. The university hosts more than two dozen BGI-funded researchers undertaking science and health doctorates.

Biology head Kroer told Reuters the university had been unaware of "claims that BGI has connections with the PLA." The university said that other than Zhang's salary as a professor, no Danish money was spent on the study, which animal rights activists have argued https://actionforprimates.org/public/afp_take_action_2020.php subjected the animals to suffering and distress.

The student Zhang worked with was in China and employed by BGI, the university said. Zhang's research team was not involved in the animal experiments performed in China, but did analyse the genomic data generated from the experiments, it added.

The Lundbeck Foundation, which primarily funds brain research and was incorrectly listed as a funder of the monkey brain study, "has not supported this area of his research, nor do we have any knowledge about it," a spokesman said of the monkey brain project. Lundbeck said Zhang had told them he was studying ants and genetics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2P3WGVZgJs and how this could explain brain processes in humans.

The foundation said it asked Zhang this year to remove its name from the study. The Carlsberg Foundation, which controls the world's third-largest brewer and said it gave Zhang a DKK 4 million ($623,000) fellowship in 2016, also told Reuters it had been incorrectly listed as funding the project.

The paper was published in a Chinese journal, Zoological Research, which declined to comment.

Zhang is on the journal's editorial board. He told Reuters the two Danish foundations were mentioned in the paper by mistake. "We did not spend any funding from the grants I received from these two foundations on this project," he added in an email. The journal published a correction removing the foundations' names in March 2021.

Lundbeck declined to comment on what impact the discovery might have; Carlsberg has said animal experiments conducted overseas must comply with Danish regulations, but did not comment on the military involvement.

INTERNAL DEBATE

In June 2020, the University of Copenhagen decided to close a think tank it had run with Shanghai's Fudan University since 2013, saying it had adjusted its overall cooperation strategy.

The decision prompted a debate about China inside the university, documents obtained by Reuters under freedom of information rules show. The university held a meeting in August 2020 to discuss the closure of Fudan and review its collaboration with China.

"China has engaged in a strategic civil-military fusion of research that often blurs the lines to the outsider," China Studies professor Jorgen Delman said in a note to the university's head afterwards, recommending better screening of Chinese researchers and consultations with Danish military intelligence to advise on "risks and no-go areas." He declined to comment further.

Genetic cloning technology was transferred to BGI after a researcher, Yutao Du, received her doctorate in 2007 with a team from Danish universities that created the world's first pigs using a technique called handmade cloning. She was praised by the Chinese government for bringing the technology to China, which went on to clone genetically modified pigs for the study of human neurological illnesses.

China's national science programme said cloned pigs were a stepping stone to chimeras, a controversial area where China wanted to lead the world. Chimeras are organisms composed of cells from two or more species that may be capable of growing organs for human transplantation.

Du is now vice president at BGI Genomics Ltd, and won promotion within the Chinese Communist Party, becoming a delegate to its national congress in 2017. She did not respond to a request for comment.

(Kirsty Needham reported from Sydney, Stine Jacobsen from Copenhagen; Edited by Sara Ledwith)

HINDUISM IS ARYANISM
UC Davis adds caste to its anti- discrimination policy


This photo provided by the University of California, Davis shows the university campus in Davis, Calif., on April 3, 2015. The university has added caste, a millennia-old concept that assigns people in South Asia their social statuses at birth, to its anti-discrimination policy. Under UC Davis' policy amended in September, students or staff who face discrimination or harassment for their perceived castes can now file complaints that could result in formal investigations. 

(Chris Di Dio/University of California, Davis via AP)More


Thu, November 18, 2021,

DAVIS, Calif. (AP) — The University of California, Davis, has added caste to its anti-discrimination policy after students said they have seen discrimination take place at the university based on the South Asian practice of assigning people their social status at birth.

Under UC Davis’ policy, which was amended in September, students or staff who face discrimination or harassment for their perceived castes can now file complaints that could result in formal investigations, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Wednesday.

The Northern California university may be the first public institution to address caste discrimination, which was largely imported from South Asia.


“The significance of adding caste … is it ensures that the communities most impacted and most vulnerable to this type of discrimination or harassment know that the university recognizes the harm caused,” Danésha Nichols, director of UC Davis’ Harassment & Discrimination Assistance and Prevention Program, told the newspaper.

Students started pushing for the change after receiving insulting memes in their group chats and overhearing South Asian students ask each other what caste they belonged to before picking roommates, the newspaper reported.

Estimated to be thousands of years old, caste is rooted in India’s Hindu scripture. It long placed Dalits at the bottom of a social hierarchy, once terming them “untouchables.” Inequities and violence against Dalits have persisted even though India banned caste discrimination in 1950.

The practice has traveled outside of India to Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar, and occurs among Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, Christians and Buddhists, said Anjali Arondekar, a professor and co-director of the Center for South Asian Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz told the newspaper.

“Caste is really about labor segmentation and sustained inequality through the years — millenniums, really,” she said.

India’s caste system, which assigns people their social statuses at birth, places Dalits, once called “untouchables,” at the bottom of its social hierarchy that can determine where they live, what schools they can attend, what jobs they can get and where they marry.

Last year, California regulators sued Cisco Systems, saying an engineer faced discrimination at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters because he is a Dalit Indian.

The engineer worked on a team at Cisco’s San Jose headquarters with Indians who all immigrated to the U.S. as adults, and all of whom were of high caste, according to the lawsuit filed by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing.

The “higher caste supervisors and co-workers imported the discriminatory system’s practices into their team and Cisco’s workplace,” the lawsuit said, and that the company did not “substantiate any caste-based or related discrimination or retaliation."

Cisco Systems Inc., a major supplier of computer networking gear that makes the internet work, has said it would defend against the allegations in the complaint.

Caste is often based on a person's last names, the village or town a person comes from, and from their religious and social practices.

Prem Pariyar, a 37-year-old graduate student at California State University, East Bay, said his family would be physically assaulted because of their lower caste in his home country of Nepal. He said the last thing he expected was to face casteism when he moved to the U.S. in 2015.

But he faced it when interacting with other South Asians in the Bay Area — at his restaurant job, at the university, at community events and at dinner parties.

“Some will ask me my last name under the pretense of getting to know me, but are really trying to find out about my caste. Others have served me meals in separate plates and utensils after they find out I’m Dalit,” Pariyar said.

He started organizing with other CSU students around the issue and their efforts led the Cal State Student Association, which represents all 23 CSU campuses, to recognize caste as a protected category this year. But the CSU school system itself has not made any changes to its discrimination policy. Pariyar was also part of the UC Davis campaign.

UC Davis' policy change feels like a big step for those trying to get caste discrimination recognized across the U.S.

“It is an issue, it’s here and it’s time to deal with it,” he said.

SEE

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2006/10/hinduism-is-fascism.html

Duchess of Cornwall visits Egyptian donkey hospital on final day of royal tour

Hannah Furness
Fri, November 19, 2021


The Duchess of Cornwall during a visit to Brooke Veterinary Hospital in Cairo, Egypt on the last day of her tour of the Middle East with the Prince of Wales. - Joe Giddens/PA

In 1931, the wife of an Army officer was so horrified to find Britain's loyal war horses working into old age on the streets of Egypt that she wrote to The Telegraph pleading with its readers for help.

The result was £20,000 in donations and a refuge for 5,000 of those horses saved from suffering and ending their lives in peace.

Today, the Duchess of Cornwall has visited the site of that sanctuary, now a modern veterinary hospital for injured donkeys and horses brought in from the streets of Cairo.


The Duchess was shown around the stables, stroking the animals' noses and asking after their welfare. She was introduced to an injured horse painted by henna and brought in by his owner, and patted two nervous donkeys recuperating in the hay.

Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, visits the Brooke Veterinary Hospital in Cairo

The visit took place on the last day of her tour of the Middle East with the Prince of Wales - Joe Giddens/PA

Escorted by Sherif Foda, chairman of Brooke Egypt, the Duchess first cut a ribbon to officially open the refurbished hospital which contained row upon row of stables containing animals being treated by the charity’s vets.

"I can’t believe how clean they are, so impressive," she said. "They really are spotless."

Head of animal welfare Dr Emad Nouam, who has worked there for 32 years, gave the Duchess bardeen, a type of clover, to feed them.

She stroked one and asked what he happened to it and was told that it had been hit by a car.

"You poor thing, well you are in good hands," she said.

Dorothy Brooke, whose name and picture are still on the wall, was the wife of a Major General in the British Army who arrived in Egypt in 1930 and found the ageing war horses "dragging out wretched days of toil in the ownership of masters too poor to feed them – too inured to hardship themselves to appreciate, in the faintest degree, the sufferings of animals in their hands".

The Duchess was given bardeen, a type of clover, to feed the animals

The following year, having established the problem stretched to thousands of elderly horses once used to transport British troops in the region during the First World War, she wrote to the Morning Post, which is now The Telegraph.

"They are all over twenty years of age by now, and to say that the majority of them have fallen on hard times is to express it very mildly," she wrote.

"These old horses were, many of them, born and bred in the green fields of England – how many years since they have seen a field, heard a stream of water, or a kind word in English?"

Saying "many are blind - all are skeletons", she told readers she was setting up a fund to buy the horses, restore any she could back to health and bring a "merciful end" for the rest.

She told them: "If those who truly love horses – who realise what it can mean to be very old, very hungry and thirsty, and very tired, in a country where hard, ceaseless work has to be done in great heat – will send contributions to help in giving a merciful end to our poor old war heroes, we shall be extremely grateful; and we venture to think that, in many ways, this may be as fitting (though unspectacular) part of a War Memorial as any other that could be devised."

Newspaper readers sent the modern equivalent of £20,000, allowing Mrs Brooke to buy 5,000 ex-war horses. Most were "old, exhausted, and had to be humanely put down", the charity said.

In 1934, she set up the Old War Horse Memorial Hospital in Cairo. Four years later, the charity put shade shelter and water troughs for animals in the city, and brought in its first motorised ambulance.

It now has four hospitals and 28 mobile vet units in Egypt, provides free care for around 160,000 injured and sick donkeys and horses, most of which are brought in by owners who cannot afford to treat them.

The Duchess of Cornwall during a visit to Brooke Veterinary Hospital in Cairo, Egypt on the last day of her tour of the Middle East with the Prince of Wales. - Joe Giddens/PA

They also run education programmes about animals welfare.

It is now a multi-national charity with centres throughout Egypt and in the UK. Donations to the Cairo branch are now negligible, staff said.

The Brooke, as it is known in England, has recently put out an appeal after being hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic. In Egypt, it ran a feeding programme for 1,700 horses whose owners worked in tourism and could no longer afford to keep them well.

The visit from the Duchess of Cornwall came on the final day of the royal tour to Jordan and Egypt. The Prince attended a meeting of his Sustainable Markets Initiative.

3 million workers are missing amid the labor shortage, and 2 million of them are immigrants who never came to the US because of Trump-era policies

Jason Lalljee,Andy Kiersz
Sat, November 20, 2021

The U.S. would have about 2 million more workers if not for Trump-era policies.

Alexander W Helin/Getty Images


The US would have about 2 million more workers if not for Trump-era policies, Insider estimates.


Immigrant workers typically fuel the industries that are currently experiencing worker shortages.


The current shortage of workers is causing problems for both businesses and consumers.

American businesses are feeling the impact of the current labor shortage as they struggle to hire amid a record high wave of people quitting — and Trump-era immigration policies could be to blame.

Roughly 3 million fewer people in the US are working or looking for work than in February 2020, as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics labor force participation rate. That's the labor shortage in a nutshell.

But what if we told you that problem could be cut down to just a third of its size by going back to a pre-Donald Trump legal regime?

The current dearth of workers is mirrored by the number of working-age adults who would have lived in the United States if pre-Trump immigration trends persisted, according to 2020 US Census data.

Former President Donald Trump's administration was more restrictive to immigration than any other in recent history, making good on Trump's rhetoric antagonizing immigrants of color, specifically undocumented and Latinx immigrants. According to the Migration Policy Institute, the Trump administration undertook over 400 executive actions on immigration.

We estimate that in all, about 2 million of America's missing workers are immigrants who never came to the US.

The Census Bureau estimates that about 1.07 million people immigrated on net to the US in 2016, while only about 480,000 people immigrated in 2020.

Between 2011 and 2016, the US was gaining an additional 54,000 net immigrants each year. But that began to turn around, with net international migration declining each year between 2017 and 2020. If the early-decade trend continued instead, the US would have added about 2.1 million immigrants over those four years:
Trump-era policies are responsible for the missing workers

As it turns out, industries facing labor shortages — truck drivers and construction workers, namely — would have benefited from immigrant workers had Trump-era policies not prevented them from entering the US.

Construction, transportation and warehousing, accommodation and hospitality businesses, and personal service businesses like salons and dry cleaners are the four industries currently facing the worst labor shortages, the pro-immigration think tank New American Economy found last month for a Vox investigation.

All four industries saw increases in job postings of more than 65 percent from 2019 to 2021, when comparing the period between May to July for those two years. Immigrants make up more than a fifth of the workforce in those industries.

Immigrant workers account for about a quarter of the construction workforce as well, the National Association of Home Builders reported in March. That share is even higher when it comes to construction tradesmen, and is as much as 40% in states like California and Texas. These numbers would be even higher if they accounted for construction workers hired informally.

The National Foundation for American Policy projected last year that Trump administration policies reduced legal immigration by about 49% during Trump's time in office. They also projected that average annual labor force growth would be about 59% lower as a result of the policies.

Trump issued more than 40 immigration policy changes after the onset of the pandemic, limiting legal roads to immigration and tightening rules for undocumented immigration.

He also banned asylum seekers last March, for example, re-implementing the policy and eventually extending it indefinitely throughout the year. Similarly, he indefinitely postponed hearings for immigrants returned to Mexico under the Migrant Protection Protocols.

2021 continues to chart record numbers of workers quitting. Roughly 4 million people, about 3% of workers, voluntarily left their jobs in September, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' most recent survey. That's up from 4.3 million in August, and 4 million in July. These are the largest mass resignations the US has seen in the two decades since the government started documenting them.

This labor shortage has been affecting American consumers as well, causing supply chain issues and greater price inflation, which recently hit a 30-year high in the U.S.

"When you don't have the truck drivers and we don't have the people that are working in construction, then economics says prices are going to go up," Julie Palmer, a human resource professor at Webster University, told KSDK News on Monday.

White supremacist prison guards work with impunity in Fla.




 A pickup truck with a Confederate flag-themed decal is parked outside the Reception and Medical Center, the state's prison hospital where new inmates are processed, in Lake Butler, Fla., Friday, April 16, 2021. According to public documents and interviews with a dozen inmates and current and former employees in the nation’s tenth largest prison system, Florida prison guards openly tout associations with white supremacist groups to intimidate inmates and Black colleagues, a persistent practice that goes unpunished and is allowed to fester in prisons throughout the U.S. 

(AP Photo/David Goldman, File)More

JASON DEAREN
Thu, November 18, 2021

In June, three Florida prison guards who boasted of being white supremacists beat, pepper sprayed and used a stun gun on an inmate who screamed “I can’t breathe!” at a prison near the Alabama border, according to a fellow inmate who reported it to the state.

The next day, the officers at Jackson Correctional Institution did it again to another inmate, the report filed with the Florida Department of Corrections’ Office of Inspector General stated.

“If you notice these two incidents were people of color. They (the guards) let it be known they are white supremacist,” the inmate Jamaal Reynolds wrote. “The Black officers and white officers don’t even mingle with each other. Every day they create a hostile environment trying to provoke us so they can have a reason to put their hands on us.”

Both incidents occurred in view of surveillance cameras, he said. Reynolds' neatly printed letter included the exact times and locations and named the officers and inmates. It’s the type of specific information that would have made it easier for officials to determine if the reports were legitimate. But the inspector general’s office did not investigate, corrections spokeswoman Molly Best said. Best did not provide further explanation, and the department hasn't responded to The Associated Press’ August public records requests for the videos.

Some Florida prison guards openly tout associations with white supremacist groups to intimidate inmates and Black colleagues, a persistent practice that often goes unpunished, according to allegations in public documents and interviews with a dozen inmates and current and former employees in the nation’s third-largest prison system. Corrections officials regularly receive reports about guards’ membership in the Ku Klux Klan and criminal gangs, according to former prison inspectors, and current and former officers.

Still, few such cases are thoroughly investigated by state prison inspectors; many are downplayed by officers charged with policing their own or discarded as too complicated to pursue.

“I've visited more than 50 (prison) facilities and have seen that this is a pervasive problem that is not going away,” said Democratic Florida state Rep. Dianne Hart. “It's partly due to our political climate. But, those who work in our prisons don't seem to fear people knowing that they're white supremacists.”

The people AP talked to, who live and work inside Florida’s prison system, describe it as chronically understaffed and nearly out of control. In 2017, three current and former Florida guards who were Ku Klux Klan members were convicted after the FBI caught them planning a Black former inmate’s murder.

This summer, one guard allowed 20-30 members of a white supremacist inmate group to meet openly inside a Florida prison. A Black officer happened upon the meeting, they told The AP, and later confronted the colleague who allowed it. The officer said their incident report about the meeting went nowhere, and the guard who allowed it was not punished.

The officer spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not cleared to discuss official prison business. They told The AP that, after the report went nowhere, they did not feel safe at work and are seeking to leave.

Officers who want to blow the whistle on colleagues are often ostracized and labeled a “snitch,” according to current and former officers.

Mark Caruso, a former sergeant with Florida corrections who was twice fired and reinstated after blowing the whistle on fellow officers, described the department as a “good old boy” network.

He said that senior officers-in-charge have the power to censor any allegations of corrupt behavior that occurs on their watch. This keeps reports inside prison walls.

Caruso worked at three prisons in central Florida and reported inmate beatings and officer misconduct multiple times. Being a whistleblower did not work out well for him. He was fired after reporting on a colleague at the first prison where he worked as a sergeant, he said.

He was reinstated after the officers’ union challenged the firing, and he moved to a new prison. There, he again reported an officer’s use of force and was later fired and reinstated after the union challenged it again.

In 2019, he reported for duty at another new post, the Central Florida Reception Center. He was soon greeted with signs on an employee bulletin board where his name had been crossed out and “SNITCH” scrawled instead, according to testimony at a union grievance hearing. Another officer spit on his car windshield, he said.

Despite the intimidation, Caruso continued reporting inmate abuse and other illegal activity by fellow officers.

“I have reported people when physically seeing them abuse inmates,” he testified in another grievance hearing earlier this year. The AP obtained video of the hearing at which multiple officers and leadership testified in detail about the system’s reporting structure and culture.

Corrections officers are required to file “incident reports” if they see a co-worker acting inappropriately. In some Florida prisons, supervisors often tell them not to email the reports, according to officers who testified at Caruso’s hearing. Instead, they’re told to tell their supervisor verbally what happened or write it longhand. A superior officer then types it up, choosing the language and framing the event.

A sergeant testified that the reason he typed up his officers’ incident reports was because most struggle with writing. Also, most do not have computer access at the prison.

Caruso said he refused to report incidents of corruption verbally because it left no record, and he worried that prison leadership would censor his reports. So he emailed them to create an electronic record, a decision that, he says, irked prison leadership.

After seeing his reports go nowhere, he finally went over his superior officers' heads. Caruso made contact with an investigator in the Office of Inspector General and emailed Florida Corrections Secretary Mark Inch directly. Inch responded to him expressing concern, Caruso said, and referred the matter to the IG’s office. That did not end well, either.

“For at least two years I reported to (the IG's office) all of the corruption I saw. He didn’t respond or follow up,” Caruso said of the inspector general’s investigator.

Caruso was eventually fired again after officials said he’d failed to report an inmate beating — one Caruso said he did not actually witness. It was a baffling charge given his active campaign of reporting others throughout his corrections career. He claimed, unsuccessfully this time, that the firing was retaliation.

If the inspector general were motivated to aggressively investigate reports of abuse by white supremacists or other gang members working as correctional officers he would face barriers, the former investigators told AP.

That’s because state law limits the use of inmates as confidential informants, they said, and guards are reluctant or afraid to snitch on their colleagues.

For an inmate to act as an informant, the FBI would have to take over the case because Florida law limits the inspector general’s office’s interactions with inmates, the former investigators said. “We don’t have the authority to do anything,” one said.

Officers, meantime, fear retaliation.

“Officers are saying their colleagues are members, but they can have me killed,” one former investigator said.

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After the three guards in Florida were captured on FBI recordings plotting a Black inmate’s murder upon his release, Florida corrections spokeswoman Michelle Glady insisted there was no indication of a wider problem of white supremacists working in the prisons, so the state would not investigate further.

After the statement, an AP reporter in April visited the employee parking lot of one facility in the state’s rural north and photographed cars and trucks adorned with symbols and stickers that are often associated with the white supremacist movement: Confederate flags, Q-Anon and Thin Blue Line images.

Florida has grappled with this issue for decades. In the early 2000s, the corrections department was forced by a St. Petersburg Times expose to investigate a clique of racist guards who all carried rope keychains with a noose. The Times reported that the noose keychains were used to signal a racist officer who was willing to inflict pain, particularly on Black inmates.

The state investigated the keychains and complaints from Black guards of workplace discrimination. Department inspectors interviewed the white guards who were known to carry the noose keychains and eventually cleared them all.

“This is a pattern all over the country,” said Paul Wright, a former inmate who co-founded the prisoner-rights publication Prison Legal News. Wright helped expose Ku Klux Klan members working in a Washington state prison in the 1990s. He and Prison Legal News have since reported cases of Nazis and klan members working as correctional officers in California, New York, Texas, Illinois and many other states.

“There’s an institutional acceptance of this type of racism," Wright said. “What’s striking about this is that so many of them keep their jobs."

Most state prisons and police departments throughout the U.S. do very little background checking to see if new hires have extremist views, said Greg Ehrie, former chief of the FBI’s New York domestic terrorism squad, who now works with the Anti-Defamation League.

“There are 513 police agencies in New Jersey, and not one bans being part of outlaw motorcycle gangs. A prison guard who is the patched member of the Pagans, he can be out about it and tell you about it (with no punishment) because it’s not stipulated in the employment contract,” Ehrie said. The ADL lists the Pagans among biker gangs with white supremacist group affiliations.

This dynamic can lead to what the former Florida prison investigator described as “criminals watching over criminals.”

“If you have a heartbeat, a GED and no felony conviction you can get a job. That’s sad,” said Caruso, the former Florida correctional sergeant.

Florida state Rep. Hart and Caruso have called for a thorough investigation of the issue and a federal takeover of the prison system.

The FBI said it would neither confirm nor deny if such an investigation had been launched, but Ehrie said it is likely.

“I would be extremely surprised if this wasn’t an open bureau investigation,” he said of Florida's prison system. “It’s almost impossible that they’re not investigating.”

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Meanwhile, reports of racist behavior by correctional officers continue, according to inmates and current and former Florida corrections employees.

In late September, at another Panhandle prison, a 25-year-old Black inmate reported being beaten by a white officer who said “You’re lucky I didn’t have my spray on me, cuz I would gas yo Black ass.” The inmate’s lip was split open and his face swollen.

The inmate’s family requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.

His mother reported the incident to the Inspector General's office on Oct. 1 and requested a wellness check on him. The office sent an investigator to the facility to interview her son, according to emails provided by the family.

After the interview, the IG refused to investigate the officer’s conduct. The mother was told it was her son’s word versus the officer’s, and there was nothing they could do. The IG’s office referred the matter instead to the prison warden.

The officer continued working in the inmate's dorm and threatened him, the inmate said in letters home.

“All them is a click (sic), a gang. Ya feel me, they all work together,” the inmate wrote in October. For weeks, he sent desperate letters saying he was still being terrorized. He urged his mother to continue fighting.

“Don’t let up Mom. This has extremely messed up my mental. Got me shell shock, feel less of a man, violated ya feel me? But I love you.”

She eventually helped him get transferred in early November to a facility with a reputation for being even more lawless and brutal, according to the family and a current officer. He is four years into a 12-year sentence for attempted robbery with a gun or deadly weapon.

“I do look forward to seeing my son one day and I can only pray,” the mother told AP. “I’m overwhelmed, tired and doing my best to hold on for my son’s sake.”

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Michael Balsamo in Washington contributed to this report.

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Email AP’s Global Investigations Team at investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/. See other work at https://www.apnews.com/hub/ap-investigations.

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Follow Jason Dearen on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/JHDearen