Sri Lankan students demand government resign over crisis

 

 

ERANGA JAYAWARDENA
Mon, June 20, 2022

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — Thousands of students from state universities marched in Sri Lanka’s capital on Monday to demand the president and prime minister resign over an economic crisis that has caused severe shortages of essential supplies and disrupted people's livelihoods and education.

The students say President Gotabaya Rajapaksa is responsible for the economic crisis, the worst since independence in 1948, and that Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, who took over the position a little more than a month ago promising to end shortages, has not delivered on his pledges.

Sri Lanka is nearly bankrupt and has suspended repayment of $7 billion in foreign debt due this year. It must also pay back more than $5 billion every year until 2026. Its foreign reserves are nearly gone and it is unable to import food, fuel, cooking gas and medicines. A lack of fuel to run power stations has resulted in long daily power cuts.

In recent months people have been forced to stand in long lines to buy fuel and gas, and the country has survived mostly on credit lines extended by neighboring India to buy fuel and other essentials.

With that credit also running out, authorities have shut schools and instructed teachers to teach online, and have asked non-essential government employees to work from home for one week to preserve limited stocks of fuel.

Officials from the International Monetary Fund are currently in Sri Lanka to discuss a bailout package.

Monthslong protests have nearly dismantled the Rajapaksa political dynasty that has ruled Sri Lanka for most of the past two decades.

One of Rajapaksa's brothers resigned as prime minister last month, and two other brothers and a nephew quit their Cabinet posts earlier.

President Rajapaksa has admitted he did not take steps to forestall the economic collapse early enough, but has refused to leave office. It is nearly impossible to oust a president under the constitution unless he resigns on his own accord.

Sri LankaSri Lankan student Buddhist monks shout slogans as they march demanding President Gotabaya Rajapaksa resign over the economic crisis in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Monday, June 20, 2022. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

What Happened When France Sent Low-Income Kids to Wealthy Schools


Peter Yeung
Mon, June 20, 2022,


In 2004, Maxence Arcy moved with his family to Bellefontaine, a poor suburb of the French city of Toulouse. Limited by what he could afford, the father of six bought a place on a sprawling housing estate in the neighborhood which had catchment schools with the worst educational record in the region.

“At the time, there were only Mahgrebians and Africans living on the estate and going to these schools,” says Arcy, who originally migrated from Morocco in search of work in 1984. “It was a kind of segregation in the 21st century.”

But in January 2017, local authorities closed those schools in France’s fourth biggest city and instead bussed the 1,140 affected pupils to high-achieving facilities in the prosperous downtown in an attempt to write a new chapter of education equality.

The theory, according to Georges Méric, president of the Haute-Garonne region that includes Toulouse, was that a “rising tide lifts all boats.” Put another way, by inserting the students from Bellefontaine and two other suburbs, La Reynerie and Mirail, into schools of proven success, social determinism would be countered and all children would benefit.

“There are districts in Toulouse with 90 or 95 percent immigrant populations,” says Méric, who helped develop the scheme. “They are very poor and opportunities are hard to come by. But the young children living there have the right to success in life.”

Under Méric’s €56 million project, buses take the pupils — aged 11 to 15 — to nearly a dozen different schools in the city center in journeys that take less than an hour. The school principals and teachers are supported by six “social mix masters” who help facilitate logistics such as transport and tackle any problems that arise, such as dealing with parent concerns.

Five years on, the test results have been noteworthy. Before the bus scheme began, the drop-out rate for students living on the three estates after taking the Brevet — France’s national diploma for 15-year-olds — was almost 50 percent. That rate has now fallen to less than six percent and grades have risen by nearly 15 percent on average. Some 94 percent of pupils have stayed in the same school, calming fears that the scheme would lead wealthier families to move their children into the private sector.

“The welcoming colleges had a very good academic level already, that was important,” says Méric. “It’s worked very well. There has not been segregation in them and it’s promoting the wider acceptance of diversity across the city.” (Middle school is the U.S. equivalent of what is called college in France.)

Eduardo Mosqueda, a professor who specializes in access to education at the University of California, Santa Cruz, acknowledges the successes of the Toulouse project. But, he says, consideration must be given to the amount of funding it requires.

“I can’t help to wonder what the differences are in resources [that were] available to students in Bellefontaine compared to students in the schools where they are being bussed in terms of quality curriculum and adequately prepared teachers,” he says. “If the project to bus students costs €56 million, how much would student achievement improve if that money was invested into improving the schools that were closed?”

Even so, despite their poor academic performance, the Bellefontaine schools already had a high student to teacher ratio of around four to one, which came at a significant cost.

Mosqueda also believes bussing might lead to added pressures on pupils. “Students that are bussed are also in new school environments where it may be difficult to integrate given the racial, income, cultural and linguistic differences,” he says.

Yet Maxence Arcy’s 13-year-old son, Adam, who switched from a Bellefontaine school to one in Saint Aubin, has had few issues to date. “There’s a bus that comes to pick him up 200 meters from our house,” says Arcy. “He’s mixing with other students. He’s happy, he has improved his grades. He wants to be an engineer.”

For Arcy, the initiative is a textbook example of how to improve social diversity and the opportunities of future generations. “We were always for the project,” he says. “We wanted our child to see other nationalities and cultures. We were just concerned about the distance to the new school, but the bus works well.”

One crucial learning from the scheme has been the need for extensive dialogue between all parties involved. As many as 80 meetings, including 50 public meetings, were held before the bussing project was launched, helping address the concerns of those who voiced opposition to the project.

The latter included parents worried about the distances the children would have to travel and a handful of teachers who were resistant enough to the idea of changes in the student makeup that they went on strike to try and prevent it.

“It wasn’t comfortable at the beginning,” says Méric. “There was resistance both through administration and the local level. But we listened to their concerns.”

These lessons could be invaluable, according to Malika Baadoud, director of L’École et Nous, a Bellefontaine-based parents association, given that schooling segregation is present across France and other countries. Often resulting from societal divides, she says, it has led to high dropout rates, school violence, racism and teacher burnout. “In certain areas of France, social and racial diversity simply doesn’t exist,” says Baadoud, who has held her role since 2003 and was last year awarded the prestigious National Order of Merit for her work.

One of the initial concerns for parents whose children were set to be bussed further afield, according to Baadoud, was the fact that many families don’t own cars. But that was resolved by providing parents with free bus passes to travel from the estates to the schools to meet their children. “Slowly it was proved that all of these fears were unfounded,” says Baadoud. “They know it’s an opportunity for their children. It’s something that is unprecedented.”

The project is here to stay. Already this year two new schools have been built away from the estates’ traditional catchment areas in other, more privileged parts of Toulouse to ensure permanent social mixing in the classrooms and promote a more diverse staff.

Encouraged by the results, several other cities and towns across France are now studying ways to launch their own bussing initiatives, according to Méric, with the Ministry of National Education helping to coordinate.

“Others have contacted us — regional departments and ministerial officials have come to see us,” he says. “I hope the scheme multiplies.”

WELL IT'S ABOUT TIME, IT'S LATER THAN THEY THINK

PG&E moves power underground in plan to bury 10,000 miles




California Buried Power Lines

A PG&E crew works at installing underground power lines along Porter Creek Road in Sonoma County, Calif., site of the 2017 Tubbs Fire, on Monday, June 13, 2022. Pacific Gas & Electric Co. has started an ambitious project to bury thousands of miles of power lines underground in an effort to prevent igniting fires with its equipment and avoid shutting down power during hot and windy weather. (AP Photo/Haven Daley)

HAVEN DALEY
Wed, June 15, 2022, 10:34 PM·4 min read

SANTA ROSA, Calif. (AP) — Pacific Gas & Electric Co. is working on an ambitious project to bury thousands of miles of power lines in an effort to prevent igniting fires with its equipment and avoid shutting down electricity during hot and windy weather.

PG&E announced last year that it planned to bury 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometers) of power lines in the next decade at a projected cost of $15 billion to $30 billion. The announcement came just days after PG&E informed regulators that a 70-foot (23-meter) pine tree that toppled on one of its power lines ignited a major fire in Butte County, the same rural area about 145 miles (233 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco where another fire sparked by its equipment killed more than 80 people and destroyed thousands of homes in 2018.

Since 2017, the aging equipment of the nation's largest utility has been blamed for more than 30 wildfires that wiped out more than 23,000 homes and businesses and killed more than 100 people. In 2019, PG&E filed for bankruptcy after facing billions of dollars in wildfire fines and lawsuits.

In addition to preventing wildfires, PG&E says burying power lines underground will lead to fewer disruptive public safety power shutoffs, which have become more frequent in the last few years due to dry weather and high wind events linked to climate change.


PG&E previously has buried power lines as systems are rebuilt in the wake of destructive wildfires, such as the massive blaze that wiped out most of the town of Paradise in 2018. This month, it started work on a plan to place 175 miles (280 kilometers) of power lines underground this year in central and Northern California, said Deanna Contreras, a PG&E spokeswoman.

The company has said it plans to bury as many as 1,200 miles a year to meet its goal.

“Undergrounding reduces ignition risk by 99% so we are starting in the areas of the highest fire risk, high fire threat district areas, and also prioritizing areas where we can reduce the number of public safety power shutoffs,” she said.

She said burying power lines costs $3.75 million per mile.

“As we increase the line miles every year and we scale up, we expect those costs to come down to about $2.5 million a mile by the end of 2026,” she added.

But some critics of PG&E’s plan say it’s too expensive and will take too long to complete. The plan calls for ratepayers to finance the project through higher utility bills.

The Utility Reform Network, or TURN, a consumer advocacy organization, questions whether PG&E will be able to continue properly maintaining its power lines while it focuses on the burying power lines, which will take at least a decade to complete.

“This would take years upon years and we need to be sure that the company is focusing on its compliance in the meantime,” said Katy Morsony, a TURN staff attorney. “By also trying to engage in this huge capital investment program at the same time, it’s unclear that they can both properly manage compliance in the meantime, as well as successfully and efficiently complete the undergrounding program.”

PG&E, a 117-year-old company, generates about $20 billion in revenue annually while serving a 70,000-square-mile (181,300-square-kilometer) service area in the northern and central part of California that includes farmland, forests, big cities and the world’s technology hub in Silicon Valley.

One of the places where lines are currently being buried is near the Sonoma County site of the 2017 Tubbs wildfire that killed at least 22 people and destroyed thousands of homes in and around Santa Rosa.

Supporters say burying the lines also provides a more aesthetically pleasing California landscape.

Tom Sullivan, who rebuilt after losing his home in the 2017 Tubbs wildfire, said he’s willing to pay a little more for his power if it means there’s less chance of another devastating wildfire.

"It’s something that has to be done, so we’re just all going to have to pay for it. Either that or we’re going to end up with more fires," Sullivan said.

NASA discovers mysterious balanced rock on Mars, igniting debate over how it happened

Mark Price Sun, June 19, 2022,

NASA’s roving camera on Mars has discovered another oddity in the 750-mile-wide Jezero Crater, and it has some people wondering if aliens are yanking our chain.

A rock about the size of bowling ball was photographed precariously balanced atop a leaning boulder.

The find was announced just one day after NASA questioned whether “the wind” blew a piece of rocket insulation 1.2 miles away from the Perseverance Rover’s entry point on Mars.

A photo of the formation was shared June 16 on Facebook, and NASA says it’s in an area named “Hogwallow Flats.” Rocks in the area are believed to be “as old as 3.6 billion years.”

https://www.facebook.com/NASAPersevere/photos/a.110522540557599/537483164528199/?type=3

“The nearby rocks are a sight to behold,” NASA reported. “Take a look at some of these close-ups. Tons of potential targets for study.”

NASA didn’t address the balanced rock specifically, likely knowing social media would point it out and raise questions. The post has since gotten 14,000 reactions and nearly 300 comments as of the morning of June 19, including some who called it “a Martian basketball.”

“Who balanced that rock!?” Stephen Bukowski asked.

“The shape of this rock is not natural,” Ahmad Ahmad Alawaj posted.

“Did you see an alien sitting on the rock?” Ravindu Nimsara asked.

Some noted this formation resembled a “snake head” sticking out of a Mars cliff.

Some speculated the rock was connected to the boulder under it, and was simply an example of weaker stone weathering away around it over the centuries. A few swore they even saw a pedestal.

The space and astronomy news site Universe Today marveled that it had somehow become “perfectly balanced.”

“Knowing the history of that rock would certainly provide an interesting story, geologically speaking,” the site wrote.

“What process or processes could bring a rock to be in such an unlikely position? ... It’s very unlikely the rock was ‘dropped’ into its current location. More probable is that the rock was part of the original bedrock formation and over millennia, wind erosion wore it down to its present shape.”

NASA has cited weathering as a likely cause for several other odd formations seen on Mars, including a series of “spikes” photographed last month at Gale Crater.

Rocks near the “Martian basketball” formation appeared honey-combed with holes, and Universe Magazine Space Tech noted one resembled a snake head jutting out of a rock wall.

Fox Poll Triggers GOP Senator Into Blaming Ignorant Americans for Supporting Assault Weapons Ban

Mike Lee responded by essentially saying the American people don’t know their rights, so they need lawmakers to defend them.

Peter Wade
Sun, June 19, 2022


Faced with the news that a significant majority of Americans support a number of gun control measures, including a ban on assault weapons, Republican Senator Mike Lee struggled to defend his party’s staunch opposition to some of those policies. Instead, he blamed Americans, claiming they don’t understand their rights or know what an assault weapon is.

“Fox’s polling shows that there is a lot of strength behind some of these proposals,” host Shannon Bream said on Fox News Sunday as a graphic on-screen showed 82 percent support for raising the legal age to purchase an assault rifle to 21; 81 percent support for flagging people who are a danger to themselves or others; and 63 percent support for banning assault weapons altogether.

“There is a lot of momentum, at least among the public sphere, for doing this. Are you out of step with your constituents?” Bream pointedly asked the senator.

Lee responded by essentially saying the American people don’t know their rights, so they need lawmakers to defend them. “OK, so, first of all, what’s important is we look out for the rights of constituents,” he said. “Constituents are asked poll questions, they’re not asked questions about specific language within legislative text. It’s the job of the lawmaker to look out for the interests and the rights of the law-abiding citizens they represent.”

Yes, according to Lee, it’s up to the lawmaker to carefully and condescendingly explain that the right not to have your body torn apart by an AK-47 in a grocery store or public school is less important than a gunman’s right to yield a rapid-firing weapon of war equipped with a high capacity magazine.

Lee continued, “With each of those provisions, I understand how they could get high popularity ratings when they don’t define them. For example, you talk about banning assault weapons, there is no universal definition of what an assault rifle is.”

The senator then went on to babble about how whether an assault rifle is made of “wood, or of plastic, or of composite” can change its status as an assault weapon. But, of course, we do have a clear definition of a semiautomatic assault weapon contained in the 1994 assault weapons ban, which lasted 10 years (and reduced mass shooting fatalities) until the George W. Bush administration allowed it to lapse.

Lee, unsurprisingly, has an “A” lifetime rating from the National Rifle Association, meaning he regularly supports legislation endorsed by the pro-gun group. During his 2016 re-election bid, Lee received more than $23,000 from the gun lobby, including $3,000 from the CEO of a gun silencer manufacturer. He later introduced a bill to eliminate all federal regulations on silencers.

This May Be the COVID Variant Scientists Are Dreading

David Axe
Mon, June 20, 2022

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty

COVID-19 cases are increasing again in the United Kingdom, potentially signaling a future surge in infections in the United States and other countries.

A pair of new subvariants of the dominant Omicron variant—BA.4 and BA.5—appear to be driving the uptick in cases in the U.K. Worryingly, these subvariants seem to partially dodge antibodies from past infection or vaccination, making them more transmissible than other forms of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

There are also some suggestions that the new subvariants have evolved to target the lungs—unlike Omicron, which usually resulted in a less dangerous infection of the upper respiratory tract.


But there’s good news amid the bad. While cases are going up in the U.K., hospitalizations and deaths are increasing more slowly or even declining so far. “This could mean higher transmissible variants, BA.4 or 5, are in play, [and] these variants are much less severe,” Edwin Michael, an epidemiologist at the Center for Global Health Infectious Disease Research at the University of South Florida, told The Daily Beast.

The trends could change, of course, but the decrease in deaths is an encouraging sign that, 31 months into the pandemic, all that immunity we’ve built up–at the cost of half a billion infections and tens of billions of dollars’ worth of vaccines—is still mostly holding.

As far as COVID goes, things were really looking up in the U.K. until recently. COVID cases steadily declined from their recent peak of 89,000 daily new infections in mid-March. Deaths from the March wave peaked a month later at around 330 a day.

The Massive Screwup That Could Let COVID Bypass Our Vaccines

By early June cases and deaths were near their pandemic lows. Then came BA.4 and BA.5. The grandchildren of the basic Omicron variant that first appeared in the fall of 2021, BA.4 and BA.5 both feature a trio of major mutations to their spike protein, the part of the virus that helps it to grab onto and infect our cells.

Eric Bortz, a University of Alaska-Anchorage virologist and public-health expert, described BA.4 and BA.5 as “immunologically distinct sublineages.” In other words, they interact with our antibodies in surprising new ways.

The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control—the European Union’s answer to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—labeled BA.4 and BA.5 “variants of concerns” back in mid-May. Two weeks later the two new subvariants began the gradual process of overtaking older forms of Omicron in the U.K. That’s when cases began increasing again.

It doesn’t help that the U.K. like most countries—China is a big exception—has lifted almost all restrictions on schools, businesses, crowds and travel. Those restrictions helped to keep down cases, but were broadly unpopular and came at a high economic cost.

“There’s a disconnect between the actuality of how infections are happening… and how people are deciding not to take very many precautions,” John Swartzberg, a professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccinology at the University of California-Berkeley's School of Public Health, told The Daily Beast. He described it as “COVID fatigue… 100 percent of the world’s population must have it by now.”

The combination of a fully reopened economy and new COVID subvariants had an immediate effect. The U.K. Health Security Agency registered 62,228 new infections in the week ending June 10, a 70 percent uptick over the previous week. COVID hospitalizations grew more slowly over the same period, spiking 30 percent to 4,421.

COVID fatalities actually dropped, however—sliding 10 percent to 283. Deaths tend to lag infections by several weeks, of course, so it should come as no surprise if the death rate flattens or bumps up later this month or early next month.

But it’s possible it won’t. Yes, BA.4 and BA.5 are more transmissible, owing to that mutated spike protein. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to kill a lot of people. Despite their unusual qualities, it could be that BA.4 and BA.5 aren’t actually more dangerous than previous subvariants.

Bortz sketched out one possibility, that BA.4 and BA.5 are “immune-evasive enough to infect, but generally not evasive enough to counteract acquired immunity from vaccines and/or prior infection.”

Of course, immunity varies from community to community, country to country. The U.K.’s 67 million people have, for their part, built up pretty serious immunity over the past two-and-a-half years.

Tens of millions of U.K. residents have natural antibodies from past infection. 87 percent of the population is fully vaccinated. 68 percent is boosted. All those antibodies might not prevent breakthrough infections, but they do tend to prevent serious breakthrough infections.

How bad the current surge in cases gets depends to a great extent on the durability of those antibodies. Immunity, whether from past infection or vaccines, tends to wane over time. But how fast it wanes, and to what effect, is unpredictable.

It’s possible widespread immunity holds and the swelling BA.4 and BA.5 wave in the U.K. crests in a few weeks without making a whole lot more people sick—or killing them. That’s the best-case scenario given the lack of political will, and public support, for a new round of restrictions. “If higher cases would not lead to significant disease or deaths, then we may be able to live with this virus,” Michael said.

The worst-case scenario is that BA.4 and BA.5 prove more capable of evading our antibodies than experts currently anticipate. Keep an eye on the hospitalization stats. If COVID hospitalizations start increasing in proportion to the growth in cases, it’s a sign the new sublineages are dodging our hard-won immunity.

In that case, a big spike in deaths is sure to follow.

That could be a big red flag for the Americas. COVID variants tend to travel from east to west, globally. New variants and subvariants tend to appear in the United States a few weeks after becoming dominant in the U.K. At present, BA.4 and BA.5 account for just a fifth of new cases in the U.S. Expect that proportion to increase.

The problem for Americans is that they’re much less protected than Britons. Yes, Americans have a lot of antibodies from past infection, but they’re also a lot less likely to be vaccinated—and even less likely to be boosted. Just 67 percent of Americans are fully vaxxed. A little over a third of the U.S. population has gotten a booster.

So if BA.4 and BA.5 end up causing a surge in deaths in the U.K., they’re likely to inflict an even greater death toll on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. “We’re sort of in this zone now, betwixt and between,” Swartzberg said. “It’s unclear which way things are going to go.”

A Somali boy's mission to find food as climate change takes its toll







Kalmole Moalin Aden, 11, stands with classmates at the the Kabasa Primary School in Dollow

Mon, June 20, 2022, 
By Katharine Houreld

DOLLOW, Somalia (Reuters) -Each morning in this Somali border town, 11-year-old Bashir Nur Salat plots his day's mission behind a crooked wire fence. Armed with only a friend's yellow school shirt, a borrowed book and toothy grin, he eyes his prize through the mesh: lunch.

Bashir lives where three crises converge - global warming, spiralling food prices and war. He, like millions of others in Somalia, are in the crosshairs of what some aid workers are calling the "The Three Cs": climate change, costs and conflict.

The worst drought in four decades in war-torn Somalia forced his family to leave their farm three months ago and to move about 100 kilometers (62.5 miles) north to the town of Dollow, on the border with Ethiopia.


Now, he leads a pack of younger children who gather when the Kabasa Primary School serves its students food. Through the school's wire fence, the children stare at students inside gulping warm porridge or plates of beans and corn served as part of a U.N.-supported program, one of the few regular sources of food in the town.

Many of the gang were among the latest influx of people into Dollow, too late to register for schooling. One by one, they slink through the broken gate and dart across the dusty schoolyard to grab a meal when the teachers aren't looking.

"When I don't get food, I'm so hungry: I lie down and I can't sleep," Bashir said quietly. He had eaten no dinner the night before nor breakfast that morning. His eight brothers and sisters at home were all hungry, he said.

The drought, which began last year, is predicted to worsen, exacerbated by climate change, many scientists and humanitarian organizations say. A third of livestock is already dead from thirst or hunger. Crops and fruit trees have withered.

Somalia, riven by a long-running Islamist insurgency, needs to import more food but people can't afford to buy it. Foreign aid is dwindling and food prices spiking because of war in Ukraine, the world's fourth-largest grain exporter.

At least 448 children have died since January while being treated for acute malnutrition, the United Nations said. The figures are likely a fraction of the true deaths since many will have been unable to reach help.

The United Nations warned this month that more than a third of Somalia's 16 million people need food aid to survive. Some areas could face famine this month. Aid in some places will run out in June.

(For a graphic on spreading hunger in Somalia please click https://tmsnrt.rs/3QxOydu)

NO TIME TO RECOVER

Bashir's family had never before left their home in south-central Somalia, even when famine in 2011 claimed more than a quarter of a million lives, most of them children. Aid workers say deaths may approach those levels again in this drought.

Bashir's family did not move then. Some livestock survived, so they stayed in their farm near Ceel Bon village.

Not this time. The drought took all of their 12 cows and 21 goats – a small fortune in a country where wealth is counted in animals. The family once enjoyed three meals a day: creamy milk from the family cows now reduced to scattered bones; and beans and sorghum from fields now parched and cracked.

"I've never seen a drought like this before," said Bashir's 30-year-old mother. She and her nine children now sleep on two mattresses in Dollow.

On a good day, Bashir's father may make $2 selling charcoal in a nearby town, but since May 2 he has managed to send only $10 because of lack of work. The family has not received any food aid, she said.

Such desperation is set to become more common in Somalia, and beyond, as rising temperatures fuel more natural disasters, many scientists say. In the last 50 years, extreme weather events have increased five-fold worldwide, according to the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

The Horn of Africa, including Somalia, is at its driest on record. This year's March-to-April rains – the first of two annual rainy seasons - have been the smallest in 70 years, and the second rains from October to December are also predicted to be unusually dry, according to a warning last month from a group of 14 meteorological and humanitarian associations, including the WMO.

"We've never seen a four-season drought before, and now we're likely to see a fifth" in October, said climatologist Chris Funk from the Climate Hazards Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

"This drought has been made much more likely due to climate change," Funk said.

The El-Nino-La Nina weather cycle halfway across the world in the Pacific is partly influencing the warm, dry air over Somalia, as is the Indian Ocean Dipole climate pattern. (For a graphic on how La Nina affects weather please click https://tmsnrt.rs/3zNnC3q)

When the Dipole is positive, it is warmer in the west of the Indian Ocean and more rain falls in East Africa. Now, the Dipole is forecast by the WMO to go negative until the end of the year, causing dryness over the Horn.

But those alone don't explain the steep decline in springtime rains over the last 20 years, said Funk.

Ocean warming may also play a part. Climate scientist Abubakr Salih Babiker of the WMO Regional Office for Africa said the Indian Ocean is among the fastest-warming water bodies in the world.

With oceans absorbing much of the increasing atmospheric heat, scientists believe warming Indian Ocean waters may be evaporating and raining down more rapidly over the ocean before reaching the Horn of Africa, leaving dry air to sweep across the land.

Another factor: air temperatures in Somalia have increased an average 1.7 degrees Celsius from the preindustrial average – faster than the global average of 1.2 degrees, said Babiker. Warmer air speeds up evaporation from soil and plants.

The Horn of Africa has seen other climate-linked disasters in recent years - damaging floods, a record number of cyclones and vast locust swarms - leaving the region staggering from one crisis to the next, he said.

"There's no time for recovery," Babiker said.

CLIMBING COSTS

The children's ward at Dollow's hospital was full of listless patients, as were the maternity and outpatient wards.

Every bed was occupied when Reuters visited in May, with age-height-weight ratios sometimes veering into the red. Weakened by severe malnutrition, some children had serious infections, including measles.

At the school where Bashir hunts for food, 10-year-old Suleko Mohammed says she lost three siblings to measles in six weeks – two brothers, aged 2 and 3, and her older sister who used to help her with homework.

They now lie under piles of rubble and thorn branches in a graveyard next to the playground. As she spoke between classes, mourners were digging another small grave.

Down the road, market stalls displayed watermelons, mangoes, beans, and bags of flour and wheat – too costly for many.

Food prices have jumped by up to 160 percent in parts of Somalia, due to the drought and global supply disruptions from the conflict in Ukraine. Even in good times, Somalia imports over half its food.

The government has become alarmed by what it says is the slow international aid response, with its special drought envoy Abdirahman Abdishakur Warsame saying countries need "to pay attention to this drought before it becomes a famine."

"All human lives are equal," he told Reuters. "The international community, particularly the Western nations, are paying more attention to Ukraine than the other crises."

To date, Somalia has received just 18% of the $1.46 billion it needs in humanitarian aid this year, according to U.N. figures - well below the level of response last year. Ukraine, by contrast, has received 71% of its requested $2.25 billion for six months. Senior U.N. officials have repeatedly sounded the alarm about the shortfall of aid in the Horn of Africa to tackle the worsening drought.

RELATIVE SAFETY

Dollow is better served by aid agencies than most Somali towns and is among the safest places from the al Qaeda-linked insurgency, one of the world's longest-running conflicts.

More than 520 aid workers have been kidnapped, injured or killed over the last 15 years – the majority of them Somali. In Dollow, Ethiopian soldiers patrol the streets and keep order.

The Kabasa Primary School was established to cope with the influx of families ravaged by the 2011 famine. Admissions swelled again during the 2016-17 drought, when early humanitarian intervention kept the death rate low.

About one fifth of students typically leave school during hard times and never return, said Rania Degesh, deputy director of East and southern Africa for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).

"When you uproot children, you expose them to incredible risks: exploitation, gender-based violence, early marriages, recruitment, neglect," Degesh said.

The meal program entices them to stay in school. Schools in Somalia get 41 U.S. cents per child for two meals a day, said the U.N.'s World Food Programme.

But dwindling funds have already forced cutbacks to the program supporting 110,000 Somali children. Schools have just started a two-month break; there is no funding for when classes resume in August.

Teachers said Bashir and his gang were among at least 50 unenrolled children who appeared daily hoping for meals. Sometimes, teachers pushed them back. Sometimes, they offered leftovers. Sometimes they turned a blind eye.

"If they eat the food, then there is not enough for the students," said Kasaba's principal, Abdikarim Dahir Ga'al, as he watched Bashir's gang slip into the schoolyard.

Ga'al pretended not to notice. It was the last day of term.

"I am a teacher," he said. "But I am also a parent."

Outside, Bashir scrambled among the last students to receive their meals, emerging triumphantly from the scrum with a metal plate of bean and corn mash.

His grin was wide and his head held high. At last, he would eat.

(Additional reporting by Gloria Dickie in London; Editing by Katy Daigle, Mike Collett-White and Daniel Flynn)

Why a Rhodes Scholar's Ambition Led Her to a Job at Starbucks

Noam Scheiber
Sun, June 19, 2022

Jaz Brisack, a Rhodes scholar and a barista who helped unionize Starbucks workers, at her home in Buffalo, N.Y., Feb. 26, 2022. (Brendan Bannon/The New York Times)

Most weekend mornings, Jaz Brisack gets up around 5, wills her semiconscious body into a Toyota Prius and winds her way through Buffalo, New York, to the Starbucks on Elmwood Avenue. After a supervisor unlocks the door, she clocks in, checks herself for COVID symptoms and helps get the store ready for customers.

“I’m almost always on bar if I open,” said Brisack, who has a thrift-store aesthetic and long reddish-brown hair that she parts down the middle. “I like steaming milk, pouring lattes.”

The Starbucks door is not the only one that has been opened for her. As a University of Mississippi senior in 2018, Brisack was one of 32 Americans who won Rhodes scholarships, which fund study in Oxford, England.

Many students seek the scholarship because it can pave the way to a career in the top ranks of law, academia, government or business. They are motivated by a mix of ambition and idealism.

Brisack became a barista for similar reasons: She believed it was simply the most urgent claim on her time and her many talents.

When she joined Starbucks in late 2020, not a single one of the company’s 9,000 U.S. locations had a union. Brisack hoped to change that by helping to unionize its stores in Buffalo.

Improbably, she and her co-workers have far exceeded their goal. Since December, when her store became the only corporate-owned Starbucks in the United States with a certified union, more than 150 other stores have voted to unionize, and more than 275 have filed paperwork to hold elections. Their actions come amid an increase in public support for unions, which last year reached its highest point since the mid-1960s, and a growing consensus among center-left experts that rising union membership could move millions of workers into the middle class.

Brisack’s weekend shift represents all these trends, as well as one more: a change in the views of the most privileged Americans. According to Gallup, approval of unions among college graduates grew from 55% in the late 1990s to 70% last year.

I have seen this firsthand in more than seven years of reporting on unions, as a growing interest among white-collar workers has coincided with a broader enthusiasm for the labor movement.

In talking with Brisack and her fellow Rhodes scholars, it became clear that the change had reached even that rarefied group. The American Rhodes scholars I encountered from a generation earlier typically said that, while at Oxford, they had been middle-of-the-road types who believed in a modest role for government. They did not spend much time thinking about unions as students, and what they did think was likely to be skeptical.

“I was a child of the 1980s and 1990s, steeped in the centrist politics of the era,” wrote Jake Sullivan, a 1998 Rhodes scholar who is President Joe Biden’s national security adviser and was a top aide to Hillary Clinton.

By contrast, many of Brisack’s Rhodes classmates express reservations about the market-oriented policies of the ’80s and ’90s and strong support for unions. Several told me that they were enthusiastic about Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who made reviving the labor movement a priority of their 2020 presidential campaigns.

Even more so than other indicators, such a shift could foretell a comeback for unions, whose membership in the United States stands at its lowest percentage in roughly a century. That’s because the kinds of people who win prestigious scholarships are the kinds who later hold positions of power — who make decisions about whether to fight unions or negotiate with them, about whether the law should make it easier or harder for workers to organize.

As the recent union campaigns at companies like Starbucks, Amazon and Apple show, the terms of the fight are still largely set by corporate leaders. If these people are increasingly sympathetic to labor, then some of the key obstacles to unions may be dissolving.

Then again, Brisack isn’t waiting to find out.

The Fight in Buffalo

Brisack moved to Buffalo after Oxford for another job, as an organizer with the union Workers United, where a mentor she had met in college worked. Once there, she decided to take a second gig at Starbucks.

“Her philosophy was get on the job and organize. She wanted to learn the industry,” said Gary Bonadonna Jr., the top Workers United official in upstate New York. “I said, ‘OK.’”

In its pushback against the campaign, Starbucks has often blamed “outside union forces” intent on harming the company, as its CEO, Howard Schultz, suggested in April. The company has identified Brisack as one of these interlopers, noting that she draws a salary from Workers United. (Bonadonna said she was the only Starbucks employee on the union’s payroll.)

But the impression that Brisack and her fellow employee-organizers give off is one of fondness for the company. Even as they point out flaws — understaffing, insufficient training, low seniority pay, all of which they want to improve — they embrace Starbucks and its distinctive culture.

They talk up their sense of camaraderie and community — many count regular customers among their friends — and delight in their coffee expertise. On mornings when Brisack’s store isn’t busy, employees often hold tastings.

A Starbucks spokesperson said that Schultz believes employees don’t need a union if they have faith in him and his motives, and the company has said that seniority-based pay increases will take effect this summer.

One Friday in February, Brisack and another barista, Casey Moore, met at the two-bedroom rental that Brisack shares with three cats to talk union strategy over breakfast. Naturally, the conversation turned to coffee.

“Jaz has a very barista drink,” Moore said.

Brisack elaborated: “It’s four blonde ristretto shots — that’s a lighter roast of espresso — with oat milk. It’s basically an iced latte with oat milk. If we had sugar-cookie syrup, I would get that. Now that that’s no more, it’s usually plain.”

That afternoon, Brisack held a Zoom call from her living room with a group of Starbucks employees who were interested in unionizing. It is an exercise that she and other organizers in Buffalo have repeated hundreds of times since last fall, as workers around the country sought to follow their lead. But in almost every case, the Starbucks workers outside Buffalo have reached out to the organizers, rather than vice versa.

This particular group of workers, in Brisack’s college town of Oxford, Mississippi, seemed to require even less of a hard sell than most. When Brisack said she, too, had attended the University of Mississippi, one of the workers waved her off, as if her celebrity preceded her. “Oh, yeah, we know Jaz,” the worker gushed.

A few hours later, Brisack, Moore and Michelle Eisen, a longtime Starbucks employee also involved in the organizing, gathered with two union lawyers at the union office in a onetime auto plant. The National Labor Relations Board was counting ballots for an election at a Starbucks in Mesa, Arizona — the first real test of whether the campaign was taking root nationally, and not just in a union stronghold like New York. The room was tense as the first results trickled in.

“Can you feel my heart beating?” Moore asked her colleagues.

Within a few minutes, however, it became clear that the union would win in a rout — the final count was 25-3. Everyone turned slightly punchy, as if they had all suddenly entered a dream world where unions were far more popular than they had ever imagined. One of the lawyers let out an expletive before musing, “Whoever organized down there …”.

Brisack seemed to capture the mood when she read a text from a co-worker to the group, “I’m so happy I’m crying and eating a week-old ice cream cake.”

A Black Antifa T-shirt at the Formal

Brisack once appeared to be on a different path. As a child, she idolized Lyndon Johnson and imagined running for office. At the University of Mississippi, she was elected president of the college Democrats.

She had developed an interest in labor history as a teenager, when money was sometimes tight, but it was largely an academic interest. “She had read Eugene Debs,” said Tim Dolan, the university’s national scholarship adviser at the time. “It was like: ‘Oh, gosh. Wow.’”

When Richard Bensinger, a former organizing director with the AFL-CIO and the United Automobile Workers, came to speak on campus, she realized that union organizing was more than a historical curiosity. She talked her way into an internship on a union campaign he was involved with at a nearby Nissan plant. It did not go well. The union accused the company of running a racially divisive campaign, and Brisack was disillusioned by the loss.

“Nissan never paid a consequence for what it did,” she said. (In response to charges of “scare tactics,” the company said at the time that it had sought to provide information to workers and clear up misperceptions.)

Dolan noticed that she was becoming jaded about mainstream politics. “There were times between her sophomore and junior year when I’d steer her toward something, and she’d say, ‘Oh, they’re way too conservative.’ I’d send her a New York Times article, and she’d say, ‘Neoliberalism is dead.’”

In England, where she arrived during the fall of 2019 at age 22, Brisack was a regular at a “solidarity” film club that screened movies about labor struggles worldwide and wore a sweatshirt that featured a head shot of Karl Marx. She liberally reinterpreted the term “black tie” at an annual Rhodes dinner, wearing a black dress-coat over a black antifa T-shirt.

“I went and got gowns and everything; I wanted to fit in,” said a friend and fellow Rhodes scholar, Leah Crowder. “I always loved how she never tried to fit in to Oxford.”

But Brisack’s politics didn’t stand out the way her formal wear did. In talking with eight other American Rhodes scholars from her year, I got the sense that progressive politics were generally in the ether. Almost all expressed some skepticism of markets and agreed that workers should have more power. The only one who questioned aspects of collective bargaining told me that few of his classmates would have agreed and that he might have been loudly jeered for expressing reservations.

Some in the group even said they had incorporated pro-labor views into their career aspirations.

Claire Wang has focused on helping fossil fuel workers find family-sustaining jobs as the world transitions to green energy. “Unions are a critical partner in this work,” she told me. Rayan Semery-Palumbo, who is finishing a dissertation on inequality and meritocracy while working for a climate technology startup, lamented that workers had too little leverage. “Labor unions may be the most effective way of implementing change going forward for a lot of people, including myself,” he told me. “I might find myself in labor organizing work.”

This is not what talking to Rhodes scholars used to sound like. At least not in my experience.

I was a Rhodes scholar in 1998, when centrist politicians like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were ascendant, and before “neoliberalism” became such a dirty word. Though we were dimly aware of a time, decades earlier, when radicalism and pro-labor views were more common among American elites — and when, not coincidentally, the U.S. labor movement was much more powerful — those views were far less in evidence by the time I got to Oxford.

Some of my classmates were interested in issues like race and poverty, as they reminded me in interviews for this article. A few had nuanced views of labor; they had worked a blue-collar job, had parents who belonged to a union or had studied their Marx. Still, most of my classmates would have regarded people who talked at length about unions and class the way they would have regarded religious fundamentalists: probably earnest but slightly preachy and clearly stuck in the past.

Kris Abrams, one of the few U.S. Rhodes scholars in our cohort who thought a lot about the working class and labor organizing, told me recently that she felt isolated at Oxford, at least among other Americans. “Honestly, I didn’t feel like there was much room for discussion,” Abrams said.

By contrast, it was common within our cohort to revere business and markets and globalization. As an undergraduate, my friend and Rhodes classmate Roy Bahat led a large public-service organization that periodically worked with unions. But as the “new” economy boomed in 1999, he interned at a large corporation. It dawned on him that a career in business might be more desirable — a way to make a larger impact on the world.

“There was a major shift in my own mentality,” Bahat told me. “I became more open to business.” It didn’t hurt that the pay was good, too.

Bahat would go on to work for McKinsey & Co., the city of New York and the executive ranks of News Corp., then start a venture capital fund focused on technologies that change how business operates. More recently, in a sign of the times, his investment portfolio has included companies that make it easier for workers to organize.

On some level, Bahat and Brisack are not so different: Both are chronic overachievers; both are ambitious about changing society for the better; both are sympathetic to the underdog by way of intellect and disposition. But the world was telling Bahat in the late 1990s to go into business if he wanted to influence events. The world was telling Brisack in 2020 to move to Buffalo and organize workers.

Reaching Howard Schultz

The first time I met Brisack was in October, at a Starbucks near the Buffalo airport.

I was there to cover the union election. She was there, unsolicited, to brief me. “I don’t think we can lose,” she said of the vote at her store. At the time, not a single corporate-owned Starbucks in the country was unionized. The union would go on to win there by more than a 2-1 ratio.

It’s hard to overstate the challenge of unionizing a major corporation that doesn’t want to be unionized. Employers are allowed to inundate workers with anti-union messaging, whereas unions have no protected access to workers on the job. While it is officially illegal to threaten, discipline or fire workers who seek to unionize, the consequences for doing so are typically minor and long in coming.

At Starbucks, the NLRB has issued complaints finding merit in such accusations. Yet the union continues to win elections — over 80% of the more than 175 votes in which the board has declared a winner. (Starbucks denies that it has broken the law, and a federal judge recently rejected a request to reinstate pro-union workers whom the labor board said Starbucks had forced out illegally.)

Though Brisack was one of dozens of early leaders of the union campaign, the imprint of her personality is visible. In store after store around the country, workers who support the union give no ground in meetings with company officials.

Even prospective allies are not spared. In May, after Time ran a favorable piece, Brisack’s response on Twitter was: “We appreciate TIME magazine’s coverage of our union campaign. TIME should make sure they’re giving the same union rights and protections that we’re fighting for to the amazing journalists, photographers, and staff who make this coverage possible!”

The tweet reminded me of a story that Dolan, her scholarship adviser, had told about a reception that the University of Mississippi held in her honor in 2018. Brisack had just won a Truman scholarship, another prestigious award. She took the opportunity to urge the university’s chancellor to remove a Confederate monument from campus. The chancellor looked pained, according to several attendees.

“My boss was like, ‘Wow, you couldn’t have talked her out of doing that?’” Dolan said. “I was like: ‘That’s what made her win. If she wasn’t that person, you all wouldn’t have a Truman now.’”

(Dolan’s boss at the time did not recall this conversation, and the former chancellor did not recall any drama at the event.)

The challenge for Brisack and her colleagues is that while younger people, even younger elites, are increasingly pro-union, the shift has not yet reached many of the country’s most powerful leaders. Or, more to the point, the shift has not yet reached Schultz, the 68-year-old now in his third tour as Starbucks’ CEO.

Schultz has long opposed unions at Starbucks, but Brisack, for one, believes that even business executives are persuadable. She recently spoke at an Aspen Institute panel on workers’ rights. She has even mused about using her Rhodes connections to make a personal appeal to Schultz, something that Bensinger has pooh-poohed but that other organizers believe she just may pull off.

“Richard has been making fun of me for thinking of asking one of the Rhodes people to broker a meeting with Howard Schultz,” Brisack said in February.

“I’m sure if you met Howard Schultz, he’d be like, ‘She’s so nice,” responded Moore, her co-worker. “He’d be like: ‘I get it. I would want to be in a union with you, too.’”

© 2022 The New York Times Company

RIGHT ON!

'Breaking Bad' actor says Americans should 'stfu' about gas prices if they
'love capitalism so much'


Landon Mion

FOX

 Sun, June 19, 2022

Actor Dean Norris criticized people who are complaining about soaring gas prices across the United States.

The "Breaking Bad" star said current gas prices are "fair market" and urged anyone who "love[s] Capitalism" to "stfu," an acronym for shut the f--- up.

"You're not getting 'robbed' at the pump," Norris wrote in a tweet on Wednesday. "You’re paying fair market price for a commodity. If you love Capitalism so much then stfu."

Dean Norris attends the 9th Annual Unbridled Eve Kentucky Derby Gala at The Galt House Hotel on May 06, 2022 in Louisville, Kentucky. 

Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for Unbridled Eve

The tweet garnered more than 7,200 retweets and 66,000 likes as of Sunday morning.

The tweet also garnered some pushback from people who pointed out that Norris is wealthy.

"Easy to say when you have a net worth of 5 mil" one person commented.

Norris' social media post comes as Americans are seeing record-high gas prices.

661 pounds, 13 feet long and a mouth 'the size of a banana': The largest freshwater fish ever caught

Evan Bush
Mon, June 20, 2022,

A fisherman in northern Cambodia hooked what researchers say is the world’s largest freshwater fish — a giant stingray that scientists know relatively little about.

The fisherman, 42, caught the 661-pound fish — which measured about 13 feet in length — near a remote island on the Mekong River in the Stung Treng area. A team of scientists from the Wonders of Mekong research project helped tag, measure and weigh the ray before it was released back into the river. The research group believes it was healthy when released and expects it to survive.

The tag — which emits an acoustic signal — will allow researchers to track the fish’s movements and, they hope, learn more about its species’ behavior in the Mekong.

The catch “highlights how little we know about a lot of these giant freshwater fish,” said Zeb Hogan, a fish biologist at the University of Nevada. “You have a fish that’s now the record holder for the world’s largest freshwater fish, and we know little about it.”

The giant freshwater stingray was captured the night of June 13, 2022 near Koh Preah island in the Mekong River in northern Cambodia. It was accidentally hooked by a 42-year-old fisherman named Moul Thun. (Chhut Chheana / Wonders of the Mekong)

The fisherman, Moul Thun, caught the giant stingray with a hook and line on the evening of June 13, and then contacted researchers the next morning.

Researchers with the Wonders of Mekong were already in northern Cambodia to install underwater receivers as part of a project to track migratory fish in the river.

“It’s a particularly healthy stretch of the river with a lot of deep pools — pools up to 90 meters deep,” said Hogan, who is also the host of National Geographic’s “Monster Fish” television series. “We started focusing on this area as a stretch of river that’s particularly important for biodiversity and fisheries, and as a last refuge for these big species.”

For several months, the research group has been in contact with local fishermen, asking them to get in touch if they landed a significant catch. The group has helped with two other large giant freshwater stingray releases in recent months. The fisherman who caught the record ray was paid market price for his catch.

“It works because the fish is not a highly prized food fish,” Hogan said.

Hogan said little is known about the giant freshwater stingray. The creature has a mouth about “the size of a banana” with no teeth, but with “gripping pads” used to crush prey.

“They’re on the bottom finding shrimps, mollusks and small fish. They can suck them up with this banana-shaped mouth and crush them,” Hogan said.

Wonders of the Mekong team members, Cambodian fisheries officials, and villagers took photos with the giant freshwater stingray. (Chhut Chheana / Wonders of the Mekong)

Fishermen have reported three catches of female stingrays in the area during the past two months, Hogan said. The scientists suspect the site could be an important seasonal gathering site for giant freshwater stingrays, and might serve as a pupping ground for young.

The research group plans to tag and track a few hundred big fish in the Mekong River to better understand fish migrations and local habitat in the upper Cambodian Mekong.

“There’s potential for hydropower development right where these stingrays were caught,” Hogan said. “We want to understand the importance of this area before there’s development, potentially in an unsustainable way.”

Hogan said the Cambodian government has expressed interest in developing a conservation plan for the giant freshwater stingrays.

The upper Mekong is also habitat for Mekong giant catfish and other species of large freshwater fish.

Worldwide, “most of these species of big fish are in trouble, their populations are declining. The Chinese paddlefish was declared extinct in 2020,” Hogan said. “We need to do more to protect these freshwater habitats.”

The former world record holding fish — a 646-pound Mekong giant catfish — was also caught on the Mekong River in 2005, in Thailand.

There are other, larger recorded catches of fish that spend time in both fresh and saltwater, such as the beluga sturgeon.

“This is the record for the largest fish that has spent its entire life in freshwater,” Hogan said of the recently caught ray.

Cambodian catches world's largest recorded freshwater fish

JERRY HARMER
Mon, June 20, 2022

BANGKOK (AP) — The world’s largest recorded freshwater fish, a giant stingray, has been caught in the Mekong River in Cambodia, according to scientists from the Southeast Asian nation and the United States.

The stingray, captured on June 13, measured almost four meters (13 feet) from snout to tail and weighed slightly under 300 kilograms (660 pounds), according to a statement Monday by Wonders of the Mekong, a joint Cambodian-U.S. research project.

The previous record for a freshwater fish was a 293-kilogram (646-pound) Mekong giant catfish, discovered in Thailand in 2005, the group said.

The stingray was snagged by a local fisherman south of Stung Treng in northeastern Cambodia. The fisherman alerted a nearby team of scientists from the Wonders of the Mekong project, which has publicized its conservation work in communities along the river.

The scientists arrived within hours of getting a post-midnight call with the news, and were amazed at what they saw.

“Yeah, when you see a fish this size, especially in freshwater, it is hard to comprehend, so I think all of our team was stunned,” Wonders of the Mekong leader Zeb Hogan said in an online interview from the University of Nevada in Reno. The university is partnering with the Cambodian Fisheries Administration and USAID, the U.S. government’s international development agency.

Freshwater fish are defined as those that spend their entire lives in freshwater, as opposed to giant marine species such as bluefin tuna and marlin, or fish that migrate between fresh and saltwater like the huge beluga sturgeon.

The stingray's catch was not just about setting a new record, he said.

“The fact that the fish can still get this big is a hopeful sign for the Mekong River, ” Hogan said, noting that the waterway faces many environmental challenges.

The Mekong River runs through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. It is home to several species of giant freshwater fish but environmental pressures are rising. In particular, scientists fear a major program of dam building in recent years may be seriously disrupting spawning grounds.

“Big fish globally are endangered. They’re high-value species. They take a long time to mature. So if they’re fished before they mature, they don’t have a chance to reproduce,” Hogan said. “A lot of these big fish are migratory, so they need large areas to survive. They’re impacted by things like habitat fragmentation from dams, obviously impacted by overfishing. So about 70% of giant freshwater fish globally are threatened with extinction, and all of the Mekong species.”

The team that rushed to the site inserted a tagging device near the tail of the mighty fish before releasing it. The device will send tracking information for the next year, providing unprecedented data on giant stingray behavior in Cambodia.

“The giant stingray is a very poorly understood fish. Its name, even its scientific name, has changed several times in the last 20 years,” Hogan said. “It’s found throughout Southeast Asia, but we have almost no information about it. We don’t know about its life history. We don’t know about its ecology, about its migration patters.”

Researchers say it’s the fourth giant stingray reported in the same area in the past two months, all of them females. They think this may be a spawning hotspot for the species.

Local residents nicknamed the stingray "Boramy,” or “full moon,” because of its round shape and because the moon was on the horizon when it was freed on June 14. In addition to the honor of having caught the record-breaker, the lucky fisherman was compensated at market rate, meaning he received a payment of around $600.

Why Is The United States Still Exporting Fuel?


Editor OilPrice.com
Sun, June 19, 2022

As the U.S. national average price of gasoline hits $5 per gallon, higher fuel exports out of America are additionally sapping domestic fuel inventories, which are already at multi-year lows.

Reduced refining capacity since the start of COVID, low inventories, and strong post-COVID demand, alongside $120 a barrel crude, have sent U.S. gasoline prices soaring over the past months to reach a record-breaking $5 a gallon on average.

The White House is desperate to lower gasoline prices, which are the most important election issue for many Americans ahead of the mid-term elections in November. Ideas juggled by the Biden Administration range from invoking the Defense Production Act to boost refining capacity and output, to restrictions on oil exports. President Joe Biden also stepped up rhetoric toward oil companies, telling them in a letter sent this week to increase fuel production and noting that “refinery profit margins well above normal being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable.”

Refiners have boosted exports of refined petroleum products this year, especially to Latin America, which isn’t getting much fuel these days from Europe, which in turn is grappling with its own set of fuel supply troubles with the sanctions and embargoes on Russian oil after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.


Exports of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel from the U.S. Gulf Coast were up by 32 percent in March, April, and May compared to those three months of 2021, and up 11 percent compared to those months in the pre-pandemic 2019, data from market-intelligence firm Kpler cited by The Wall Street Journal showed.

So far in June, seaborne shipments of gasoline and diesel from the Gulf Coast have jumped on track to be the highest since at least 2016, per oil analytics company Vortexa quoted by Bloomberg.

Higher fuel exports have contributed to lower inventories in the U.S., although this is not the primary reason for multi-year-low stockpiles of products.

Related: The Energy Crisis Has Been A Boon For Argentina’s Dead Cow Shale Patch

U.S. motor gasoline inventories are about 11 percent below the five-year average for this time of year, the EIA said in its latest weekly inventory report. Distillate fuel inventories, which include diesel, are some 23 percent below the five-year average.

“With refiners already running at full tilt, something has to give,” BloombergNEF analyst Danny Adkins told Bloomberg. “We either need a redirection of exports, or prices will need to rise enough for more significant demand destruction.”

President Biden slammed oil companies for passing record profit margins onto consumers and asked for solutions to the refining constraints in the letter to major oil companies and refiners.

The President is also “open to all reasonable uses of the federal government’s tools to increase output and lower costs at the pump, including emergency authorities like the Defense Production Act,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said this week.

The White House is even considering restrictions on gasoline and diesel exports, and discussions on such a move have intensified in recent days, sources with knowledge of the talks told Bloomberg this week.

However, a partial ban on petroleum exports would backfire as it would create additional supply shortages globally, driving oil prices higher.

Restrictions on exports would also send a mixed message to U.S. allies in a divided world, especially to allies in Europe, which is looking to phase out Russian seaborne oil and refined products imports within eight months when the EU embargo on Russian oil officially kicks in.

After all, crude oil prices are the single biggest factor determining U.S. gasoline prices, accounting for over 53 percent of the average retail price per gallon. In addition, some 1 million bpd of U.S. refinery capacity has been shut permanently since the start of the pandemic, as refiners have opted to either close money-losing facilities or convert some of them into biofuel production sites. U.S. operable refinery capacity was at just over 18 million bpd in 2021, the lowest since 2015, per EIA data.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

FROM ONE HELL TO ANOTHER
Ten weeks after escaping Kabul, a women's rights activist found herself in Texas without food, money and three of her kids

Anna Schecter and Kenzi Abou-Sabe and Cynthia McFadden
Mon, June 20, 2022, 1:00 PM·9 min read

Roshan Mashal had been fighting for women’s rights in Afghanistan for more than a decade when the Taliban took over in August. Their lives in peril, she and 18 other prominent activists targeted by the Taliban were given seats on a flight and airlifted with their families out of Kabul. Their evacuation was arranged with the aid of women’s rights organizations and the State Department.

Ten weeks after she escaped to safety in the U.S. as part of the Biden administration’s Operation Allies Welcome, Mashal found herself out of food and money in a Texas apartment, with no access to health care or transportation and separated from three of her children.

Mashal, her husband and her children were among the more than 76,000 evacuees who poured into the U.S. after the Taliban took control of Afghanistan. Her family’s bumpy first year in the U.S. highlights the cracks in the resettlement system that have left whole families stuck in hotel rooms for months, overwhelmed by the paperwork needed to start their lives in America.

“We are struggling with this complicated system,” Mashal said. “There is one caseworker with 60 clients.”

The case worker at her local resettlement agency was swamped by Afghans needing assistance in the Dallas area. Most of the families had fled Afghanistan with only a single small bag, many not speaking English or knowing how to apply for Social Security or Medicaid or register their kids for school.

The Biden administration had instructed the departments of State and Health and Human Services to coordinate with 200 local resettlement agencies to help Afghans rebuild their lives here. But the system was so overwhelmed by the sheer number of refugees that the “welcome” many received was less than ideal. Mashal's family was just one of many that slipped through the cracks.

Texas was the unexpected endpoint of their harrowing journey from Kabul to America. The family’s first stop was at Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, a military base recast as a refugee camp for nearly 13,000 Afghans. For more than a month evacuees stood in long lines for food and clothing, and there was little privacy in the barracks.

Mashal asked that she and her family be resettled in the Washington, D.C., area, like other prominent activists, so she could continue her work on behalf of Afghan women. She said she was told her family of seven — her, her husband and five children — was too large to be resettled there. She said she was told that if she went to Texas, instead, the family could stay together.

Women's rights advocate Roshan Mashal, center, and Hillary Clinton receive awards from Refugees International, a nonprofit organization promoting human rights for refugees, on May 11. (Laurence L. Levin / Refugees International)

But she said that when she and her husband were abruptly put on a plane to Dallas, only her two youngest children were allowed to go with them. The three older children, all over 21, had to stay in Wisconsin. Two made it to Dallas in late October, and the third arrived in January.

Within 10 days of their having moved into an apartment north of Dallas, the groceries the resettlement agency provided Mashal had run out.

“In the camp they say we are working so that when you resettle you have your own apartment, food stamps, Medicaid, Social Security and work permit, but that’s not the case,” she said. Every member of her family, she said, experienced delays in getting social services.

Her son had an eye infection but was turned away from two clinics because he didn’t have Medicaid. A caseworker from the resettlement agency had to drive him to the emergency room for treatment.

Her husband, who asked not to be named in this article, didn’t get a work permit until February, four months after he arrived in Texas, Mashal said. He had been a member of the professional class in Kabul. In May he started working at a minimum-wage job.

Congress had passed an emergency funding bill that included $6.3 billion to help Afghans and resettlement agencies pay for housing and other basic services.

As part of the program, the federal government provided money to resettlement agencies for services for every evacuee, sometimes referred to as “welcome money.” But the welcome money ran out fast for many. Mashal said she soon had trouble buying her family food.

It also took until February, six months after her arrival in the U.S., for Mashal to receive the card she needed to buy food via the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the program once known as “food stamps.” But the first time she used it at a grocery store checkout counter, she learned it wouldn’t cover all her groceries. While she was grateful to be in America, she was frustrated by her struggle to care for her family.

It was a low moment, she recalled. “Morally, it was stressful and shameful.”

After Mashal told the resettlement agency about her family’s lack of food, she said, a caseworker started bringing supplies every 10 to 15 days. A local nongovernment organization, DFW Refugee Outreach Services, also distributed food to Afghan families several times.

Ultimately, Mashal was able to gather her children, arrange for food and health care and find employment. She has a one-year fellowship at the University of Texas at Arlington Women’s and Gender Studies program, which was arranged with the help of the Georgetown Institute of Women, Peace and Security and the Texas International Education Consortium. She is one of 16 Afghan women who have received fellowships through the Georgetown institute.

Roshan Mashal put photos of women in Afghanistan on the walls of her office at the University of Texas at Arlington. They are reminders of the ongoing struggle back home, she said. 

(Kenzi Abou-Sabe / NBC News)

For the first few months of the job, she commuted three hours each way by trains, a bus and an Uber to get to the university. She and her family have since moved to an apartment closer to work.

But the son who had an eye infection is still without Medicaid. Her 25-year-old daughter, who studied medicine in Kabul, doesn’t yet have papers that would let her work, even though the application process began back at Fort McCoy.

A State Department spokesperson declined to comment on Mashal’s family or any Afghan’s individual case, citing privacy considerations.

Mashal said she is concerned for Afghan refugees who don’t speak English and who don’t have connections to American NGOs as she does thanks to her years working alongside U.S. organizations to promote equality for women in Afghanistan.

“I worry about women and girls here. Many of them are illiterate and don’t understand the transportation system,” she said. “It is so different from Afghanistan. They need support.”

Chris George, the executive director of the Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services resettlement agency in Connecticut, said resettlement agencies across the country struggled to do more with less for Afghan evacuees after they were weakened during the Trump administration.

“Many of them had closed down. And then, suddenly, we were asked to do something that was really unprecedented, which is to resettle 76,000 people in a matter of three or four months,” George said.

“There were too many cases, too many families coming in too short a period of time. We did the best we could. And in some cases, families suffered.”
Volunteers and veterans

During the chaos of the first months of Afghan resettlement, volunteers, NGOs and military veterans stepped in to help with the absorption of so many people with language and cultural barriers all needing help at the same time.

Retired Green Beret Matthew Coburn of Pennsylvania operated as a one-man resettlement agency for weeks as he assisted the evacuation of four Afghan commandos he’d fought alongside over multiple tours in Afghanistan.

But in an example of bureaucratic wire crossing, an able-bodied former Afghan commando whom Coburn helped to evacuate is still waiting for a work permit while the man’s baby son inexplicably received employment authorization in the mail.

“It has been chaotic, overwhelming and disorganized from the get-go,” Coburn said. “Once the resettlement agency got up to speed, it took a lot of the burden off me, but the government’s bureaucracy” — which provides things like employment authorization and Social Security cards — “still hasn’t caught up.”

At times tensions have bubbled up between unaffiliated volunteers trying to help Afghans and the refugee resettlement agencies tasked to do so.

In Iowa a volunteer group called Des Moines Refugee Support, which wasn’t officially part of the refugee resettlement agency network, started getting calls from desperate Afghan evacuees. The group stepped in to buy food and clothing and provide rides to doctor’s appointments. Volunteers asked local resettlement agencies for evacuees’ information to help fill out medical forms and register children in school. The group said two agencies refused, citing privacy concerns.

“There were kids sitting in hotel rooms for months, not registered for school, because they had no permanent address,” said Alison Hoeman, the founder of Des Moines Refugee Support, who said many of evacuees said they struggled to get enough food.

One of the Iowa resettlement agencies declined to comment, and the other didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Mashal’s resettlement agency also didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Women fleeing the repression of the Taliban, like Mashal, have also gotten specific help from volunteers and NGOs. As the Taliban closed in on Kabul, Mina’s List, an NGO that helps women run for office in places around the world where women are marginalized, realized the U.S. government was focused on evacuating military contractors who had helped U.S. armed forces.

Roshan Mashal, center, leading a march for women’s rights in Afghanistan before the U.S. withdrawal from the country. (Courtesy Roshan Mashal)

“Just knowing the demographics, we realized those are mostly men,” said Teresa Casale, the executive director of Mina’s List, who helped flag Mashal and other female human rights activists to the U.S. government as being at risk.

A majority of Afghan evacuees are male, and the majority of Afghan women who made it to the U.S. are dependents, according to NGOs that work to support the evacuees.

“I do believe that the U.S. government’s overall approach did fail Afghan women and Afghan women leaders in particular. Everything from the peace process to the withdrawal to evacuation and resettlement,” Casale said.

The next hurdle for Mashal will be to clear the way to live and work here legally once the two-year grace period ends for Afghans who came to the U.S. as humanitarian parolees. She and her family are applying for asylum, but the system is backlogged, and it could take years.

“Every day all I think about are the people left behind in Afghanistan,” she said. “I am committed to continue my work fighting for women and human rights. I will never accept the Taliban’s ideology for women and girls and will continue our struggle.”