Doing Paid Sick Leave Right

It’s not just about the number of days. 

BC should set the highest standard for workers’ rights.

David Fairey 6 Oct 2021 | TheTyee.ca
David Fairey is a labour economist, a research associate of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ B.C. office and co-chair of the BC Employment Standards Coalition.

Frontline workers are at high risk of COVID-19, and most don’t have paid sick leave to let them take time off work. 

Photo by Ewien van Bergeijk–Kwant via Unsplash.


The B.C. government will implement the right for all employees to have a minimum number of employer-paid sick days on Jan. 1, becoming just the third province in Canada to do so.

One very lucky Tyee reader will receive full access to the city’s hottest literary event.

And it has an opportunity to make history by bringing in the strongest, most well-designed program in the country.

Last May, the government established the temporary right to three paid sick days for COVID-19 related absences for all employees covered by the Employment Standards Act. It also committed to establish a permanent minimum number of employer-paid illness or injury leave days, with the number to be determined following consultation with the public, employers and unions.

This action is long overdue. Even before the onset of the pandemic, only a minority of employers (four out of 10, according to a recent government survey) provided paid sick leave to any of their employees. In nearly every workplace, workers and their employers had to contend with the spread of infectious diseases such as new strains of influenza as people routinely reported for work sick so as not to lose pay or jobs.

But the lack of access to paid sick leave came into sharp focus in 2020 when it was apparent that the deadly COVID-19 virus was spreading rapidly through workplace contact.
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Canada and its provinces have been laggards in legislating paid sick leave as an employee right. Most developed countries and many jurisdictions in the United States have had universal paid sick leave laws for many years.

What is disturbing is that it took so long for provincial governments to realize that if workers need to stay away from work when they feel sick, in the interests of public health and workplace safety, they should not have to lose income.

It is now well established that employees in low-wage precarious employment, especially in customer and personal service, have the greatest need for employer-paid sick leave. The pandemic has raised public awareness of the value — for workers, businesses and communities — of people staying away from work when they are sick.

The provincial government is now in the second phase of its consultation on the number of employer-paid sick days to be legislated. Until Oct. 25, the public can complete an online survey that asks how strongly they are in favour or opposed to each of three paid sick leave options — three days, five days or 10 days. (Workers will also continue to have access to three days of general unpaid illness or injury leave, as is already the case.)


BC Commits to Paid Sick Leave by Jan. 1, But Details Still to Come

READ MORE

It is mystifying as to why the provincial government would be considering anything less than 10 paid sick days since the federal Liberals and the NDP committed during last month’s election campaign to 10 employer-paid sick leave days for federally regulated industries and workplaces. This ought to now set the bar for any provincial government serious about public health.

Developed countries with economies and workplace policies similar to Canada’s and B.C.’s, such as Australia and New Zealand, have 10 days or more of paid sick leave per year. Across OECD countries 10 days of employer paid sick leave is the common minimum standard. Spain, Norway, Slovakia, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland and Norway all provide two weeks. Denmark provides four weeks and Germany six.

Anything less than 10 days has been shown to be inadequate in achieving the objective of keeping sick or injured workers at home, especially for workers with family and caregiving responsibilities. If a worker is required to be in quarantine for just one infectious illness or contact, 10 days of paid leave will be used up very quickly.

But the number of paid sick days is only one of several critical elements of a progressive model of paid sick leave — and the province’s survey is silent on them. Advocates are calling for:

Automatic access to paid sick leave when needed at full regular pay without pay disruption;

Automatic entitlement to three days of paid sick leave on date of hire and at the start of every subsequent year with the same employer;

In addition to the automatic initial three days, annual accrual of one hour of paid sick leave for every 35 hours worked up to a maximum 52 hours paid leave per year, equating to a total maximum of 10 days per year for full-time employment;

Carry-over of up to 10 days of unused paid sick leave at the end of each year to the following year;

Elimination of the current requirement in the Employment Standards Act that an employee complete 90 days work before being eligible for paid sick leave;

Paid sick leave available to all categories of employee, including full time, part time, casual, seasonal, temporary agency and temporary foreign workers regardless of immigration status;

Inclusion of leave to attend to personal emergency as well as family emergency and responsibility related to illness or injury;

Entitlement to paid sick leave without the requirement of proof via a doctor’s medical note; and

Provision for an additional 10 days of paid sick leave per year in the event of a declared public health emergency, such as another viral pandemic.

The B.C. government now has the historic opportunity to provide national leadership on this public health and human rights issue and implement comprehensive legislation that provides for 10 days of paid sick leave for every worker.

Jason Kenney’s Desperate Bet
He’s thirsty for a win. But his Hail Mary

 anti-equalization referendum could backfire.

David Climenhaga Today | TheTyee.ca
David J. Climenhaga is an award-winning journalist, author, post-secondary teacher, poet and trade union communicator. He blogs at AlbertaPolitics.ca, where this column originally appeared. Follow him on Twitter @djclimenhaga.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney responding to questions at the latest government COVID-19 press update held Oct. 7. Photo via Government of Alberta.


It is fairly bizarre, now that you mention it, that Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is plowing ahead with his constitutionally meaningless anti-equalization referendum at a moment he’s so messed up Alberta’s response to COVID-19 that other provinces and the Canadian Armed Forces are having to send us ICU nurses to keep the province’s health-care system afloat.

Asked about this by the Globe and Mail’s Kelly Cryderman last week at yet another uninformative COVID-19 news conference, Mr. Kenney let loose with one of his trademark bloviations on the topic.

“Obviously I’m focused on the task at hand with this fourth wave, uh, that is the overwhelming focus of my time and attention, as it should be, and as it is for the whole government,” he began rambling, piling parenthetical clause upon parenthetical clause.

“But, other things continue to move forward in our society, including our democracy. Uh, we committed to this referendum at this time, uh, in the last election, nearly two and a half years ago, this is, we’re keeping that commitment, and, Kelly, we’ve had elections in, I think five provinces, four or five provinces, uh, throughout COVID-19, we just had a federal election, where every issue under the sun was debated, and people went to the polls, we have a municipal election, on the 18th of October, where people will be voting for, uh, school boards and municipal councils. I think it’s possible for Albertans to address important public issues that affect our long-term future as a province, including the need for us to have a fair deal. Uh, I don’t think that uh, a distraction, uh, for the p-public. You know, people have to, society goes on, uuuh, the economy has to function, and our democracy has to continue to work.…”

That’s enough! Here’s the most likely translation: “It’s too late to get it off the ballot.”

That said, it didn’t really make sense before the pandemic either, before Mr. Kenney’s United Conservative Party had laid waste to the health-care system by opening the doors wide to the COVID virus, and when its only major accomplishment was expanding the Trans Mountain Pipeline to B.C., a project bought and paid for by Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberals in co-operation with the previous NDP provincial government.

Come to think of it, that’s still pretty much the only thing the UCP can claim as an accomplishment.

It is more than merely ironic, of course, that the current equalization formula was imposed by the Harper Conservative government, when Mr. Kenney was an influential member of cabinet.

As for the referendum, it was probably originally tacked onto the Oct. 18 province-wide municipal elections as a way to get the UCP base out to vote against Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, despised by the UCP’s well-heeled developer supporters in the Cowtown Sprawl Cabal.

But Mr. Nenshi changed the dynamic of the Calgary vote by taking himself off the board.

Nevertheless, Mr. Kenney would still like to see the referendum pass, if only to distract from his present troubles and to open the door to future independantiste mischief to keep his foes in Ottawa and Alberta off balance and the UCP base sweet.

The question is:

“Should section 36(2) of the Constitution Act, 1982 – Parliament and the government of Canada’s commitment to the principle of making equalization payments – be removed from the constitution?”

As folks keep pointing out, now might be an ironically bad time for Alberta to be advocating any such thing.

Regardless, though, the Canadian Constitution can’t be changed at the snap of Mr. Kenney’s fingers, or even those of former Wildrose Party deputy leader Rob Anderson and his posse of bozo-erupting UCP MLAs.

No, it would require Ottawa and all provinces to sit down and negotiate to amend the constitution, something that just isn’t going to happen no matter how strong the referendum result turns out to be.

The unpopularity of the federal equalization program in Alberta is largely a built on misinformation promoted by Conservative politicians like Mr. Kenney and political groups with an interest in stirring up regional grievances.


As has never been well understood in Conservative circles in this province, if equalization were to disappear, Albertans wouldn’t notice any change in their tax bills because the funds distributed by Ottawa are collected through federal taxes paid by all Canadians.

Still, I guess, at this point Mr. Kenney must figure getting voters to think about almost anything is better than having them focus on his terrible record or listen to the people on both sides of the province’s political divide who are calling for his head.

And remember, as my blogging colleague Dave Cournoyer recently reminded me, the referendum idea wasn’t Mr. Kenney’s, but was dreamed up by former Wildrose Party Leader Brian Jean when he was running for the leadership of the UCP in 2017.

Lately the former Fort McMurray MP and MLA, embittered by the tricks employed by Mr. Kenney to win that contest, seems to be plotting a comeback.

Residents of the Fort McMurray-Lac La Biche riding report being asked by a telephone pollster what they’d think if Mr. Jean ran to replace their former MLA, Laila Goodridge, who recently abandoned the riding lickety-split when she got the chance to be elected federal MP for Fort Mac-Cold Lake.

Ms. Goodridge will now be safely ensconced in Ottawa when the tumbrils roll for the UCP Government, in the spring of 2023 as expected or possibly even sooner. And I’m sure Mr. Jean would like to be back in the Alberta House as her replacement to argue he’s the only leader who could possibly save the province from a return of the NDP.

That might not be a very persuasive narrative, but you can hardly blame Mr. Jean for trying.

The arrival of an ambitious Independent MLA with Wildrose ties to several members of the premier’s caucus would not be a positive development for Mr. Kenney.

Nor would an early UCP leadership review before March 1, 2022.

Reports circulating on social media last week suggested that as many as 16 UCP constituency boards have now passed motions demanding a review of Mr. Kenney’s leadership before March 1. A total of 22 riding votes would be required to force the early review.

An easy win in his silly equalization referendum on Oct. 18 might give Mr. Kenney a meaningless victory to tout as he tries to hang onto his job.

How unfortunate for him that many of his opponents on both sides of the aisle have seized on the idea of using a No vote in the referendum as a way to show non-confidence in his leadership.

As a meme circulated widely on social media by the informal, unfunded, grassroots campaign that has sprung up around this idea says: “Oct. 18 Across Alberta #RejectKenney VOTE NO to a useless equalization referendum.”

Geologists explain why the water you're drinking may be thousands of years old
The Conversation
October 11, 2021

Child drinking water from a fountain (Shutterstock)

Communities that rely on the Colorado River are facing a water crisis. Lake Mead, the river's largest reservoir, has fallen to levels not seen since it was created by the construction of the Hoover Dam roughly a century ago. Arizona and Nevada are facing their first-ever mandated water cuts, while water is being released from other reservoirs to keep the Colorado River's hydropower plants running.

If even the mighty Colorado and its reservoirs are not immune to the heat and drought worsened by climate change, where will the West get its water?

There's one hidden answer: underground.

As rising temperatures and drought dry up rivers and melt mountain glaciers, people are increasingly dependent on the water under their feet. Groundwater resources currently supply drinking water to nearly half the world's population and roughly 40% of water used for irrigation globally.

What many people don't realize is how old – and how vulnerable – much of that water is.

Most water stored underground has been there for decades, and much of it has sat for hundreds, thousands or even millions of years. Older groundwater tends to reside deep underground, where it is less easily affected by surface conditions such as drought and pollution.

As shallower wells dry out under the pressure of urban development, population growth and climate change, old groundwater is becoming increasingly important.

Drinking ancient groundwater

If you bit into a piece of bread that was 1,000 years old, you'd probably notice.

Water that has been underground for a thousand years can taste different, too. It leaches natural chemicals from the surrounding rock, changing its mineral content. Some natural contaminants linked to groundwater age – like mood-boosting lithium – can have positive effects. Other contaminants, like iron and manganese, can be troublesome.


Older groundwater is also sometimes too salty to drink without expensive treatment. This problem can be worse near the coasts: Overpumping creates space that can draw seawater into aquifers and contaminate drinking supplies.



Flow timescales of groundwater through different layers. USGS

Ancient groundwater can take thousands of years to replenish naturally. And, as California saw during its 2011-2017 drought, natural underground storage spaces compress as they empty, so they can't refill to their previous capacity. This compaction in turn causes the land above to crack, buckle and sink.

Yet people today are drilling deeper wells in the West as droughts deplete surface water and farms rely more heavily on groundwater.

What does it mean for water to be 'old'?

Let's imagine a rainstorm over central California 15,000 years ago. As the storm rolls over what's now San Francisco, most of the rain falls into the Pacific Ocean, where it will eventually evaporate back into the atmosphere. However, some rain also falls into rivers and lakes and over dry land. As that rain seeps through layers of soil, it enters slowly trickling “flowpaths" of underground water.

Some of these paths lead deeper and deeper, where water collects in crevices within the bedrock hundreds of meters underground. The water gathered in these underground reserves is in a sense cut off from the active water cycle – at least on timescales relevant to human life.


In California's arid Central Valley, much of the accessible ancient water has been pumped out of the earth, mostly for agriculture. Where the natural replenishment timescale would be on the order of millennia, agricultural seepage has partially refilled some aquifers with newer – too often polluted – water. In fact, places like Fresno now actively refill aquifers with clean water (such as treated wastewater or stormwater) in a process known as “managed aquifer recharge."



Average turnover times for groundwater in the U.S. (Alan Seltzer, based on data from Befus et al 2017, CC BY-ND)

In 2014, midway through their worst drought in modern memory, California became the last western state to pass a law requiring local groundwater sustainability plans. Groundwater may be resilient to heat waves and climate change, but if you use it all, you're in trouble.

One response to water demand? Drill deeper. Yet that answer isn't sustainable.


First, it's expensive: Large agricultural companies and lithium mining firms tend to be the sort of investors who can afford to drill deep enough, while small rural communities can't.

Second, once you pump ancient groundwater, aquifers need time to refill. Flowpaths may be disrupted, choking off a natural water supply to springs, wetlands and rivers. Meanwhile, the change in pressure underground can destabilize the earth, causing land to sink and even leading to earthquakes.




Pumping accelerates groundwater flow to a well, delivering dissolved chemicals. (USGS)

Third is contamination: While deep, mineral-rich ancient groundwater is often cleaner and safer to drink than younger, shallower groundwater, overpumping can change that. As water-strapped regions rely more heavily on deep groundwater, overpumping lowers the water table and draws down polluted modern water that can mix with the older water. This mixing causes the water quality to deteriorate, leading to demand for ever-deeper wells.
Reading climate history in ancient groundwater

There are other reasons to care about ancient groundwater. Like actual fossils, extremely old “fossil groundwater" can teach us about the past.

Envision our prehistoric rainstorm again: 15,000 years ago, the climate was quite different from today. Chemicals that dissolved in ancient groundwater are detectable today, opening windows into a past world. Certain dissolved chemicals act as clocks, telling scientists the groundwater's age. For example, we know how fast dissolved carbon-14 and krypton-18 decay, so we can measure them to calculate when the water last interacted with air.

Younger groundwater that disappeared underground after the 1950s has a unique, man-made chemical signature: high levels of tritium from atomic bomb testing.


The various components and properties of an unconfined aquifer. (USGS)

Other dissolved chemicals behave like tiny thermometers. Noble gases like argon and xenon, for instance, dissolve more in cold water than in warm water, along a precisely known temperature curve. Once groundwater is isolated from air, dissolved noble gases don't do much. As a result, they preserve information about environmental conditions at the time the water first seeped into the subsurface.

The concentrations of noble gases in fossil groundwater have provided some of our most reliable estimates of temperature on land during the last ice age. Such findings provide insight into modern climates, including how sensitive Earth's average temperature is to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. These methods support a recent study that found 3.4 degrees Celsius of warming with each doubling of carbon dioxide.
Groundwater's past and future

People in some regions, like New England, have been drinking ancient groundwater for years with little danger of exhausting usable supplies. Regular rainfall and varied water sources – including surface water in lakes, rivers and snowpack – provide alternatives to groundwater and also refill aquifers with new water. If aquifers can keep up with the demand, the water can be used sustainably.

Out West, though, over a century of unmanaged and exorbitant water use means that some of the places most dependent on groundwater – arid regions vulnerable to drought – have squandered the ancient water resources that once existed underground.


How water use and recharge fit into the hydrological cycle. (State of California)

A famous precedent for this problem is in the Great Plains. There, the ancient water of the Ogallala Aquifer supplies drinking water and irrigation for millions of people and farms from South Dakota to Texas. If people were to pump this aquifer dry, it would take thousands of years to refill naturally. It is a vital buffer against drought, yet irrigation and water-intensive farming are lowering its water levels at unsustainable rates.

As the planet warms, ancient groundwater is becoming increasingly important – whether flowing from your kitchen tap, irrigating food crops, or offering warnings about Earth's past that can help us prepare for an uncertain future.

[Understand new developments in science, health and technology, each week. Subscribe to The Conversation's science newsletter.]

By Marissa Grunes, Environmental Fellow, Harvard University; Alan Seltzer, Assistant Scientist in Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Kevin M. Befus, Assistant Professor of Hydrogeology, University of Arkansas

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Fact-checking former President Donald Trump’s 'save America' rally in Iowa

Former President Donald Trump greets Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, after endorsing the senator on Saturday night. (Cecilia Shearon/The Daily Iowan)

By Caleb McCullough October 11, 2021

By Lyle Muller October 11, 2021

Former President Trump’s latest stop was Des Moines, Iowa, as he made the rounds across the United States to fire up his political supporters.

 
Iowa is the first state in the nation to hold presidential nomination precinct caucuses.

Trump made several familiar claims in the state he won in the 2020 election — some were true, and others were either exaggerated or outright false — especially his claims of election fraud.

Conjecture that former President Donald Trump is seeking back the White House job he held for four years continued to generate news— and fact checks — in Iowa on Saturday night, Oct. 9.

Trump’s latest visit was a Save America Rally that drew thousands of people to the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines, Iowa, and was run by Trump’s Save America PAC.

We checked some of the Republican former president’s Iowa comments. Many are familiar from previous appearances across the country. But, they bear paying attention to because Iowa has held the nation’s first presidential nominating precinct caucuses and, so far, figures to do so again in 2024.

"Just this week the latest Des Moines Register poll showed that Biden is a record low, 31 percent approval in Iowa … While your all-time favorite president … is at a record high, the highest we’ve ever been."

Trump has received high marks among Iowa voters, especially Republicans. The most recent Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll, reported Oct. 4, showed that 53 percent of Iowans have a favorable view of Trump, while 45 percent have an unfavorable view. The approval numbers are better than he had when president, The Register reported. The poll questioned 805 adults between Sept. 12-15. Its margin of error was plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Among Republicans, 91 percent had a favorable view of Trump in the Iowa Poll survey. Another 7 percent viewed him unfavorably, while 2 percent didn’t know, the survey showed. The flipside showed 99 percent of Democrats in Iowa viewing Trump unfavorably, and only 1 percent viewing him favorably.

Whether it was a mistake or intentional, Trump flubbed the numbers on President Joe Biden’s favorability rating — in the same poll, 37 percent of voters said they had a favorable view of the president, not 31 percent.

Beyond the latest poll, Trump can point to his 2020 electoral performance in Iowa. He won 53 percent of the November vote for president, while Democrat Joe Biden collected 45 percent. Other candidates got the rest.

Few Iowans are ambivalent about Trump. In that latest Iowa Poll, only 2 percent said they were not sure how they feel about him.

But some Republicans in other parts of the United States have been upset by Trump’s rallies. In Perry, Georgia, on Sept. 25, Trump upset members of the Republican establishment by calling Gov. Brian Kemp a disaster and saying he’d prefer Democrat Stacey Abrams, a rising star in her party and a frequent target of derision among Republicans, as governor.
"They’ve never been so successful as they are now because of what we did," talking about giving billions in subsidies to farmers.

Agriculture income was a mixed bag during the Trump Administration, in large part because of a trade war with China during which the federal government compensated farmers for lost sales. Net farm income – income minus expenses – increased from $75.1 billion to $81.1 billion from 2017 to 2018, went back to $79.1 billion in 2019 and up to $94.6 billion in 2020, U.S. Department of Agriculture data as of Sept. 2, 2021, show.

That net income was helped by government assistance in 2018 and 2019 to counteract the trade wars and assistance in 2020 for COVID-19 pandemic-related losses. The USDA Economic Research Service reported that federal government assistance to farmers totaled $11.5 billion in 2017 and $13.7 billion in 2018 before jumping to $22.4 billion in 2019 and $45.7 billion in 2020.

An analysis by The National Foundation for American Policy reported in January 2020 that Trump aid to farmers was exceeding federal spending on several federal government agencies. The nonpartisan research group, which focuses on immigration, international trade and other matters dealing with globalization and the economy, also reported that farm subsidies at that time exceeded how much the federal government spent on building naval ships and maintaining the United States’ nuclear arsenal.

The USDA’s most recent forecast calls for net farm income to increase 19.5% by $18.5 billion from 2020 to $113.0 billion in 2021.
The Arizona forensic audit of the state’s 2020 presidential election results "showed massive irregularities."

PolitiFact looked into this when Trump previously made the false comment, which the fact-finders ruled to be "Pants on Fire." That report showed that a Republican-led review of the 2020 election totals in crucial Arizona showed Biden with 45,469 more votes than Trump in Maricopa, the state’s largest county.

Not only was that close to the official results certified in November 2020, Cyber Ninjas, the firm hired to conduct the review, reported that Biden’s margin of victory was 360 votes larger than what the county’s official canvass showed.

Trump claimed that the audit showed "2,500 duplicate ballots," but that claim is misleading. The previous fact check found that duplicate ballots are created when election officials find a ballot has inconsistent signature information and they contact the voter, but only one ballot is actually counted.

Trump also claimed that "10,324 voters might have voted in multiple counties." This is an exaggeration of what the report says, and Maricopa County officials have said that the report’s criteria were not stringent enough to prove duplicate voting.

The report said it found 5,047 voters with the same first, middle, last name, and birth date, representing 10,342 votes among all Arizona counties. A report from Maricopa County officials, though, said the criteria used to identify voters resulted in false duplicates, and the firm should have used more specific criteria like social security number and driver’s license number.
"We won by a lot" in Wisconsin.

This is false. Biden won in Wisconsin with more than 20,000 more votes than Trump.

While he didn’t get into specifics, Trump made a similar claim about winning Wisconsin in August, which PolitiFact found to be "Pants on Fire." It involves an email exchange in the early morning hours after Election Day from an election consultant to Claire Woodall-Vogg, executive director of the Milwaukee Elections Commission.

"Damn, Claire, you have a flair for drama, delivering just the margin needed at 3:00 a.m." the consultant wrote. "I bet you had those votes counted at midnight, and just wanted to keep the world waiting!"

Woodall-Vogg responded about 10 minutes later: "Lol. I just wanted to say I had been awake for a full 24 hours!"

Right-leaning news organizations published the exchange and commentators jumped on it but Woodall-Vogg said the exchange was a joke, but inappropriate. Republican and Democratic observers were at Milwaukee’s absentee ballot-counting center until all results were tallied and no evidence exists showing ballots deliberately were miscounted. Trump’s efforts to impugn the process lost in both a recount requested by Trump and a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling.
"Illegal aliens and deadly drug cartels are taking over our borders."

This is another topic PolitiFact has researched, as have fact-checkers with other news organizations. Border security drew interest in Iowa before Trump came to the state when Gov. Kim Reynolds joined nine other Republican governors for an Oct. 6 trip to Anzaldaus Park, in Mission, Texas, where the U.S. border with Mexico exists. The governors used the setting to sharply criticize Biden’s handling of border crossings.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection data show crossings of the Mexican border into the United States are at an all-time high, with 200,599 encounters in July alone and 195,958 in August. Data for September had not been compiled. That compared with 38,536 the previous July and 50,648 the previous August, the data show.

Austin American-Statesman fact-checkers wrote in March that a surge in immigrants was the result of drastic changes between the immigration policies of Biden’s and Trump’s administrations, but also worsening economic circumstances in countries where the migrants have lived, notably Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

PolitiFact reported in June that a U.S. Customs and Border Protection status memo on border wall construction between 2017 and 2020 showed about 738 miles of barriers were planned, of which 453 miles were completed. About 17 miles of completed wall were in Texas.

Another 285 miles were either under construction or in the pre-construction phase when Trump left office. President Biden ordered that the work be stopped on his first day in office, although another some 13 miles of wall is being built in a flood control plan that has pro-immigration activists upset, NPR News reported.

Overall, U.S. Border Patrol total apprehensions at all of the nation’s borders totaled 405,036 in fiscal 2020, which ran from Oct. 1, 2019, through Sept. 30, 2020 on the federal calendar. That was a little more than one-half of the 859,501 apprehensions the previous fiscal year but close to those in fiscal 2018 and up from fiscal 2017, U.S. Border Patrol data show.

You have to go back to fiscal 2000 for the peak of almost 1.7 million apprehensions, the data show. The Border Patrol consistently had, with a few exceptions in the 900,000 to 970,000 range, more than 1 million apprehensions in a stretch from fiscal 1983 through fiscal 2006.
On the Oct. 7 Senate Judiciary Committee report on Trump’s efforts to overturn election: "The left’s new obsession is the un-select committee, I call it the un-select committee."

The Judiciary Committee issued two reports on Oct. 7 on the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 president election. One was from the majority Democrats and one was from minority Republicans, led by ranking member Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa. The two reports were based on the same testimony but had different conclusions.

The majority report said Trump repeatedly asked leaders of his Department of Justice "to endorse his false claims that the election was stolen and to assist his efforts to overturn the election results." They added that Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows asked Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen "to initiate election fraud investigations on multiple occasions, violating longstanding restrictions on White House-DOJ communications about specific law enforcement matters."

"Trump allies with links to the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement and the January 6 insurrection participated in the pressure campaign against DOJ," the report also said.

The report said Rosen threatened to resign and that other Justice Department lawyers would, too, if Trump persisted with his pressure and that Trump forced the resignation of a U.S. attorney so that he could appoint someone who would "do something" about his claims of election fraud, the report said.

The minority report didn’t dispute any of the testimony but said Trump followed the Justice Department staff recommendations and did not take actions that an assistant attorney general, Jeffrey Clark, suggested: sending a draft letter to some states with reported voter irregularities and recommending that their legislatures choose different Electoral College electors. Biden won the states in question.

The Republican report also noted that Trump did not fire anyone over these matters. It said the Republicans believe Trump had legitimate complaints and reports of crimes involving the election, and that he was reaching out to the Justice Department to make it aware of those complaints and doing its job of investigating them. He did not, the Republicans said, issue an order to take any actions.

Multiple audits and reviews have shown no evidence of widespread voter fraud, and have confirmed that Biden beat Trump in the election.

'Absolutely wrong': GOP Senate candidate's pro-Christopher Columbus rant ripped to shreds by scholars
Brad Reed
October 11, 2021

Portrait of a man, said to be Christopher Columbus (MetMuseum)

Missouri Republican Senate candidate Eric Schmitt on Monday defended the legacy of Christopher Columbus with a historically illiterate rant that also took a subtle shot at scientists.

"In 1492 the 'consensus' among scientists was that the earth was flat," Schmitt wrote on Twitter. "Christopher Columbus challenged that notion and changed the world forever."

Multiple scholars, however, jumped in to point out that Schmitt has his history completely wrong.

"Nope, absolutely wrong. Any scholar of the Middle Ages knew the earth was round," wrote University of Pittsburgh professor of religion Brock Baher. "The myth that they believed it was flat came from 19th Century when anti-Catholic propagandists like John William Draper & Washington Irving who wanted to claim religion was in conflict thesis with science."

Thomas Lecaque, an associate professor of Medieval history at Grand View University, made similar points about Europeans' general knowledge of the Earth's shape at the end of the 15th century.

"In 1492, almost everyone in Europe knew that the earth was round, and were closer to the accurate size than Columbus was," he wrote. "Columbus followed an incorrect line of reasoning, based on bad exegesis, and only survived due to luck. No one thought the world was flat."

Rebecca Anne Goetz, an associate professor of history at New York University, pointed out that "knowledge of a spherical Earth was widely discussed as early as the 5th century BC" through translated writings of Greek philosopher Aristotle.

And Princeton historian Kevin Kruse delivered an even pithier reply to Schmitt by writing, "Congrats on never reading a book after the second grade."

GOP lawmakers introduce measure in support of Columbus Day

BY CRISTINA MARCOS - 10/11/21 

A pair of House Republicans introduced a measure in support of the federally recognized Columbus Day holiday amid efforts largely on the left to promote Indigenous Peoples Day instead.

The resolution from GOP Reps. Andrew Garbarino (N.Y.) and Mark Amodei (Nev.) formally expresses support for recognition of the explorer Christopher Columbus and "his impact on the Italian-American community."

"Columbus Day honors not just the contributions and ingenuity of Christopher Columbus, but also of the generations of Italian Americans that followed. It is a day of great pride and celebration for the Italian American community," Garbarino tweeted on Monday.

Garbarino added in a statement that he is "committed to making sure it is preserved for future generations."

President Biden late last week became the first sitting U.S. president to issue a presidential proclamation marking Indigenous Peoples Day.


Proponents of Indigenous Peoples Day argue that there should be a holiday celebrating the historical contributions of Native Americans rather than Columbus, who enslaved the Native people he encountered during his voyages to what would be later be known as the Americas.

“For generations, Federal policies systematically sought to assimilate and displace Native people and eradicate Native cultures,” Biden wrote in the proclamation. “Today, we recognize Indigenous peoples’ resilience and strength as well as the immeasurable positive impact that they have made on every aspect of American society.”

Biden also issued a proclamation acknowledging Columbus Day and the contributions of Italian Americans but noted the "painful history of wrongs and atrocities that many European explorers inflicted on Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities."

"It is a measure of our greatness as a Nation that we do not seek to bury these shameful episodes of our past — that we face them honestly, we bring them to the light, and we do all we can to address them," Biden wrote. "On this day, we recognize this painful past and recommit ourselves to investing in Native communities, upholding our solemn and sacred commitments to Tribal sovereignty, and pursuing a brighter future centered on dignity, respect, justice, and opportunity for all people."

Some cities and states across the nation have already moved to replace celebrating Columbus Day on Monday with Indigenous Peoples Day.

At the federal level, Democratic members of Congress have introduced legislation to make Indigenous Peoples Day a federal holiday instead of Columbus Day.

Rep. Norma Torres (D-Calif.) and Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) both recently introduced bills to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day as a legal public holiday on the second Monday in October.

Many Republicans, meanwhile, have pushed back against the criticisms of celebrating Columbus Day by arguing its legacy deserves recognition despite the complicated history.

In his presidential proclamation marking Columbus Day last year, former President Trump condemned “radical activists” who “have sought to undermine Christopher Columbus’s legacy.”

The cities and states marking Indigenous Peoples' Day for the first...
The Hill's 12:30 Report - Presented by The National Columbus...

“These extremists seek to replace discussion of his vast contributions with talk of failings, his discoveries with atrocities, and his achievements with transgressions,” Trump wrote. “Rather than learn from our history, this radical ideology and its adherents seek to revise it, deprive it of any splendor, and mark it as inherently sinister.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) similarly argued in a series of tweets on Monday that critics of Columbus Day were "not interested in teaching real history, with context & truth" about the conflicts between European explorers and Native Americans.

"I believe America has been the greatest force for good in the history of the world. Do we have our faults? Certainly. Including especially the oppression of Native Americans & our original sin the grotesque evil of slavery. But our IDEALS transformed the world," Cruz wrote.

An obscure piece of Biden's agenda could deal a big blow to Trump's right-wing nationalism
Travis Gettys
October 11, 2021

Joe Biden (Shutterstock)

An obscure provision of President Joe Biden's agenda could deal a big blow to one of Donald Trump's most controversial legacies.

Global minimum taxes will likely be included as part of the reconciliation deal after 130 nations reached a deal that would impose a minimum 15-percent levy on corporations on their overseas profits to stop the "race to the bottom" competition for multinational corporations and keep those companies from stashing profits in low-tax havens, reported the Washington Post.

"Right wing nationalists are supposed to hate such elite chicanery," wrote Post columnist Greg Sargent. "After all, international capital mobility and profit shifting are two key ways that multinationals have emerged as big winners from globalization. This has deprived the nation of revenue, while allowing multinationals access to elite tax avoidance strategies that ordinary Americans lack."

"You'd think this would be particularly offensive to those nationalists who preen around declaring that globalist and cosmopolitan elites have presided over the hollowing out of virtuous nonmetropolitan Real America," he added. "Yet, while such nationalists do sometimes decry this problem, there isn't a real nationalist solution to it. The answer is a multilateral one."

The Biden administration believes the tax would generate billions of dollars over the next decade, but right-wing nationalists will likely oppose it even though the 2017 Trump tax cuts tried but largely failed to recapture some overseas profits for multinationals.

"The standard right wing nationalist objection to such multilateral arrangements is they deprive U.S. citizens of agency by turning over decision-making to globalist elites," Sargent wrote. "But in this case, multilateral cooperation could prevent corporations from exploiting global mobility in ways that limit what nations can do democratically, in keeping with their own citizens' aspirations."

SPRITES

Astronaut shares images of mysterious luminous event from the ISS

Shane McGlaun - Oct 11, 2021,

Astronaut Thomas Pesquet took a photograph on October 8 from the International Space Station that captured something exceedingly rare. The photo seen below clearly shows a bright blue-white luminous event on the horizon of the Earth. Pesquet took the single frame showing the blue luminous event from a longer time-lapse.

While the photograph looks like some sort of explosion, it was not, and most people on the ground would probably have never noticed the event occurred. What Pesquet captured is called a “transient luminous event,” which is similar to lightning but strikes upward in the upper atmosphere of the planet. Another name for the event is upper-atmospheric lightning.

Transient luminous events are a group of related phenomena typically occurring during thunderstorms. While similar to lightning, they occur significantly higher than normal lightning and work differently. Different types of events that fall into the transient luminous event category include “blue jets” occurring in the lower stratosphere, triggered by lightning. For such an event to occur, lightning must propagate through a negatively charged area of thunderstorm clouds before reaching a positive region below.

If that occurs, lightning strikes upward, which causes a blue glow from molecular nitrogen. A phenomenon known as red SPRITES also exists. Red SPRITES is an electric discharge typically red in color that occurs high above a thunderstorm cell and is triggered by lightning from below. One interesting aspect of what Pesquet captured is that scientists weren’t convinced they existed only a few decades ago.

Pilots had observed phenomena of the sort before science agreed the phenomena existed. Today, we know not only do transit luminous events exist, but they also influence the climate. It’s unclear what type of event we see in the photograph taken by Pesquet aboard ISS. It is worth noting that phenomena of this type are very difficult to capture in photographs from the ground.

‘I think there’s life out there’: powerful radio antenna used for first time to find exoplanets


Australian scientists part of team using Low Frequency Array to detect signals indicating planets beyond our solar system

Image taken with Low-Frequency Array (Lofar). Australian scientists are part of team to use Lofar to discover radio signals that indicate exoplanets. 

Photograph: Cyril Tasse/OBSERVATOIRE DE PARIS - PSL/AFP/Getty Images

Tory Shepherd
Mon 11 Oct 2021 

New techniques for spotting previously hidden planets could reveal whether there is life out there – or not.

Australian scientists are part of a team that has for the first time used a radio antenna to find exoplanets, which means planets beyond our solar system.

Using the world’s most powerful antenna – the Low Frequency Array in the Netherlands (Lofar) – the team has discovered radio signals from 19 distant red dwarf stars.

Four of them are emitting signals that indicate that planets are orbiting them.

University of Queensland astrophysicist Dr Benjamin Pope says the finding opens up “radically new opportunities” to study exoplanets, which may be habitable.

The research was published on Tuesday in Nature Astronomy, at the same time as a second paper Pope has authored which confirmed the data using an optical telescope.

Pope said it was staff at Australia’s scientific research agency, the CSIRO, who first started studying the sky with military radars during the second world war. Then CSIRO developed the Parkes Observatory – known as The Dish.

Lofar is a prototype or “pathfinder” that is part of the development of the Square Kilometre Array, which will be the world’s largest telescope, based in Western Australia and South Africa. “Lofar’s a mini version of what we can expect in WA in five to 10 years,” Pope said.

The team studies space using radio signals and importantly worked out how to screen out other objects such as black holes and neutron stars to focus on red dwarfs, using the same technology that gives us polarised sunglasses.

Lead author Joseph Callingham said the team is confident the signals come from a magnetic connection between the stars and unseen orbiting planets.

“It’s a spectacle that has attracted our attention from light years away,” he said.

Pope said further study is needed, but that “the evidence rules out all the other possibilities other than that it is a star interacting with a planet”.

“We now have a new window on the sky thanks to the power of Lofar and techniques like putting on the polarised sunnies. This opens up a realm of possibilities for the future,” he said.

So far with Lofar, they have only looked at a fraction of the sky. Once the SKA comes online “we’ll find hundreds and hundreds of these things”, Pope said.

And the thing about red dwarves is that planets which orbit them often have Earth-like temperatures.

“So we’re looking for habitable planets as potential abodes for life. It’s not about finding Planet B for us to move to. It’s about finding whether there is life elsewhere in the universe. This would be a profound discovery,” he said.

Pope, who researches exoplanets, said it was likely that many planets orbiting red dwarves were pleasantly balmy but scoured by radiation, rendering them uninhabitable.

But some could be in the so-called Goldilocks zone.

As for his own opinion, he doesn’t think we are alone in the universe but is careful to distinguish between the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the search for evidence of any sort of biological signature.

“I do think there’s life out there. I wouldn’t be doing this job if I didn’t think there was some realistic prospect of that,” he said, adding that he thinks we’ll have an answer within our lifetimes – either way.

Hearth site in Utah desert reveals human tobacco use 12,300 years ago

Will Dunham Reuters
PUBLISHEDOCT 11, 2021

CREDIT: REUTERS/HANDOUT
Scientists have unearthed evidence of a milestone in human culture - the earliest-known use of tobacco - in the remnants of a hearth built by early inhabitants of North America's interior about 12,300 years ago in Utah's Great Salt Lake Desert.

WASHINGTON, Oct 11 (Reuters) - Scientists have unearthed evidence of a milestone in human culture - the earliest-known use of tobacco - in the remnants of a hearth built by early inhabitants of North America's interior about 12,300 years ago in Utah's Great Salt Lake Desert.

Researchers discovered four charred seeds of a wild tobacco plant within the hearth contents, along with stone tools and duck bones left over from meals. Until now, the earliest documented use of tobacco came in the form of nicotine residue found inside a smoking pipe from Alabama dating to 3,300 years ago.

The researchers believe the nomadic hunter-gatherers at the Utah site may have smoked the tobacco or perhaps sucked wads of tobacco plant fiber for the stimulant qualities offered by the nicotine it contained.

After tobacco use originated among the New World's native peoples, it spread worldwide following the arrival of Europeans more than five centuries ago. Tobacco now represents a worldwide public health crisis, with 1.3 billion tobacco users and more than 8 million annual tobacco-related deaths, according to the World Health Organization.


"On a global scale, tobacco is the king of intoxicant plants, and now we can directly trace its cultural roots to the Ice Age," said archaeologist Daron Duke of the Far Western Anthropological Research Group in Nevada, lead author of the research published on Monday in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

The seeds belonged to a wild variety of desert tobacco, named Nicotiana attenuata, that still grows in the area.

"This species was never domesticated but is used by indigenous people in the region to this day," Duke said.

The Great Salt Lake Desert today is a large dry lake bed in northern Utah. The hearth site at the time was part of a vast marshlands, with a chillier clime during the twilight of the Ice Age. It is called the Wishbone site owing to duck wishbones found in the hearth.

The hearth remnants were found eroding out of the barren mud flats where wind has been peeling away sediment layers since the marshlands dried up about 9,500 years ago.

"We know very little about their culture," Duke said of the hunter-gatherers. "The thing that intrigues me the most about this find is the social window it gives to a simple activity in an undocumented past. My imagination runs wild."

Artifacts there included small sharp stone cutting tools and spear tips made of a volcanic glass called obsidian, used for hunting large mammals. One spear tip bore the remains of blood proteins from a mammoth or mastodon - elephant relatives that later went extinct.

"We surmise that tobacco must have figured into the ecological knowledge base of those who settled the interior of the North American continent, some 13,000-plus years ago," Duke said.

Tobacco domestication occurred thousands of years later elsewhere on the continent, in the Southwestern and Southeastern United States and in Mexico, Duke added.

"We don't know when exactly tobacco was domesticated, but there was a great florescence of agriculture in the Americas within the last 5,000 years. Evidence for the use of tobacco, both direct - seeds, residue - and indirect - such as pipes - increases during these times alongside the domestication of food crops," Duke added.

Some scholars have argued that tobacco may have been the first plant domesticated in North America - and for sociocultural rather than food purposes.

"There is no doubt that people would have already been at least casually tending, manipulating and managing tobacco well before the population and food-requirement incentives that drove investments in agriculture," Duke said.

AFRIKA DOMINATES

Boston Marathon results: Kenya's Benson Kipruto, Diana Kipyogei win 2021 race


By Steve Buckley and The Athletic Staff
October 11, 2021


Kenya's Benson Kipruto and Diana Kipyogei swept the men's and women's races at the long-awaited 125th Boston Marathon on Monday morning as the event returned for the first time since April 2019.

Kipruto won in 2:09:51, 46 seconds ahead of second-place finisher Lemi Berhanu of Ethiopia. Kipyogei won in 2:24:45, 24 seconds ahead of Kenya's Edna Kiplagat.

Marcel Hug of Switzerland finished in first place in the men’s wheelchair division with an unofficial time of 1:18:11. But even though “The Swiss Silver Bullet” easily beat second-place finisher Daniel Romanchuk of the United States by nearly seven minutes, there was still some last-minute drama.

Racing to break his own course record for the Boston Marathon, which he set in 2017 with a time of 1:18:04, Hug missed a late turn as he neared the finish line. Hug was on pace to set a new record — and win a $50,000 bonus — before missing the turn.

Just 24 hours earlier, Hug and Romanchuk competed in the Chicago Marathon, with Romanchuk finishing first with a time of 1:29.06.

Switzerland's Manuela Schär won the women's wheelchair race with an unofficial time of 1:35:21, her third Boston Marathon victory after winning in 2017 and 2019. Five-time winner Tatyana McFadden finished second, one day after winning the Chicago Marathon.

The 2020 marathon was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This year's race was moved from its traditional April date to October.

Shalane Flanagan, an Olympic silver medalist and New York City Marathon winner, ran in Boston a day after racing in the Chicago Marathon. With her fourth marathon in three weeks, Flanagan moved closer to running all six of the world's major marathons in the span of six weeks — Berlin, London, Chicago, Boston, Tokyo and New York. The Tokyo Marathon is virtual this year after the in-person event was canceled. The New York City Marathon is on Nov. 7.

(Photo: Jessica Rinaldi / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Jump to
Were there any surprises among the race winners?
How was this year's race different?
What went wrong for Hug at the end?
What happened to American C.J. Albertson, an early leader?