EU faces nuclear rift in decision on energy funds, future

By SAMUEL PETREQUIN and RAF CASERT

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German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, right, and French President Emmanuel Macron address a media conference at the conclusion of an EU Summit in Brussels, Friday, Dec. 17, 2021. European Union leaders met for a one-day summit Thursday focusing on Russia's military threat to neighbouring Ukraine and on ways to deal with the continuing COVID-19 crisis. (John Thys, Pool Photo via AP)

BRUSSELS (AP) — The leaders of the European Union’s two most important nations faced reporters together during a joint news conference early Friday, a show of unity at the end of the EU’s final summit of the year.

Then two words - “nuclear energy” - intervened.

Heading into the Christmas week, atomic power is a topic on which France and Germany broadly differ, and one that has become a big thorn in the side of the EU as the 27-nation bloc decides whether to include nuclear-generated energy among the economic activities that qualify for sustainable investment.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who took office last week, and French President Emmanuel Macron agreed on most of the issues tackled during Thursday’s summit, including Ukraine-Russia tensions and an immigration dispute with Belarus.

On the the sustainable investment rules, however, the two leaders have yet to reach a compromise. The rift over nuclear energy was enough to scuttle any agreement on energy prices during the summit.

A big rise in energy prices has reignited the debate about whether the EU should promote nuclear power projects as a way of becoming greener and more energy independent.

France has asked for nuclear power to be included in the so-called “taxonomy” by the end of the year, leading the charge with several other EU countries that operate nuclear power plants.

The group initially faced strong opposition from Germany and other members that wanted nuclear power to be ineligible for green financing, but Scholz adopted a peacebuilding tone in the summit’s final hours early Friday.

“We are talking about countries with different business models. It’s important that each EU country can pursue its own approach without Europe becoming disunited,” Scholz said. “At the end of the day, we will have to come together despite the different priorities we may have set.”

Germany’s remaining nuclear power plants are due to go offline next year. France derives about 70% of its electricity from nuclear energy.

Last month, Macron announced that France will start building its first new nuclear reactors in decades. Unveiling the plans, he said the the new reactors will help guarantee France’s energy independence and help reach carbon neutrality in 2050.

“It’s not a Franco-German discussion,” Macron said during the press conference. “There are different energy models in different European countries. What we want to achieve is agree on a taxonomy that allows us to continue with our industrial policy and to be coherent in decarbonizing our economies.”

Two years ago, EU leaders agreed that nuclear could be part of the bloc’s solution to making its economy carbon neutral by 2050. Leaving the possibility of using nuclear energy in their national energy mixes reassured the bloc’s coal-reliant countries, which are expected to suffer the most during the transition.

However, making future nuclear power projects eligible for billions in euros available as part of the European Green Deal while avoiding “greenwashing” remains a controversial issue.

Countries that want nuclear power to remain ineligble for green financing often cite the EU’s guidance that all investments financed by the pandemic recovery fund should not harm the bloc’s environmental goals.

“The lack of agreement shows how lively this is, not only in our country, but throughout Europe,” Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, who faces a domestic crisis over how to phase out nuclear plants and still maintain energy security to his citizens.

De Croo suggested that amid the energy price crunch, nuclear energy and gas could be temporarily eligible for funds.

“You have to be able to look sufficiently ahead, and if you do so you can assume that technologies like nuclear and gas can be useful technologies in the medium term to bridge the gap until we have fully sustainable energy,” De Croo said early Friday.

The ball is now with the EU’s chief, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. She is expected to present before the end of the year the list of activities eligible for the green investment funds and must decide whether nuclear energy and natural gas make the cut.

Von der Leyen has been under pressure from environmental groups and Green European lawmakers to resist the inclusion of both.

“Fossil gas and nuclear power have no place in the EU taxonomy” for sustainable activities, said Sven Giegold, a Green lawmaker in the European Parliament.

A low-carbon alternative to fossil fuels, nuclear energy represented around 26% of the electricity produced in the bloc in 2019, with 13 EU countries endowed with operational reactors.

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Over Ethiopia’s objections, UN rights body backs war monitor
By JAMEY KEATEN

Nada Al-Nashif, UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, delivers her statement, during the Human Rights Council special session on "the grave human rights situation in Ethiopia", at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, Friday, Dec. 17, 2021. The U.N.'s main human rights body is opening a special session Friday to discuss rights violations in conflict-torn Ethiopia, with many Western countries trying to set up an international team of experts to boost scrutiny of the situation despite a lack of support from African nations and amid accusations from Ethiopia’s government that it's politically motivated. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP)

GENEVA (AP) — Over Ethiopia’s objections, the U.N.’s main human rights body voted Friday to create an international team of experts to boost scrutiny of rights abuses in the devastating yearlong war between Ethiopian government forces and fighters from the country’s Tigray region.

Ethiopia’s government decried a “neocolonialist mentality” after the European Union and other Western countries sought a special session of the Human Rights Council to ratchet up attention on the conflict that has left tens of thousands dead.

A resolution that won the council’s approval on a 21-15 vote with 11 countries abstaining creates a three-person team with a one-year mandate to monitor and report on rights abuses in Ethiopia.

The push from EU and other Western countries demonstrates their frustration that a joint investigation between Ethiopia’s human rights commission and the U.N. human rights office, which culminated with a report last month, didn’t go far enough.

“The conflict has continued with ongoing fighting beyond the borders of Tigray. Our office continues to receive credible reports of severe human rights violations and abuses by all parties,” the U.N. deputy high commissioner for human rights, Nada al-Nashif, told representatives at Friday’s session. “The humanitarian impact of the conflict is increasingly dramatic.”

Nearly 10 million people in northern Ethiopia face acute food insecurity, and at least 2 million have been forced to flee their homes. Humanitarian workers have little access and face hostility. Ethiopia’s government has sought to restrict reporting on the war and detained some journalists, including a video freelancer accredited to The Associated Press, Amir Aman Kiyaro.

Between 5,000 and 7,000 people swept up under Ethiopia’s new state of emergency remain detained, most of them Tigrayans, al-Nashif said: “Many are detained incommunicado or in unknown locations. This is tantamount to enforced disappearance, and a matter of very grave alarm.”

The government-created Ethiopian Human Rights Commission acknowledged in a statement this week that there was “value-added” in encouraging the joint investigation to continue, but said creation of a new body “is repetitive, counterproductive to ongoing implementation processes, and further delays redress for victims and survivors.”

Ethiopia’s ambassador in Geneva, Zenebe Kebede Korcho, said his government rejects the draft resolution the Human Rights Council is considering. At Friday’s session, he called the resolution a “deliberate destabilization effort” and said the government “will not cooperate with any mechanism imposed on it.” The Africa group of nations at the council backed his position in a separate statement.

“Multilateralism, after all these years, is once again being hijacked by a neocolonialist mentality. Ethiopia is being targeted and singled out at the Human Rights Council for defending a democratically elected elected government,” the ambassador said. “The council is being used as an instrument of political pressure.”

The Ethiopian ambassador said Ethiopia’s government had set up an “inter-ministerial task force” in response to the human rights report issued last month, and it has begun work.

The joint report decried the “terrible toll on civilians” in the conflict in the Tigray region, and human rights violations and abuses committed by all sides. The rare collaboration by the U.N. human rights office with the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission was hampered by authorities’ intimidation and restrictions, and didn’t visit some of the war’s worst-affected locations.

The U.N. human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, has said all sides in the war in the Tigray region have committed brutal abuses that could amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The investigation broke little new ground and confirmed in general the abuses described by witnesses throughout the war. But it gave little sense of scale, saying for example that the more than 1,300 rapes reported to authorities were likely far fewer than the real number.

The government has insisted the report cleared it of allegations that genocide was happening in Tigray.

The conflict erupted in November 2020 after a political falling-out between the Tigray forces that long dominated the national government and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s current government. Ethnic Tigrayans across the country have reported being targeted with arbitrary detentions, while civilians in Tigray have described gang rapes, human-caused famine and mass expulsions.

The Tigray forces now face a growing number of allegations of abuses after taking the fighting into Ethiopia’s neighboring Amhara and Afar regions in recent months. The joint investigation didn’t examine that period.

For a special council session to take place, the support of one-third of its 47 member states is required.

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Cara Anna in Nairobi, Kenya, contributed to this report.

Pope at 85: Gloves come off as Francis’ reform hits stride
By NICOLE WINFIELD

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 Pope Francis attends a meeting with priests, religious men and women, seminarians and catechists, at the Cathedral of Saint Martin, in Bratislava, Slovakia, Sept. 13, 2021. Pope Francis is celebrating his 85th birthday Friday, Dec. 17, 2021, a milestone made even more remarkable given the coronavirus pandemic, his summertime intestinal surgery and the weight of history: His predecessor retired at this age and the last pope to have lived any longer was Leo XIII over a century ago. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia, file)

ROME (AP) — Pope Francis celebrated his 85th birthday on Friday, a milestone made even more remarkable given the coronavirus pandemic, his summertime intestinal surgery and the weight of history: His predecessor retired at this age and the last pope to have lived any longer was Leo XIII over a century ago.

Yet Francis is going strong, recently concluding a whirlwind trip to Cyprus and Greece after his pandemic-defying jaunts this year to Iraq, Slovakia and Hungary. And he shows no sign of slowing down his campaign to make the post-COVID world a more environmentally sustainable, economically just and fraternal place where the poor are prioritized.

Francis also has set in motion an unprecedented two-year consultation of rank-and-file Catholics on making the church more attuned to the laity.

“I see a lot of energy,” said the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, one of Francis’ trusted Jesuit communications gurus. “What we’re seeing is the natural expression, the fruit of the seeds that he has sown.”

But Francis also is beset by problems at home and abroad and is facing a sustained campaign of opposition from the conservative Catholic right. He has responded with the papal equivalent of “no more Mr. Nice Guy.”

After spending the first eight years of his papacy gently nudging Catholic hierarchs to embrace financial prudence and responsible governance, Francis took the gloves off this year, and appears poised to keep it that way.

Since his last birthday, Francis ordered a 10% pay cut for cardinals across the board, and slashed salaries to a lesser degree for Vatican employees, in a bid to rein in the Vatican’s 50-million-euro ($57 million) budget deficit.

To fight corruption, he imposed a 40-euro ($45) gift cap for Holy See personnel. He passed a law allowing cardinals and bishops to be criminally prosecuted by the Vatican’s lay-led tribunal, setting the stage for the high-profile trial underway of his onetime close adviser, Cardinal Angelo Becciu, on finance-related charges.

Outside the Vatican, he hasn’t made many new friends, either. After approving a 2019 law outlining the way cardinals and bishops could be investigated for sex abuse cover-up, the past year saw nearly a dozen Polish episcopal heads roll.

Francis also approved term limits for leaders of lay Catholic movements to try to curb their abuses of power, resulting in the forced removal of influential church leaders. He recently accepted the resignation of the Paris archbishop after a media storm alleging governance and personal improprieties.

“In the past year, Pope Francis has accelerated his efforts at reform by putting real teeth into the church’s canon law regarding finances,” the Rev. Robert Gahl, director of the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross’s Program of Church Management, said.

“While celebrating his birthday, Vatican watchers are also looking for more concrete signs of compliance regarding the pope’s new rules, especially from those who report directly to him within the Vatican,” Gahl said in an email, noting that a change in culture is needed alongside Francis’ new policies and regulations.

Despite Francis’ tough line, the pope nevertheless got a round of birthday applause from Holy See cardinals, bishops and priests who joined him for an Advent meditation on Friday morning. Later in the day, he welcomed a dozen African and Syrian migrants whom the Vatican helped resettle from Cyprus.

If there was anything Francis did this past year that riled his critics, it was his July decision to reverse his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, and reimpose restrictions on celebrating the old Latin Mass. Francis said he needed to take action because Benedict’s 2007 decision to allow freer celebration of the old rite had divided the church and been exploited by conservatives.

“Some wanted me dead,” Francis said of his critics.

Speaking with fellow Jesuits in Slovakia in September, Francis confided that he knew his 10-day hospital stay in July for surgery to remove 33 centimeters (about 13 inches) of his large intestine had fueled hope among some conservative Catholics eager for a new pope.

“I know there were even meetings among priests who thought the pope was in worse shape than what was being said,” he told the Jesuits, in comments that were later published in the Vatican-approved Jesuit journal La Civilta Cattolica. “They were preparing the conclave.”

That may not have been the case, but if history is any guide, those priests might not have been wrong to have at least discussed the prospect.

Benedict was 85 when he resigned in February 2013, becoming the first pope to step down in 600 years and paving the way for Francis’ election. While enjoying robust health at the time, Benedict said he simply didn’t have the strength to carry on.

Before him, John Paul II died at age 84 and John Paul I died at 65 after just 33 days on the job. In fact, all 20th-century popes died in their early 80s or younger, with the exception of Pope Leo XIII, who was 93 when he died in 1903.

Early on in his pontificate, Francis predicted a short papacy of two or three years, and credited Benedict with having “opened the door” to future papal retirements.

But the Argentine Jesuit made clear after his July surgery that resigning “didn’t even cross my mind.”

That is welcome news to Sister Nathalie Becquart, one of the top women at the Vatican. Francis tapped her to help organize the two-year consultation process of Catholics around the globe that will end in 2023 with a meeting of bishops, known as a synod.

Becquart knows well what the pope is up against as he tries to remake the church into a less clerical, more laity-focused institution.

“It’s a call to change,” she told a conference this week. “And we can say it’s not an easy path.”

Opinion: A difficult papacy — Pope Francis turns 85

A pope who wants to change his Church more than it can be changed. But also one for whom time is running out, says Christoph Strack.


Pope Francis often seems alone in a Catholic Church mired in systemic decay

He has reached an age that most pope's never see — Francis, head of the Roman Catholic Church since 2013, turns 85 this Friday. Still, he's making travel plans, and embarking on a path of reform and renewal of the Church from within that will take years, decades to complete. Every step a new beginning.

But what does it all mean? The topic that has overshadowed everything about this papacy remains the Church's global sex scandals, in which young children were abused by clerics. With these scandals goes a loss of trust — and that at an institution built on belief and trust. Francis promised a full investigation of the scandal and vowed a "zero tolerance" policy.

Yet more often than not, his words were grander than his gestures. That is all part of a system in which the pope is the sole prosecutor and judge while also acting as auditor, role model, boss and confidant.
Sometimes subversive

Francis has always been one to criticize clericalism, patriarchal arrogance and pretensions of power. His actions often seem like a caricature of his diminishing Church. A pope is — when the Church gets lucky — a prophetic figure. But in far too many of Francis' speeches you initially think: "Now he's doing something!" Yet then you sense his intention: "Do it already …" That is not enough. It's too little.

DW's Christoph Strack

All the while, Francis stands at the head of and is caught in the middle of an organization steeped in crisis — and it reaches all the way to the College of Cardinals who will eventually elect his successor. A quick look at the three German cardinals currently seated among 120 colleagues says a lot: One, Munich's Cardinal Marx (age 68), unexpectedly offered his resignation this May and has cut a pale figure ever since. Another, Cardinal Woelki (65), is so controversial in his Archdiocese of Cologne that parishioners there are leaving the Church in droves and the pope has sent him on hiatus. And the third, Cardinal Müller (73), loses himself in US-style conspiracy theories, populism and anti-papal tirades. Certain circles seem to want the Church more feudal again, displaying contempt for questions of basic rights.

Sure — Francis sounds different in his criticism, almost contrary and sometimes even subversive. He encourages Catholics to enthusiastically forge ahead at the grass roots level. Yet, in the end, he also reminds everyone that the Catholic Church is not a democracy.

The old man and the Holy See

Francis' strongest moments come when he directly engages with people, especially those who are marginalized. He seeks to give them a face and to restore their dignity — migrants, refugees, the homeless, ostracized, the physically and mentally weak. This man, who never fails to rail against the "globalization of indifference," seems indifferent to no one. That is more than a protest against false standards. Francis stands for a different image of the Church. One of the most iconic pictures of his entire papacy remains that of his entreaties during the global coronavirus pandemic. Pope Francis at an entirely empty Saint Peter's Square in March 2020 — a man alone in prayer, pleading with his god, the image of Job in his moment of need. Francis, pastor of the world. The old man and the Holy See.

Yet none of that can hide the fact that time is running out for this pope. His predecessor Benedict, now 94, retired at age 85. And Francis? When he had to undergo surgery this summer it was weeks before he acknowledged the seriousness of the operation. Still, the Argentine divulged even that information in his typically earnest yet good-natured and chatty style. At 85, Pope Francis represents a great, difficult and strange papacy in a structurally decaying Church.

AMERIKA

Supply shortages and emboldened workers: A changed economy
By PAUL WISEMAN and DEE-ANN DURBIN

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Muhammad Rahman delivers orders at Gotham restaurant on Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2021, in New York. When COVID-19 tore through the United States in March 2020, the recession it caused was brutal yet brief. Yet for much of 2021, the recovery was undermined by new threats: A surge in inflation that shrank the value of paychecks, hurt the least advantaged Americans most and posed a political threat to President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress. (AP Photo/Brittainy Newman)

Employees at a fast-food restaurant in Sacramento, California, exasperated over working in stifling heat for low wages, demanded more pay and a new air conditioner — and got both.

Customer orders poured in to an Italian auto supplier, which struggled to get hold of enough supplies of everything from plastic to microchips to meet the demand.

A drought in Taiwan magnified a worldwide shortage of computer chips, so vital to auto and electronics production.

The global economy hadn’t experienced anything like this for decades. Maybe ever. After years in which ultra-low inflation had become a fixture of economies across the world, prices rocketed skyward in 2021 — at the grocery store, the gasoline pump, the used-car lot, the furniture store. Chalk it up to a surprisingly swift and robust economic recovery from the pandemic recession, one that left suppliers flat-footed and hampered by COVID-19 disruptions.

U.S. workers, having struggled for years to achieve economic gains, secured better wages, benefits and working conditions — and the confidence to quit their jobs if they didn’t get them.

Global supply chains that ran efficiently for years broke down as factories, ports and freight yards buckled under the weight of surging orders.

Propelled by vast infusions of government aid and the widespread distribution of COVID vaccines, the economic bounce-back was as startling as the fall that had preceded it. Policymakers, business owners and economists were caught off-guard by both the speed of the recovery and the new COVID variants that threatened its durability.

They had never, after all, had to manage the unpredictable fallout, economic and otherwise, from a global pandemic.

BACK FROM THE BRINK

In the spring of 2020, the global economy appeared to stand on the brink of a catastrophe. The sudden and blindingly fast spread of COVID-19 infections forced lockdowns, frightened people into hunkering down at home, paralyzed travel and ordinary business activity and led employers to slash tens of millions of jobs.

In June that year, the International Monetary Fund predicted that the global economy would shrink 4.9% for the year, the first drop in worldwide economic output since the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

But the governments of the wealthiest nations, scarred by the achingly slow recovery from the financial crisis just over a decade earlier, poured money into rescuing their economies. The United States was particularly aggressive: It supplied $5 trillion in COVID-related stimulus aid to individuals, businesses and municipalities this year and last.

“The U.S. has been a total outlier globally,” said Robin Brooks, chief economist at the Institute of International Finance, a global trade group for financial companies.

“We had the deepest pocketbook of any country. We have this exorbitant privilege” — the ability to run up debts to pay for COVID relief without having to pay high interest rates to do so. Global investors regard U.S. government debt as perhaps the safest investment around; their purchases of U.S bonds keep American interest rates low.

So despite immense federal spending and surging inflation, the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note — below 1.4%, as of early Friday — remains lower than it was before the pandemic.

In the United States and elsewhere, stimulus aid is widely credited with helping stave off disaster. Though the global economy did shrink in 2020, it did so by a less-than-expected 3.1%. And the IMF expects growth to rebound to 5.9% for 2021. That would be the fastest calendar-year expansion in IMF records dating to 1980.

Beginning earlier this year, vaccines accelerated the return to something much closer to ordinary pre-pandemic life.

“We got this scientific miracle,” said Jacob Kirkegaard, senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “We had a vaccine that was available six to nine months earlier than anybody had really believed in 2020 ... What that meant was that the second half of 2021 saw basically a general reopening in all of the advanced economies, and that was certainly was a massive positive surprise.’’


COVID UNCERTAINTY

Still, the virus itself has continued to complicate anyone’s ability to forecast where the economy was headed or to determine what to do about it. A wave of infections over the summer, for instance, sent Japan’s economy into a nasty tailspin: It shrank from July through September at a 3.6% annual rate.

Likewise, America’s recovery lost momentum once the highly contagious delta variant erupted over the summer. Growth slowed to a 2.1% annual rate from July through September, sharply down from a 6.7% rate in the April-June quarter and 6.3% in the January-March period.

Overall, though, the economy has recovered with surprising vigor. In June 2020, with the economy still reeling from the pandemic, the Federal Reserve’s policymaking committee forecast that unemployment would average 9.3% in the final three months of the year and 6.5% at the end of 2021. In reality? The jobless rate plummeted from 11.1% in June 2020 to 6.7% by year’s end. It’s now at a near-fully healthy 4.2%.

Flush with government payments and, in many cases, savings accrued from working at home and from stock-market gains, people in rich countries were sitting on larger piles of cash and spending a lot of it.

Capital Economics calculates that households in advanced economies like the United States and the European Union were holding “excess savings” at mid-year of $3.7 trillion — the amount above what they would likely have saved if the pandemic had never happened.


OVERWHELMED

In some ways, it’s been too much of a good thing.

Robust demand, especially for autos, appliances and other physical goods, overwhelmed global manufacturers. Factories couldn’t obtain enough raw materials and parts. Ports and freight yards were swamped. Companies grappled with shortages of everything they needed, notably workers.

That was particularly true at many restaurants. At the newly re-opened Gotham restaurant in Manhattan, for instance, patrons are unable to find handcrafted chocolates, once a big draw for the holidays, or grab a burger or order oysters. Gotham couldn’t find enough employees to make the chocolates, work the grill or shuck the oysters.

“We worked to bring the restaurant back to life,” said Bret Csencsitz, the new owner of the restaurant. “The demand is there. The product is superior. Yet I don’t have enough people to make the business what it needs to be and what it should be.”

The restaurant was also hampered by shortages of basic supplies like ceramic plates and glassware. Food costs fluctuated wildly. Halibut, which cost $14 a pound one day, was $24.99 a week and a half later.

Across the Atlantic, MTA, an auto components manufacturer that endured Italy’s first lockdown in February 2020, reopened within a week and ended 2020 with unexpectedly healthy business. But the recovery bred new troubles.

“Everything is lacking,” said Maria Vittoria Falchetti, the company’s marketing chief.

“Plastic is lacking. Metals are lacking. Paper is lacking. Microchips — don’t even mention. Also, we are struggling with a big increase in prices in these materials, and also energy,”

In Asia, manufacturers of everything from toys to cellphones suffered from a global shortage of computer chips and surging costs for components, raw materials and shipping.

Kaixiang Electric Appliance Co., which makes LED lamps and flashlights in Ningbo, south of Shanghai, paid 20% more in 2021 for labor, materials and complications resulting from shipping bottlenecks.

“The current delay in delivery is about one or two months,” said Susan Yang, CEO of the 80-employee company.

“The sharp rise in sea freight has eaten into manufacturers’ profits and ours,” said Max Chen, general manager of Makefigure Co., a toymaker in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. “If we want to stay in the business, we need to lower our profit expectations and develop new clients.”

The supply chain problems have been compounded by what Kirkegaard of the German Marshall Fund calls “idiosyncratic things.”

A drought in Taiwan curtailed production at water-dependent computer chip plants. A February deep freeze shut down petrochemical plants in Texas. A huge container ship got stuck in the Suez canal for a week in March and cut off shipping between Asia and Europe.


THE PAIN OF HIGH PRICES

The supply chain bottlenecks have driven up costs, contributing to a problem that most rich countries hadn’t had to endure for years: Persistently high inflation. The IMF expects consumer prices in advanced economies to rise 2.8% this year. That would be the highest such rate since 2008.

Soaring energy prices, a response to the brisk economic recovery, contributed mightily to the runup in prices. The price of the U.S. benchmark crude skyrocketed 75% — to $84 a barrel — from January through October, before easing in recent weeks as the omicron variant raised the prospect of slower growth.

Inflationary pressures were especially intense in the United States. In addition to energy, some of the largest cost spikes were for such necessities as food, housing, autos and clothing — goods and services that millions of Americans regularly depend upon. Especially hard hit were lower-income households with little or no cash cushions. Last month, U.S. consumer prices shot up 6.8% from 12 months earlier — the biggest year-over-year increase since 1982.

Over the past year, used-car prices surged 31%, beef roast 26%, men’s suits and coats 14%. And price hikes are outpacing wage gains. After inflation, U.S. workers’ hourly earnings, despite pay increases, were actually down 1.9% last month compared with November 2020.

At a Mobil station in Yonkers, New York, a gallon of regular gas was selling for $3.89. Mario Bodden, a project manager at a nearby mall, said it cost $50 to fill up, instead of the $35 he was used to.

“You start thinking: Do I go shopping? Do I fill it up today?” Bodden said. “Every trip is planned and targeted. So there’s a lifestyle change.”

“We still have to do what we have to do to survive,” Ray Khoury, a hospital administrator, said as he filled up a Mercedes at a BP station in Yonkers. “The everyday needs of your families, your kids — it trickles down. Forget about savings. Savings are shot.”

A MADE-IN-AMERICA LABOR SHORTAGE

Even while absorbing higher prices, workers, especially in America, were benefiting from a tighter labor market that gave them leverage to secure better pay and benefits. With many white collar employees able to work from home, companies found that their staffs didn’t need to commute to the office to do their jobs. That meant that workers could spend more time at home and save money they would have spent on parking, commuting and lunches out.

The United States, in particular, experienced acute labor shortages. At the depths of the pandemic recession in the spring of 2002, employers had slashed 22 million jobs. As the economy recovered, they refilled more than 18 million jobs — and complained that they couldn’t find enough workers.

In September and October, employers listed 1.4 job openings for every unemployed American, the most in records going back 15 years. That marked a striking reversal from April 2020, in the depths of the coronavirus recession, when there were just 0.2 openings for each unemployed person — or, stated another way, when there were five unemployed people for every available job.

A rise in early retirements, a shortage of affordable child care, the reluctance of many restaurant workers to return and a drop in immigration contributed to the labor shortage. The government also expanded unemployment aid and gave relief checks to households, bolstering their savings and allowing the jobless to be choosier about their next employer.

In Europe, by contrast, governments essentially paid companies to keep workers on their payrolls.

“In Europe, you didn’t have this fire-and-rehire response,” Kirkegaard said.

Keeping European workers on company payrolls, he noted, made it “much more seamless to reopen the economies in Europe because basically people just went back to their old job.”

American companies, by contrast, had to call back employees they had laid off or find new ones.

Workers in some cases gained a rare upper hand in negotiations over wages and working conditions.

Workers who are in particularly high demand and in short supply, many of whom are in relatively lower-paying service jobs, are receiving pay raises high enough to exceed inflation. Adjusted for inflation, hourly earnings have jumped 12% in the past year for people who work at bars and nearly 6% for workers at hotels and restaurants.

Hundreds of Frito-Lay workers went on strike in July to protest mandatory overtime shifts. More than 10,000 workers at Deere & Co. struck in the fall before winning a contract with 10% raises. U.S. cereal workers at Kellogg Co. have been on strike since October.

Among the newly emboldened workers was Leticia Reyes, a mother of five who has worked at a Jack in the Box restaurant in Sacramento, California, for nearly two years. Over the summer, she and her co-workers went on strike to protest working conditions, including an air conditioner that constantly broke, forcing them to toil in sweltering heat.

Reyes said the store’s regional manager installed a new air conditioner and raised workers’ wages by $1.25 an hour.

“The increase was small, but every little bit helps,” she said.

American workers, as a whole, were hardly afraid to change jobs: 4.2 million of them quit in October, just off the all-time record of 4.4 million, set one month earlier.

After COVID hit in March 2020, Stephanye Blakely of Louisville, Kentucky, quit her job at a warehouse. With schools closed, she needed to care for her 7-year-old son. She had been thinking about leaving anyway. The warehouse work, she said, was tedious.

Blakely, 36, spent three months training for a tech career with Hack Reactor, a software engineering boot camp, where she learned about database management. She had to tap her savings and take out a loan. But the timing was right. The job market was rebounding, and Blakely eventually landed a job at a tech company — earning 10 times what she had made before.

And she could work from home, giving her the flexibility to care for her son. At first, it looked as though she’d eventually have to move to New York for the job, but the company decided to let employees keep working from home. She could stay in Louisville and avoid New York’s much higher housing costs.

Likewise, life improved for Pamela Thompson of Tampa, Florida, who had labored in the federal court system for more than 10 years, most recently as supervisor. While still working at her job, Thompson, 38, had started a business — My Shade & Texture, a beauty supply store. When the pandemic hit, she decided to take it on full time.

She has endured ups and downs with periodic shutdowns during the pandemic. But she says she doesn’t regret anything. She earns “significantly more” than she did before, with work she enjoys far more.

“I don’t have a desire to return to corporate America,” she said. “I love doing what I’m doing.”

____

Wiseman reported from Washington and Durbin from Detroit. AP Writers Anne D’Innocenzio and Mae Anderson in New York; Cathy Bussewitz in Yonkers, New York; Tom Krisher in Detroit; Colleen Barry in Milan; Joe McDonald in Beijing; Christopher Rugaber in Washington; David McHugh in Frankfurt, Germany; and David Koenig in Dallas contributed to this report.

Far-right using COVID-19 theories to grow reach, study shows

By DAVID KLEPPER and LORI HINNANT

 Protestors light flares during a demonstration against measures to battle the coronavirus pandemic in Vienna, Austria, on Dec. 11, 2021. New research indicates that far-right extremists and white supremacists are gaining new followers and influence by co-opting conspiracy theories about COVID-19. (AP Photo/Florian Schroetter, File)

PARIS (AP) — The mugshot-style photos are posted on online message boards in black and white and look a little like old-fashioned “wanted” posters.

“The Jews own COVID just like all of Hollywood,” the accompanying text says. “Wake up people.”

The post is one of many that white supremacists and far-right extremists are using to expand their reach and recruit followers on the social media platform Telegram, according to the findings of researchers who sifted through nearly half a million comments on pages — called channels on Telegram — that they categorized as far-right from January 2020 to June 2021.

The tactic has been successful: Nine of the 10 most viewed posts in the sample examined by the researchers contained misleading claims about the safety of vaccines or the pharmaceutical companies manufacturing them. One Telegram channel saw its total subscribers jump tenfold after it leaned into COVID-19 conspiracy theories.

“COVID-19 has served as a catalyst for radicalization,” said the study’s author, Ciaran O’Connor, an analyst at the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “It allows conspiracy theorists or extremists to create simple narratives, framing it as us versus them, good versus evil.”

Other posts downplayed the severity of the coronavirus or pushed conspiracy theories about its origins. Many of the posts contain hate speech directed at Jews, Asians, women or other groups or violent rhetoric that would be automatically removed from Facebook or Twitter for violating the standards of those sites.

Telegram, based in the United Arab Emirates, has many different kinds of users around the world, but it has become a favorite tool of some on the far-right in part because the platform lacks the content moderation of Facebook, Twitter and other platforms.

In a statement to The Associated Press, Telegram said it welcomed “the peaceful expression of ideas, including those we do not agree with.” The statement said moderators monitor activity and user reports “in order to remove public calls for violence.”

O’Connor said he believes the people behind these posts are trying to exploit fear and anxiety over COVID-19 to attract new recruits, whose loyalty may outlast the pandemic.

Indeed, mixed in with the COVID-19 conspiracy posts are some direct recruitment pitches. For example, someone posted a link to a news story about a Long Island, New York, synagogue on a channel popular with the far-right Proud Boys and added a message urging followers to join them. “Embrace who you were called to be,” read the post, which was accompanied by a swastika.

The researchers found suggestions that far-right groups on Telegram are working together. ISD researchers linked two usernames involved in running one Telegram channel to two prominent members of the American far-right. One was a scheduled speaker at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a white supremacist deliberately drove into a crowd of counterdemonstrators, killing one and injuring 35.

That channel has grown steadily since the pandemic began and now has a reach of around 400,000 views each day, according to Telegram Analytics, a service that keeps statistical data on about 150,000 Telegram channels on the site TGStat. In May 2020 the channel had 5,000 subscribers; it now has 50,000.

The data is especially concerning given a rash of incidents around the world that indicate some extremists are moving from online rhetoric to offline action.

Gavin Yamey, a physician and public health professor at Duke University, has written about the rise of threats against health care workers during the pandemic. He said the harassment is even worse for those who are women, people of color, in a religious minority or LGBTQ.

Yamey, who is Jewish, has received threats and anti-Semitic messages, including one on Twitter calling for his family’ to be “executed.” He fears racist conspiracy theories and scapegoating may persist even after the pandemic eases.

“I worry that in some ways the genie is out of the bottle,” Yamey said.

The pandemic and the unrest it has caused have been linked to a wave of harassment and attacks on Asian-Americans. In Italy, a far-right opponents of vaccine mandates rampaged through a union headquarters and a hospital. In August in Hawaii, some of those who harassed that state’s Jewish lieutenant governor at his home during a vaccine protest brandished fliers with his photo and the word “Jew.”

Elsewhere, people have died after taking sham cures, pharmacists have destroyed vaccine vials, and others have damaged 5G telecommunication towers since the pandemic began nearly two years ago.

FILE - People carry signs and flags as several hundred anti-mandate demonstrators rally outside the Capitol during a special legislative session considering bills targeting COVID-19 vaccine mandates, on Nov. 16, 2021, in Tallahassee, Fla. New research indicates that far-right extremists and white supremacists are gaining new followers and new influence by co-opting conspiracy theories about COVID-19. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File)

FILE - People take part in a protest against COVID-19 vaccine passports and other policies outside the Houses of Parliament in London, on Dec. 13, 2021. New research indicates that far-right extremists and white supremacists are gaining new followers and new influence by co-opting conspiracy theories about COVID-19. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)


FILE - Anti-vaccine mandate protesters hold signs outside the front doors of the Los Angeles Unified School District, LAUSD headquarters in Los Angeles, on Sept. 9, 2021. New research indicates that far-right extremists and white supremacists are gaining new followers and new influence by co-opting conspiracy theories about COVID-19. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, File)

Events such as the pandemic leave many people feeling anxious and looking for explanations, according to Cynthia Miller-Idriss, director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, which studies far-right extremism. Conspiracy theories can provide an artificial sense of control, she said.

“COVID-19 has created fertile ground for recruitment because so many people around the world feel unsettled,” Miller-Idriss said. “These racist conspiracy theories give people a sense of control, a sense of power over events that make people feel powerless.”

Policing extremism online has challenged tech companies that say they must balance protecting free speech with removing hate speech. They also must contend with increasingly sophisticated tactics by groups that have learned to evade platform rules.

Facebook this month announced that it had removed a network of accounts based in Italy and France that had spread conspiracy theories about vaccines and carried out coordinated harassment campaigns against journalists, doctors and public health officials.

The network, called V_V, used both real and fake accounts and was overseen by a group of users who coordinated their activities on Telegram in an effort to hide their tracks from Facebook, company investigators found.

“They sought to mass-harass individuals with pro-vaccination views into making their posts private or deleting them, essentially suppressing their voices,” said Mike Dvilyanski, head of cyber espionage investigations at Meta, Facebook’s parent company.

O’Connor, the ISD researcher, said sites like Telegram will continue to serve as a refuge for extremists as long as they lack the moderation policies of the larger platforms.

“The guardrails that you see on other platforms, they don’t exist on Telegram,” O’Connor said. “That makes it a very attractive place for extremists.”

___

Klepper reported from Providence, R.I.

Pressure builds against doctors peddling false virus claims
By HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH

In this June 8, 2021, photo provided by the The Ohio Channel, Dr. Sherri Tenpenny speaks at a Ohio House Health Committee in Columbus, Ohio. The Cleveland-based osteopathic doctor testified that COVID-19 vaccines cause magnetism. “They can put a key on their forehead; it sticks,” said Tenpenny. (The Ohio Channel via AP)

They have decried COVID-19 as a hoax, promoted unproven treatments and pushed bogus claims about the vaccine, including that the shots magnetize the human body.

The purveyors of this misinformation are not shadowy figures operating in the dark corners of the internet. They are a small but vocal group of doctors practicing medicine in communities around the country.

Now medical boards are under increasing pressure to act. Organizations that advocate for public health have called on them to take a harder line by disciplining the doctors, including potentially revoking their licenses. The push comes as the pandemic enters a second winter and deaths in the U.S. top 800,000.

At least a dozen regulatory boards in states such as Oregon, Rhode Island, Maine and Texas recently issued sanctions against some doctors, but many of the most prolific promoters of COVID-19 falsehoods still have unblemished medical licenses.

“Just because it is physicians, it is no different than if someone called you claiming to be the IRS trying to steal your money,” said Brian Castrucci, president and chief executive officer of the de Beaumont Foundation. “It’s a scam, and we protect Americans from scams.”

Castrucci’s organization, which advocates for public health, and No License For Disinformation, which fights false medical information, issued a report Wednesday that highlighted some of the cases. The report emerged a week after the Federation of State Medical Boards released a survey that found that 67% of the boards had seen an increase in complaints about COVID-19 misinformation.

That figure “is a sign of how widespread the issue has become,” said Dr. Humayun Chaudhry, president and CEO of the federation.

Dr. Kencee Graves, a physician at the University of Utah hospital in Salt Lake City, said one of her patients decided not to get vaccinated after listening to misinformation from a physician.

“She was led astray” by someone she should have been able to trust, Graves said, describing the patient as a “very, very sweet older lady.”

The woman later acknowledged her mistake, saying “I realize now I am wrong, but that is who I thought I should listen to.”

There is widespread support for cracking down on such doctors, according to a national poll conducted by the de Beaumont Foundation. In the survey of 2,200 adults, 91% of respondents said doctors do not have the right to intentionally spread false information.

But policing doctors is no easy feat for boards that were created long before social media. Their investigations tend to move slowly, taking months or even years, and many of their proceedings are private.

Castrucci said it is time for them to “evolve,” but doing so is challenging. This month, Tennessee’s medical licensing board removed from its website a recently adopted misinformation policy amid pressure from a GOP state lawmaker and a new law imposing sprawling virus-related restrictions.

Even individual board members have been targeted. In California, the president of the state’s medical board, Kristina Lawson, said a group of anti-vaccine activists stalked her at home and followed her to her office last week. She said the people identified themselves as representing America’s Frontline Doctors, a group that criticizes the COVID-19 vaccine and spreads misinformation.

The group’s leader, Dr. Simone Gold, who was arrested during the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, tweeted this month to her nearly 390,000 followers that “nurses know that Covid patients are dying from government subsidized hospital protocols (Remdesivir, intubation), NOT from Covid.”

Gold remains a licensed physician in California, although her emergency medicine certification lapsed last year. Complaints and investigations are not public in the state, so it is unclear whether she faces any.

In Idaho, the state’s medical association got so frustrated with pathologist Dr. Ryan Cole’s promotion of the anti-parasite drug ivermectin that it filed a complaint with the state medical board. Susie Keller, the association’s chief executive director, said she believed it was the first time the group sought action against one of its own. Many doctors, she explained, are fed up.

The spreading falsehoods have “actually caused our physicians and nurses to be subjected to verbal assaults” by patients who are convinced that the fake information is true, Keller said.

Cole did not respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press, but his work voicemail said that he is “unable to prescribe medications or issue vaccine or mask exemption letters.” The voicemail also directed callers to the website of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, a group that champions ivermectin.

Under Idaho law, all investigations of physicians are conducted in private unless there is a formal hearing. The Washington state medical board, meanwhile, is investigating five complaints about Cole, spokeswoman Stephanie Mason said.

Investigating misinformation is “very challenging in that a lot of action isn’t documented,” she wrote in an email. Many examples “happen quietly in an office.”

In Ohio, the state’s medical board automatically renewed the license of Sherri Tenpenny in September after the Cleveland-based osteopathic doctor testified this summer before a state House Health Committee that COVID-19 vaccines cause magnetism.

Vaccine recipients “can put a key on their forehead; it sticks,” Tenpenny said.

Jerica Stewart, a spokesperson for the state’s medical board, said that a recent license renewal doesn’t prevent the board from taking action.

“Making a false, fraudulent, deceptive or misleading statement” is grounds for discipline, Stewart said.

In Texas, Dr. Stella Immanuel appeared in a video that promoted the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine. “You don’t need masks. There is a cure.”

In October, the Texas Medical Board ordered her to pay $500 and improve her consent procedures because it found she had prescribed hydroxychloroquine to a COVID-19 patient without adequate explanation of the potential health consequences, records show.

Immanuel did not respond to a Facebook message from the AP, and the medical practice where she works did not respond to an email.

Dr. Nick Sawyer, who heads No License For Disinformation, described the action against Immanuel as a “small slap on the wrist” and accused the nation’s medical boards of “not doing their job of protecting public health.”

He said he has seen the damage firsthand as he practices emergency medicine in Sacramento, California. He said a diabetic patient in her 70s insisted just this month that she didn’t have COVID-19 despite testing positive, then demanded ivermectin and signed out against medical advice when the drug was denied.

“She said, ‘If I have COVID, you gave it to me,’” he recalled, blaming the woman’s resistance on misinformation-spreading doctors. “It is killing us.”

Deceptive videos used to link athlete deaths to COVID shots
By ANGELO FICHERA and SOPHIA TULP

1 of 8

Julie West poses for a portrait at the Play For Jake Foundation, named after her 17-year-old son who died in 2013, of sudden cardiac arrest, Thursday, Dec. 16, 2021, in La Porte, Ind. His death, well before the pandemic, has not stopped news coverage of his collapse from being misappropriated online in a widely shared video designed to cast doubt on COVID-19 vaccination. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Jake West was a seemingly healthy 17-year-old when he collapsed during high school football practice in Indiana and died of sudden cardiac arrest. A video widely shared online falsely suggests COVID-19 vaccination is to blame, weaving headlines about him into a rapid-fire compilation of news coverage about athletes collapsing.

The vaccine played no role in West’s death — he died from an undiagnosed heart condition in 2013, seven years before the pandemic began.

The video is just one example of many similar compilations circulating on the internet that use deceptive tactics to link vaccines to a supposed wave of deaths and illness among the healthiest people, often athletes, a claim for which medical experts say there is no supporting evidence.

The clips inundate viewers with a barrage of stories and headlines delivered without context, some translated from other languages and offering few details people can check on their own.

They are highly effective at spreading misinformation using a strategy that sows doubt and bypasses critical analysis, capitalizing on emotion, according to Norbert Schwarz, a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Southern California.

“It’s designed to foster that feeling that the vaccines may be risky,” Schwarz said. “You’re doing that with material that seems real, because it is real. All of these events actually happened, they just have nothing to do with the vaccines.”

The nearly four-minute montage that included West’s story originated on “The HighWire,” an online talk show hosted by Del Bigtree that is popular among the anti-vaccine community, and gradually became magnified via social media.

It takes the viewer through more than 50 cases of medical emergencies in rapid succession while eerie music plays and a beating heart pulses in the background, ending with somber images of medics and teammates rushing to fallen athletes.

After airing the video, Bigtree noted on his show that there is “no proof” vaccines were responsible for the cases — even while suggesting they might be.

“All of these sports are mandating this vaccine on everybody in order to play, and I can only ask the very simple question, do you ever remember hearing a story of an athlete having a heart attack on the field?” Bigtree said.

Yet cases of sudden cardiac arrest — an abrupt malfunction of the heart, different from a heart attack — have long been documented among young athletes.

One analysis based on 2016 emergency medical services data estimated that there are more than 23,000 pediatric, out-of-hospital cardiac arrest cases in the U.S. annually — 4,000 of which were caused by primarily cardiac issues.

Dr. Jonathan Drezner, director of the University of Washington’s Center for Sports Cardiology, said there is “no scientific evidence” that either COVID-19 or the mRNA vaccines have increased sudden cardiac arrest, often referred to as SCA, among athletes.

“SCA has been the leading cause of sudden death in athletes during sports and exercise well before the pandemic ever began,” Drezner said. “There is no evidence that the cases shown in that video were caused by a vaccine.”

A rare risk of myocarditis, a condition that causes inflammation of the heart and tends to occur mostly in young men and teen boys, has been associated with the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. Those affected usually recover quickly, however, and health officials have concluded that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks.

Experts point out that COVID-19 itself carries the risk of myocarditis, too.

Dr. Jonathan Kim, chief of sports cardiology at Emory University School of Medicine and team cardiologist for Atlanta’s NFL, NBA and MLB teams, also disputed the claim that such cardiac issues among athletes are increasing.

“One of the key points that all of us in the sports cardiology community are really trying to emphasize is there have been tragic cases of athletes dying before COVID, and after COVID ends there are going to be tragic cases of sudden cardiac death,” Kim said.

Still, the claims circulate widely online and gain traction in anti-vaccine circles.

Dr. Robert Malone, a self-identified inventor, and now skeptic, of the technology used in some COVID-19 vaccines, shared the “HighWire” video with his more than 440,000 Twitter followers, saying: “Safe and effective?”

Malone deleted it in late November, around the same time a lawyer sent a cease-and-desist order on behalf of the West family. He did not respond to an AP request for comment, but tweeted that he took the video down after learning it had been “doctored.”

While a lack of details makes it impossible to check every case mentioned in the “HighWire” video, many the AP was able to examine had no connection with COVID-19 vaccines. Some local reporting showed environmental factors such as heat exhaustion or different underlying conditions could have played a role.

An early version of the video showed clips of the University of Florida’s Keyontae Johnson collapsing during a basketball game, as did other compilations. But Johnson’s collapse was in December 2020, before vaccines were widely available. University officials confirmed to AP that he was not vaccinated at the time.

Others featured in the video were Florida teen Ryne Jacobs, who collapsed during tennis practice in January 2021, and Danish soccer player Christian Eriksen, who suffered cardiac arrest on the field this June during a match vs. Finland. Neither were vaccinated, according to Jacobs’ family and Eriksen’s club.

The video was updated weeks later after issues were raised with some of the stories it included. Johnson’s and Jacobs’ cases were removed after they were found to be “no longer relevant due to timing or newly disclosed medical records or statements,” Bigtree said in an emailed statement.

West’s story remains in the latest iteration, as do other disputed cases, such as that of Jack Alkhatib, a 17-year-old South Carolina student who died during football practice in August. His mother, Kelly Hewins Alkhatib, said an autopsy revealed he had a rare heart disease unrelated to vaccines.

Some of the other athletes had reportedly received the vaccine, though the status of many others isn’t clear. At least one, Dutch speed skater Kjeld Nuis, reportedly experienced pericarditis after being vaccinated, but he posted on Instagram soon after that he had recovered.

For West’s family members, who have worked to raise awareness about sudden cardiac arrest through their Play for Jake Foundation, seeing his story co-opted in the service of spreading anti-vaccine misinformation has been distressing. His mother, Julie West, questioned whether those behind the videos ever considered the feelings of parents.

“My tragedy of losing my son is always upsetting, and to think that somebody would use that for their gain is very upsetting,” she said. “It’s mind-boggling to me that there are people out there like that that want to spread or have their own agenda.”

___

Associated Press writer Mark Long in Gainesville, Fla., contributed to this report.

USA, CANADA, EU, UK  ITS ALL THE SAME

Nurses in crisis over COVID-19 dig in for better work conditions

 nurses are a little like coal miners. They tend to help each other. They are watching each other's back. They have solidarity.

By Christine Spolar & Mark Kreidler & Rae Ellen Bichell, 

Kaiser Health News

A small group of employees picket outside the Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, Calif., on May 19, 2020. The picketers claim management is putting their health and safety at risk because of lax protocols around the treatment of COVID-19 patients, a lack of personal protective equipment and short-staffing. 

File Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI | License Photo

Dec. 16 (UPI) -- In California, which has a strong union tradition, Kaiser Permanente management misjudged workplace tensions during the COVID-19 crisis and risked a walkout of thousands when union nurses balked at signing a four-year contract that would have slashed pay for new hires.

In Colorado, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Massachusetts, nurses have been embroiled in union battles over staffing and work conditions.


A small group of employees picket outside the Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, Calif., on May 19, 2020. File Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI | License Photo

As deadly coronavirus cases spiked this year, daily pressures intensified on hospital floors. Some nurses retired; some became travel nurses, hired by agencies that advertised more than double, even triple, the day rates for intensive care unit, telemetry and emergency room nurses. Others gave up their jobs to avoid possibly carrying the COVID-19 virus home to their families.

"Things had gotten particularly stark for nurses," said Rebecca Kolins Givan, an associate professor of labor studies at Rutgers University.

'Make more at McDonald's'

It was so grim in Pittsburgh that registered nurses at West Penn Hospital, part of the Allegheny Health Network, voted this year to authorize a strike -- less than a year after they unionized with SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania. Chief among their complaints: The hospital system had balked at improving staff ratios even as it offered bonuses, up to $15,000 for some, to hire registered nurses to fill vacancies.

Kathleen Jae, a member of the bargaining team that reached a pact without a work stoppage, said nurses wanted management to work harder to retain veteran staff members: "We had to face the fact that nurses are retiring, nurses are leaving the bedside out of frustration, and, in certain instances this year, nurses had more patients than they felt comfortable taking care of."

RELATED U.S. short on faculty to train next generation of nurses

Allegheny Health Network said the first-ever pact with RNs at West Penn provides "competitive wages and benefits" to help it "recruit and retain talented, experienced nurses."

Liz Soriano-Clark, a teacher-turned-nurse on the bargaining team, said the pandemic had made workers across the health sector more careful and choosier about what jobs they'll take.

"There's a nursing shortage and a shortage of nursing instructors, nationwide. They've seen aides leave. They've seen cleaners leave," Soriano-Clark said. "Why is that? Because they can make more at McDonald's and not have to clean up vomit."


Nurses hold photos of fellow healthcare workers who have died from COVID-19 during a protest calling attention to healthcare infections nationwide and demanding the Trump administration provide extra protective equipment for healthcare workers at the White House on April 21, 2020. File Photo by Kevin Dietsch/UPI | License Pho

In September, the American Nurses Association alerted the Biden administration to an "unsustainable nurse staffing shortage facing our country" in a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services. The ANA said a "crisis-level human resource shortage" was evident: Mississippi had 2,000 fewer nurses than it did at the beginning of 2021. Tennessee called on its National Guard to reinforce hospital staffs. Texas was recruiting 2,500 nurses from outside the state.

Union membership among U.S. nurses has inched up over the past 15 years and held steady, at about 17%, for five years, according to unionstats.com, an academic website. But 2021, a year of union organizing and holdouts in such disparate workplaces as Starbucks cafes and John Deere tractor plants, might well be a turning point for essential workers in healthcare.

"If you ask nurses what they want," said Givan, who interviewed dozens of nurses for a 2016 book on healthcare workers, "they want working conditions where they can provide a high level of care. They don't want appreciation that is lip service. They don't want marketing campaigns. They don't want shiny new buildings."

Still, Givan noted, the healthcare sector has spent handsomely to fight unions.

A woman holds a photo of a deceased registered nurse as nurses, elected officials and community members come together to commemorate the final day of Nurses Week with a vigil in Yonkers, N.Y., on May 12, 2020. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI | License Photo

After years of staff retention issues at Longmont United Hospital in Colorado, nurses are awaiting the results of a vote on whether to join National Nurses United, the largest union of registered nurses in the United States.

Stephanie Chrisley, a registered nurse in the hospital's ICU, said nurses are regularly caring for double the number of patients considered appropriate -- often three to four "ventilated, sedated, critically ill patients."

She and others protested outside the hospital in early December. They said the company that runs the hospital, Centura Health, this year had employed aggressive union-busting tactics, including disputing a handful of votes, which dragged out the union election for about five months.

In another instance, her colleague Kris Kloster said, Centura, founded by Catholic nuns, issued company-wide emails announcing raises and retention bonuses for everyone except nurses at her hospital.

"Where there should have been newly hired nurses, there were anti-union consultants roaming around the hospital," Chrisley said. Since July, she added, the hospital has lost nearly 80 RNs, "nearly a third of our nursing staff." Longmont United Hospital interim CEO Kristi Olson said in a statement that the hospital "will remain open and fully operational" and that "we are committed to making sure that all voices were heard" in the union election.

Organizing can take a long time, Givan said, pointing to tense labor negotiations in Massachusetts, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. "But when there is a crisis -- what we call a hot shop -- you can get workers to organize quite quickly."

Nurses represented by the Massachusetts Nurses Association walked off the job March 8 in Worcester. A chance to break the bitter impasse collapsed when management, Tenet Healthcare, refused to allow some nurses to return to their original jobs. In North Carolina, registered nurses at Mission Hospital in Asheville ratified a contract with the HCA management that locked in 17% raises over three years and set up a committee to review patient care conditions.

A recent poll by Gallup, the global analytics firm, found that the share of Americans who say they approved of unions was at 68%, its highest point since 1965.

Sal Rosselli, president of the National Union of Healthcare Workers, said that in the past year "there has just been an explosion of leads," queries from health workers exploring how to unionize.

Rosselli, whose organization represents about 15,000 health workers, said the pandemic exposed practices that had long antagonized employees. Too many hospitals scrambled for masks, gloves and gowns, he said, and front-line workers were on round-the-clock schedules and facing ghastly daily deaths.

"They weren't keeping their employees and their patients safe," Rosselli said, "and all because these systems were focused on profit over anything else. That has been coming on for a long, long time."

Registered nursing is among the U.S. occupations expected to experience the greatest levels of job growth in the next decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Employment Projections 2020-2030. Also among the fastest-growing occupations are nurse practitioners, home healthcare aides and assistants. Shortages of RNs and other healthcare workers are expected to be the most intense in the South and West.

Some of the most powerful nursing unions in the nation operate out of California, representing employees in Western states. "The nurses in California have the hours they have, the care they have, the protections they have because of the union," said Soriano-Clark, who has worked at hospitals in California and Pennsylvania.

Ready to picket

Douglas Wong, a physician assistant, never imagined hoisting a "strike" sign outside Riverside Medical Center. But that nearly happened after a sobering breakdown in talks between Kaiser Permanente and a top nurses union at the facility, part of the KP system. Nurses, pharmacists and operations staffers are among the insurers' 160,000-plus unionized employees, according to KP spokesman Marc Brown.

The California-based health system giant tried to force a two-tier pay schedule that would have cut wages for new nurses by 26%. Wong and thousands of allies -- many who dryly noted they had been heralded as "heroes" in the COVID-19 crisis -- prepared to picket in the middle of a pandemic. Kaiser Permanente's demands crumbled when dozens of affiliated unions threatened one-day sympathy strikes.

The tiered-pay demand and an attempt to lower wages in some markets were dropped. Staffing ratios were adjusted to ease safety concerns. Wong said that, despite the pact, the bruising negotiations "felt like a betrayal."

"Make no mistake: This was an enormous win for labor, especially pushing back on the two-tier. At the end of the day, they pulled back. And we made huge strides toward improvement in our staffing," said Wong, a six-year KP employee and an official with the United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals.

The negotiations were a marked shift for Kaiser Permanente, which for most of three decades has relied on a labor-management partnership with its unions, emphasizing cooperative decision-making and robust discussions. Talks were held with teams, set around circular tables, hashing out concerns. KP was known for much of the past decade as a market leader in wages and quality of care, and the labor-management partnership was received by academics and labor experts as an innovative, successful approach to managing a workforce.

The health system recently hired new top executives, and, to the surprise of the unions, Kaiser Permanente used negotiations this year to offer the two-tier pay regimen, a tactic used by auto- and steel-makers during economic downturns in the 1980s. The union negotiators noted this: The healthcare giant's management wanted to scale back wages after notching $6.8 billion in net revenue from 2018 to 2020.

On Thursday, workers voted to ratify a four-year contract with KP. The company declined to comment for this article. In a news release, Christian Meisner, KP's chief human resources officer, saidThe Wall Street Journal recently reported that nurses' pay was sweetened in 2021 by thousands of dollars in raises -- handed out without union wrangling -- as hospitals competed for workers. Premier, a healthcare consultancy hired by the Journal, analyzed 60,000 registered nurses' salaries and found that average annual pay, not including overtime or bonuses, grew about 4% in the first nine months of the year, to more than $81,000. That compares with a 2.6% rise in 2019, according to federal data.

Raises don't necessarily mean retention.

"There always seems to be a shortage of nurses," said Professor Paul Clark, who is a former director of Penn State University's School of Labor and Employment Relations and has studied nursing and labor organizing. "But it's important to realize there's not a shortage of RNs. There's a shortage of RNs willing to work under the conditions they've been asked to work."

Aya Healthcare, a national travel nurse provider, has found that the pandemic aggravated historical understaffing at hospitals, spokeswoman Lisa Park said in an email. "There were over 100,000 vacancies at the start of the pandemic. And now, that number has increased to over 195,000," Park said. Travel nurses account for fewer than 2% of the nursing workforce, she added, but "with the increase in permanent vacancies due to burnout/resignations, the demand for temporary healthcare workers has increased."

David Zonderman, a professor of labor history at North Carolina State University, noted that nurses unions have grown more political and more outspoken -- in Washington, D.C., and their home states. Nurses on the hospital floor lived through a crisis -- fearing for their lives amid shortages of protective equipment -- much like the trials of American workers in the mining and manufacturing industries in decades past.

"This may sound weird," Zonderman said, "but nurses are a little like coal miners. They tend to help each other. They are watching each other's back. They have solidarity."

"And," he said, "if you treat people badly long enough, they finally say, 'I'm done.'"

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation. Neither KHN nor KFF is affiliated with the health insurance company Kaiser Permanente.

Google still running ads for anti-climate change content, watchdog report says

The report said it found that 50 ads for climate change-denying articles were published after Google's promised policy deadline. 

File Photo by Kevin Dietsch/UPI | License Photo

Dec. 16 (UPI) -- Tech giant Google has not yet fully implemented its pledge to stop running advertisements for articles that deny climate change, according to a watchdog analysis.

Google had said on Oct. 7, ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP26 in Scotland, that it would cease running ads that promote content that deny climate and set a Nov. 8 deadline for the policy.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate said in a report Thursday that it found 50 ads for climate change-denying articles were published after the deadline. The non-governmental organization said those ads reached nearly 50,000 interactions on Facebook.

"Climate change denial is a cynical strategy that seeks to delay the action needed to prevent ecological disaster," CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed said in a statement.

"In making their initial announcement, Google appears to recognize that they have played a part in making climate change denial a profitable business, and yet they have not followed through with real action."

Last month, the group published a "Toxic Ten" report that showed that just 10 publishers were responsible for almost 70% of Facebook interactions with climate denial content. The analysis said eight of the 10 earned $3.6 million from Google Ads in the six months leading up to Google's pledge.

Thursday's report also cited multiple ads for articles that attacked climate science as "alarmism."

Google said in response to the report that it's "taken appropriate enforcement actions." 

File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI

Google communications manager Michael Aciman told The Verge after the report was posted that the company has "taken appropriate enforcement actions."

"When we find content that crosses the line from policy debate to promoting climate change denial, we stop serving ads on that page or site," Aciman told The New York Times.

Facebook bans seven companies accused of surveillance for hire

A months-long investigation identified the seven companies over four countries.

 File photo by Kon Karampelas/Unsplash

Dec. 16 (UPI) -- Facebook's parent company Meta on Thursday banned seven surveillance-for-hire companies from the social media platform over concerns about spying that could affect close to 50,000 users.

The Facebook users across 100 countries may have been targeted by the surveillance companies working for both government agencies and private clients.

"We alerted around 50,000 people who we believe were targeted by these malicious activities worldwide, using the system we launched in 2015. We recently updated it to provide people with more granular details about the nature of targeting we detect, in line with the surveillance chain phases framework we shared above" states the report.

"Given the severity of their violations, we have banned them from our services. To help disrupt these activities, we blocked related internet infrastructure, putting them on notice that their targeting of people has no place on our platform."

The move comes after months of investigation by the parent company, which used terms such as "cyber-mercenaries" and "surveillance-for-hire" to describe the bad actors.

The Meta report says the banned companies provide "intrusive software tools and surveillance services indiscriminately to any customer -- regardless of who they target or the human rights abuses they might enable.

The spying was not limited to Facebook. The parent company confirmed that users of Meta-owned Instagram were also targeted with malicious software.

The seven surveillance companies are located across four countries.

Facebook said it removed approximately 1,500 fake accounts, blocked malicious web addresses, and sent cease-and-desist letters to the companies.

END STATE MURDER OF CITIZENS

House Democrats seek answers on federal executions from Justice Department
By Danielle Haynes

House Democrats sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland asking him to provide them with an update on the Justice Department's death penalty policies. Photo by Leigh Vogel/UPI | License Photo


Dec. 16 (UPI) -- House Democrats on Thursday asked the Justice Department whether the Biden administration plans to resume federal executions using a single-drug lethal injection protocol.

Reps. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., and Jamie Raskin, D-Md., sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland asking the Justice Department to provide an update on its policies by Dec. 23.

The request comes nearly five months after the Biden administration issued a moratorium on federal executions pending a review of the Justice Department's policy to use a single drug, pentobarbital, in its lethal injections.

Despite the halt -- and President Joe Biden's stated preference for abolition -- the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to reinstate the death sentence for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in June after it was overturned.

"Given its recent actions, we are concerned that DOJ may renew its efforts to obtain pentobarbital from non-[Food and Drug Administration]-regulated pharmacies for use in future federal executions," the letter read. "This would be consistent with the actions of certain states that have continued using single-drug pentobarbital in state executions."

Former Attorney General William Barr announced plans in 2019 to resume federal executions after an unofficially moratorium since 2003, when the government administered the lethal injection to Louis Jones Jr., who raped and killed Army Pvt. Tracie McBride in 1995.

Barr's Justice Department faced lawsuits, though, over its plan to use a single drug -- pentobarbital -- in its lethal injection protocol. Under federal law, the U.S. government must use the same execution method as the state where the crime was committed and most states use a multi-drug cocktail.

The Trump administration ultimately executed 13 federal death row prisoners between July 2020 and January 2021. Those executions surpass the total number of federal executions that took place between 1949 and 2019.

During his campaign for president, Biden said he opposes the death penalty, despite supporting the punishment as a senator.

"Because we cannot ensure we get death penalty cases right every time, Biden will work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government's example," his campaign website said.

Biden's changing views on the issue have reflected an overall decline in support for the death penalty in the United States. A Gallup poll released in November found that 54% of American adults favor the use of the death penalty as a punishment for those convicted of murder, down from 55% in 2020 and 80% in the mid-1990s.

Use of the death penalty also has dropped sharply in recent years. Eleven people were executed in the United States in 2021, down from 17 in 2020 and a high of 98 in 1999 since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976. The last time there were this few executions was in 1988.

Twenty-three states have abolished the use of the death penalty, including Virginia in March.

"The death penalty grew increasingly geographically isolated in 2021 and public support dropped to its lowest levels in a half-century," said Robert Dunham, the Death Penalty Information Center's executive director.

"Virginia's repeal created a death-penalty-free zone along the U.S. Atlantic coast that now runs from the Canadian border of Maine to the northern border of the Carolinas. In the west, an execution-free zone spans the Pacific coast from Alaska to Mexico. The handful of states that continue to push for capital punishment are outliers that often disregard due process, botch executions, and dwell in the shadows of long histories of racism and a biased criminal legal system."