AT&T quits Venezuela as US sanctions force it to defy Maduro

In this Jan. 9, 2020 file photo, a DirectTV dish stands on home in the Catia neighborhood of Caracas, Venezuela. AT&T, one of the last major American companies still operating in Venezuela, said Tuesday, May 19, 2020 it will immediately abandon Venezuela’s pay TV market, as U.S. sanctions prohibit its DirecTV platform from broadcasting channels that it is required to carry by the Venezuelan government, making it impossible to comply with the legal requirements of both countries. (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix, File)


MIAMI (AP) — AT&T said Tuesday it will immediately ditch Venezuela’s pay TV market as U.S. sanctions prohibit its DirecTV platform from broadcasting channels that it is required to carry by the socialist administration of Nicolás Maduro.

The Dallas-based company’s closing of its Venezuela unit is effective immediately.

It follows a decision by the Trump administration not to renew a license it had granted AT&T to continue carrying Globovision, a private network, sanctioned by the U.S., owned by a businessman close to Maduro who is wanted on U.S. money laundering charges, three people familiar with the situation told the AP. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss U.S. government licensing activity.

AT&T joins a number of other U.S. companies — General Motors, Kellogg Co. and Kimberly-Clark — that have abandoned Venezuela due to shrinking sales, government threats and the risk of U.S. sanctions. Around 700 Venezuelans depended on the unit for employment.

“Because it is impossible for AT&T’s DIRECTV unit to comply with the legal requirements of both countries, AT&T was forced to close its pay TV operations in Venezuela, a decision that was made by the company’s U.S. leadership team without any involvement or prior knowledge of the DIRECTV Venezuela team,” the company said in a statement.


At nighttime Tuesday, residents in Caracas started banging on pots and pans for nearly a half hour to spontaneously protest a decline in public services. Some yelled “I want my DirecTV” amid chants against Maduro.

AT&T has a 44% share of the pay TV market and its departure is likely to hit hard working-class barrios of larger cities and the interior that depend on DirecTV for access to information and entertainment.

An Associated Press investigation from January found that AT&T had been under increasing pressure from the Trump administration to stand up to Maduro’s censors, who since 2017 have ordered the removal of some 10 channels, including CNN en Español, that had broadcast anti-government protests.

Local regulators accuse the channels of violating the Law on Social Responsibility on Radio and Television, which seeks to guarantee socially responsible programming but that press freedom groups consider it a tool to muzzle critical coverage due to its ambiguous language and heavy penalties. DirecTV is also a major platform for the broadcast of state-run TV outlets criticized by the opposition as propaganda.

A never-implemented plan promoted by the State Department would have forced AT&T to pull the plug on Globovision and the state-run channels while restoring some of the banned international news channels, according to five people familiar with the discussions cited in the earlier AP investigation.

AT&T hasn’t made money from its Venezuelan operations for years due to strict government controls that keep the price of its packages artificially low — a few pennies per month. The situation has become so dire that DirecTV in 2012 stopped importing set-top boxes, choking its growth. In 2015, it wrote down its assets in the country by $1.1 billion.

But the company was reluctant to close down its operations in Venezuela because of its market share — the largest it has anywhere in the world — and its commitment to a satellite broadcast center from which DirecTV beams about a third of its programming to several parts of South America.

An AT&T executive said that while its broadcast signal in Venezuela will stop working Tuesday, the company has enhanced other facilities in the region to ensure that service continues uninterrupted throughout South America. The executive spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal procedures.

AT&T’s departure deprives many Venezuelans of what had been a cheap form of entertainment in a nation ravaged by 2 million percent hyperinflation. Among them is Maduro himself, who at a recent press conference boasted that he’s a fan of CNN’s English language channel, even rattling off the channel — 706 — where it appears on DirecTV’s platform.

Socialist party boss Diosdado Cabello on Twitter said “no blockade will censure us” and invited his followers to watch his weekly TV program that is broadcast on state TV on a streaming platform.

There was no immediate comment from the Trump administration.

With AT&T’s announcement Tuesday, however, some DirecTV subscribers reported that their service immediately went dark, displaying the message: “Channel not available.”

Pedro Zambrano, a taxi driver waiting on a client at a Caracas supermarket, said he has subscribed to DirecTV for years to watch his favorite series and tuned in nightly to the German government’s Deutsche Welle channel, which broadcast international news in Spanish.

The 54-year-old said the loss of DirecTV amid the coronavirus pandemic, where he and others are forced to spend long stretches at home, is only likely to further erode a quality of life that has worsened in recent years by frequent power outages and shortages of water and gasoline for his car, which provides his living.

“I don’t know how a person can live with dignity in a country like this,” Zambrano said. “Well, what can I tell you? We’re sunk.”

—

Smith reported from Caracas. AP Writer Fabiola Sanchez contributed to this report from Caracas, Venezuela

Ukraine’s overburdened doctors in desperate virus fight

AP SPECIAL ESSAY AND PHOTO FEATURE 

https://apnews.com/5e7c49c2623adbf213cb8eeb4648f0b9

By MSTYSLAV CHERNOV and YURAS KARMANAU 

May 18, 2020

Tech-assisted COVID-19 tracking is having some issues

THE COVID-19 SECURITY STATE


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FILE - In this April 5, 2020, file photo, a man checks his mobile phone along the Yangtze River in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province. As governments around the world consider how to monitor new coronavirus outbreaks while reopening their societies, many are starting to bet on smartphone apps to help stanch the pandemic. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File)


PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Harnessing today’s technology to fight the coronavirus pandemic is turning out to be more complicated than it first appeared.

The first U.S. states that rolled out smartphone apps for tracing the contacts of COVID-19 patients are dealing with technical glitches and a general lack of interest by their residents. A second wave of tech-assisted pandemic surveillance tools is on its way, this time with the imprimatur of tech giants Apple and Google. But those face their own issues, among them potential accuracy problems and the fact that they won’t share any information with governments that could help track the spread of the illness.


Contact tracing is a pillar of infection control. It’s traditionally conducted by trained public health workers who interview those who may have been exposed, then urge them to get tested and isolate themselves. Some estimates call for as many as 300,000 U.S. workers to do the work effectively, but so far those efforts have lagged.

Other tech companies like Salesforce have offered database tools to assist manual tracing efforts, although those also raise privacy concerns because of the need to collect and store detailed information about people’s social connections, health status and whereabouts.

Privacy advocates warn that the danger of creating new government surveillance powers for the pandemic could lead to much bigger problems in the future. In a new policy paper shared with The Associated Press, the American Civil Liberties Union is warning state governments to tread more carefully and establish stricter privacy procedures before deploying technology meant to detect and curb new coronavirus outbreaks.

Even the most privacy-minded tools, such as those to be released soon by Apple and Google, require constraints so that they don’t become instruments of surveillance or oppression. “The risks of getting it wrong are enormous,” said Neema Singh Guliani, a senior legislative counsel with the ACLU.

ACLU’s report says the worst location-tracking technology should be rejected outright, such as apps that track individual movements via satellite-based GPS technology and feed sensitive personal data into centralized government databases. “Good designs don’t require you to gather people’s location information and store that,” Singh Guliani said.
She urged governments to set rules addressing both privacy and efficacy so that surveillance tools don’t interfere with more conventional public health methods.

Utah, North Dakota and South Dakota were the first U.S. states to launch voluntary phone apps that enable public health departments to track the location and connections of people who test positive for the coronavirus. But governors haven’t had much luck getting the widespread participation needed for them to work effectively.

Nearly a month after Utah launched its Healthy Together app to augment the state’s contact-tracing efforts by tracking phone locations, state officials confirmed Monday that they haven’t done any contact tracing out of the app yet. Instead, people who download the app have been able to “assess their symptoms and get testing if appropriate,” Utah’s state epidemiologist, Angela Dunn, said last week.

The state with the highest known rate of participation so far is North Dakota, where last week about 4% of residents had downloaded the Care19 app and were using its location services. The same app is getting even less support in South Dakota.

“This is a red state,” said Crystal Wolfrum, a paralegal in Minot, North Dakota, who says she’s one of the only people among her neighbors and friends to download the app. “They don’t want to wear masks. They don’t want to be told what to do. A lot of people I talk to are, like, ‘Nope, you’re not going to track me.’”

Wolfrum said she’s doubtful that the app will be useful, both because of people’s wariness and its poor performance. She gave it a bad review on Google’s app store after it failed to notice lengthy shopping trips she made one weekend to Walmart and Target stores.

North Dakota is now looking at starting a second app based on the Apple-Google technology. The existing app “was rushed to market, because of the urgent need, Vern Dosch, the state’s contact tracing facilitator, told KFYR-TV in Bismarck. “We knew that it wouldn’t be perfect.”

The ACLU is taking a more measured approach to the Apple and Google method, which will use Bluetooth wireless technology to automatically notify people about potential COVID-19 exposure without revealing anyone’s identity to the government.

But even if the app is described as voluntary and personal health information never leaves the phone, the ACLU says it’s important for governments to set additional safeguards to ensure that businesses and public agencies don’t make showing the app a condition of access to jobs, public transit, grocery stores and other services.

Among the governments experimenting with the Apple-Google approach are the state of Washington and several European countries.

Swiss epidemiologist Marcel Salathé said all COVID-19 apps so far are “fundamentally broken” because they collect too much irrelevant information and don’t work well with Android and iPhone operating software. Salathé authored a paper favoring the privacy-protecting approach that the tech giants have since adopted, and he considers it the best hope for a tool that could actually help isolate infected people before they show symptoms and spread the disease.

“You will remember your work colleagues but you will not remember the random person next to you on a train or really close to you at the bar,” he said.

Other U.S. governors are looking at technology designed to supplement manual contact-tracing efforts. As early as this week, Rhode Island has said it is set to launch a “one-stop” pandemic response phone app. It will pair with a new contact-tracing database system built by software giant Salesforce, which has said it is also working with Massachusetts, California, Louisiana and New York City on a similar approach.

Salesforce says it can use data-management software to help trained crews trace “relationships across people, places and events” and identify virus clusters down to the level of a neighborhood hardware store. It relies on manual input of information gathered through conversations by phone, text or email.

“It’s only as good as a lot of us using it,” Democratic Gov. Gina Raimondo said of the soon-to-be-launched mobile app at a news conference last week. “If 10% of Rhode Island’s population opts in, this won’t be effective.” The state hasn’t yet outlined what people are expected to opt into.

The ACLU hasn’t weighed in on the Salesforce model, but has urged contact-tracing public health departments to protect people from unnecessary disclosure of personal information and to not criminalize the requirement for self-isolation.

——

This story was first published on May 18, 2020. It was updated on May 19, 2020, to correct information about the usage of COVID-19 contact-tracking apps. North Dakota has the highest participation rate at about 4% of its population, not South Dakota at about 2%. AP reporter Lindsay Whitehurst contributed to this story from Salt Lake City, Utah.

Concerns erupt over integrity of Florida’s COVID-19 website

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks at a news conference Monday, May 18, 2020, in Orlando, Fla. The governor announced that the I-4 and State Road 408 interchange has opened and because of less traffic due to the coronavirus pandemic, workers were able to expedite the workflow on the I-4 Ultimate Project. (AP Photo/John Raoux)

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — The chief architect of Florida’s coronavirus website was fired this week after a dispute over what information should be made public, underscoring how entwined public health data and politics have become as elected officials move to reopen their communities amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has said his decision to begin reopening his state has been driven by science, and federal epidemiologists have praised his administration’s daily release of COVID-19 related data as especially granular and user-friendly.


But questions about the integrity of the state’s public health data were raised anew when Rebekah Jones, an information systems manager with the Florida Department of Health, announced in an email to researchers Friday that she was reassigned from her duties overseeing an online dashboard that provides daily snapshots of Florida’s COVID-19 infections, testing and deaths.

In preparation for reopening the state, DeSantis has lashed out against early prognostications of gloom and doom, saying in recent weeks that many of the state’s hospital beds are lying empty and some testing sites were closed because there was not much demand.

He’s used data from the dashboard — including the relatively low rate of people testing positive for the coronavirus — to build support for reopening the state. Still, he said, reopening will happen in phases. This week, restaurants and retail businesses were allowed to open at 50% capacity.

But the firing has provided new fodder against the Republican governor as he defends his handling of the coronavirus outbreak. DeSantis has also come under fire for his handling of the state’s unemployment system, which broke down after being inundated by hundreds of thousands of Floridians who suddenly lost their jobs because of the economic downturn caused by the outbreak.

“We were told the reopening Florida was built on studying the data. If that data was wrong or manipulated, that puts countless Floridians at risk for exposure to COVID-19,” said state Rep. Tracie Davis, a Democrat from Jacksonville and a member of the House Health Committee.

“We do know our state is being reopened and we now have a question mark about the data,” she said.

The timing of her reassignment came a day after the state’s May 4 rollout of the first phase of the governor’s reopening plan. It was unclear if Jones was being asked to make Florida appear more solidly in compliance with the White House’s criteria for reopening. At the time, Florida was showing a downward trajectory in new infections and rates of positive tests — as well as meeting the rest of the federal criteria.

During a Tuesday press conference, DeSantis dismissed the matter as “a nonissue” and praised the dashboard as a national model.

Afterward, the governor’s spokeswoman, Helen Ferre, said in an email that Jones had “exhibited a repeated course of insubordination,” asserting that Jones had made “unilateral decisions to modify the Department’s COVID-19 dashboard without input or approval from the epidemiological team or her supervisors.”

Jones, whose dismissal Monday was first reported by Florida Today, could not be reached for comment.

In an email she sent Friday to researchers and others, Jones said that as of May 5 she was no longer in charge of the dashboard and said she would not expect “the same level of accessibility and transparency” in the data presented on the dashboard, adding that her “commitment to both is largely (arguably entirely) the reason I am no longer managing it.”

Jones was more pointed in an email to a West Palm Beach television station, CBS12 News, when she said she was removed from her role because she would not “manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen.” It was unclear what data she was asked to change.

“Regardless of what you think about the reopening in Florida, you’d like to know how it’s going,” said professor Ben D. Sawyer, who runs the University of Central Florida’s LabX. “The data is our ability to see, and I want to believe the state is here to help keep everyone safe and healthy and give us the ability to see how things are going.”

Part of the data-driven research being conducted by his team focuses on looking at how the virus is hitting different age groups.

Sawyer said he and other researches will have to scrutinize the data more deeply as they consider whether information scraped from the site is being manipulated for political reasons.

“Even if the data is transparent, now that we’ve basically run into an issue where somebody said it might not be transparent and where they fired somebody for refusing to do something they didn’t feel comfortable doing, that makes us believe the data might not be accurate,” said Jennifer Larsen, a LabX research assistant.

“If you don’t trust something that you’re hearing, how can you know to make good decisions with it?”

During an April 20 news conference, Dr. Deborah Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator for the White House, singled out Florida’s dashboard for praise.

“This is how we have to inform the American public, and this is where the American public will develop confidence in each of their counties and local governments,” Birx said then.

The dashboard debuted on March 16, providing a detailed glimpse of where coronavirus has hit, how many Floridians have tested positive for the infection, how many have been hospitalized and how many people have died. Over the weeks, new information was added, including the number of infections by ZIP codes.

After some prodding by the news media, the state also began releasing data on nursing homes and prisons, although it has declined to disclose some information that is now part of public records lawsuits filed by several news media companies.

In the early weeks of the outbreak, health officials cited privacy issues in declining to identify where infections were occurring only to reverse themselves when public concern over the outbreak grew and quickly became a political issue.

___

Google says it won’t build AI tools for oil and gas drillers

In this April 21, 2020 file photo, a pumpjack is pictured as the sun sets in Oklahoma City. Google says it won’t build custom artificial intelligence tools for speeding up oil and gas extraction, taking an environmental stance that distinguishes it from cloud computing rivals Microsoft and Amazon. The announcement followed a Greenpeace report on Tuesday, May 19, that documents how the three tech giants are using AI and computing power to help oil companies find and access oil and gas deposits in the U.S. and around the world. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki File)

Google says it will no longer build custom artificial intelligence tools for speeding up oil and gas extraction, separating itself from cloud computing rivals Microsoft and Amazon.

A statement from the company Tuesday followed a Greenpeace report that documents how the three tech giants are using AI and computing power to help oil companies find and access oil and gas deposits in the U.S. and around the world.

The environmentalist group says Amazon, Microsoft and Google have been undermining their own climate change pledges by partnering with major oil companies including Shell, BP, Chevron and ExxonMobil that have looked for new technology to get more oil and gas out of the ground.

But the group applauded Google on Tuesday for taking a step away from those deals.
“While Google still has a few legacy contracts with oil and gas firms, we welcome this indication from Google that it will no longer build custom solutions for upstream oil and gas extraction,” said Elizabeth Jardim, senior corporate campaigner for Greenpeace USA.

Google said it will honor all existing contracts with its customers, but didn’t specify what companies. A Google cloud executive had earlier in May revealed the new policy during a video interview.

Greenpeace’s report says Microsoft appears to be leading the way with the most oil and contracts, “offering AI capabilities in all phases of oil production.” Amazon’s contracts are more focused on pipelines, shipping and fuel storage, according to the report. Their tools have been deployed to speed up shale extraction, especially from the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico.

Some of the contracts have led to internal protests by employees who are pushing their companies to do more to combat climate change.
Full Coverage: Technology

Amazon declined to comment on the Greenpeace report, but pointed to wording on its website that said “the energy industry should have access to the same technologies as other industries.”

Microsoft published a blog statement Tuesday that didn’t address Greenpeace’s claims but emphasized the company’s commitment to remove from the air all the carbon it has ever emitted by 2050.

Quest for `super-duper missile’ pits US against key rivals

In this Jan. 31, 2019, image provided by the U.S. Air Force Academy, Cadet 2nd Class Eric Hembling uses a Ludwieg Tube to measure the pressures, temperatures, and flow field of various basic geometric and hypersonic research vehicles at Mach 6 in The United States Air Force Academy's Department of Aeronautics, in Colorado Springs, Colo. Little on the Pentagon’s drawing board illustrates more clearly the Trump administration’s worry about China and Russia than its work on hypersonic weapons. These missiles and aerial vehicles fly at speeds of a mile a second or faster and maneuver in ways that make them extra difficult to detect and destroy in flight. (Joshua Armstrong/U.S. Air Force Academy via AP)

WASHINGTON (AP) — They fly at speeds of a mile a second or faster and maneuver in ways that make them extra hard to detect and destroy in flight.

President Donald Trump calls them a “super-duper missile,” though they’re better known as hypersonic weapons. And they are at the heart of Trump administration worries about China and Russia.

For decades the United States has searched for ways to get ultra-fast flight right. But it has done so in fits and starts. Now, with China and Russia arguably ahead in this chase, the Trump administration is pouring billions of dollars a year into hypersonic offense and defense.


The Pentagon makes no bones about their purpose.

“Our ultimate goal is, simply, we want to dominate future battlefields,” Mark Lewis, the Pentagon’s director of defense research and engineering for modernization, told reporters in March.

Critics argue that hypersonic weapons would add little to the United States’ ability to deter war. Some think they could ignite a new, destabilizing arms race.

A look at hypersonic weapons:

WHAT’S SPECIAL ABOUT HYPERSONIC?

Two things make these weapons special: speed and maneuverability. Speed brings surprise, and maneuverability creates elusiveness. Together, those qualities could mean trouble for missile defenses.

By generally agreed definition, a hypersonic weapon is one that flies at speeds in excess of Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound. Most American missiles, such as those launched from aircraft to hit other aircraft or ground targets, travel between Mach 1 and Mach 5.

Trump occasionally mentions his interest in hypersonic weapons, sometimes without using the term. In February he told governors visiting the White House: “We have the super-fast missiles — tremendous number of the super-fast. We call them ‘super-fast,’ where they’re four, five, six, and even seven times faster than an ordinary missile. We need that because, again, Russia has some.”

And last Friday, Trump told reporters, “We have no choice, we have to do it, with the adversaries we have out there,” mentioning China and Russia. He added, “I call it the super-duper missile.” He said he “heard” it travels 17 times faster than any other U.S. missile. “It just got the go-ahead,” he added, although the Pentagon would not comment on that.

HOW THEY WORK

The Pentagon is pursuing two main types of hypersonic weapons. One, called a hypersonic glide vehicle, is launched from a rocket. It then glides to a target, maneuvering at high speed to evade interception. The other is sometimes referred to as a hypersonic cruise missile. Capable of being launched from a fighter jet or bomber, it would be powered by a supersonic combustion ramjet, or scramjet, enabling the missile to fly and maneuver at lower altitudes.

In this photo taken from undated footage distributed by Russian Defense Ministry Press Service, an intercontinental ballistic missile lifts off from a truck-mounted launcher somewhere in Russia. The Russian military said the Avangard hypersonic weapon entered combat duty. Little on the Pentagon’s drawing board illustrates more clearly the Trump administration’s worry about China and Russia than its work on hypersonic weapons. These missiles and aerial vehicles fly at speeds of a mile a second or faster and maneuver in ways that make them extra difficult to detect and destroy in flight. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP)


On March 19, the Pentagon flight-tested a hypersonic glide vehicle at its Pacific Missile Range Facility in Kauai, Hawaii. It deemed the test a success and “a major milestone towards the department’s goal of fielding hypersonic warfighting capabilities in the early- to mid-2020s.”

Unlike Russia, the United States says it is not developing hypersonic weapons for use with a nuclear warhead. As a result, a U.S. hypersonic weapon will need to be more accurate, posing additional technical challenges.

As recently as 2017, the Pentagon was spending about $800 million on hypersonic weapon programs. That nearly doubled the following year, then rose to $2.4 billion a year later and hit $3.4 billion this year. The administration’s 2021 budget request, which has yet to be approved by Congress, requests $3.6 billion.

Although this is a priority for Pentagon spending, it could become limited by the budgetary pressures that are expected as a result of multitrillion-dollar federal spending to counter the coronavirus pandemic.

WHY THEY MATTER

Top Pentagon officials say it’s about Russia, and even more so, China.

“By almost any metric that I can construct, China is certainly moving out ahead of us,” Lewis, the Pentagon research and engineering official, said Tuesday. “In large measure, that’s because we did their homework for them.” Basic research in this field was published by the U.S. years ago, “and then we kind of took our foot off the gas,” although the Pentagon is now on a path to catch up and surpass China, he added.

China is pushing for hypersonic weapon breakthroughs. It has conducted a number of successful tests of the DF-17, a medium-range ballistic missile designed to launch hypersonic glide vehicles. According to a Congressional Research Service report in March, U.S. intelligence analysts assess that the DF-17 missile has a range of approximately 1,000 to 1,500 miles and could be deployed this year.

Russia last December said its first hypersonic missile unit had become operational. It is the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, which Moscow says can fly at Mach 27, or 27 times faster than the speed of sound, and could make sharp maneuvers to bypass missile defenses. It has been fitted to existing Soviet-built intercontinental ballistic missiles, and in the future could be fitted to the more powerful Sarmat ICBM, which is still in development.

BUT ARE THEY NECESSARY?

As with other strategic arms, like nuclear weapons and naval fleets, for example, hypersonic weapons are seen by the Trump administration as a must-have if peer competitors have them.

But critics see hypersonic weapons as overkill and potentially an extension of the arms race that led to an excessive nuclear buildup by the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

There also is worry about these technologies spreading beyond the U.S., Russia and China.

“Their proliferation beyond these three nations could result in lesser powers setting their strategic forces on hair-trigger states of readiness and more credibly being able to threaten attacks on major powers,” the RAND Corp., a federally funded research organization, said in a 2017 report.

Author urges gardeners to form one big `national park’

This undated photo provided by Timber Press shows monarch butterflies in the University of Delaware Botanical Garden in Newark, Del., and is featured in the Douglas Tallamy book "Nature's Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard." Tallamy, a professor at the University of Delaware, is urging everyone _ homeowners and renters, in cities, suburbs and rural areas _ to pitch in. The wildlife ecologist and author doesn't just want you to embrace native plants in your yard or on your patio, he wants everyone to see their patches of land as part of a giant quilt. A "Homegrown National Park.'' Tallamy says a massive project like that can go a long way toward nurturing and protecting birds and pollinators. (Douglas Tallamy/Timber Press via AP)h

Imagine if all the back and front yards — and even patio container plants — across the country were seen as one magnificent patchwork quilt, a ``Homegrown National Park.” Home gardeners would join forces to bring back a variety of native plants to protect and nurture struggling birds, bees and other pollinators.

That’s wildlife ecologist and entomologist Doug Tallamy’s vision, as laid out in his most recent book, “Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard” (Timber Press).

Tallamy, a professor at the University of Delaware, is urging everyone — in cities, suburbs and rural areas — to pitch in.




This undated photo provided by Timber Press of a Downy woodpecker was taken in Oxford, Pa., and is featured in the Douglas Tallamy book "Nature's Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard." Tallamy, a professor at the University of Delaware, is urging everyone _ homeowners and renters, in cities, suburbs and rural areas _ to pitch in. The wildlife ecologist and author doesn't just want you to embrace native plants in your yard or on your patio, he wants everyone to see their patches of land as part of a giant quilt. A "Homegrown National Park.'' Tallamy says a massive project like that can go a long way toward nurturing and protecting birds and pollinators. (Douglas Tallamy/Timber Press via AP)

“This enormous new national park can absolutely make a difference,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press, especially east of the Mississippi River, where the vast majority of land in the U.S. is privately owned.

While one home garden can have a welcome effect, he says, it would be a game changer if lots of people pitched in on different, connected parcels of land, replacing traditional lawns, imported ornamentals and invasive species that fail to provide habitat for native birds, butterflies and other pollinators with ecologically crucial trees like oaks and other native species, he says.

And even a single person acting boldly with this goal in mind could be a crucial source of inspiration for others around them.

Despite climate change, or perhaps partly because of it, Tallamy optimistically envisions the coming decades as “The Age of Ecological Enlightenment.”

“I am an ecologist who makes this claim with confidence, because it is the only option left for Homo sapiens if we want to remain viable in the future,” he writes in his book.

The pivot, he says, must start at home. You can make changes slowly on your own or hire a landscaper to make changes all at once, but embracing native plants and reducing lawn is the direction gardening must take to help the environment, he says.

Todd Forrest, vice president for horticulture and living collections at The New York Botanical Garden, agrees it’s urgent that home gardeners focus on enhancing native biodiversity.

“Over the past few decades, advances in gardening equipment and techniques, increased access to a diversity of nursery-grown native plants, and rising environmental awareness among gardeners have made it more possible than ever before to harness all the joys of gardening to benefit the health of the planet,” Forrest says.

Tallamy says it’s easy to make a meaningful transition toward conservation-minded gardening.

“You can do it for free, bit by bit, as a hobby. And if you don’t own property, you can help the process in local parks, in roof gardens or community gardens, and you can plant native species in containers on balconies or patios,” he says.




This undated photo provided by Timber Press shows a big oak tree on route 896 in Newark, Del., and is featured in the Douglas Tallamy book "Nature's Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard." Tallamy, a professor at the University of Delaware, is urging everyone _ homeowners and renters, in cities, suburbs and rural areas _ to pitch in. The wildlife ecologist and author doesn't just want you to embrace native plants in your yard or on your patio, he wants everyone to see their patches of land as part of a giant quilt. A "Homegrown National Park.'' Tallamy says a massive project like that can go a long way toward nurturing and protecting birds and pollinators. (Douglas Tallamy/Timber Press via AP

His advice:

First, reduce the amount of lawn on your property. Tallamy suggests cutting the size of your lawn by half, retaining, for example, a narrow stretch in the front and just enough in the backyard to create a pathway. “You don’t have to get rid of it, just reduce it,” he says.

Second, plant an oak or hickory tree, both of which provide habitat for a huge diversity of native species. “You don’t have to buy a tree, just plant an acorn. That’s free,” he says.

Third, put in plants that support a diverse community of pollinators, like native milkweed, pie weed or other native plants.

Fourth, get rid of invasive species. The worst are burning bush, barberry, Bradford pears, autumn olive, porcelain berries, bush honeysuckle and Kudzu, Tallamy says.

Fifth, add a bubbling water feature. “Any sort of bubbler where the water is kept clean is great for birds. It’s just a magnet for them,” he says.

Sixth, coordinate with your neighbors. “You don’t have to do all these things on a single property, particularly if your property is small. Maybe your neighbor can plant an oak and you can put lots of native species in containers and install some kind of water feature,” Tallamy explains.

As a whole, the Homegrown National Park should feature all these things on a loosely connected patchwork of land, he says.

“Admission to Homegrown National Park is free and there are no restricted seasons,” he writes in his book.

“As you become familiar with the natural cycles that occur in your yard, you will start to anticipate them, subconsciously at first, but then as something you eagerly await.”


This undated photo provided by Timber Press shows a lawn beauty strip at Mt. Cuba Center in Hockessin, Del, and is featured in the Douglas Tallamy book "Nature's Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard." Tallamy, a professor at the University of Delaware, is urging everyone _ homeowners and renters, in cities, suburbs and rural areas _ to pitch in. The wildlife ecologist and author doesn't just want you to embrace native plants in your yard or on your patio, he wants everyone to see their patches of land as part of a giant quilt. A "Homegrown National Park.'' Tallamy says a massive project like that can go a long way toward nurturing and protecting birds and pollinators. (Douglas Tallamy/Timber Press via AP)


SEE KROPOTKIN, FIELDS, FACTORIES, AND WORKSHOPS 
http://www.blackcatpress.ca/ffw.html

Dutch government asks prosecutors to probe tax office

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The Dutch government reported its own taxation office to public prosecutors on Tuesday, seeking an investigation into possible discrimination in a long-running scandal centered on civil servants trying to track down parents fraudulently claiming child care benefits.

The case involves thousands of parents who had their child care benefit payments stopped or were ordered to repay money amid fraud investigations. In some cases, parents were plunged into financial problems after being wrongly accused of falsely claiming benefits.

The investigation into possible discrimination between 2013 and 2017 comes amid reports of possible profiling by tax authorities as they sought to identify fraudsters. Dutch media have reported that one of the criterion used to select parents for investigation was having dual nationality.


The finance ministry said in a statement that an independent expert who looked into the case based his suspicion of discrimination on “questions in Tax Service systems based on origin.”

Government officials have apologized for the scandal and in March earmarked 500 million euros ($550 million) to compensate more than 20,000 parents.

Prosecutors also have been asked to look into whether civil servants deliberately demanded wrongful payments.

The Dutch minister that oversees the tax office, Alexandra van Huffelen, said it’s important for prosecutors to investigate. It will be up to prosecutors to decide whether to press charges.

“Hopefully, this far-reaching step will contribute to closing in a just manner this painful chapter for so many people,” Van Huffelen said.

Tokyo Olympics protest parody of logo that depicts COVID-19

IN SAVING FACE ONE SHOWS ONESELF AN ASS 
The cover design of Number 1 Shimbun is seen in Tokyo, Tuesday, May 19, 2020. Tokyo Olympics officials are incensed that their games emblem has been used in the cover design of the local magazine that combines the logo with the novel coronavirus. The “look-alike”emblem, which had “COVID-19” written underneath, was published on the cover the the April issue of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan's magazine. It also appeared in an online edition. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)


TOKYO (AP) — Tokyo Olympic officials are incensed that the games emblem has been used in the cover design of a local magazine that combines the logo with the coronavirus.

Tokyo spokesman Masa Takaya said in an online news conference on Tuesday that organizers had requested the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan “take down” the image.

Takaya did not answer a direct question if the organizing committee was planning a legal challenge. He said negotiations were going on “in a private manner” with the Tokyo foreign journalists’ club.

“It is very disappointing to see the games emblem being distorted and associated with the novel coronavirus, which affects human life, people’s lives, the economy, and our society,” Takaya said. “The design is clearly using the design of the Olympic emblem. We therefore consider it an infringement on our legally secured copyright to the Tokyo 2020 Olympic emblem.”


The cover design of Number 1 Shimbun is seen in Tokyo, Tuesday, May 19, 2020. Tokyo Olympics officials are incensed that their games emblem has been used in the cover design of the local magazine that combines the logo with the novel coronavirus. The “look-alike”emblem, which had “COVID-19” written underneath, was published on the cover the the April issue of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan's magazine. It also appeared in an online edition. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)


He said the organizing committee had not yet received a formal reply to its request.

The “look-alike” emblem, which had “COVID-19” written underneath, was published on the cover the the April issue of the club’s magazine. It also appeared in an online edition.

The FCCJ did not respond immediately to a request for comment from The Associated Press.

In an article about the logo published several days ago by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, it named the artist as Andrew Pothecary. It identified him as a British designer based in Japan who serves as the magazine’s art director.

The artist said he viewed the design as a parody, though other designers interviewed by the newspaper suggest parody was difficult with a topic such as the virus and pandemic.

“It is insensitive to many people being affected,” Takaya said.

___

More AP sports: https://apnews.com/apf-sports and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

German court nixes law allowing foreign telecom monitoring
Stephan Harbarth, Chairman of the Senate at the Federal Constitutional Court and President of the Court, holds a document as he announces the ruling on the BND's powers of surveillance abroad at the court in Karlsruhe, Germany, Tuesday, May 19, 2020. Germany's highest court has ruled that regulations allowing Germany’s foreign intelligence service to monitor the communications of reporters working abroad and others violate the country’s constitution and must be changed. (Uli Deck/dpa via AP)

BERLIN (AP) — Regulations allowing Germany’s foreign intelligence service to monitor the communications of reporters working abroad and others violate the country’s constitution and must be changed, Germany’s highest court ruled Tuesday, deciding in favor of journalists’ rights group Reporters Without Borders and others.
The complaint against the foreign intelligence service, the BND, came after a law was changed allowing the agency, starting in 2017, to collect and evaluate communications from foreigners abroad without having to provide legal justification.
In the complaint, Reporters Without Borders, Germany’s GFF civil rights association, as well as several journalists and others argued that blanket telecommunications surveillance meant that German reporters, and others, working with colleagues in other countries could also be spied upon, in violation of the constitution.

The Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe agreed, ruling that the law must be redrawn by the end of 2021 at the latest, saying it was a violation both of Germany’s telecommunication privacy regulations and its protections of the freedom of the press.
“The protection of fundamental rights against German state authority is not limited to German territory,” the court said in a press release after the ruling.
The regulations were initially passed after Germany’s involvement in surveillance abroad was revealed in leaks from former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowdon.
But Christian Mihr, the director of Germany’s chapter of Reporters Without Borders, said “instead of setting clear barriers to international intelligence, the federal government simply wanted to legalize the general overseas surveillance.”
He called the court ruling a “great success.”
“The Federal Constitutional Court has, once again, underlined the importance of the freedom of the press,” he said in a statement.
Snowden, who remains in exile in Russia, called the German court’s ruling “an important step into the right direction.”
In a statement issued via the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, Snowden said he hoped the decision would set an example to other states and lead to the development of international standards banning systems of mass surveillance.