BIG FRIGGEN DEAL

'Big Sky' producers recognize Native American criticism

DAVID E KELLEY 

PRETENDS TO BE IGNORENT

PROVING HE IS 

© Provided by The Canadian Press

LOS ANGELES — Native American tribes and advocates are condemning “Big Sky,” a Montana-set ABC drama, for ignoring the history of violence inflicted on Indigenous women and instead making whites the crime victims.

They also have assailed the network and the show's producers for failing to respond to their complaints, which they first made known in a Nov. 17 letter. On Tuesday, the makers of “Big Sky” broke their silence.

“After meaningful conversations with representatives of the Indigenous community, our eyes have been opened to the outsized number of Native American and Indigenous women who go missing and are murdered each year, a sad and shocking fact," the executive producers said in a statement to The Associated Press.

“We are grateful for this education and are working with Indigenous groups to help bring attention to this important issue,” according to the statement. 

The producers include David E. Kelley ("Big Little Lies," “The Undoing”) and novelist C.J. Box, whose 2013 book “The Highway” was adapted for the series.

Created by Kelley, “Big Sky” stars Katheryn Winnick and Kylie Bunbury as private detectives searching for two white sisters on a road trip who go missing and turn out to be part of a pattern of abductions.

With a disproportionate number of American Indians among Montana’s missing and murdered girls and women, the fictional approach represents “at best, cultural insensitivity, and at worst, appropriation,” said the signers, including the Rocky Mountain Tribal Leaders Council that represents all of Montana’s tribal nations.

“I’m not at all surprised that they’re doing this because Hollywood’s been appropriating our trauma and our lived experience for years and years and years,” said Georgina Lightning, an actor and longtime activist. “And we’ve always cried about it. We’ve always called it out. But nobody ever cared. Nobody ever listened and nobody cared.”

In the November letter, ABC was asked to consider adding an on-screen message steering viewers to information about the entrenched peril facing Indigenous women in North America. They cited “Somebody's Daughter,” a documentary detailing the murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls crisis, as it's known to those fighting the scourge.

“This is such an easy fix for ABC to make,” the film's director, Rain, said in a statement. “Indigenous leaders are reaching out to ally and inform, to open a dialogue. They’re not asking for ‘Big Sky’ to be taken off the air,” he said, but instead be used to inform.

When no response was forthcoming, the coalition took its effort public and enlisted support from other tribal organizations, including Canada’s Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs and the Great Plains Tribal Chairmen's Association.

“Two-thirds of this country doesn’t even know that Native Americans still exist," said Tom Rodgers, president of the Global Indigenous Council and a co-signer of the letter to ABC. “We thought, what a teachable moment.”

In response to the producers' statement, a skeptical Rodgers said Tuesday he hadn't heard from anyone connected with the show and called for further details, including which Indigenous partners were being consulted.

While more than 5,000 Indigenous women were reported missing in 2016 in the U.S., reporting by The Associated Press has shown the number is difficult to determine because some cases go unreported, others aren’t well-documented, and a comprehensive government database to track the cases is lacking.

Advocates, including some lawmakers representing Native Americans, also link the long-standing problem to inadequate resources, indifference and a jurisdictional maze. The rise of the #MeToo movement helped give the issue political heft, but Hollywood has lagged in paying heed.

While Lightning said she was “a little bit shocked” when she saw a Native American tragedy mirrored in a story but without Native American characters, her years working in Los Angeles meant she wasn’t surprised. Now living in Alberta, she’s in the Canadian miniseries “Trickster,” about a dysfunctional Native family.

“There's such resistance” to change in Hollywood, she said. "When you’re used to being one of the good old boys... there's no way they think they’re going to have to conform to the rest of society. It’s such an arrogance.”

Native Americans are used to being routinely ignored by American popular culture, registering barely a blip on TV as they're usually seen on only one or two shows, such as Paramount Network's “Yellowstone.” A University of California, Los Angeles, study released this year found that Indigenous actors were cast in six of 1,816 broadcast and cable series roles for the 2018-19 season.

But being slighted on the crucial issue raised by “Big Sky” is too bitter a pill to accept, said Rodgers, a Blackfeet Nation member whose Global Indigenous Council, an advocacy group for Indigenous peoples worldwide, helped organize the outreach to ABC.

“The one thing we won’t be anymore is ignored. We’re not going to be made invisible, we will not be erased," he said.

____

Lynn Elber can be reached at lelber@ap.org and is on Twitter at http://twitter.com/lynnelber.

___

This story has been corrected to use the accurate pronoun for filmmaker Rain.

Lynn Elber, The Associated Press

HOW THE WORLD’S BIGGEST SLUM STOPPED THE VIRUS

Dharavi contained Covid-19 against all the odds.

 Now its people need to survive an economic catastrophe.

By Ari Altstedter and Dhwani Pandya
Photographs and Video by Zishaan A Latif

Normally, Khwaja Qureshi’s recycling facility in Dharavi, the slum in Mumbai, would be no place for three newborn tabby kittens. Before efforts to contain the novel coronavirus idled much of the Indian economy, the 350-square-foot concrete room was a hive of nonstop industry. Five workers were there 12 hours a day, seven days a week, dumping crushed water bottles, broken television casings, and discarded lunchboxes into a roaring iron shredder, then loading the resulting mix of plastic into jute sacks for sale to manufacturers. But during a recent visit, the shredder was silent and the workers gone, decamped to their villages in India’s north. That left the kittens plenty of space to gambol across the bare floor, nap on a comfortable cardboard box, or be amused by the neighborhood kids who came to visit.

Qureshi, a stout, thick-fingered man of 43 whose father founded the operation, mostly ignored his feline workplace companions. He’d been spending his days sitting on a plastic chair, drinking cup after cup of milk tea and chatting with other Dharavi entrepreneurs, all of them part of Mumbai’s fearsomely efficient but completely informal recycling industry, who stopped by to talk business. The consensus was pessimistic. India’s economy is in an historic slump, and less economic activity means fewer things being thrown away—and also less demand to make new products from the old. No one had much hope that things would pick up soon.


▲ Khwaja Qureshi is waiting for his employees to return.


The irony is that Dharavi, which has a population of about 1 million and is probably the most densely packed human settlement on Earth, has largely contained the coronavirus. Thanks to an aggressive response by local officials and the active participation of residents, the slum has gone from what looked like an out-of-control outbreak in April and May to a late-September average of 1.3 cases per day for every 100,000 residents, compared with about 7 per 100,000 in Portugal. That success has made Dharavi an unlikely role model, its methods copied by epidemiologists elsewhere and singled out for praise by the World Health Organization. It’s also a remarkable contrast to the disaster unfolding in the rest of India. The country has recorded more than 6.5 million confirmed cases—putting it on track to soon overtake the U.S.—and over 103,000 deaths.

Dharavi’s economic calamity, however, may be just getting started. Its maze of tarpaulin tents and illegally built tenements and workshops have traditionally served as a commercial engine for all of Mumbai, a frenetic crossroads of exchange and entrepreneurship at the heart of India’s financial capital. Before the pandemic, it generated more than $1 billion a year in activity, providing a base for industries from pottery and leather-tanning to recycling and the garment trade. Deprivation abounded, but Dharavi could also be a social accelerator, allowing the poorest to begin their long climb to greater prosperity—and to joining the consumer class that powers the $3 trillion Indian economy. Qureshi’s own family is a case in point. His father was born in the hinterland to a poor tenant farmer but moved to Dharavi to work in a textile factory, getting into the recycling business after he realized the value of the plastic packaging that new spools of thread arrived in.


▲ Kiran Dighavkar at an isolation center.

Led by an energetic municipal manager named Kiran Dighavkar, who was also in charge of the slum’s Covid-19 response, people in Dharavi are now trying to restart their economic lives without seeding new outbreaks. Their success or failure will be an important example for similar places around the world—areas that are home to as much as a sixth of the global population and which no government hoping for a durable recovery from the virus can afford to ignore. Whether in Nairobi’s Kibera or Rio de Janeiro’s hilltop favelas, slum economies are inextricably linked to the cities around them. In some countries their inhabitants account for 90% of the informal urban workforce—an army of construction laborers, small-time vendors, assembly-line helpers, and restaurant servers that developing world metropolises rely on to function. Those jobs are never easy, but they are often preferable to the monotony of rural poverty.

The challenge in Dharavi is to reclaim this vitality safely. “Now we have to live with this disease,” Dighavkar said in an interview at a temporary hospital, one of several he’d established to handle Covid-19 cases. “Dharavi is a hub of activity, and we cannot let it go.”

Watch: How India’s Biggest Slum Contained Covid

Dharavi’s modern history dates to the late 19th century, when Muslim tanners, looking for a place to practice their odoriferous trade outside the limits of British-run Bombay, built a rudimentary settlement nearby. By the 1930s it was attracting other migrants: potters from Gujarat, crafters of gold and silver embroidery from north India, and leather workers from the Tamil-speaking south, among many others. All added their own living quarters, building with whatever materials they could find, giving little notice to the fact they were, technically, squatting on government-owned land.

As the Raj gave way to independent India and Mumbai’s population swelled, the teeming slum eventually found itself not on the city’s fringe but near its geographic center. By then, many of its tents and huts had been replaced by structures of brick, concrete, and tile, arrayed around communal wells and powered by electricity from the municipal grid—even though almost no residents had formal land title. There were far too many of them to evict, or ignore, and in the 1970s, vote-seeking politicians began to make small improvements, such as public latrines. By the time the area played a starring role in 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire, soaring housing costs in the rest of Mumbai had even made it attractive to some white-collar workers looking for affordable, centrally located housing.

Meanwhile, Mumbai’s government had begun floating ideas for a redevelopment, one that would replace lopsided squatters’ homes with modern apartments and move factories and workshops into purpose-built quarters, probably elsewhere in the metropolis. But successive consultations, proposals, tenders, and visioning exercises failed to settle on any plan. That was due in part to opposition from residents, who pointed out that even if renovations brought better housing, their jobs might be relocated to distant industrial parks.


▲ International Footsteps’ workshop.

Dighavkar, who is 37 and a civil engineer by training, came to Dharavi with modest ambitions. Last year he was named assistant municipal commissioner for G Ward North, a swath of Mumbai that includes the slum. His previous posting was in the historic core, where his signature project had been the construction of a viewing platform in front of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, an architecturally spectacular Victorian rail hub, that allowed tourists to snap photos without dashing into traffic. He also proudly took credit for building the city’s costliest public convenience, a $122,000 toilet complex on a busy seaside promenade.


▲ Dr. Asad Khan (center) and Dighavkar at a field hospital.

With redevelopment plans in flux, Dighavkar’s superiors had little enthusiasm for putting significant money into Dharavi. So in his first months in his new role he focused on the middle-class neighborhoods at its edges, laying new sidewalks and making symbolic changes such as switching the figures on crosswalk signals from male to female.

Dharavi’s first coronavirus case was posthumous. In early April, a 56-year-old resident tested positive after he’d already died. There were only about 2,000 confirmed infections in India at the time, mostly traceable to international travel, and the news seemed to indicate a serious problem. A place with more people than San Francisco, crammed into an area smaller than Central Park, is hardly a promising environment for social distancing. As many as 80 people may share a single public toilet in Dharavi, and it’s not uncommon for a family of eight to occupy a 100-square-foot home. Infections were soon spreading rapidly, prompting the Mumbai government to impose draconian containment measures. Whole streets were sealed off behind checkpoints, with officers on patrol and camera-equipped drones buzzing overhead. With rare exceptions, no one could leave the area, not that there was anywhere to go: The rest of the city, and all of India, were locked down, too, though usually with much lighter enforcement.

▲ Near Qureshi’s recycling facility.

But to Dighavkar, the impossibility of keeping slum residents in their homes quickly became evident. At the very least, people had to come out to use the toilet, to fill water bottles from public taps, and to collect food packets donated by charities. Gradually he and his colleagues developed a more precise approach. Rather than waiting for infected people to announce themselves, the government began dispatching teams of health-care workers to find them, going door to door asking about symptoms, offering free fever screenings, and administering tests to those likeliest to have the virus. They commandeered wedding halls, sports centers, and schools as isolation facilities to separate suspected cases from the rest of the population. Those who tested positive were sent to hospital wards that had been dedicated entirely to treating Covid-19, while contact tracers raced to locate people they’d spent time with.

Some were reluctant to cooperate. Many people in Dharavi work in unlicensed businesses that are in perpetual danger of being closed, and have good reasons to avoid contact with the authorities. But Dighavkar’s workers gradually won their trust, thanks in part to residents returning from quarantine telling of a comfortable stay and competent care. By July the number of new cases had declined to an average of 10 a day, compared with 45 per day in May, although the figure has since ticked modestly upward.


▲ Valli Ilaiyaraaja in her Dharavi home.

Some scientists have suggested the impressive numbers aren’t entirely the result of public-health measures. Antibody surveys over the summer found that almost 60% of the population in certain Mumbai slums had coronavirus antibodies, indicating that a degree of herd immunity could be at work. But even the most fatalistic virologists credit Dighavkar’s model with keeping mortality low, with some help from a youthful population. At just 270 confirmed deaths, Dharavi has one of the lowest Covid-19 fatality rates of any urban area in India, and methods developed there are now being rolled out across the country as the disease tears through smaller cities.

“This is our own invention. Contactless entry”

The apparent containment of the virus in Dharavi, or at least of its worst effects, didn’t spare its people economically. Many have had experiences like those of Valli Ilaiyaraaja, who used to work as a cleaner for three families in a neighborhood near the slum, and said none would allow her back even after the national lockdown ended in June. Their apartment buildings had banned entry to outside help, out of fear that cleaners and cooks would bring the virus with them. Similar policies remain in place across the city.

This has resulted in some inconvenience for Mumbai’s middle and upper classes—one local company had to suspend sales of dishwashers because of an overwhelming volume of orders. But it’s a financial catastrophe for people like Ilaiyaraaja. She and her three young daughters now depend entirely on her husband, who lost his job as a welder during the lockdown and is making just 100 rupees ($1.37) a day loading trucks. That’s not enough to pay for the cost of traveling to their home village in South India, where they could live rent-free, nor to cover school tuition for the girls. So the family is in limbo, waiting both for the economy to pick up and for the stigma attached to slum dwellers to fade. “We are fed up with this virus,” Ilaiyaraaja said in her tiny tenement apartment, two of her daughters sitting shyly by her side, “and with waiting for this nightmare to be over.”

On a muggy summer day, seven anxious-looking people, all wearing masks, stepped off a minibus and into a large vinyl tent that had taken over a parking lot on Dharavi’s outskirts. The tent housed a 192-bed field hospital for Covid-19 cases and had been carefully designed to triage incoming patients without letting them spread the virus. Past the double doors the group entered a spacious holding area monitored by a thermal camera on a tripod. Just behind, in a sealed-off observation booth, Dr. Asad Khan issued instructions through a microphone while observing the camera feed on a monitor.

When the system detected a fever, the monitor was supposed to show a red box around a patient, while normal temperatures would prompt a green box. The trouble, though, was that all the boxes were green—not something a physician greeting confirmed coronavirus carriers would expect to see. This prompted Khan to query the new arrivals on why they’d been brought to his tent. A young man stepped forward as the group’s unofficial spokesperson, and after some back and forth, Khan learned that none of them had even been tested for the virus. They were contacts of positive cases and were supposed to have been taken to an isolation center, not the hospital. A few minutes later they climbed back into their vehicle and were driven away.

Dighavkar, watching from inside the booth, was pleased. A bus going to the wrong facility was a harmless mix-up, but letting seven potentially healthy people interact with infectious Covid-19 patients would have been a disaster. The thermal camera and Khan’s questioning had prevented that outcome—evidence, to Dighavkar, that the system was working. “This is our own invention,” he said of the camera-and-interview process. “This is the procedure. Contactless entry.”


▲ Dr. Khan screens patients.

He was conscious, though, that a system sufficient to contain the virus with the economy halted could be severely tested by the resumption of more activity. By July some parts of Dharavi were coming slowly back to life. Beggars had returned to intersections, though usually wearing masks as they shuffled from car to car. Fabric wholesalers had rolled up their steel shutters, while corner stores were again places for groups of local women to meet and chat.

What worried Dighavkar was the prospect of reopening factories—cramped, poorly ventilated places where laborers spend hours on end, elbow-to-elbow. “Once the factories start again, maybe we’ll get more cases,” he said in his office. In front of his broad wooden desk, someone had set up neat rows of chairs to allow subordinates to gather before him like students at an assembly. “We have to make sure safety measures are taken.” His most urgent priority was to get as much protective gear to workers as possible. The municipal government had been distributing masks, gloves, face shields, and sanitizer to factories for free, turning a blind eye to illegal operations in the hope that owners would accept help. Regardless of their official status, “we are here to take care of them,” Dighavkar said.

The future of Dharavi’s manufacturing sector may look like International Footsteps, a factory that makes sandals for Western mall brands such as Aldo. To get there, you must first turn off one of the slum’s raucous commercial drags and into a lane of decrepit buildings covered in tarps and corrugated steel sheets, which opens after a little while into something of a public square. There, if you skip between a puddle of foul water and a dead rat, then duck beneath a tangle of electrical wires, you’ll come to a dark, damp tunnel leading to what feels like a different world. In a pristine marble hallway, a multilingual sign asks visitors to apply some hand sanitizer from a dispenser on the wall. Just beyond is a bright workshop, where during a recent visit eight artisans sat cross-legged at workstations spaced about two feet apart—considerably less jammed-in than they would have been before this year. Managers had cleared out some upstairs storage space to allow more distance between each employee, and all of them were wearing disposable smocks, masks, and plastic face shields, purchased at the company’s expense. The protection raises costs, “but it’s required for the safety of everyone,” said floor manager Vijayanti Kewlani, who’d donned the same gear.

The problem, for International Footsteps as well as other businesses in Dharavi, is that “everyone” isn’t who it used to be. Only about two-thirds of the slum’s people are formal residents; the rest are rural migrants who traditionally slept on factory floors or shared rented rooms, returning to their hometowns a few times a year. But there was no government help to cover wages during the national lockdown, and it caused a severe crisis for these laborers. With snack bars and mess halls shut, even those who could afford food struggled to find enough to eat.


▲ Workers at International Footsteps.

Many had little choice but to go home, a journey that had to be made on foot, because the government had suspended train and bus services to contain infections. It was likely the country’s largest forced migration since Partition, the violent 1947 division of India and Pakistan—and had the unintended result of spreading the coronavirus deep into rural areas. With the global economic slump depressing activity in cities, a large proportion of the migrants have stayed in the countryside.

International Footsteps tried to keep connected with its workers, paying them 80% of their salaries for the first month of lockdown and 60% for the second. It also offered to cover the cost of transportation back to the city and is looking into securing more spacious housing—maybe even with the luxury of an attached toilet—for staff who return. But only 30% of its personnel have resumed their jobs, mostly Dharavi locals, leaving the company well short of the numbers it might need to fill large orders.

Suraj Ahmed was one of the few who’d come back—in his case from a small village in Uttar Pradesh. He couldn’t afford to live in the room he’d been sharing with two co-workers, because neither had yet returned. So the company was letting him stay on the premises for free, until he could find a more permanent arrangement. The visible precautions in the factory made him feel safer, Ahmed said as he attached a finely worked leather strap to the top of a new sandal, his wiry beard peeking out from under his mask. But he was more impressed with the 10% raise he’d received for coming back to work. “I have to earn a living,” he said.

Despite its absent workers and stepped-up protective measures, Dharavi could still provide an extremely hospitable environment for the virus—particularly if a rush of returning migrants reintroduces it at large scale. The only solution, Dighavkar says, is “screening, screening, screening,” an unrelenting effort to track down infected people and isolate them from the community. “It will be part of our continuous process from now on.”

The front line of Dighavkar’s plan will be made up of women. His department has assembled an army of almost 6,000 health workers and volunteers, mainly from Dharavi itself, who’ve been given thermometers, pulse oximeters, and basic training in how to spot Covid-19. The idea is to send them house to house, day after day, in continuous sweeps of every part of the slum, and to keep doing it until the end of the pandemic. It’s a substantial commitment of resources, but the human and economic toll of a renewed outbreak would be far larger.

One morning in July, after one of the heaviest monsoon rainfalls Mumbai had seen in years, about a dozen of these women gathered at a public hospital to collect their addresses for the day and suit up in protective gear. Some undertook a tricky maneuver that involved pulling the hems of their saris up and back between their legs, tucking the fabric behind their waists, to step into the white coveralls they’d been issued. After drawing the hoods over their hair, they looked a little like snowmen.


▲ Bhoyar prepares to visit Dharavi residents.

Sunanda Bhoyar was more practically attired, in a block-print tunic over billowy pink trousers, and donned her suit with ease. She was one of the group’s few professionals, a registered nurse assigned to guide the less-experienced workers. She soon set off into the heart of Dharavi’s residential quarter, a warren of footpaths and alleyways often too narrow for a pair of people to walk abreast. There was almost no sunlight, the result of haphazard additions that had pushed the buildings on either side to structurally questionable heights.

Bhoyar knew the way and soon found what she was looking for: the home of an elderly couple who’d just tested positive and were being treated in hospital. She told the young

China has promised millions of coronavirus vaccines to countries globally. And it is ready to deliver them

By David Culver and Nectar Gan, CNN

Updated  Wed December 2, 2020

(CNN)Inside a gray warehouse at the Shenzhen International Airport in southern China, a row of white chambers sits in a cordoned-off corner, each fitted with a display screen showing the customized temperature inside.

A security worker in face mask, surgical gown and rubber gloves stands guard. Anyone entering this part of the warehouse has to either complete two weeks of quarantine or wear a head-to-toe hazmat suit.

These climate-controlled rooms, totaling an area of 350 square meters (3,767 square feet), are soon to be filled by rows and rows of Chinese-made Covid-19 vaccines -- after they receive approval from the country's drug regulators. From there, they'll be loaded onto temperature-controlled compartments of cargo jets and flown to continents around the world.

The climate-controlled chambers at Shenzhen's international airport will soon be filled with Chinese-made coronavirus vaccines.

In the coming months, China will be sending hundreds of millions of doses of coronavirus vaccines to countries that have conducted last-stage trials for its leading candidates. Chinese leaders have also promised a growing list of developing countries priority access to its successful vaccines.



The Wuhan files: Leaked documents reveal China's mishandling of the early stages of Covid-19.

This global campaign presents China an opportunity to repair its image, which was damaged for its initial mishandling of the coronavirus outbreak -- rather than being blamed for the primary spread of the virus it can potentially be esteemed for helping to bring an end to the pandemic.

The vaccines can also be used by Beijing as "an instrument for foreign policy to promote soft power and project international influence," said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations.

Earlier in the pandemic, China's efforts to curry favor by donating masks and other supplies to countries hit hard by the virus were tarnished by reports of poor quality supplies, and accusations that Beijing was launching a disinformation campaign to change the coronavirus narrative.

Beijing's vaccine diplomacy, Huang said, could give it another chance.

"Vaccine Diplomacy"

China currently has five coronavirus candidates from four companies which have reached phase 3 clinical trials, the last and most important step of testing before regulatory approval is sought.

Having largely eliminated the coronavirus inside its borders, Chinese drugmakers had to look abroad for places to test the efficacy of their vaccines. Together, they have rolled out phase 3 trials in at least 16 countries.

In exchange, many of the host countries have been promised early access to the successful vaccines -- and in some cases, the technology know-how to manufacture them locally.

Sinovac Biotech, a Nasdaq-listed drugmaker based in Beijing, has signed deals to provide 46 million doses of its Covid-19 vaccine to Brazil and 50 million doses to Turkey. It'll also supply 40 million doses of vaccine bulk -- the vaccine concentrate before it is divided into little vials -- to Indonesia for local production.

CanSino Biologics, which developed a coronavirus vaccine with a research unit of the Chinese military, will deliver 35 million doses of its vaccine to Mexico, one of the five host countries of its trials.

China National Biotec Group (CNBG), a unit of state-owned pharmaceutical giant China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm), has been less open about its deals. The company's two vaccine candidates are undergoing phase 3 trials in 10 countries, mostly in the Middle East and South America. In the United Arab Emirates, Dubai's ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum volunteered to be vaccinated in trials and the vaccine was approved for emergency use. The Emirati company in partnership with Sinopharm hopes to produce between 75 and 100 million doses next year.

Sinopharm chairman Liu Jingzhen said last month that dozens of countries have requested to buy the company's vaccines. He did not name the countries or elaborate on the amount of doses they proposed, but he said CNBG was capable of producing more than one billion doses in 2021.

"China not only has the political will (for its vaccine diplomacy), it also has the robust capacity to make that happen," Huang said.

Because China has largely contained the virus, there's no urgent need to vaccinate every one of its 1.4 billion population. "That gives it this leverage ... to make deals with countries in need of the vaccines," he said.

"Health Silk Road"

China's global vaccine campaign is in stark contrast to the Trump administration's "America first" approach, which focuses on vaccinating its own citizens before those elsewhere.
"So far we haven't heard the US saying or suggesting they're gonna earmark a percentage of their vaccine to support poor countries. So that puts China in an even better situation to use the vaccine to serve its foreign policy objective," Huang said.

In October, China joined a World Health Organization-backed global initiative to ensure the rapid and equitable distribution of Covid-19 vaccines to rich and poor countries alike.

The project, known as COVAX, is designed to discourage governments from hoarding coronavirus vaccines and instead focus on vaccinating high-risk groups in every country. But it was shunned by the United States, partly because President Donald Trump did not want to work with the WHO, leaving a global public health leadership vacuum for China to fill.

From early on, Chinese leaders have repeatedly stressed that China's vaccines are for sharing, especially with the developing world.

Chinese President Xi Jinping speaking via video link to the World Health Assembly on a giant screen beside a street in Beijing on May 18.

In May, Chinese President Xi Jinping told the WHO's annual assembly that China would make its coronavirus vaccine a "global public good," calling it the country's "contribution to ensuring vaccine accessibility and affordability in developing countries."

In a video summit with African leaders in June, Xi pledged that "once the development and deployment of a Covid-19 vaccine is completed in China, African countries will be among the first to benefit."

In August, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said Beijing would also give priority access to Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. Other countries that have been promised priority access by Chinese officials include Afghanistan and Malaysia.

Many of these countries are also in Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative, a multibillion dollar infrastructure and trade program that has lost some of its steam during the pandemic. Recently, Chinese officials have ramped up talks of a "Health Silk Road." 

At the WHO meeting in May, Xi pledged to donate $2 billion over two years to help countries cope with the pandemic. Beijing has also offered a $1 billion loan to Latin America and the Caribbean for access to its coronavirus vaccines.

China is doubling down in the global push for a coronavirus vaccine

But there are signs that China's vaccine diplomacy won't always be a smooth ride. In Brazil, Sinovac's vaccine, CoronaVac, has been embroiled in a political feud between President Jair Bolsonaro -- known for his stauch anti-China stance -- and the governor of Sao Paulo, Joao Doria, who is expected to run against Bolsonaro in the country's next presidential elections in 2022. In Bangladesh, Sinovac's trial has been stalled due to a funding dispute.

International public health experts have also questioned China's emergency use program, which inoculated nearly one million Chinese people with experimental vaccines before their safety had been fully proven by clinical trials.

Then there's the question of efficacy. Last month, Pfizer and Moderna announced that early results showed their vaccines to be over 90% effective, while another candidate produced jointly by Oxford University and AstraZeneca had an average efficacy of 70%. So far, none of the Chinese vaccine candidates have announced any preliminary efficacy results, though company executives have repeatedly stressed their safety, insisting no serious adverse effect has been observed in vaccinated volunteers.

Cold storage

Compared with Pfizer and Moderna, Chinese vaccines have a crucial advantage -- most of them do not require freezing temperatures for storage, making transport and distribution much easier, especially in developing countries that lack cold storage capacities.

Kate O'Brien, director of the WHO's immunization and vaccines department, likens the development of vaccines to building a base camp at Everest. "But the climb to the peak is really about delivering the vaccines," she said at a news conference last month.

Both Pfizer and Moderna's vaccines use pieces of genetic material called messenger RNA (mRNA) to prompt the body to make synthetic pieces of the coronavirus and stimulate an immune response -- a new technology that has not been used in existing vaccines.

But mRNA is vulnerable to degradation at room temperature. Moderna's vaccine has to be stored at -20 degree Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit), or at refrigerator temperatures for up to 30 days, while the Pfizer vaccine has to be stored at an ultra-cold temperature of -75˚C (-103˚F), and used within five days once refrigerated at higher temperatures.

Here's a look at how the different coronavirus vaccines work

Sinopharm and Sinovac, meanwhile, use an old-fashioned approach that has long been proven effective in other vaccines, such as polio and flu shots. Their coronavirus vaccines employ an inactivated whole virus to prompt the body to develop immunity, and only need to be stored at standard refrigerator temperatures of 2˚C to 8˚C (36˚F to 46˚F). CanSino's vaccine, which uses a common cold virus called adenovirus 5 to carry genetic fragments of coronavirus into the body, can also be kept at 2˚C to 8˚C.

Still, the required temperatures must be maintained throughout transport, from leaving the production facility to airport storage and finally to global distribution.

Cainiao, the logistics arm of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, will help with the distribution of the Chinese vaccines as soon as they're given the go ahead. It says its end-to-end climate controlled infrastructure is in place and ready.

The company has partnered with Shenzhen Baoan International Airport, which recently received the certification for pharmaceutical logistics from the International Air Transport Association. A cold-chain warehouse was built in 2019 for frozen foods and goods. Earlier this year, it was converted to store coronavirus testing kits -- and now vaccines. The airport said on its website that it wants to make Shenzhen a "Covid-19 vaccine global delivery base."

Cainiao has partnered with Ethiopian Airlines to distribute Chinese-made coronavirus vaccines abroad.

Cainiao is also in partnership with Ethiopian Airlines, which will be sending the Chinese vaccines to the Middle East and then Africa. Since the pandemic, the airline has flown more than 3,000 tons of medical supplies from Shenzhen to Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South America.

But Cainiao is also looking to add more routes for greater global reach, according to its CEO Wan Lin.

"Of course, we are not still quite sure about the exact demand on that but we are definitely building our capability to be prepared for that," Wan said.

CNN's Emma Reynolds contributed to this story.

How UK protesters are taking the spark of Black Lives Matter back to their hometowns

By Aaliyah Harris and Shama Nasinde, CNN

CNN Illustrations by Ken Fowler and Gabrielle Smith

CNN Video by Sofia Couceiro and Agne Jurkenaite

© CNN/Photo Illustration/Getty Images/Jess Sterry/Gabrielle Smith

 "A lot of people in the UK don't acknowledge racial violence. They think this is a US problem. Actually, racism is rife in the UK."

George Floyd's death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in May sparked a mass global movement against structural racism and police brutality.

The outcry began in Minnesota, but campaigners spread the spark of the movement to towns around the world. In the UK, even as the coronavirus pandemic gripped the country, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched in the streets of its major cities.

In June, large crowds protested outside Parliament Square and the US Embassy in London, in Manchester's Piccadilly Gardens and in central Birmingham.

Yet the movement also spread outside Britain's big urban centers, as anti-racist campaigners challenged institutional racism in smaller towns and cities which have less ethnic diversity and are less known for their activism. The tragedy of Floyd's death inspired ordinary people, thousands of miles away in the UK, to fight for institutional change in their communities under the banner of "Black Lives Matter" (BLM).

© CNN/Photo Illustration/Getty Images/Jason Bryant/Maia Thomas/Ken Fowler

 "I've been assaulted, required security protection and had threats against my life for speaking up."

Six months later, here are some of the voices of those continuing to fight for racial equality outside of the global spotlight.

Maia Thomas, 21, is an activist who campaigns for Black history and anti-racism to be taught in English schools.

In June, Thomas used social media to organize a peaceful protest and vigil for Floyd in Exeter, a small, historic city in the English county of Devon, around 170 miles southwest of London.

© CNN/Photo Illustration/Getty Images/Nadia Thomas/Ken Fowler 

"I had to block a relative because he would constantly send me negative memes, articles and videos of Black people."

"People were shouting at me in the street 'you're pretty for a Black girl, you should use your looks instead of your voice,' and 'White supremacy will always win.' I was threatened online by people saying they were going to attack, kill me and come after my family," she told CNN.

Thomas said she was physically assaulted by a man in Exeter. After the protest she said she required security patrols in the city's shopping center where she worked.

"I was given a key card to go through the back-exit doors just in case I was being followed," she said. "At times my manager escorted me. It was serious."

Despite the violence Thomas says she experienced, she regards the march as a success.

"There were more Black people at the protest than I've ever seen in the whole time that I've lived in Devon," Thomas said.

Many parts of Britain are predominately White. In Exeter alone, out of an estimated 128,900 residents, around 93% are White according to the UK's most recent census, in 2011.

Thomas' views on education had an immediate impact. Scores of schools and other educational institutions have asked for the 21-year-old's help to run equality workshops.

© CNN/Photo Illustration/Getty Images/Euan Robertson/Ken Fowler 

"You can get rid of every statue, and every street name, and still have institutionalized racism."

Activists are also pushing to diversify England's national school curriculum, though this has caused a backlash.

Kemi Badenoch, a Black government minister, for example, criticized the influence of BLM on education in an October 2020 speech in parliament.

Thomas is also a part of "Black Lives Matter Somerset," helping to produce Black History packs for schools and working to increase diversity within her local council. Next year she will attend a conference in Berlin as a UK delegate to speak about Britain's BLM movement.

She has no intention of stopping anytime soon, but says campaigning can feel overwhelming: "Every organization, business, school and individual does not realize how draining it is to constantly relive trauma because no one has actually wanted to listen until now.

"I realized in Zoom calls, assemblies and talks if it was any other subject, the school or council would pay for a speaker," she added. "So why should we as activists and educators be doing this for free?"

Liza Bilal is a 21-year-old student and one of the most prominent faces in Britain's BLM movement. In June, Bilal and five young activists arranged a protest in Bristol, a port city in southwest England that has strong historic links to the UK slave trade. Britain enslaved 3.1 million Africans between 1640 and 1807, transporting them to colonies around the globe, according to Historic England, a public body. Many of them left on ships from Bristol.

© CNN/Photo Illustration/Getty Images/Khali Ackford/Euan Robertson/Jason Bryant/Nadia Thomas/SADACCA/C...

Bristol is now 78% White British with a growing Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic population at 16%.

An estimated 10,000 people marched in support of the BLM movement in Bristol on June 7. The peaceful protest culminated with demonstrators toppling the statue of 17th century slave trader Edward Colston and hurling it into the River Avon.

Their act of resistance became a focal point for protests in the UK. It ignited a national conversation on slave trader memorials, and Colston's empty plinth was secretly occupied with the statue of a BLM protester. That was removed 24 hours later by the local authority.

© CNN/Photo Illustration/Getty Images/SADACCA/Corporate LiveWire/Ken Fowler 

"Black Lives Matter needs to matter to us as Black people. A lot of it seems to be trying to convince White people -- if they don't know by now, they never will." -- Robert Walcott

The protests were a call to be heard, said Bilal. "People have been petitioning for the statue to come down for decades and were routinely ignored by the council."

Bilal believes Floyd's death forced people outside the US to reflect on their own issues with racism. She said the brutality of his death awakened "a lot of people that hadn't really thought about systemic racism before."

The backdrop to 2020 has also been a deadly pandemic, where Britain's ethnic minorities are up to 50% more likely to die than White Brits, according to a recent government review. Bilal believes it's time for the UK to address institutional racism.

© CNN/Photo Illustration/Getty Images/Khali Ackford/Ken Fowler

 "Black people shouldn't have to be brutalized for White people to care."

"Black and Brown people have been disproportionately affected. We know that's nothing to do with biology and everything to do with systemic racism," she said.

In November, the UK Human Rights Committee said the coronavirus death rate disparity in the UK is in part due to "deep-seated inequalities." The inquiry found that major factors include minority groups being more likely to work in frontline jobs and less likely to be protected with adequate PPE.

Yet the surge of protests has also had unintended consequences. Bilal fears the summer's demonstrations have emboldened Britain's far-right groups.

"In the summer I saw a group of White supremacists. I think there were maybe around 200-300 guarding the Cenotaph [war memorial] which is next to the plinth from which Edward Colston was torn down," she told CNN.

UK security experts warn that far-right extremism in the UK is increasing. In June more than 100 people were arrested after violence broke out at a far-right counter-protest in London targeting BLM demonstrations. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson condemned the disruption as "racist thuggery."

The backlash hasn't halted the All Black Lives campaign's mission. They continue to hold monthly protests and weekly panels.

"We have to have a resilience that is unbreakable in the face of something as pervasive as White supremacy," said Bilal.

Since Scottish National Party (SNP) councilor Graham Campbell moved from London to Glasgow 20 years ago, Scotland's largest city has become increasingly ethnically diverse. Around 12% of Glasgow's population is from an ethnic minority, according to the 2011 census, and more than one in five students in the city's primary schools are from non-White backgrounds.

In 2017 Campbell became Glasgow's first African Caribbean councilor. He's determined to see the city's growing diversity reflected in its workforce, citing the underemployment of qualified Black professionals.

A 2016 analysis of government data by the UK's Trades Union Congress found that Black and ethnic minority graduates with a first degree were more than twice as likely to be unemployed as their White counterparts.

"They're not getting interviewed. They're not getting the breaks. There's been a lack of awareness that something structural [has] to adjust," Campbell told CNN.

In June, hundreds of people staged anti-racism rallies in the center of Glasgow. Campbell said the protests were the Black community's demand for change.

"This generation has decided that the racism, daily microaggressions, and experiences of exclusion from a job market -- they're no longer prepared to tolerate it. They felt the George Floyd moment. They said no more," Campbell said.

Since joining the local authority, Campbell has seen its ethnic minority workforce double. He wants to reach a proportionate level of employment by 2030. "Had we relied on the rate that we were going, I calculated it would take 107 years before we got a proportionate level of Black employment," he said.

Campbell helped create an employment working group that monitors diversity in council departments. He worries that without enforcing inclusive hiring initiatives, equality would remain a pipe dream.

According to Campbell, changing place names and removing statues isn't enough to fight racism in Britain. Instead, he believes consciously challenging racism is necessary.

"People in Scotland too often presumed that you are anti-racist by default. In a racist society, especially one with a colonial history like Britain, you have to be actively anti-racist," said Campbell.

"It's the unconscious biases, that translate into institutional practices, that discriminate against non-White people."

Sheffield is one of Britain's biggest cities, with a population of 575,400 in 2016 and around 20,000 Black residents, according to the 2011 census.

The Sheffield and District African Caribbean Community Association (SADACCA) provides a space for the local African and Caribbean communities to socialize in the northern English city.

Robert Walcott, a director of SADACCA, believes BLM should primarily help Black people in their day-to-day lives, rather than educating White audiences.

"I want to focus on what we are doing after the protests. I'd like to see more of what we're doing to support ourselves as opposed to trying to raise the issue to a White audience," he told CNN.

Walcott's mother is a part of the Windrush generation, the Caribbean immigrants who moved to the UK from the late 1940s at the invitation of the government.

The Windrush generation was invited to Britain to rebuild the country after World War II. They comprised the UK's first large wave of Caribbean migration and were named after the Empire Windrush passenger liner that carried some of them across the Atlantic.

The cruel consequences of tougher immigration policies implemented from 2012 were revealed five years later, in what came to be known as the Windrush scandal.

Those who had arrived decades earlier, without papers to prove their legal status as citizens as such documentation wasn't needed before, had been denied government services, wrongly detained or even deported.

"I think there is a slight disconnect between the Windrush elders because they don't fully understand why there is such hostility from young people towards the situation," he said.

Walcott said that "racism was a fact of life" for the Windrush generation, who see younger Black people as currently having more opportunities than they did. "There have been more opportunities for Black people [created] in their lifetime," he added.

"There is a fragility of people who are still refusing to accept that racism is the world's number one pandemic. Still people don't even know what racism is or about England's major role in the slave trade," said Robert Cotterell, SADACCA chairman.

BLM grabbed headlines in 2020 but the movement has been active since 2012, when Trayvon Martin's death sparked the hashtag. The deaths of several African Americans at the hands of police have kept protesters marching since.

Before the protests "there were no conversations at all from institutions and key players in the city," said Cotterell.

SADACCA has continued discussions with authorities and institutions in Sheffield that "traditionally have had, and still have, issues around institutional structural racism."

Despite the growing interest in hearing Black voices, Cotterell says anti-racism activists aren't fairly compensated for their time and work.

"They can't keep using us as the experts because if we were White, we'd be getting paid for our knowledge," Cotterell told CNN. "If we were White, we would become consultants, we'd be getting paid... £1,500 a day."

A CNN/Savanta ComRes poll this year found that Black Britons' experiences with racism differ from other ethnic groups. "Black people are considerably more dissatisfied with race relations in Britain than other ethnic minorities," said Chris Hopkins, associate director of Savanta ComRes.

Nadia Thomas, 25, says she was forced to cut ties with a close family member after receiving relentless offensive messages due to her supporting BLM.

While 95.6% of the population of Wales is White, in Chepstow, a small town near the border with England, that figure is 98.1%.

"My relative sent me a meme from the film 'Zulu' where all the British soldiers took over South Africa and knelt, about to go into battle. It said, 'me and the boys, hashtag taking the knee,'" Thomas told CNN.

With a mixed-race background and having both White and Black parents, Thomas was shocked by her White relative's insensitivity. The relative had worked for her Antiguan father for many years.

"It's an awakening and it goes beyond ignorance," she said.

In June this year Thomas and a group of friends organized a BLM protest. "At first, I couldn't take part, I didn't even want to turn on the TV," she said.

As Thomas watched the cause spread globally she became less skeptical.

She felt responsible for confronting the racism within her own town -- no matter how small or rural. "Since Brexit, [Donald] Trump and Boris [Johnson]... people aren't afraid to be racist. I always thought it was a passive ignorance in this country and now I see blatant racism. It's clearly always been here and it's now allowed by people in power," Thomas told CNN.

In post-Brexit Britain, overt racism appears to be growing. Last year a report found that 71% of people from ethnic minorities in the UK had reported experiencing racial discrimination, an increase of 13 percentage points since the 2016 Brexit vote.

Thomas is working on ways to tackle racism in Chepstow. "I've got a meeting with the Labour Party and my constituency to do with Black history and diversity workshops in school curriculums," she told CNN.

"Nationally, this needs to be addressed. I don't want to just protest. I want to shake up the world."

When Khady Gueye co-organized a BLM protest in Lydney, Gloucestershire, a small town in southwest England, she didn't know it would come with controversy. Members of the local council wrote an open letter demanding the demonstration be canceled, two local councilors resigned in protest due to the letter, and Gueye began to feel unwelcome in her hometown, though the event eventually went ahead.

"We were followed home. We were threatened. We were told people were coming to find us. I moved out of my house for a few weeks just because someone followed me home," said Gueye who is mixed-race Senegalese-British.

In response to the backlash, she co-founded the Local Equality Commission, a racial equality group that runs workshops to challenge racism in rural areas.

"The main aim of that was to try and suture some of the divides that occurred because of the protests that we organized," Gueye told CNN. "We wanted to reaffirm to people that this isn't a problem that's going away."

According to Gueye, education on racism is needed most in rural areas: "The UK doesn't seem to understand how the BLM movement in the US resonates with the UK. In rural areas we don't have the exposure to diversity. There is no exposure to this knowledge."

The voices of Gueye and others in small towns demonstrate the power of protest, education and allyship. As the national focus on BLM dies down, Gueye aims to keep the conversation alive in Gloucestershire.

"George Floyd's murder is the perfect example of the police brutality that happens frequently throughout the world, throughout the US, throughout the UK. We are in a system that is failing Black people," said Gueye.

"Everything that has happened over the past six months has been a trajectory towards change," she added. "It's about trying to engage with people who don't necessarily understand or empathize with what we're trying to fight for."

Climate Point: Climate change disrupts life from the Hopi Reservation to Louisiana

Mark Olalde, USA TODAY 

Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to climate, energy and environment news from around the Golden State and the country. In Palm Springs, Calif., I’m Mark Olalde.

© David Wallace/The Republic 

Recca Lomawaima, 15, pauses while working in the field at her family's home below Second Mesa on the Hopi Reservation on July 30. The family uses traditional Hopi dry farming methods to grow corn. Hot, dry conditions reduced the amount of corn they were able to harvest this year.

Let's talk wildfires, as the West's fire season is technically winding down, even if the lines between this, rainy season and everything else are blurring due to climate change.

Arizona Republic reporter Debra Utacia Krol takes us to Northern California in a fascinating piece looking back on the lessons learned, or perhaps ignored, in this record-breaking year of blazes.

In September, an inferno ripped through Happy Camp, the capital of the Karuk Tribe, killing two people. Could this have happened specifically because land managers ignored Indigenous firefighting knowledge?

Krol tells us about an emerging research field called pyrogeography, which is "the study of historic, present-day and future wildfire distribution and effects of ecologies and societies." It suggests that returning to historical styles of forest management, including burns like those the Karuk Tribe once oversaw, could save other Western towns in the future.

Protecting climate denial. E&E reports that social media site Parler — which has gained popularity recently as a safe space for unchecked, right-wing conspiracy theories — is growing quickly and providing another channel for climate denialism. More than just a fringe website, Parler was bankrolled by the Mercer family, who are ardent supporters of President Donald Trump, have given vast sums of money to conservative causes and partly funded the far-right Project Veritas, which tries to secretly record and smear journalists, nonprofits and other targets.

Salmon salvation. In a compelling read about humans' impact on the natural world, the Adirondack Explorer dives into the fight to save salmon populations in the Boquet River. A somewhat successful first step, perhaps unsurprisingly, involved removing a dam. But that alone hasn't been enough to see sustainable levels of salmon reproduction, and biologists are now "tinkering" to find a solution. "What it took to kill off the native salmon is a simple story compared to the convoluted journey required to bring them back," journalist Ry Rivard writes.

Cover your tracks. Utility company Georgia Power is in the market for land deals that appear, at first, to be head-scratchers. In a new investigation, Georgia Health News, in partnership with ProPublica, uncovered how the utility has spent more than $15 million buying land that's downstream of its unlined coal ash ponds that "frequently leak contaminants into groundwater." Coal ash, which is the gunk left over after running a coal-fired power plant, is much safer in lined landfills, public health experts say, but moving the waste into such impoundments can cost companies many millions of dollars. It's easier to have a buffer zone and forestall cleanup. The company said its sites had no impact on drinking water but didn't respond directly to the findings.

POLITICAL CLIMATE

© Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun 

Oil derricks and other infrastructure pump oil and gases as well as dominate the landscape in Kern County, California, February 20, 2020.

Oil well shortcuts. Golden State oil regulators ignored their own regulations and issued improper permits for hundreds of new wells last year, according to an audit by the state Department of Finance that dropped just before Thanksgiving, The Desert Sun's Janet Wilson reports. Meanwhile, The Ventura County Star writes that California oil drillers are fighting to tank attempts by county-level officials to impose regulations that would update decades-old permits that were approved before modern environmental laws were written.

No cleanup insurance? At the federal level, Courthouse News Service reports the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has finalized a rule that will not call for insurance policies "for multiple industries that include gas, coal, oil and chemical manufacturing." Environmental groups have argued for years that a section under the law that created the Superfund program also mandated certain heavy industries put aside money to clean up their messes. The EPA disagreed, raising worries that costly environmental reclamation costs could fall to taxpayers.

Just a drop. The AP reports that, due to an exceptionally dry start to the rainy season, water agencies around California received a mere 10% of the water allocation they requested from the state. The agencies in question supply 27 million people and 750,000 acres of agriculture, and this is the second year in a row that the first allocation was only one-tenth the initial ask.

THE IMMEDIACY OF CLIMATE CHANGE

© David Wallace/The Republic

Beatrice Norton prays at sunrise while taking ground white corn in her hand in front of her home in Oraibi on the Hopi Reservation on Sept. 12, 2020. Corn is an integral part of Hopi culture and religion. Norton prays this way each morning.

Harvesting disappointment. The Arizona Republic is out with new, required reading on the very real impacts of climate change. Reporter Ian James and photographer David Wallace traveled to the Hopi Reservation to chronicle how all-important corn is becoming increasingly "stunted and meager" as hot, dry weather withers crops. For the Hopi, corn is more than food — it holds cultural significance. Now, they're fighting to keep the harvest alive.

Disaster in the Arctic. Earlier this year, melting permafrost caused oil infrastructure to fail in Russia within the Arctic Circle, spilling 21,000 tons of diesel oil into a river. The Moscow Times reports that a consultant hired to investigate what happened at the site, owned by metals company Nornickel, was barred from entering the area for months after the disaster. When they finally got in, they found warming temperatures mixed with company failings made the disaster "inevitable." (If you want to brush up on what happened back in late May, USA Today has the details here.)

Climate refugees. The Advocate reports that more than three months since Hurricane Laura hit Louisiana, more than 2,000 people are still displaced, costing the government hundreds of millions of dollars in disaster relief money. As climate change fuels larger storms, these numbers will almost certainly increase. In related news, USA Today reports on a new United Nations report that found "the world is still far from meeting its climate goals." At the current trajectory, we're set to release more than twice the greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 than what is allowed for within the Paris Agreement's goals. Climate change's impacts fall on a continuum — it's not all or nothing — but the report indicates we need to move much faster to limit the fallout.

AND ANOTHER THING

© Dave Harp/Bay Journal News Service

 Steve Levitsky, Perdue Farms Inc.’s vice president for sustainability, walks through the pollinator garden that surrounds the company’s solar array at its Salisbury headquarters. Some solar developers are planting these habitats with projects to address complaints about farmland being lost.

Sunny bee. I know I read and share a lot of doom-and-gloom, so let's kick this one with some solutions. InsideClimate News is out with a look at some new Yale Center for Business and the Environment research that encourages planting native grasses and wildflowers around solar installations. The practice appears to be a big win-win. "Pollinator-friendly solar can boost crop yields, increase the recharging of groundwater, reduce soil erosion and provide long-term cost savings in operations and maintenance," they wrote. "The research also found that by creating a cooler microclimate, perennial vegetation can increase the efficiency of solar panels, upping their energy output."

Scientists agree that to maintain a livable planet, we need to reduce the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration back to 350 ppm. We’re above that and rising dangerously. Here are the latest numbers

© Janet Loehrke The Earth's greenhouse gas levels continue to rise.

That’s all for now. Don’t forget to follow along on Twitter at @MarkOlalde. You can also reach me at molalde@gannett.com. You can sign up to get Climate Point in your inbox for free here. And, if you’d like to receive a daily round-up of California news (also for free!), you can sign up for USA Today’s In California newsletter here. Do your part; wear a mask, please! Cheers.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Climate Point: Climate change disrupts life from the Hopi Reservation to Louisiana

Trump Election Fraud Witness Says We Need Voter ID Because ‘All Chinese Look Alike’ (Video)

This Republican poll watcher did not provide any evidence of fraud

Phil Owen | December 2, 2020


SHE CAN'T BE RACIST SHE IS A SOUT ASIAN INDIAN IMMIGRANT....

EXCEPT HINDUISM IS THE BASIS OF ARYANISM

The Michigan state legislature held a wild hearing on Wednesday evening as Trump campaign lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis continued their crusade to defy the will of the American people by overturning Joe Biden’s election victory over Trump. And some of the witnesses Giuliani trotted out did indeed make headlines, but not necessarily for the reasons that Trump and friends would have liked.

One of the witnesses, a naturalized American citizen from India, served as a Republican poll watcher at the TCF Center in Detroit on election day, and she spoke at length about various interactions she had with others that she thought indicated widespread voter fraud — though it needs to be made clear that she and the other witnesses didn’t provide evidence. One specific complaint she had, which had little to do with what she was there to testify about, was that people can vote without a photo ID.

This is a problem, she said, because “all Chinese look alike.”

The woman made the comment in response to a question from the Michigan House Oversight Committee chair, who asked what she would do in the future to avoid election fraud.

“I come from a country where a lot of things go wrong. Our countries are known for corruption. But when it comes to elections, from what I’ve seen here to what we used to do back in India, it is a lot more organized now because we have an identification system,” the woman said.

“And the fact that now, as the other representatives said, you can actually show up and vote without an ID. It’s shocking. How can you allow that to happen?

“Like, a lot of people think all Indians look alike. I think all Chinese look alike. So how would you tell? If some Chow shows up, you can be anybody and you can vote. And if somebody with my name — you can’t even tell my name — anybody can vote on my behalf. So ID should be the basic requirement.”

The subject of voter ID in the United States is a tricky one, with every state having its own rules — and prices — for obtaining a valid ID. For more on how problematic it would be to require voter ID, here’s a solid rundown of the facts.

It’s not clear how, if poll workers are unable to distinguish between various individuals of Chinese heritage, voter ID would help with that. If they couldn’t tell the difference between them in person, then they likely would not be able to tell if the person in the ID photo is the same as the person who presented the ID.