NDP pitches venture capital fund to bolster Alberta's growing tech sector

Alberta’s NDP Opposition is proposing a government-backed venture fund to take advantage of a technology sector weathering the COVID-19 pandemic better than others

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© Provided by Edmonton Journal Alberta NDP Leader Rachel Notley.

New Democrat Leader Rachel Notley likened the idea of a $200-million Alberta Venture Fund – which would invite equity investments from Albertans – to former Social Credit premier Ernest Manning’s Great Canadian Oil Sands project.

“Are we growing at a rate that is fast enough to make up for the jump on Alberta that so many other jurisdictions have successfully earned as a result of our provinces’ failure to engage aggressively?” said Notley in Calgary Monday.

The NDP’s bid to reinstate axed programs like the digital media tax credit and invest in research comes as the province sees record-breaking investments in technology and artificial intelligence. Edmonton-based online platform Jobber announced in January it had attracted a US $60 million investment .

“We could see much more activity right now if the rug had not been pulled out from underneath these programs by the UCP government,” said Notley.

Jobs, Economy and Innovation Minister Doug Schweitzer said in a statement he was pleased to see NDP economic development and innovation critic Deron Bilous recognize tech jobs and sector growth in his report.

“I am looking forward to discussing his proposals to see continued growth in Alberta’s tech industry,” he said.

Last year, the government announced Alberta Enterprise Corporation funding aimed at supporting tech start-ups would total $175 million over three years, and an i nnovation employment grant covering up to 20 per cent of research and development costs opened in January .

But Trent Johnsen, founder and CEO of Liveweb, said gaps in government support, including the lack of an investor tax credit, were holding Alberta back.

“As Albertans, our ability to succeed in this new technology innovation-based economy will determine how successful we are as a province, our quality of life, and our children’s quality of life in the 21st century,” he said at the NDP news conference.

Johnsen and Notley said recent good news out of the sector was the result of resiliency and hard work.

“These Alberta tech success stories that we are seeing recently are actually occurring despite the government of the day, which has chosen not to participate or support,” said Johnsen.

Access to capital and a talented, creative workforce will attract businesses to the province, Johnsen said.

Bilous added that quality of life is a higher priority for businesses than the the low eight per cent tax rate implemented by the UCP government.

The latest in a series of NDP discussion papers includes initiatives that, if adopted together, would have an estimated cost of more than half a billion dollars over five years.

Days before Alberta is set to release a bleak pandemic budget, Notley said the province’s debt-to-GDP ratio, while important, should not be the defining measure of an economic plan.

“Job creation is to me the fundamentally most important measure,” said Notley.

lijohnson@postmedia.com

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NASA releases Mars landing video: 'Stuff of our dream

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA on Monday released the first high-quality video of a spacecraft landing on Mars, a three-minute trailer showing the enormous orange and white parachute hurtling open and the red dust kicking up as rocket engines lowered the rover to the surface.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The footage was so good — and the images so breathtaking — that members of the rover team said they felt like they were riding along.

“It gives me goose bumps every time I see it, just amazing,” said Dave Gruel, head of the entry and descent camera team.

The Perseverance rover landed last Thursday near an ancient river delta in Jezero Crater to search for signs of ancient microscopic life. After spending the weekend binge-watching the descent and landing video, the team at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, shared the video at a news conference.

“These videos and these images are the stuff of our dreams," said Al Chen, who was in charge of the landing team.

Six off-the-shelf colour cameras were devoted to entry, descent and landing, looking up and down from different perspectives. All but one camera worked. The lone microphone turned on for landing failed, but NASA got some snippets of sound after touchdown: the whirring of the rover’s systems and wind gusts.

Flight controllers were thrilled with the thousands of images beamed back — and also with the remarkably good condition of NASA's biggest and most capable rover yet. It will spend the next two years exploring the dry river delta and drilling into rocks that may hold evidence of life 3 billion to 4 billion years ago. The core samples will be set aside for return to Earth in a decade.

NASA added 25 cameras to the $3 billion mission — the most ever sent to Mars. The space agency's previous rover, 2012's Curiosity, managed only jerky, grainy stop-motion images, mostly of terrain. Curiosity is still working. So is NASA's InSight lander, although it's hampered by dusty solar panels.


Video: What's next for Mars exploration? (cbc.ca)
Duration 7:32

They may have company in late spring, when China attempts to land its own rover, which went into orbit around Mars two weeks ago.

Deputy project manager Matt Wallace said he was inspired several years ago to film Perseverance's harrowing descent when his young gymnast daughter wore a camera while performing a backflip.

Some of the spacecraft systems — like the sky crane used to lower the rover onto the Martian surface — could not be tested on Earth.

“So this is the first time we’ve had a chance as engineers to actually see what we designed,” Wallace told reporters.

Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s science mission chief, said the video and also the panoramic views following touchdown “are the closest you can get to landing on Mars without putting on a pressure suit.”

The images will help NASA prepare for astronaut flights to Mars in the decades ahead, according to the engineers.

There's a more immediate benefit.

“I know it's been a tough year for everybody,” said imaging scientist Justin Maki, “and we're hoping that maybe these images will help brighten people's days.”
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press

Manchin, Romney and Collins make it clear they won’t stand for mean tweets — unless a man does it: columnist

Sarah K. Burris RAW STORY
February 22, 2021

Susan Collins (Screen Shot)

Senators Susan Collins (R-ME), Mitt Romney (R-UT) Joe Manchin (D-WV) made it clear with their opposition to Neera Tanden to be the director of the Office of Management and Budget, that it isn't acceptable for a woman to send mean tweets. But as Aaron Blake made clear, those senators find it acceptable from a man.

"This has led to charges of hypocrisy and a new standard," Blake wrote in a Washington Post column Monday. "In particular, many Republicans who now appear primed to vote against Tanden's nomination often turned a blind eye to former president Donald Trump's controversial tweets (or claimed they hadn't seen them)."

Richard Grenell faced questions in 2018 when he was nominated to be Trump's ambassador to Germany. He was later appointed to be the acting director of national intelligence. Those senators never took issue with Grenell's so-called mean tweets.

"Some of the most oft-cited past Tanden tweets include her calling Collins 'the worst,'" said Blake. "She attacked Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR.) as a fraud, said vampires have 'more heart' than Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), and she latched on to a very-online effort to label then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY.) as 'Moscow Mitch.'"

Ironically, even Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) joked that someone could shoot Ted Cruz on the Senate floor and be acquitted by the Senate for it. Some of Cruz's colleagues were just as annoyed with the Texas senator last week, though their language was less colorful.

"I believe her overtly partisan statements will have a toxic and detrimental impact on the important working relationship between members of Congress and the next director of the Office of Management and Budget," Manchin said in a statement.

"Her past actions have demonstrated exactly the kind of animosity that President Biden has pledged to transcend," Collins agreed.

But when Grenell came before the Senate for a vote, Manchin didn't take issue with his partisan attacks on former President Barack Obama and Secretary Hillary Clinton.

"Without a teleprompter, Oh-bahh-mahhh isss ahhh slowww and weakkk speakerrrr ahhhh …#syria," Grenell tweeted in 2012 about Obama. He also tweeted: "Hating people who make more than you is the product of having a community organizer as president. #AnyoneButObama"

He attacked Hillary Clinton for her appearance and Michelle Obama for exercising and "sweating on the East Room carpet" as part of her "Let's Move" campaign to encourage children to be more active and eat healthily.

Neither Manchin nor Collins commented on the "toxic and detrimental impact" Grenell's attacks could have on working with Democrats.

Tanden also went after Democrats, but Grenell similarly attacked members of his own party, Blake explained.

In addition to making fun of Newt Gingrich's weight, he asked if Gingrich's wife, Callista's "hair snaps on." He later said that Gingrich's third wife "stands there like she is wife #1," asking, "does callista speak?" (sic)

Grenell passed it all off as a joke and he was approved by the Senate.

"It begs for a declared standard when it comes to who is confirmation-worthy," Blake closed. "Can someone be extremely partisan but not attack senators? Is it okay for someone to attack someone's appearance on social media and still be confirmed? And how much are apologies for past statements operative?"

He noted that questions about Tanden's qualifications for OMB are absolutely valid, but it appears the calls of hypocrisy came too late for her nomination.

Read the full column at the Washington Post.

U.S. Supreme Court to review a hardline Trump immigration rule
2021/2/22  ©Reuters


By Andrew Chung

(Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to examine the legality of one of former President Donald Trump's hardline immigration rules that bars immigrants deemed likely to require government benefits from obtaining legal permanent residency.

President Joe Biden, who has criticized Trump's immigration approach, is widely expected to dump the so-called "public charge" rule.

The justices agreed to take up an appeal that the Trump administration had filed of a lower court ruling that found the rule likely violated federal immigration and administrative law by impermissibly expanding the definition of who counts as a "public charge" and greatly increasing the number of people who would be rejected for residency.

Trump's hardline stance toward legal and illegal immigration was a hallmark of his presidency. Primarily at issue in the litigation, filed in federal courts in New York and Illinois, is which immigrants would be eligible for legal permanent residency, known as a "green card." U.S. immigration law has long required officials to exclude people likely to become a "public charge" from permanent residency.

U.S. guidelines in place for the past two decades had said immigrants likely to become primarily dependent on direct cash assistance or long-term institutionalization, in a nursing home for example, at public expense would be barred.

Trump's policy expanded the public charge bar to anyone deemed likely to receive a much wider range of public benefits for more than an aggregate of 12 months over any 36-month period including the Medicaid healthcare program, housing and food assistance.

The challengers in the New York case were three states - New York, Connecticut and Vermont - and a coalition of immigrant advocacy groups. A federal judge blocked the rule in 2019 for likely violations of federal law, and last August the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision.

The justices did not act in a separate dispute over the rule in which Cook County, Illinois, and an advocacy group sued in federal court in that state and the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an injunction as well last June. Then-Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who is now a justice on the Supreme Court appointed by Trump, dissented from that decision, finding that the government's rule was reasonable interpretation of the public charge law.

This is how the American Alligator survives in freezing temperatures

The 1.5 million child slaves behind your chocolate bar


Jillian S. Ambroz, DCReport @ RawStory
February 22, 2021


Enslaved cocoa plantation boys with their machetes in Ivory Coast 

(Terrence Collingsworth / IRAdvocates)

Jillian S. Ambroz, DCReport @ RawStory


Next time you take a bite of a chocolate bar, consider the small hands that farmed the cocoa beans.

Industrial food heavyweights like Nestlé USA, Hershey and MARS Inc., rely on cocoa grown in Côte D'Ivoire, the Ivory Coast, to make their confections. And the West African nation relies on enslaved child laborers to farm its cocoa crops, a well-known fact in the candy world that keeps the cocoa at favorably low prices for the big companies.

A class-action civil suit brought against the big chocolate companies sheds stark light on the entire candy bar industry. It outlines the relationships between the candy makers and the cocoa farms in West Africa, which provide 70% of the world's cocoa supply. Half is grown in Ghana and Ivory Coast. Most American chocolate is made from Ivory Coast cocoa beans.

In cocoa-growing regions of Ghana and the Ivory Coast more than 43% of all children between the ages of 5 and 17 living in agricultural households are engaged in hazardous work.

The plaintiffs are eight former enslaved children who, the court papers charge, were trafficked from their home country Mali, and sold to cocoa farms in the neighboring West African country.

"This lawsuit against the cocoa and chocolate industry is about much more than the eight Malian citizens who were trafficked and exploited as child slaves to harvest cocoa," says Fernando Morales-de la Cruz, founder of Cacao for Change and Cartoons for Change. Both organizations in Strasbourg, France, seek to raise awareness of child labor in both the cocoa and coffee trades.

Low Price Business Model

"The business model of the chocolate industry is cruel, exploitative, and illegal because it exploits between 2.2 and 3 million children worldwide, besides exploiting millions of farmers and farmworkers, all to buy cocoa for less than one-third of the real price," Morales-de la Cruz said.

He noted that a number of chocolate companies run their revenues through Switzerland to avoid taxes in countries, like the United States, where they earn their profits selling chocolate confections. "With their Swissploitation business model the cartel of cocoa companies 'saves' more than $20 billion per year buying cheap cocoa," he said.

This is the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labor as declared by the United Nation's International Labor Organization. The time is ripe to press for an end to profiting off exploitive and forced child labor

Make no mistake, chocolate is big business. The global chocolate market is a $136 billion business. It's expected to grow to $182 billion by 2025.

The plaintiffs filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Columbia just days ago, selecting the U.S. legal system for several reasons. In 2000, Congress and President Bill Clinton enacted a landmark law against human trafficking known as the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, or TVPA. It has been reauthorized five times, most recently in 2019 with Congress earmarking $250 million toward the effort. That law gives us extraterritorial jurisdiction.

Our Government Knows

Since the 1990s, the U.S. State Department and the Department of Labor have recognized the existence of child slavery in the cocoa industry in the Ivory Coast. In 2004, State estimated there were at least 15,000 child laborers working on cocoa, coffee and cotton farms there. As the photo above shows these children wield machetes to do their dangerous harvesting.

A study conducted by Tulane University in 2015 found that the number of children engaged in the 'Worst Forms of Child Labor' on cocoa plantations grew substantially between 2009 and 2014.

In October 2020, a new report by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, which was funded by Labor, was released showing child labor had increased again in the cocoa production sector since the Tulane study.
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In the 2018 to 2019 harvest season, the prevalence of children involved in hazardous child labor in the cocoa sector in the Ivory Coast and Ghana rose to almost 1.5 million children. That's also 1,000 times the official U.S. estimate in 2004. The Ivory Coast has fewer than 26 million people.

Hazardous Work

The study also found that in cocoa-growing regions of Ghana and the Ivory Coast more than 43% of all children between the ages of 5 and 17 living in agricultural households are engaged in hazardous work – not just child labor, but hazardous child labor.

Comparing a 10-year span concluding with the 2018-2019 harvest season, the NORC report found a 14% increase in child labor and a 62% increase in production over the same period.

"There is a large group of extremely poor, vulnerable boys in Mali and Burkina Faso who are on the verge of starving and will do about anything for the promise of a paying job," said Terry Collingsworth, who was arrested by the Ivory Coast police as he interviewed enslaved boys at a cocoa plantation. Collingsworth is executive director of International Rights Advocates.

Mali and Burkina Faso both border the Ivory Coast. Cacao refers to the beans harvested to make chocolate. Cocoa refers to the product after the beans are roasted.

Sweet Talk

So, what's the U.S. government doing besides bankrolling studies?

In 2001, the House passed a bill that would require U.S. importers and manufacturers to certify and label their products "slave-free." Have you seen those startling words on your recent candy wrappers? No? That's because of what's known as the Cocoa Cartel, the defendants in the lawsuit, rallied against it.

Instead, they were able to get themselves a sweet deal, the Harkin-Engel Protocol, a voluntary private inspection and enforcement system that all but guaranteed the continuance of enslaved child labor.

In fact, as part of the initial Harkin-Engel Protocol, the candy companies gave themselves an arbitrary deadline till 2005 to end their reliance on child labor for cocoa harvesting. That deadline got extended again and again.

Now the industry has a goal to stop profiting from enslaved child labor by 2025, though an industry spokesperson admitted in 2018 that the industry would fail to meet that deadline.

As the class-action suit alleges, the defendants' "voluntary initiative is a sham, and they are getting away with and profiting from an international human rights crime while claiming they are making progress."

Given the fact that enslaved children are still picking the beans, it's fair to call it the Cocoa Cartel strategy "see no enslaved children." Clearly, this willful blindless strategy worked.

The U.S. government has several agencies monitoring human trafficking, in addition to the State Department and Department of Labor, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

A Loophole Hurts Kids

There are several federal laws going back to the Tariff Act of 1930 designed to reduce the profit motive for labor trafficking by barring the import of goods made with trafficked labor.

But these laws had a loophole. All importers had to do was show that domestic production could not meet demand and the use of enslaved children was irrelevant. Since the United States is not a cocoa bean country, that was as easy as breaking off a piece of a KitKat bar.

That loophole was supposedly closed in 2015, although almost no one noticed. The Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015 was intended to close a loophole in an earlier law that made it possible for goods produced using forced labor to still enter the United States.

The new law enhanced the Customs and Border Patrol's ability to block such products altogether.

Clearly, the chocolate titans found a workaround. The lawsuit brought on behalf of the enslaved children asserts that the "defendants have engaged in various deceptive practices to avoid taking responsibility for their long-term profiting from various forms of child slavery."

After the Tulane report came out, the defendants "renewed their false assurances to consumers and regulators that they would initiate programs to reduce child labor in their supply chains," according to the suit. As the NORC study showed, child labor increased.

The suit states, "Defendants control production and could, if they wanted to, stop profiting from child labor. Instead, they chose to delay taking action by creating ineffective programs that provide public relations cover for their obviously failed efforts."

Helping 1 in 1,000

One such example is Nestlé's remediation assistance for some 15,000 children. By remediation, they mean handing out school kits, birth certificates, tutoring and other provisions – not assistance ending their enslaved labor conditions.

Other chocolate heavyweights named as defendants are Cargill Inc., Barry Callebaut USA LLC, Mars Wrigley Confectionery, Olam Americas Inc. and Mondelēz International Inc. (Nestle's American candy division has been sold to the Ferraro Group.) In addition, the suit lists 10 unidentified 'Corporate Does' as defendants.

These candy companies have higher profits because using child laborers keeps the cost of cocoa down. If the farms paid adult workers using proper protective equipment to maintain the crops and harvest the beans, prices would rise. Chocolate makers would see profits fall unless they could raise their prices. Upping consumer prices, whether by subtly shrinking candy bars or slapping on a higher price, runs the risk that people will eat fewer chocolate treats, causing sales volume to fall, lowering the profit margins of the Cocoa Cartel companies.

Dangerous Jobs for Kids

We've already noted that the work done by children on cocoa plantations is classified as hazardous and the "worst forms of child labor," according to the Tulane and NORC studies.

So, what are these enslaved children doing exactly? Children who work on cocoa plantations burn and clear fields, fell trees to expand cocoa plantations, spray hazardous pesticides without any personal protection, wield machetes to break cocoa pods and transport heavy loads of cocoa pods and water.

Add to that claims of negligent supervision, intentional infliction of emotional distress and physical abuse. Enslaved child laborers are not usually paid. They are forced to work long hours. That's true even when sick. The lawsuit says they are underfed and locked in their housing at night to prevent them from running away.
Industry Standard

Though the defendants, the Hershey's, MARS' and Nestlés, do not own cocoa farms – a fact they like to hide behind – they maintain and protect a steady supply of cocoa by forming exclusive buyer-seller relationships with Ivorian farms, according to the lawsuit. This is similar to the practice with chicken farms in the United States where companies like Perdue and Tyson Foods require chicken ranchers to rear the birds in cages of specific sizes, to feed them exact amounts of food bought from the big meat companies or at their direction and many more details that effectively make the farmers not independent businesspeople, but 21st century American serfs.

The Cocoa Cartel manages its relationships with the cocoa farms through memorandums of understanding and written and oral agreements and contracts, according to the suit. These companies dictate the terms by which such farms produce and supply cocoa to them, including "specifying labor conditions under which the beans are produced."

The candy companies control so much of the world chocolate business that they can easily wield economic leverage over the West African farmers, effectively controlling the production of Ivorian cocoa while insisting they have not seen any enslaved children.

Willful Blindness

To cultivate and keep their exclusive relationships with the farms, candy makers offer both financial assistance and technical farming assistance designed to support cocoa agriculture. Financial assistance includes advanced payment for cocoa and spending money for the farmers' personal use, according to the lawsuit. Tech support includes equipment and training in various growing techniquesnand even appropriate labor practices. Just what do these conglomerates consider appropriate?

The defendants or agents working for them visit the cocoa plantations regularly throughout the year and therefore must see firsthand the enslaved children working the crops. They know the deal. Instead of using their position to effect change for the sake of the enslaved children, they choose profit via willful blindness and zero accountability.

"The chocolate industry owned by multibillionaires and large corporations exploits millions of children and women, paying them less than the price of a candy bar," Morales-de la Cruz says. "They also deceive consumers claiming that they are fair and ethical.

"This has to stop!"

Meanwhile, Nestlé USA Inc. and Cargill Inc., which is also named in the class-action suit, are facing a consolidated legal battle before the U.S. Supreme Court with an anonymous defendant for their responsibility in the human rights violations in the cocoa industry. A third defendant, Archer Daniels Midland, reportedly was dropped from the suit after settling with the plaintiffs.

The court heard oral arguments in January in that consolidated case, Nestlé USA, Inc. v. Doe 1 and Cargill, Inc. v. Doe 1.

That case goes back to an initial filing in 2005. It was dismissed in 2010 by Judge Stephen V. Wilson of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. He held that "corporations could not be sued under the current understanding of the Alien Tort Statute (ATS)." In 2013, that decision was reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The candy companies filed petitions for review by the Supreme Court after being denied an en banc hearing, a review by a panel of judges or all the judges of a court.

Corporate Accountability

At the heart of that lawsuit is whether domestic corporations can be held accountable and liable for aiding and abetting human rights crimes committed abroad. The case could redefine the limits of corporate liability under the ATS, according to the blog Just Security.

The Trump administration tried to intervene in the case. Strangely, the acting solicitor general filed briefs on an issue none of the parties raised: whether aiding and abetting liability claims are ever permissible under the Alien Tort Statute.

"Child labor is unacceptable and goes against everything we stand for. Nestlé has explicit policies against it and is unwavering in our dedication to ending it. We remain committed to combatting child labor within the cocoa supply chain and addressing its root causes as part of the Nestlé Cocoa Plan and through collaborative efforts," a Nestlé spokesperson said. "This lawsuit does not advance the shared goal of ending child labor in the cocoa industry. Child labor is a complex, global problem. Tackling this issue is a shared responsibility. All stakeholders – including governments, NGOs, the communities and the broader cocoa industry – need to continue to address its root causes to have an impact."

Some candy companies have made public efforts to at least make seem like they are trying to make changes – putting band-aids on a cancerous practice. MARS launched an endeavor in 2018 to "reshape the cocoa industry," noting the child labor and forced labor practices of the cocoa farms, for example. That effort is backed by what the company says is $1 billion.

Since the cocoa industry's use of child labor has been on the world's radar for years, it clearly will require a large-scale public reckoning and massive revenue loss to see any real change.

We would love to tell you much more about this story from the perspective of the candy companies and the federal agencies that are supposed to seize as contraband imported products made with child labor and slave labor. The problem? Calls to Hershey's, MARS and the Customs Border Patrol were not returned. Only Nestlé responded, as noted above.

Mexican president pressures Canadian miner in simmering tax dispute

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican President \Manuel Lopez Obrador on Monday urged a Canadian mining company in the country to pay outstanding taxes, saying it was hiding behind the threat of international litigation to shirk its obligations

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© Reuters/HENRY ROMERO FILE PHOTO: 

Mexico's President Lopez Obrador addresses to the nation on his second anniversary as President, at the National Palace in Mexico City

Questioned at a news conference about the tax burden on mining firms in Mexico, Lopez Obrador said there were Canadian companies that met all their fiscal obligations.


"However, this other company does not," Lopez Obrador said, describing the miner as operating in Tayoltita in the northern state of Durango, without disclosing its name.

He appeared to be referring to First Majestic Silver Corp, which operates the San Dimas silver and gold mine in Tayoltita, one of its three working mines in Mexico.

Reuters reported this month that the government planned to seek 11 billion pesos ($534 million) from First Majestic in delinquent taxes.

First Majestic declined to comment on Lopez Obrador's remarks.

The company said previously it would pursue all legal options, including under international law, if it could not reach an agreement with tax authorities.

Lopez Obrador said the company was attempting to use international tribunals to protect itself.

"It has to pay taxes and it doesn't want to pay taxes," he said, adding he hoped the Canadian Embassy would take note of what he was saying. "Hopefully the ambassador ... urges them to come to their senses, because this cannot be permitted."

A spokeswoman for the embassy said it could not comment on matters involving private companies but that the ambassador was aware of the issue.

Lopez Obrador previously called on the Canadian mining sector to bring itself up to date on taxes amid a government push to boost corporate tax collection.

(Reporting by Daina Beth Solomon; Additional reporting by Dave Graham in Mexico City and Jeff Lewis in Toronto; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Commons committee censures firearms association over inflammatory comments

OTTAWA — The National Firearms Association has been censured by a House of Commons committee for inflammatory comments about the Trudeau government's recent gun control legislation

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© Provided by The Canadian Press

The national security and public safety committee unanimously passed a motion Monday condemning the association's response to the gun bill, with the support of Liberal, Bloc Québécois and New Democrat members.

The four Conservative committee members abstained.

Liberal MP Pam Damoff proposed the motion, citing a video podcast about the bill last week in which the group's president, Sheldon Clare, recounted a conversation with someone who suggested Canadians should "construct guillotines" in response to such government "tyranny."

Damoff said last month's riot at the U.S. Capitol shows what happens when "inflammatory words provoke insurrection and violence."

"Words matter," she told the committee, adding that "it's time to stop accepting these kinds of rhetoric and vague threats."

But Clare was unrepentant.

"I make no apology for any comments made during our NFA Talk podcast – like them or not – we have the right to free speech, at least for now. Nothing said advocated violence against anyone," he said in an email statement.

Clare contended that previous Liberal gun control measures — which he referred to as "their tyrannical attack on the firearm, airsoft and air gun communities" — deserve to be challenged, as does the ban on assault-style weapons, which he called "a sweeping theft of people's lawfully obtained property."

"The NFA maintains that our strong Canadian firearms heritage and culture matters, and we shall continue to defend it with vigour." he said.

Damoff told the committee that Canada is not immune to the kind of violence that erupted in Washington.

She cited the example of heavily armed military reservist Corey Hurren, who rammed the gate at Rideau Hall last July in a bid to confront Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about, among other things, the ban on assault-style firearms.

Hurren pleaded guilty earlier this month to eight charges related to the incident.

Damoff also raised the issue of NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh being accosted last fall by a member of a fringe protest group calling itself the Canadian Revolution, which had set up camp across from the building that houses the Prime Minister's Office with the stated purpose of making citizens' arrests of politicians.

"I think we need to take a stand. We need to shut down this kind of language, this way of talking and thinking that's OK to talk about building guillotines and laughing about those kinds of comments in a public forum," Damoff said.

Conservative MP Shannon Stubbs said her party takes threats against politicians "extremely seriously," citing examples of threats she and her staff have received in the past.

But she suggested if the National Firearms Association president's comments constitute a threat, they should be investigated by the appropriate authorities and discussed only behind closed doors by committee members. She also suggested Clare's comments may have been taken out of context.

Liberal committee chair John McKay told Stubbs that the authorities have in fact been informed about Clare's comments.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 22, 2021.

Joan Bryden, The Canadian Press

 

Three longtime antibiotics could offer alternative to addictive opioid pain relievers

UT SOUTHWESTERN MEDICAL CENTER

Research News

 

IMAGE: THIS ILLUSTRATION SHOWS THE ATOMIC LEVEL RESOLUTION OF THE TETRACYCLINE ANTIBIOTIC BOUND TO THE EPHB1 RECEPTOR. view more 

CREDIT: UT SOUTHWESTERN MEDICAL CENTER

DALLAS - Feb. 22, 2021 - Three decades-old antibiotics administered together can block a type of pain triggered by nerve damage in an animal model, UT Southwestern researchers report. The finding, published online today in PNAS, could offer an alternative to opioid-based painkillers, addictive prescription medications that are responsible for an epidemic of abuse in the U.S.

Over 100 million Americans are affected by chronic pain, and a quarter of these experience pain on a daily basis, a burden that costs an estimated $600 billion in lost wages and medical expenses each year. For many of these patients - those with cancer, diabetes, or trauma, for example - their pain is neuropathic, meaning it's caused by damage to pain-sensing nerves.

To treat chronic pain, prescriptions for opioid painkillers have increased exponentially since the late 1990s, leading to a rise in abuse and overdoses. Despite the desperate need for safer pain medications, development of a new prescription drug typically takes over a decade and more than $2 billion according to a study by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, explains study leader Enas S. Kandil, M.D., associate professor of anesthesiology and pain management at UTSW.

Seeking an alternative to opioids, Kandil and her UT Southwestern colleagues - including Hesham A. Sadek, M.D., Ph.D., professor of internal medicine, molecular biology, and biophysics; Mark Henkemeyer, Ph.D., professor of neuroscience; Mahmoud S. Ahmed, Ph.D., instructor of internal medicine; and Ping Wang, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher - explored the potential of drugs already approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The team focused on EphB1, a protein found on the surface of nerve cells, which Henkemeyer and his colleagues discovered during his postdoctoral training nearly three decades ago. Research has shown that this protein is key for producing neuropathic pain. Mice genetically altered to remove all EphB1 don't feel neuropathic pain, he explains. Even mice with half the usual amount of this protein are resistant to neuropathic pain, suggesting EphB1's promise as a target for pain-relieving drugs. Unfortunately, no known drugs inactivate EphB1.

Exploring this angle further, Ahmed used computer modeling to scan a library of FDA-approved drugs, testing if their molecular structures had the right shape and chemistry to bind to EphB1. Their search turned up three tetracyclines, members of a family of antibiotics used since the 1970s. These drugs - demeclocycline, chlortetracycline, and minocycline - have a long history of safe use and minimal side effects, Ahmed says.

To investigate whether these drugs could bind to and inactivate EphB1, the team combined the protein and these drugs in petri dishes and measured EphB1's activity. Sure enough, each of these drugs inhibited the protein at relatively low doses. Using X-ray crystallography, Wang imaged the structure of EphB1 with chlortetracycline, showing that the drug fits neatly into a pocket in the protein's catalytic domain, a key portion necessary for EphB1 to function.

In three different mouse models of neuropathic pain, injections of these three drugs in combination significantly blunted reactions to painful stimuli such as heat or pressure, with the triplet achieving a greater effect at lower doses than each drug individually. When the researchers examined the brains and spinal cords of these animals, they confirmed that EphB1 on the cells of these tissues had been inactivated, the probable cause for their pain resistance. A combination of these drugs might be able to blunt pain in humans too, the next stage for this research, says Kandil.

"Unless we find alternatives to opioids for chronic pain, we will continue to see a spiral in the opioid epidemic," she says. "This study shows what can happen if you bring together scientists and physicians with different experience from different backgrounds. We're opening the window to something new."

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Sadek holds the J. Fred Schoellkopf, Jr. Chair in Cardiology. Henkemeyer holds the Dick and Martha Brooks Professorship in Nerve Growth Research.

Other researchers who contributed to this study include Ngoc Uyen Nhi Nguyen, Yuji Nakada, Ivan Menendez-Montes, and Robert Bachoo, all of UTSW; Yuji Nakada of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Muhammad Ismail of The British University in Egypt.

This study was funded by the Hamon Center for Regenerative Science and Medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center.

About UT Southwestern Medical Center

UT Southwestern, one of the premier academic medical centers in the nation, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution's faculty has received six Nobel Prizes, and includes 23 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 17 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 2,500 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in about 80 specialties to more than 105,000 hospitalized patients, nearly 370,000 emergency room cases, and oversee approximately 3 million outpatient visits a year.

Eric Trump: Biden's policies 'are causing Texas to freeze'

David Edwards
February 22, 2021

Fox News/screen grab

Eric Trump asserted on Monday that President Joe Biden is literally "causing Texas to freeze" with policies implemented during his first month in office.

During an interview on Fox News, Eric Trump spoke about his father's future plans for the Republican Party.

"There's 75-80 million people who would follow my father to the end of the Earth," Trump bragged. "There's no question he will play a pivotal role in politics for a very long time to come. I really do believe he is the modern Republican Party."


The former president's son predicted that Republicans who supported impeachment are "going to get primaried."

Trump also previewed his father's upcoming speech at CPAC.

"I think every single day, Biden makes people miss Donald Trump more," he opined. "When you see some of these policies that are literally destroying jobs, that are destroying industries, that are causing Texas to freeze, that are cutting off our power to our energy grids and all these other nonsensical policies."

"Right now, the enthusiasm, it's better than it's ever been," Trump said.