Rio Tinto pledges to protect cultural heritage after Juukan Gorge disaster 

(DELIBERATE DESTRUCTION)


Chief executive Jakob Stausholm says he will make heritage protection be ‘felt in the hearts and minds’ of his employees

 

The Juukan Gorge site before the 2020 blast. Rio Tinto CEO Jakob Stausholm says the company’s new executive team ‘feel very accountable’ for ensuring an event like its destruction never happens again. Photograph: PKKP Aboriginal Corporation


Calla Wahlquist
@callapilla
Tue 23 Mar 2021 

Rio Tinto chief executive Jakob Stausholm has pledged to make protecting cultural heritage an issue which is “felt in the hearts and minds” of his employees in an effort to avoid another Juukan Gorge-style disaster.

The mining company on Tuesday announced it would publicly report to investors on its progress on improving cultural heritage systems and renewing trust with traditional owners, as it attempts to rebuild its shattered social capital.

It will also publicly report on its progress in implementing the recommendations from a parliamentary review into the destruction of the 46,000-year-old rock shelter at Juukan Gorge, and recommendations from its own internal review.

Stausholm said the new executive team “feel very accountable” for ensuring an event like the destruction of Juukan Gorge never happens again. The incident led to the resignation of the three senior executives, including the former CEO, and prompted the chairman to step down.


'Rio is still on notice': native title groups say mining company's reshuffle is mainly PR

But Stausholm said achieving that goal required changes in the company which went “way beyond procedural”.

“It’s has to be felt in the hearts and the minds, the same way as we have built safety culture over decades,” he said in an investor briefing on Tuesday morning.

“The one big thing is to make sure that we consistently get this as a value.”
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Despite the negative publicity and heads rolling in senior management, the company reported a 20% rise in profits in 2020 and a record shareholder dividend of $9bn.

Investors have welcomed the commitment to greater transparency, which was brokered in negotiations with stakeholders including the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors (ACSI), AustralianSuper, and HESTA.

HESTA CEO Debby Blakey said investors put forward “very clear requests” around disclosure and governance arrangements and said it was “pleasing that we’ve had constructive discussions with Rio Tinto that can support progress towards managing this clear financial risk for investors”.

“The steps the company has agreed to will support broader improvements in practices, disclosure and oversight urgently needed across the mining sector,” she said. “Rio is at the start of a very long process of rebuilding trust. It will require long-term commitment to deep-seated cultural change and strong frameworks and processes in place to support genuine, open and ongoing partnership with Indigenous communities, no matter who is in management or board roles.”

ACSI CEO Louise Davidson said it was “positive” to see Rio Tinto commit to work more closely with traditional owners.

“Investors will continue to engage with Rio Tinto, and other companies with cultural heritage exposures, to understand how they are managing these risks and measuring against commitments,” Davidson said.

Rio committed to establishing an Indigenous advisory group, which will work with managers and may report to board level; modernising its approach to negotiating agreements with traditionally owners to remove confidentiality clauses; and spending $50m on attracting and retaining Indigenous people to work within the business.

The company’s chief adviser of Indigenous affairs, Brad Welsh, said the number of Indigenous leaders in the organisation had doubled last year, though only from seven to 15.

Rio also committed to measuring and reporting on social impact metrics, and to disclosing and explaining to traditional owners the likely heritage impact of projects, “as part of earning back trust” .

Megan Clark, a non-executive director and chair of Rio’s sustainability committee, said changes to cultural management practices to make it an iterative process would “fundamentally change the way we do mining”.

Clark said 1,000 cultural heritage sites in the Pilbara had been reviewed in the past 10 months, with a number of sites reclassified from being cleared for mining to protected.

She said relationships between traditional owners and Rio managers and executives needed to develop beyond a business relationship into friendships, “where the communication channels are just open, and those relationships are deep and trusting so that something like this could never happen again”.

“The one thing that still sticks in my mind as I look at what happened [at Juukan Gorge] and why it happened was: where was a quick phone call, where were all of those linkages that could have stopped it at any time?” she said. “And it’s a question that still sits there … those relationships with the traditional owners, they are as important as relationships with the prime minister of the countries in which we operate or the president in those countries. And I ask myself the question do we invest the same time in those relationships?”

The National Native Title Council chief executive, Jamie Lowe, said investing in those relationships with traditional owners – “I don’t think friendships is the right word” – was essential to rebuilding trust.


'Every day it's happening': Juukan Gorge inquiry told Aboriginal heritage is commonly destroyed

“You can have an advisory body that may sit at a high level but the relationships with the traditional owners are vital because that’s literally where the work happens,” he said. “And you have seen from the Juukan Gorge inquiry that those relationships either weren’t there or weren’t respected.

“So they will be talking some flash language and having deadly plans about what it will look like, but what it will look like will depend on the personnel. The personnel that you have is crucial, that’s how you build the relationships.”

Lowe said the Indigenous advisory group would only be effective if it was given the necessary power and responsibilities.

“If it’s just a peripheral body that meets four times a year, it’s not going to cut it,” he said.

Open season in Sudan as trophy hunters 

KILLERS flock to shoot rare ibex

Conservationists fear for endangered Nubian ibex in Sudan as westerners sold permits to hunt

Two male Nubian ibexes fight in a national park in the Negev desert, Israel. The sub-species is extremely rare in Sudan and numbers are declining. Photograph: Abir Sultan/EPA

Global development is supported by

Kaamil Ahmed

Tue 23 Mar 2021 

Sudanese conservationists have accused trophy hunters of exploiting the country’s political transition to hunt the country’s unprotected rare animals.

Photographs posted online of westerners posing with the body of a rare Nubian ibex angered Sudanese wildlife campaigners this week. They called for Facebook to remove the pages of tour groups promoting such hunts.

While wildlife hunters have long come from the Gulf, Abubakr Mohammad, a biodiversity researcher, has seen a recent trend for western trophy hunters to come too, which he said could be a result of the country being more open to outsiders since the removal of Omar al-Bashir, the former president. Permits for hunting are being given out without sufficient scrutiny, says campaigners.

The Nubian ibex is considered extremely rare in Sudan and its population is classified as vulnerable and in decline, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).


Donald Trump Jr killed rare endangered sheep in Mongolia with special permit

“Before this, they were not able to do it because of the government’s approach to European visitors, especially to these areas – they were considered spies.

“With this new government, the whole world comes to Sudan,” said Mohammad, who runs a popular Facebook page on biodiversity in Sudan. “They’re all taking advantage..”

Hunt Geo, which is based in Austria and promotes hunting trips around the world, released a YouTube video in December of what it said was the first hunt in Sudan in 10 years, since the secession of South Sudan. Hunt Geo posted photographs online of its customers posing with the Nubian ibex.

The photos were also shared by Kush Armaments, a Sudanese company that attracted Mohammad’s attention because he noticed it shared his posts about wildlife spots in Sudan. He feared it was then hunting in those areas.
This will not end as long as Sudan is ruled by militiasMohamed al-Tayeb, singer and campaigner

Responding to anger in Sudan, Kush Armaments has deleted posts of the hunts, but they remain on Hunt Geo’s Facebook page. Neither Hunt Geo nor Kush Armaments responded to requests for comment.

Mohamed al-Tayeb, a Sudanese singer and wildlife campaigner, said Sudanese law needed to be changed to outlaw such hunts, but that there was still a problem of the companies being backed by powerful figures in the country.
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“I think it’s really difficult to change this – they are the power in Sudan, they are the people who have money and weapons. Maybe they will close one company if there is media pressure about it, but this will not end as long as Sudan is ruled by militias,” said Tayeb.

Mohammad said that permits were given without enough attention to which animals were being hunted and whether rules were followed. He called for all hunting to be halted, especially as there is no clear idea about how many Nubian ibex remain in Sudan.

The IUCN said last year that the number of Nubian ibex in Sudan and neighbouring Eritrea was unknown. Mohammad said Sudan needed to update its laws to protect wildlife and write into the constitution a requirement for a body that would tasked with conservation.

Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli review – the mysteries of quantum mechanics

Having altered how we think about time, the physicist sets his sights on perhaps the most maddeningly difficult theory of all

A view of Helgoland, where Werner Heisenberg began 

to develop quantum mechanics in 1925. Photograph: Alamy

Ian Thomson
Tue 23 Mar 2021

Carlo Rovelli, the Italian theoretical physicist, is one of the great scientific explicators of our time. His wafer-thin essay collection, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, sold more than 1m copies in English translation in 2015 and remains the world’s fastest-selling science book. In The Order of Time and Reality Is Not What It Seems, Rovelli illuminated the disquieting uncertainties of Einsteinian relativity, gravitational waves and other tentative physics. Nobody said that post-Newtonian physics was easy, but Rovelli’s gift is to bring difficult ideas down a level. His books continue a tradition of jargon-free popular scientific writing from Galileo to Darwin that disappeared in the academic specialisations of the past century. Only in recent years has science become, in publishing terms, popular and attractive again.

Rovelli’s new book, Helgoland, attempts to explain the maddeningly difficult theory of quantum mechanics. The theory was first developed in 1925 by the young German physicist Werner Heisenberg during a summer holiday he spent on the barren North Sea island of Helgoland. It was there that the 23-year-old, stricken by hay fever, conceived of the “strangely beautiful interior” of an atom’s mathematical structure and, at a stroke, overturned the certainties of classical physics. Gone was the old idea that atoms consisted of tiny electrons that moved mechanically round heavier protons – as planets orbit the sun. Heisenberg’s intuition was that electrons moved in diffuse, cloudlike waves.

Excited, he devised mathematical tables (“matrices”) to predict the electrons’ wave mechanics. His work was soon refined by other forward-looking physicists such as Erwin Schrödinger and Paul Dirac. Quantum theory was sired out of Heisenberg’s observations and Einstein’s earlier relativity theory. Until Einstein, scientists believed in a predictable, deterministic universe – one driven by clockwork. Newton’s idea of absolute “true time” ticking relentlessly across the universe was countered by the Einstein theory that there is no single “now” but rather a multitude of “nows”. Heisenberg and his followers, more radical even than Einstein, held that we cannot know the present state of the world in full detail, but only by models of uncertainty and probability. The riddle of quantum theory may ultimately be beyond our tentative, Earth-bound comprehension, says Rovelli; but Newtonian mechanics, though far from obsolete, can no longer account for every aspect of the world we live in.

‘A deep-thinking, restlessly inquiring spirit’: Carlo Rovelli. 

Photograph: Roberto Serra/Iguana Press/Getty Images

Our world is understood to be non-deterministic and essentially unpredictable; moreover it works in ways that often strike us as non-intuitive. Quantum theory invites us to see the world as a giant cat’s cradle of relations, where objects exist only in terms of their interaction with one another. Ultimately, says Rovelli, Heisenberg’s is a theory of how things “influence” one another. It forms the basis of all modern technologies from computers to nuclear power, lasers, transistors and MRI scanners.

Fortified with reflections on Vedanta Hinduism (the author has a hippyish past), Buddhism, Dante, Empedocles and Democritus, Rovelli applies quantum theory to various philosophies. Humans exist by virtue of their continuous interactions with one another; so, too, do atoms and electrons. As a happy integration of science, literature and philosophy, Helgoland owes something to the Italian chemist-writer Primo Levi, whose literary-scientific memoir, The Periodic Table, reached the UK bestseller list in 1985 alongside Dick Francis. Rovelli’s book displays a very Levi-like enthusiasm for abstruse facts of all kinds. (The German director FW Murnau, we learn, had filmed parts of Nosferatu on Helgoland in 1922 a couple of years before Heisenberg arrived.)


Carlo Rovelli: ‘Time travel is just what we do every day…’

Undeniably, the book is hard going at times. (“I hope I have not lost my reader,” Rovelli says at one point.) The American physicist Richard Feynman presumably meant it when he said that “nobody understands quantum mechanics”. In his trademark lucid prose, Rovelli does his best to explain why this might be so. Known for his work on loop quantum gravity theory and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaximander, Rovelli is a deep-thinking, restlessly inquiring spirit who sees no incompatibility between physics and philosophy – only mutual attraction.

Science, in Rovelli’s estimation, is not about certainty; it is informed by a radical distrust of certainty. What is real? What exists? Helgoland, beautifully translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell, is the beginning of wisdom in these things.

Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli, translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell, is published by Allen Lane (£20).

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli review 

– a curious paean to science

The theoretical physicist untangles seven topics in a short book that works best when it doesn’t delve too deep

Carlo Rovelli: 'his tone would give Brian Cox a run for his quarks'.

 Photograph: Tony Reed/Splash News/Corbis

Nicola Davis
@NicolaKSDavis
Sun 11 Oct 2015

When I was a kid, my mother would sneak brussels sprouts on to my plate. I hated those revolting little orbs of bitterness – but Mother was wily. “It’s only a small one,” she’d say, as though diminutive size suddenly rendered the unpalatable acceptable.

I suspect Carlo Rovelli would get on well with my mother. He too is attempting to woo a tough crowd with a portion of something they find hard to swallow: physics. And he’s opting for a similar approach, issuing what JD Salinger would no doubt term a “pretty skimpy-looking book”, just 78 pages long, no doubt hoping his delicate touch will stir up a taste for the subject.

Born of a series of articles in an Italian newspaper and covering just seven topics, Rovelli’s book conveys a simple truth: physics is beautiful and awe-inspiring, its mysteries there for us all to muse upon. And his tone would give Brian Cox a run for his quarks. Elementary particles, he writes, “combine together to infinity like the letters of a cosmic alphabet to tell the immense history of galaxies, of the innumerable stars, of sunlight, of mountains, woods and fields of grain, of the smiling faces of the young at parties and of the night sky studded with stars”.

Despite its austere title, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics is no primer for the budding student, rather a curious paean to science. Einstein’s general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics and the cosmos are covered, but other bastions of the lecture hall, from optics to condensed matter, get the boot in favour of loop quantum gravity and consciousness. For each, Rovelli unpicks the basics before revealing the loose ends scientists have yet to tidy up.

And there is plenty of food for thought. “The difference between past and future only exists when there is heat,” explains Rovelli, deftly leading to the sort of existential ponderings more commonly fuelled by late nights and a bottle of red. “What is the ‘present’?” he asks, pointing out “in physics there is nothing that corresponds to the notion of the ‘now’”. The flow of time, he implies, is simply a matter of statistics.


Seven brief lessons on physics - podcast

Rovelli has a rare knack for conveying the top line of scientific theories in clear and compelling terms without succumbing to the lure of elaborate footnotes. “Planets circle around the sun, and things fall, because space curves,” he writes, neatly summarising the ramifications of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.His attempts at closing the distance between himself (a leading theoretical physicist) and his readers (who, he admits, are likely to “know little or nothing about modern science”) are perhaps less successful, describing his student digs as a “refuge from the tedium of university classes in Bologna” in the manner of a politician angling to be judged “of the people” by hanging out at a local pub. And Rovelli occasionally comes a cropper in his explanations, complacently slipping in references and terminology unlikely to ring bells with his readers. Einstein’s “box of light” thought experiment is bandied about to underline the great man’s scepticism of the later developments of quantum theory, 

but with no explanation of its thrust, the passage merely frustrates.

On the whole his spartan offering is a breath of fresh air. However, it remains to be seen if his pared-back approach could be married with a more in-depth take on physics. Capturing the imagination of a reader is one challenge, but delving deeper while retaining an accessible air is quite another: Richard Feynman, Rovelli is not. Still, perhaps his shorter form is for the best – in exploring the link between physics and the “self”, Rovelli’s occasionally florid tone is given full flight. “Amidst the infinite arabesques of forms which constitute reality we are merely a flourish among innumerably many such flourishes,” he writes, throwing measured enthusiasm out the window.

Rovelli’s approach might be refreshing, but it is still an acquired taste.

Covid-19 has shown humanity how close we are to the edge

Toby Ord

To prevent catastrophe, governments must transform our resilience to climate breakdown, AI and engineered pandemics

Eagle Creek wildfire, close to Beacon Rock golf course, Washington, US, in 2017: ‘We need to transform resilience to the full range of extreme risks we face. We don’t know what the next crisis will be.’ Photograph: Reuters

Tue 23 Mar 2021

It is profoundly difficult to grapple with risks whose stakes may include the global collapse of civilisation, or even the extinction of humanity. The pandemic has shattered our illusions of safety and reminded us that despite all the progress made in science and technology, we remain vulnerable to catastrophes that can overturn our entire way of life. These are live possibilities, not mere hypotheses, and our governments will have to confront them.

As Britain emerges from Covid-19, it could find itself at the forefront of the response to future disasters. The government’s recent integrated review, Britain’s taking of the G7 presidency and the Cop26 climate conference, which will be hosted in Glasgow later this year, are all occasions to address global crises. But in order to ensure that the UK really is prepared, we need to first identify the biggest risks that we face in the coming decades.

Technological progress since the Industrial Revolution has ultimately increased the risk of the most extreme events, putting humanity’s future at stake through nuclear war or climate breakdown. One technology that may pose the greatest threat this century is artificial intelligence (AI) – not the current crop of narrowly intelligent networks, but more mature systems with a general intelligence that surpasses our own. AI pioneers from Alan Turing to Stuart Russell have argued that unless we develop the means to control such systems or to align them with our values, we will find ourselves at their mercy.

By my estimation, the chances of such a risk causing an existential catastrophe in the next century are about one in six: like Russian roulette. If I’m even roughly right about the scale of these threats, then this is an unsustainable level of risk. We cannot survive many centuries without transforming our resilience.

The government’s recent integrated review highlighted the importance of these “catastrophic-impact threats”, paying attention to four of the most extreme risks; the threats from AI, global pandemics, the climate crisis and nuclear annihilation. It rightly noted the crucial role that AI systems will play in modern warfare, but was silent about the need to ensure that the AI systems we deploy are developed safely and aligned with human values. It underscored the likelihood of a successful biological attack in the coming years, but could have said more about the role science and technology can play in protecting us. And although it mentioned the threat of other countries increasing and diversifying their nuclear capabilities, the decision to expand the UK’s own nuclear arsenal is both disappointing and counterproductive.

To really transform our resilience to extreme risks, we need to go further. First, we must urgently address biosecurity. As well as the possibility of a new pandemic spilling over from animals, there is the even worse prospect of an engineered pandemic, designed by foreign states or non-state actors, with a combination of lethality, transmissibility, and vaccine resistance beyond any natural pathogen. With the rapid improvements in biotechnology, the number of parties who could create such a weapon is only growing.

To meet this risk, the UK should launch a new national centre for biosecurity, as has been recommended by the joint committee on the National Security Strategy and my own institute at Oxford University. This centre would counter the threat of biological weapons and laboratory escapes, develop effective defences against biological threats and foster talent and collaboration across the UK biosecurity community. There is a real danger that the legacy of Covid-19 does not go beyond preparing for the next naturally occurring pandemic, neglecting the possibilities of a human-made pandemic that keep experts up at night.

Second, the UK needs to transform its resilience to the full range of extreme risks we face. We don’t know what the next crisis on the scale of Covid-19 will be, so we need to be prepared for all such threats. The UK’s existing risk management system, within the Cabinet Office’s civil contingencies secretariat, is strong in many ways, but it only addresses risks that pose a clear danger in the next two years – making it impossible to adequately evaluate dangers that would take more than two years to prepare for, such as those posed by advanced AI. We also suffer from the lack of a chief risk officer, or equivalent position, who could take sole responsibility for the full range of extreme threats across government.

Time is running short – but we can get a grip on the climate crisis
Alok Sharma

Third, we need to put extreme risks on the international agenda. These are global problems that require global solutions. The legal scholar Guglielmo Verdirame argues that while the climate emergency and nuclear weapons are covered by at least some international law, there is no global legal regime in force that grasps the gravity of other extreme risks, or that has the necessary breadth to deal with the changing landscape of such risks. The G7 presidency is the perfect opportunity to remedy this. Rather than settle for a treaty on pandemic preparedness, as is being proposed by the prime minister, the UK could set its ambitions higher, and lead the call for a new treaty on risks to the future of humanity, with a series of UN security council resolutions to place this new framework on the strongest possible legal footing.

There is an understandable tendency for even the most senior people in government to see extreme risks as too daunting to take on. But there are concrete steps that the UK can take to transform its resilience to these threats, and there is no better time to do so than now. Covid-19 has given us the chance to make decades’ worth of progress in a matter of months. We must seize this opportunity.

Toby Ord is a senior research fellow in philosophy at Oxford University, and author of

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity

Amazon is a disaster for workers. Nomadland glosses over that
Jessa Crispin

The film doesn’t glamorize life at an Amazon warehouse. But it’s undeniably useful to the corporation to have a prestigious film to give political cover

‘

Amazon is putting cameras in the trucks of its delivery drivers, monitors on the bodies of its warehouse workers, and security cameras both inside and outside its facilities.’ Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

Tue 23 Mar 2021 

The new movie Nomadland may have received six nominations for the Academy Awards this year, but it’s also been met with its fair share of controversy. Telling the story of Fern (played by Frances McDormand), a woman who lives an itinerant life, moving from state to state to follow work, sleeping in her van modified into cramped living quarters, the depiction is, some critics say, too cheery. She lives this life because she chooses to, hitting the road after a tragedy, not because she has to. And the work she does supports her lifestyle and she wants for nothing more.

Comfort food: the Oscars nominations are not nearly as radical as they think they are
Peter Bradshaw

Nomadland shows Fern working in an Amazon warehouse; the makers of the film received permission from Amazon to film on location. The work that Fern does looks tedious and difficult, but let’s just say there are no labor violations shown on screen. Fern does this menial labor to remain true to herself and the life she wants to lead, and Amazon essentially funds her authenticity.
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Meanwhile, in the real world, Amazon is putting cameras in the trucks of its delivery drivers, monitors on the bodies of its warehouse workers, and security cameras inside and outside its facilities. It creates heat maps to detect if too many employees are gathering in the same place at the same time to discourage both fraternization and discussions of forming a union. And the company touts all of this, as effective methods for boosting productivity and profit margins.

The horrors of working at Amazon warehouse facilities have been circulating for some time. Employees, not granted long enough bathroom breaks that allow them to travel all the way from their position to the facilities and back, have reported peeing in bottles. They have said they are sometimes forced to stand in line after work for security screenings to make sure no one is smuggling out product, time they are not compensated for. Warehouses are often not temperature controlled, meaning employees have to work in sweltering conditions in the summer and in cold temperatures in the winter.

POST MODERN TAYLORISM
But the increased surveillance is a new level of indignity. The pandemic has increased the volume of packages being handled by Amazon delivery drivers, in some regions doubling their workload. Workers have complained about having to work at backbreaking speeds to meet their quotas, about injuries and exhaustion. These workers are often contractors, meaning they are working without the protections or benefits that come with full-time employment.

Instead of giving their overloaded workers a pay raise to match the increased labor, or hiring them full-time so they can receive health insurance to cover their repetitive strain injuries, Amazon has responded by putting cameras in the delivery vans to carefully monitor performance. The cameras attach to the ceiling of the van, with one lens pointed directly at the driver’s face. Now if a driver cuts corners in order to meet their impossible quotas for the day – running a stop sign here, peeing in a bottle to avoid having to stop to find a public restroom there – it will be reported immediately to Amazon headquarters. Even things like U-turns, braking too quickly, and other minor traffic issues are automatically reported without notifying the driver. Human beings are being expected to reach the performance levels of machines, and to go without basic human needs like food, bathroom breaks, sleep and leisure time.

Human beings are being expected to reach the performance levels of machines, and to go without basic human needs

Amazon trots out the usual answers when questioned about the increased monitoring: they are concerned with safety and fulfillment. They have delivery promises to keep, as their Prime customers expect their orders to magically appear on their doorsteps the day after, or even hours later, their orders are made. It’s about customer satisfaction and keeping the streets safe. (It’s not clear how Amazon’s failed plan to spy on its employees’ social media presence, including communications and posts made off hours, was about customer satisfaction, but I’m sure they will figure out a way to explain it eventually.)

We can debate whether Nomadland deserves the criticism it is receiving – it is, after all, a fictional film and not a documentary about the labor conditions of the working class. But it’s undeniably useful to Amazon right now to have a prestigious film providing cover for its abuses. Then again, the working conditions of its employees and contract workers have been well-known and reported for years, but the company keeps increasing its market share. Amazon doubled its profit during the pandemic, and the gap in pay between its executives and its warehouse workers continues to grow. Also the company doesn’t pay taxes. Amazon’s founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, saw his personal net worth grow a staggering $75bn in 2020.

Amazon can get away with it because there is an underclass of insecure workers who rely on even this underpaid, dangerous work to make ends meet. It’s not the narrative failures of one film, or even the moral failings of one CEO, that got us here; it’s the inevitable result of a society which wants to squeeze every dollar and every hour of productivity out of human beings to benefit the few. Each worker who gets fired because they ran one too many stop signs can easily be replaced by another desperate soul.


Jessa Crispin is a Guardian US columnist

Italians urged to boycott Amazon to support day of strikes

About 40,000 logistical workers hold national walkout over working conditions

Amazon employees demonstrate in front of the company’s premises in Brandizzo, near Turin. Photograph: Marco Bertorello/AFP/Getty Images

Angela Giuffrida in Rome

Mon 22 Mar 2021 14.28 GMT

Italian consumers were urged by unions to refrain from buying from Amazon for the day on Monday as about 40,000 of the online shopping giant’s logistical workers held a national strike over working conditions.

It is the first walkout in Italy to affect Amazon’s entire supply chain and involves warehouse and logistical hub workers as well as drivers provided by third-party services.

The 24-hour strike was called by the Filt Cgil, Fit Cisl and Uiltrasporti unions after negotiations over job contract revisions between the workers’ representatives and the US company broke down.

According to the unions, Amazon’s delivery network in Italy depends on 40,000 workers, including those working for the company’s own logistical unit, which employs the majority of its 9,500 staff who are on full-time contracts.

The main demands relate to workloads, long working hours for drivers, results-linked bonuses, lunch vouchers and stabilising temporary contracts. Unions also argue that workers ought to have been paid an allowance for having continued to work during the coronavirus pandemic, especially as the period marked a boom for Amazon orders.

“The strike is necessary because the workers are exhausted,” said Michele De Rose, the national secretary of Filt Cgil. De Rose added that delivery drivers “work 44 hours a week, and very often for the entire month, following the indications of an algorithm that does not understand work-life balance nor the traffic times of our cities”.

The workers’ and unions appealed to consumers to stop buying from Amazon for the day. “The people who receive the service are those we ask for solidarity, so that the service continues to be carried out in the best possible way,” the workers wrote in a statement.

In a letter to customers, Mariangela Marseglia, Amazon’s manager in Italy, wrote that the company “respects the right of everyone to express their position”, adding that the company “puts our employees and those of third-party suppliers first” by offering them “a safe, modern and inclusive work environment, with competitive wages that are among the highest in the sector”

Make it rain: US states embrace 'cloud seeding' to try to conquer drought

Cloud seeding involves adding small particles of silver iodide to clouds to spur rainfall – but will it work?

An empty irrigation canal at a tree farm in Corrales, New Mexico. Forty percent of the US west of the continental divide classed as being in ‘exceptional drought’, the most severe of four levels of drought. Photograph: Susan Montoya Bryan/AP

Supported by


Oliver Milman
@olliemilman
Tue 23 Mar 2021 

THE GUARDIAN

With three-quarters of the US west gripped by a seemingly ceaseless drought, several states are increasingly embracing a drastic intervention – the modification of the weather to spur more rainfall.


Climate crisis: recent European droughts 'worst in 2,000 years'

The latest reports from the US Drought Monitor have provided sobering reading, with 40% of the US west of the continental divide classed as being in “exceptional drought”, the most severe of four levels of drought. This is down only marginally from 47% in January, a record in the monitor’s 20-year history, and barring the arrival of a barrage of late winter storms will almost guarantee a severely parched year for western states.

“We haven’t had much in the way of winter rain or snow, which is concerning, as we would hope to put a big dent in the drought,” said Brian Fuchs, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center. “It looks like it’s going to be a very tough year. We are probably looking at increased fire dangers, water restrictions and also impacts to ecosystems, such as small rivers and streams and the wildlife living there.”

The stresses of drought, upon water supplies for drinking and to supply the west’s vast agricultural systems, have prompted eight states to look to a form of weather modification called cloud seeding to stave off the worst.

Cloud seeding involves using aircraft or drones to add small particles of silver iodide, which have a structure similar to ice, to clouds. Water droplets cluster around the particles, modifying the structure of the clouds and increasing the chance of precipitation.

“With drought still a major concern, cloud seeding is an encouraged technology for Wyoming to use based on our drought contingency plan,” said Julie Gondzar, project manager for the state’s water development office. “It is an inexpensive way to help add water to our basins, in small, incremental amounts over long periods of time.”

Cloud seeding experiments have taken place since the 1940s but until recently there was little certainty the method had any positive impact. But research last year managed to pinpoint snowfall that “unambiguously” came from cloud seeding and Gondzar said officials in Wyoming and elsewhere have “concluded that cloud seeding works, and is an effective way to aid in drought-stricken areas, with no negative environmental impacts”.

Others are now looking to join in, including the “four corners” states – Utah, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico – that have been ravaged by the most extreme version of the latest drought. “We are very hopeful for significant funding this year with an eye towards enough to do the entire state in the future,” said Rick Ledbetter, a supervisor for the Roosevelt soil and water district in New Mexico who has run a pilot scheme for cloud seeding. “I believe that there will be no choice in the future but to look at weather modification.”

Experts who have studied cloud seeding point out that it is no panacea, given it doesn’t solve the systemic causes of drought and can be tricky to implement – only certain clouds in certain weather conditions can be seeded with nascent rain and there’s no guarantee it will break a drought even if successful.

“I don’t think cloud seeding will solve the problem but it can help,” said Katja Friedrich, a University of Colorado researcher who has studied the issue. “It needs to be part of a broader water plan that involves conserving water efficiently, we can’t just focus on one thing. Also there is a question whether you will be able to do it in a changing climate – you need cold temperatures and once it gets too warm you aren’t able to do the cloud seeding.”

While states attempt to formulate a response to the growing threat of drought, advocates warn that poorer people, and people of color, are most likely to suffer from a water-constrained future. Miguel Hernandez, from the non-profit Comite Civico de Valle group in Imperial Valley, southern California, said the drought has brought ongoing issues for Latino agricultural workers, some of whom have to resort to using irrigation canals for cooking water or for brushing their teeth.

“Getting them good drinkable water is a priority,” he said. “We have issues with water diverted away to metropolitan areas too, leaving us with little to no water in our region. The drought causes a lot of different issues here.”

The current drought has been building since an exceptionally hot summer last year but the past 20 years can be seen collectively as a “mega-drought” in the US west, Fuchs said. Scientists have pointed to the climate crisis as a key cause.

“There has been very little relief and this could well be a precursor to what can be expected for the west in the future,” Fuchs said. “It’s kind of scary to think that way.”

BLASPHEMY LAWS
Polish writer charged for calling president a 'moron'

Jakub Żulczyk faces possible prison term for insulting Andrzej Duda over his comments on Biden election win

Andrzej Duda congratulated Joe Biden for his ‘successful presidential campaign’ but said he was waiting for ‘the nomination by the electoral college’. Photograph: Andrzej Lange/EPA


Agence France-Presse in Warsaw
Tue 23 Mar 2021

A Polish writer faces a possible prison sentence for insulting President Andrzej Duda by calling him a “moron” over comments the latter made about Joe Biden’s US election victory.

Jakub Żulczyk, the screenwriter behind the popular TV series Blinded by the Lights and Belfer, said prosecutors had charged him under an article in the criminal code for insulting the head of state in a Facebook post.

“I am, I suspect, the first writer in this country in a very long time to be tried for what he wrote,” he said on Facebook.

In his post on 7 November last year, Żulczyk commented on a curiously worded tweet in which Duda congratulated Biden for his “successful presidential campaign” but said he was waiting for “the nomination by the electoral college”.

Duda, who is supported by the populist rightwing Law and Justice (Pis) party, was a close ally of Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, who unsuccessfully contested the election result.

Aleksandra Skrzyniarz, a spokeswoman for Warsaw district prosecutors, told Polish news agency PAP on Monday that charges had been filed against a man, naming him only as “Jakub Z”.

“The defendant was accused of committing an act of public insult on 7 November last year on a social networking website against the president of the Republic of Poland, by using a term commonly recognised as insulting,” the spokeswoman said.

She added that the charge had been filed earlier this month and that the suspect had been questioned but “did not admit to committing the alleged act and gave explanations”.

“He indicated that the statement constituted a critical assessment of the president’s actions,” she said.

In his post, published in the days immediately after the 3 November election, Żulczyk said that “there is no such thing as ’nomination by the electoral college’”, adding that Biden’s confirmation as US president was “a mere formality”.

“Andrzej Duda is a moron”, the post said.

Poland has been criticised repeatedly over its different insult laws, including one law on offending religious feeling and another on insulting the flags of Poland or other countries.

John Oliver on plastics pollution: 'Our personal behavior is not the main culprit'


The Last Week Tonight host addresses the plastics industry-fueled myth that recycling works

John Oliver on plastic pollution and recycling: ‘Our personal behavior is not the main culprit here, despite what the plastics industry has spent decades and millions of dollars trying to convince us.’ Photograph: YouTube

Oliver’s main segment, however, unpacked the scourge of plastic pollution and the industry-fueled myth of recycling. Despite the omnipresence of the chasing arrows recycling symbol, the vast majority of plastic is neither recycled nor recyclable. Instead, it clogs up landfills, dumps and oceans, permeating our food intake – one study estimated that humans ingest a credit card’s worth of micro-plastic every week. “Which kind of explains Capitol One’s new slogan: what’s in your stomach?” Oliver joked.

Oliver dug into the history of plastic production, and how manufacturers have peddled the idea, under the guise of environmentalism, that “it’s up to you, the consumer, to stop pollution”, he said. “That has been a major throughline in the recycling movement often bankrolled by companies who wanted to drill home the message that it is your responsibility to deal with the environmental impact of their products.”

This message is epitomized by the national myth around recycling’s effectiveness; despite knowing that most plastic – over 90% – can’t be recycled, the industry lobbied state legislators to require the chasing arrows recycling symbol to be placed on all their products, and encouraged local governments to establish curbside recycling programs. “Honestly, it wasn’t all that difficult for them to convince us that all their waste is recyclable, because we so badly want to believe it,” Oliver said. “Lies go down easier when you want them to be true.”


Americans' plastic recycling is dumped in landfills, investigation shows

The truth, Oliver said, is that most US plastic waste was sold to China until it banned plastic imports in 2018; now it languishes in domestic dumps or toxic landfills in countries such as Myanmar, as well as in the ocean. And the scale is staggering: by 2050, there will be more plastic by weight than fish in the ocean; the giant garbage patch in the Pacific is now larger than France, Germany and Spain combined.

Yet “frustratingly, the plastic industry’s response to all the damage you’ve seen is to make a big show of tiny improvement and then revert to what they’ve always done, which is heavily push the idea that if we as consumers simply tried hard enough, we could make our plastic problem go away,” said Oliver. But “our personal behavior is not the main culprit here, despite what the plastics industry has spent decades and millions of dollars trying to convince us.”



Oliver advocated for thoughtful, targeted bans of single-use plastics (bags and takeout containers), and extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws that would shift responsibility and the costs of collection from the public sector to the actual producers of plastic waste.

The US is one of the few developed countries without an extended producer responsibility law for plastic – “because, of course it is”, Oliver said – though the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act will be introduced to Congress again soon. As plastic production is expected to triple by 2050, “we will need some version of an EPR law to pass, and soon,” he said.

“The real behavior change has to come from plastics manufacturers themselves,” Oliver concluded. “Without that, nothing significant is going to happen.”

Top Saudi official issued death threat against UN's Khashoggi investigator


Senior official twice threatened to have Agnès Callamard ‘taken care of’ in meeting with UN colleagues in Geneva in January 2020

The UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, Agnès Callamard: ‘Those threats don’t work on me. It didn’t stop me from acting in a way which I think is the right thing to do.’ 

Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty


Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington
@skirchy THE GUARDIAN

Tue 23 Mar 2021 

A senior Saudi official issued what was perceived to be a death threat against the independent United Nations investigator, Agnès Callamard, after her investigation into the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

In an interview with the Guardian, the outgoing special rapporteur for extrajudicial killings said that a UN colleague alerted her in January 2020 that a senior Saudi official had twice threatened in a meeting with other senior UN officials in Geneva that month to have Callamard “taken care of” if she was not reined in by the UN.


'The EU did not rise to the challenge': UN special rapporteur on Europe's failure to fill human rights void

Asked how the comment was perceived by her Geneva-based colleagues, Callamard said: “A death threat. That was how it was understood.”

Callamard, a French national and human rights expert who will this month take on her new post as secretary general of Amnesty International, was the first official to publicly investigate and publish a detailed report into the 2018 murder of Khashoggi, a prominent former insider who used his column at the Washington Post to write critically about the Saudi government.

Callamard’s 100-page report, published in June 2019, concluded that there was “credible evidence” that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and other senior Saudi officials were liable for the killing, and called the murder an “international crime”. The Biden administration has since released its own unclassified report, which concluded that Prince Mohammed had approved the murder. The Saudi government has denied the killing, which occurred in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, was ordered by the future king.

The Guardian independently corroborated Callamard’s account of the January 2020 episode.

The alleged threats were made, she said, at a “high-level” meeting between Geneva-based Saudi diplomats, visiting Saudi officials and UN officials in Geneva. During the exchange, Callamard was told, they criticised her work on the Khashoggi murder, registering their anger about her investigation and her conclusions. The Saudi officials also raised baseless allegations that she had received money from Qatar – a frequent refrain against critics of the Saudi government.

Callamard said one of the visiting senior Saudi officials is then alleged to have said that he had received phone calls from individuals who were prepared to “take care of her”.

Callamard’s report said there was ‘credible evidence’ that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and other senior Saudi officials were liable for Jamal Khashoggi’s killing. Photograph: Reuters

 

When UN officials expressed alarm, other Saudis who were present sought to reassure them that the comment ought not to be taken seriously. The Saudi group then left the room but, Callamard was told, the visiting senior Saudi official stayed behind, and repeated the alleged threat to the remaining UN officials in the room.

Specifically, the visiting Saudi official said he knew people who had offered to “take care of the issue if you don’t”.

“It was reported to me at the time and it was one occasion where the United Nations was actually very strong on that issue. People that were present, and also subsequently, made it clear to the Saudi delegation that this was absolutely inappropriate and that there was an expectation that this should not go further,” Callamard said.

While Callamard has in the past discussed the threats she has faced in her work as a special rapporteur, including by the Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte, details of the alleged Saudi threat are being revealed in the Guardian for the first time.

The development will probably bolster the view of human rights experts that Saudi Arabia’s government has acted with impunity in the wake of Khashoggi’s 2018 murder, including through arbitrary arrests of critics of the prince, as well as his potential political rivals.

The Saudi government did not respond to emailed requests for comment, which the Guardian sent to the Saudi foreign ministry, the Saudi embassy in London and the Saudi embassy in Washington.

“You know, those threats don’t work on me. Well, I don’t want to call for more threats. But I have to do what I have to do. It didn’t stop me from acting in a way which I think is the right thing to do,” Callamard said.