Cargill temporarily closes its London, Ont., poultry plant due to COVID-19 outbreak


LONDON, Ont. — Food giant Cargill Limited says it has temporarily closed its London, Ont., poultry processing plant due to a COVID-19 outbreak among some of its workers.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The company says there is an active case count of 82 and that 900 people work at the facility.

In a release Tuesday the company says it has no definite timeline on when the plant will reopen.

Cargill says it made the decision out of an abundance of caution as its workforce deals with the community-wide impacts of COVID-19 and employees will receive a weekly guarantee of 36 hours of pay.

It says it has made testing available to all its employees and has encouraged anyone who is sick or has been exposed to anyone with COVID-19 in the last 14 days to stay home.

Cargill says it is working closely with public health officials to ensure appropriate prevention, testing and cleaning in its facilities and that employees are following quarantine protocols at home.

"As we continue to prioritize the health and safety of Cargill employees, we have decided to temporarily idle our London protein facility," Derek Hill, general manager for Cargill’s London plant, said in an email.

"Our focus is on continuing to keep our employees safe and getting our facility back to normal operations."

Cargill noted that safety measures at the facility, including temperature testing, enhanced cleaning and sanitizing, face coverings, screening between employee stations, prohibiting visitors, adopting social distancing practices, offering staggered breaks and reducing carpooling have been in place for months.

Cargill's website says its London facility processes 80,000 chickens per day.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 13, 2021

The Canadian Press

CEOs say the Trump tax cut created the best economy ever. The data disagrees.
bwinck@businessinsider.com (Ben Winck)

Trump holds an example of what a new tax form may look like during a meeting on tax policy with Republican lawmakers in November 2017. Evan Vucci/AP

Many CEOs are fighting President Joe Biden's planned corporate tax hike.

CEOs surveyed by Business Roundtable say reversing Trump's 2017 cuts boosted growth and employment.

Data disagrees, showing the Trump cuts did little to stimulate the US economy despite costing trillions.

The inflation debate is dead. Long live the tax-hike debate.

President Joe Biden's spending spree was just getting started when he signed a $1.9 trillion stimulus into law on March 11. The administration now aims to spend up to $4 trillion more, split between two infrastructure packages.

Included in the proposal are tax hikes set to offset most of the new spending. Biden aims to lift the corporate tax rate to 28%, implement a global minimum corporate tax rate, and lift federal income taxes on households earning more than $400,000. The measures would undo some of the key elements of President Donald Trump's 2017 tax cuts, which is setting up a new argument between economists and business leaders.

In one corner, 98% of CEOs surveyed by the Business Round Table said Biden's proposed hikes would have a "moderate" to "very" significant negative impact on competitiveness. About 66% said the changes would stifle wage growth in the US, and more than seven in 10 said it would make hiring more difficult.

"As we look toward recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, keeping competitive tax policies in place is needed to help reinvigorate the US economy and lead to more opportunity for Americans," Gregory J. Hayes, chief executive of Raytheon and chair of the Business Round Table Tax and Fiscal Policy Committee, said in a statement.

The 2017 cuts drove economic growth before the pandemic, dragged the unemployment rate to a 50-year low, and lifted middle-class wages, Hayes added.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell echoed the CEOs on Tuesday, saying a reversal from Trump's policy will do far more harm than good.

"This tax bill of 2017 undone would create an extensive loss of jobs in our country, do exactly the wrong thing, and move us in the wrong direction."

Economists largely disagree. The previous president's cuts padded balance sheets while doing little to solve tax avoidance, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman said in a New York Times blog post published Friday.

Strong demand, not lower tax rates, was the primary factor lifting business investment after 2017, economists at the International Monetary Fund said in a 2019 paper. The investment response to the 2017 cuts was also smaller than those seen after previous cuts, they added.

© Scott J. Applewhite/AP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). Scott J. Applewhite/AP

What happened to the rocket fuel?

To be exact, Trump deemed his tax cuts "rocket fuel for our economy" that would kickstart a "rebirth of American industry." That rebirth did not arrive, as evidenced by various indicators of economic growth and labor-market health.

To start, connecting the tax cut to the record-low unemployment rate seen before the pandemic ignores several previous years of growth. The expansion that ended in March 2020 predated Trump by several years and was the longest in US history; job creation from 2012 to 2019 trended at about 2 million to 2.5 million nonfarm payrolls per year.

And after the 2017 tax cut? Job gains in 2018 were only slightly higher than those seen the year prior, and they actually went down in 2019 to the lowest since 2011, signaling the tax cut didn't spark a hiring spree.

The unemployment rate tells a similar story. The headline gauge's pace of decline was roughly the same after 2017 despite Republicans touting the cuts as a boon for the labor market.

Trump also claimed his tax policy would supercharge business investment, but data details an increase that paled in comparison to prior expansions. Domestic business investment climbed by roughly $251 billion from the first quarter of 2017 to its peak in the first quarter of 2019. Yet gains were just as large and more sustained during the dot-com boom of the 1990s and in the immediate wake of the financial crisis.

Productivity did increase in the years after the tax cut, but the trajectory only tells half of the story. The gauge - which measures output per hour of labor - remains well below levels seen just before the financial crisis and the peak seen after the 1990s expansion

As for Biden and his corporate tax hike? He's arguing for an expanded definition of infrastructure that includes mass availability of high-speed broadband and an electrified federal fleet. Time will tell whether the policy can drive the kind of growth Trump promised, or the kind that corporate leaders are still claiming was exceptional, data notwithstanding.

But with the Biden administration claiming its infrastructure plan will create millions of jobs, Democrats argue it's high time the government gets its shot at providing the kind of "rocket fuel" that could create a stronger economy.

These ants can shrink and regrow their brains 

Troy Farah 

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

4/13/2021

For most ant colonies, there’s a straightforward hierarchy: a single queen lays all the eggs, while a caste system of workers manages everything else—foraging for food, nursing baby ants, going to war, and so on. Only males and queens can reproduce, and the rest of the ants are sterile. If the queen dies, the colony usually does, too.

© Photograph by Clint Penick Ant with an ability to regrow its brain

OVARIES GROW BRAIN SHRINKS

Things are different for the Indian jumping ant, a species with forceps-like jaws and large black eyes that inhabits forests along India’s western coast. In these colonies, if the queens die, workers host bizarre competitions in which the winner becomes the monarch—and capable of producing eggs. The triumphant female ant’s ovaries expand and her brain shrinks up to 25 percent.

But new research shows these queens can be taken off their pedestal, reverting back to workers. This causes the ovaries to shrink again, and the brain to regrow, an extraordinary feat not previously known to occur in insects.

“In the animal world, this level of plasticity—and especially reversible plasticity —is pretty unique,” explains Clint Penick, the lead author of the study documenting this discovery, published Wednesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Game of ants

Penick, an assistant professor of ecology, evolution, and biology at Kennesaw State University, in Georgia, has spent years studying Indian jumping ants, known as Harpegnathos saltator. When these workers shift into queen-like reproductive mode, scientists call them gamergates (not to be confused with the online harassment campaign tied to video games). The term gamergate comes from the Greek for “married worker” and was coined in the 1980s; The “gam” in gamergate rhymes with “ham.”

Every member of H. saltator can reproduce, but this can only occur if an individual wins a drawn-out series of dominance tournaments that take place after a queen dies. Like a tiny jousting championship, the ants take turns rapidly jabbing each other with their antennae.

Half the colony can become engaged in these boxing matches, which can last up to 40 days, and all the ants save for the sole winner remain workers.

Complex behaviors to sort out dominance are known in other insects; queen wasps, example, compete for the ability to produce offspring, says Rachelle Adams, who studies ant evolution and chemical ecology at Ohio State University. But “in this case, it’s workers that are fighting for the reproductive role, which is really neat.”

When a gamergate takes over, it goes through many internal changes. Most notably, its brain shrinks by a quarter, “which is just a massive loss in brain mass,” Penick says. The researchers also found that these queen-like ants stop producing venom and also change behaviorally, hiding from intruders and stopping all hunting behavior.

To learn more about the ant’s brain plasticity, and to see if these changes could be reversed, Penick and his colleagues picked 60 gamergates and painted them specific colors to tell them apart. Half the ants were randomly chosen and put in isolation for a few weeks. The other 30 acted as controls. The isolation seemed to reduce the queen-like ants’ fertility, and when they were introduced back to the colony, they were immediately seized and detained by other workers.

This is called being “policed,” Penick explains, which researchers think is how these ants prevent their colonies from having too many reproductive members. If a queen-like ant with partially developed ovaries is detected, other workers will bite and hold the ant for hours or even days, albeit without causing bodily harm. “It’s almost like putting them in ant jail,” Penick says.

Scientists theorize that the stress of this situation triggers a cascade of chemical changes that revert the gamergates back to a workers, usually within a day or so.

“Once we sacrificed them and did the brain scans, we found that they completely reverted in every trait,” Penick says. “Their ovaries shrunk down, they started producing venom again … and then their brain grew back to its original size.”

‘Another thing entirely’

Significant changes in brain size and complexity have been recorded in a few other species, such as hibernating ground squirrels and some birds. For example, white-crowned sparrows will grow as many as 68,000 new neurons when breeding season begins to help them learn new mating calls. By winter, when food is scarce, an equivalent number of neurons die back. When spring returns, the cycle repeats. But the phenomenon is new for insects.

“There are lots of insects with documented plasticity in all of the traits here—but none that I know of with this level of reversible plasticity,” says Emilie Snell-Rood, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Minnesota. “Many social insects show changes in these brain regions as they transition between phases of their worker life, or move from foraging behavior to queen behavior. But shifting neural investment once, and then back later, is another thing entirely.”

Adams says these types of reversible brain changes may not be as rare as we think—we just haven’t looked hard enough. “I wouldn't be surprised if we see more of this,” she says.

She suggests looking at ant species that can have multiple queens, one example being Australian meat ants. When queens divide their labor, with some remaining in the colony and others foraging, this might be accompanied by corresponding difference in brain size or function, Adams says.

The more this question of reversible plasticity is investigated in all species, the more implications it could hold for understanding human brains as well. “Very, very, very far downstream, there could be insights into like the way human brains develop,” Penick says.

Such research could, for example, teach scientists more about the genes related to neural plasticity and how they work.

“Someone may wonder ‘why study this random ant species’ but they may have, over evolutionary time, stumbled on some fascinating mechanism of neural plasticity,” Snell-Rood says. “I think we have a lot to learn from amazing neural adaptations across animals.”

KULTURA HISTORIKA BUILDING
Russia detains two after huge Saint Petersburg fire

AFP 4/13/2021

Russia on Tuesday detained two people after a huge fire gutted a historic factory in Saint Petersburg, as firefighters continued putting out the blaze.

© Olga MALTSEVA Firefighters work to extinguish the blaze at the historic factory in Saint Petersburg on Monday

On Monday, a fire broke out over several floors of the red-brick Nevskaya Manufaktura building in Russia's second city. The inferno killed one firefighter and left two more hospitalised with serious burns.

The fire continued burning into Tuesday over an area of 500 square metres (5,400 square feet), the emergencies ministry said, adding that nearly 40 firefighters were involved in extinguishing the blaze and clearing the debris.

© Vincent LEFAI Map locating Saint-Petersburg in Russia where a massive fire destroyed an historic factory.

The Investigative Committee, which probes major crimes, said that it launched a criminal probe into a death caused by negligence and added that law enforcement had detained the general director of Nevskaya Manufaktura and his deputy.

© Provided by AFP Aerial shots of massive fire at historic Saint Petersburg building

Investigators cited a "number of violations" regarding fire safety and said that management "knew for a fact" that the premises could not be operated.

They estimated the total area of the blaze at some 4,000 square metres, causing a large part of the roof to collapse and even spreading to nearby trees.

Aerial shots of massive fire at historic Saint Petersburg building

Listed by the Saint Petersburg city government as a cultural heritage site, the building was home to one of Russia's largest textile companies in the 19th century.

In recent years parts of the building continued to operate manufacturing cloth, while others were rented out as office space and some areas had been abandoned.

Fires are relatively common in Russia due to dilapidated infrastructure or non-compliance with safety standards.

mak-as/em

What is the MLB antitrust exemption? Baseball's century-old golden goose becomes political cudgel

Gabe Lacques, USA TODAY 4/13/2021

For a century, Major League Baseball’s golden goose has been its antitrust exemption, a gift from Congress and the Supreme Court that allows it to operate, in essence, as a monopoly.


On May 29, 2022, the exemption will mark its 100th anniversary – though don’t expect MLB to mark such a crucial moment in time with any grand celebrations or fanfare.

No, this has been the league’s hero in the dark, better left unseen and unheard from – at least until politicians periodically find something surrounding MLB with which they disagree and raise non-specific threats to revoke it.

These threats can originate across the political spectrum, be it progressive independent Bernie Sanders taking the league to task for poorly paying minor-leaguers or trimming minor-league franchises, to right-wing Sens. Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Mike Lee objecting to MLB revoking its All-Star Game from Atlanta.

© Aaron Doster, Aaron Doster-USA TODAY Sports The 2021 MLB All-Star Game was moved to Denver from Atlanta.

A few facts on MLB’s unique exemption, and why it remains a potential political cudgel:

The origin

MLB’s antitrust exemption resulted from a 1922 Supreme Court ruling that stated, somewhat incredulously, that the business of Major League Baseball did not constitute “interstate commerce,” thus making it exempt from the Sherman Act, which prevents businesses from conspiring with one another in an effort to thwart competition.

The Supreme Court decision came seven years after the Federal League first filed suit against the major leagues, but the nascent league’s claims of collusion went unheard by the presiding judge, future baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The Baltimore Terrapins were the only Federal League franchise to press the issue, but an initial victory was overturned and ultimately the Supreme Court ruled against it, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes writing that “personal effort, not related to production, is not a subject of commerce.”

Baseball, it determined, was just a game. You wonder if Justice Holmes had any inkling this game would blossom into an $11 billion industry controlled almost entirely by one entity.

The challenges

Long before the MLB Players’ Association asserted itself as one of the most powerful unions in the country, players had far fewer avenues to seek relief against the major leagues.

More often, that came through the courts, which presided over early attempts by players to achieve free agency and, more broadly, challenge the antitrust exemption. The first was George Earl Toolson, a pitcher for the Newark Bears, the Class AAA affiliate of the New York Yankees, who sought escape from the reserve clause and the ironclad system that binded him to the Yankees.

The three decades from Holmes’ decision to Toolson’s 1953 case against the Yankees only hardened the exemption enjoyed by the league and its franchises; a 7-2 Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Yankees was brief, noting simply that “[t]he business [of baseball] has ... been left for thirty years to develop, on the understanding that it was not subject to existing antitrust legislation.”

Baseball’s true reckoning - at least regarding the reserve clause – would come nearly a quarter-century later, after Curt Flood challenged it all the way to the Supreme Court after he was traded from the St. Louis Cardinals to the Philadelphia Phillies in 1969.

Flood sat out the 1970 season, noting famously in his letter to commissioner Bowie Kuhn, “After 12 years in the Major Leagues, I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes.” His lawyer argued that the clause violated antitrust laws and 13th Amendment prohibitions against peonage and involuntary servitude.

But Justice Harry Blackmun, in an at times insipidly nostalgic 1972 opinion, reinforced MLB’s antitrust exemption but left an opening that the reserve clause could be resolved through collective bargaining. With future Hall of Famer Marvin Miller now helming the players’ union, that albatross fell three years later in an arbitration ruling.

Other, less prominent challenges to the antitrust clause never made it to the highest court, including a 2018 refusal to hear arguments from a group of baseball scouts claiming MLB clubs were colluding to suppress salaries and from property owners near Wrigley Field who argued that the Chicago Cubs’ expansion plans blocked their coveted - and lucrative - views of the stadium.

The future

It has endured long enough to see both the Model T and the Tesla. Yes, this antitrust exemption is sturdy, thanks largely to court precedents and also good zone defense on baseball’s part.

The league opened a lobbying office in Washington in 2016, and spent at least $1.32 million in the three years that followed, according to Open Secrets. That figure dropped to $1.24 million in 2020, but the short-term issues that arise rarely subside, be it its control over minor leaguers to relations with Cuba.

Yet the ever-present motivation is retaining the antitrust exemption. While spreading your chips across the table may not be a great strategy for craps players, it behooves MLB to cozy up to a wide range of politicians, occasionally throwing some cash at a candidate who runs afoul of its stated values or having to shutter the effort in the wake of unprecedented events.

But the diversified portfolio strategy is generally sound, and the clause sturdy against good-faith efforts to challenge it, and the occasional longshot bid to steal a few headlines.

Machine learning can help keep the global supply chain moving

Karen Roby 

TECHREPUBLIC

4/13/2021

© Image: Busakorn Pongparnit/Moment/Getty Images

© Provided by TechRepublic
The last year showed that the global supply chain is fragile
Watch Now


TechRepublic's Karen Roby spoke with Noel Calhoun, CTO of Interos, an artificial intelligence supply chain solution, about AI in the supply chain. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Karen Roby: Noel, we're going to talk a little bit about AI today in our supply chain. You spent many years in the public and the private sectors, working with the CIA. When we talk about our supply chain, I mean, never before has the light been put on it as much as it is right now. I mean, I think the vulnerabilities are really showing through.

Noel Calhoun: It absolutely is true. I mean, basically every day some event is happening that is showing companies how fragile their supply chains are. It's so complicated and so convoluted sometimes as to where all of your material, where all of your software, where all of your services come from, that a lot of people have a tendency to put it in a box and pretend that it's working fine until the day it's not. Then they're made really brutally aware of how fragile it is. I think that's what we've seen over the last year, year and a half, especially with COVID, but with trade wars, with China, with software attacks, like SolarWinds, with ships going crazy in the Suez Canal. I mean, it's just a never-ending string of things that really disrupt the flow of material and services and goods. That's been something that has brought the issue of supply chain really to the fore, I think, in the last six months especially.

Karen Roby: Talk a little bit about how is machine learning helping with the supply chain? And down the road, how much more can it be involved to really make a difference in terms of securing our supply chain?

Noel Calhoun: There is a lot of talk about AI and machine learning. I think they're siblings in a way. AI tends to get a lot of buzz because people didn't think of Terminator, and Sarah Connor and protecting the future, and all these things. I know certain celebrities have helped propagate that to some degree. But really I think from a practical perspective, what we're really talking about is the ability to develop machine learning software that can interpret the facts, the things that are going on around the world in a way that a human would. Then being able to figure out what's anomalous, what's weird. What has happened that maybe you haven't seen happen before, and isn't a trend that you don't really want to go that particular way. Identifying that and alerting you to that, or making it really clear when something happens that you can really quickly investigate something without having to spend weeks digging through a bunch of information.

When I was at CIA, everyone, all analysts at CIA are considered all-source analysts. Which means that you're not focusing on one particular type of information, human-reported information, signal-intercepts from NSA, or you're not recording. You're not thinking about any one particular type, you're thinking about all the types of information that you could possibly bring to bear on a problem. That's the way I think machine learning and the current trend is to do an all-source analysis approach toward the supply chain. Is it a news story? Is it a weather event? Is it the position of a ship in the Suez Canal? Is it telemetry on satellites? What information do you need to give you the insights on your supply chain?

Any one of those streams would be too much for a human to process constantly day in and day out. You would have to hire tens, if not hundreds, or thousands of analysts all day to be looking at the information, to figure out, what's going on in my supply chain and how does this affect me? Everyone realizes that's not doable. I think machine learning really is the solution there where it's not perfect, you're going to have errors. You have human errors too, so it's not like humans are perfect. But you apply machine learning to basically process all the information and give you a superpower to really observe everything that's going on without having to invest all that human research and effort into it.

Karen Roby: I know when you talk about the acceptance, do people really get that, that this is where we are, and this is the technology we need to look to? Because there are so many layers here. I mean, and like you said, you just can't wrap your brain around how many humans it would take to analyze all of this on a daily basis. Is the level of acceptance there?

Noel Calhoun: It's interesting, I think, I would almost say the level of acceptance is there, but in a very uninformed way, I think people are looking for a silver bullet, and saying, can AI solve my problem? Can machine learning solve this problem? The answer, for those who have worked in this space for a very long period of time is, it is one tool in the toolbox, and it's a very important one, and one that probably has not been used as much in the past. But just as equally important is how you apply that and the data that you apply to that problem. It's being able to pull in all the right data at one time and in real time analyze it. That in and of itself is a challenge.

This is a combination of machine learning, which everyone gravitates to and says, "OK, if I could just apply some AI to this, I would solve my problem." But what they ended up finding out is that's the shiny surface of it. Underneath is months and months and months, if not years of grunge work going through data and combining it together, putting it into a place where you can analyze it and apply the machine learning algorithms to it. That's a little bit of an education for most people. You're not three or four months away from a magic solution, if you can just get some AI, bring an AI team in and apply it to your data. There's a lot more to it. That's where, from my perspective is, always, at the CIA, at Kensho my previous company. Today it's always been that data, that data groundwork, that data plumbing that ends up taking up a big portion of your time, and that's true for, I think for most machine learning engineers.

Karen Roby: 2020 and now into 2021 have been teaching us a lesson when it comes to our supply chain. What has it really taught us this last year?

Noel Calhoun: I think it's taught us you can't take anything for granted. I think probably the worst thing to happen to the supply chain was probably Amazon because you basically got used to the fact that you could request something from Amazon and it would show up magically the next day or the day after. What the last year and a half has shown us is that even Amazon is dependent on these things. I went looking for a piece of woodworking equipment and it doesn't ship until 2022. I mean, that's how messed up some of the supply chains are right now. It's just amazing machinery. The demand on manufacturing, the demand on machinery, idling car factories for weeks because there are no microchips. You just can't take for granted that if it's needed and you have money to pay for it, it's just going to show up. It may not.

Karen Roby: Yeah. I think my teenagers need to learn that lesson because that's all they've ever known, right? They click on their phone, "I want something." In three days, two days, some of them the next day, it's on the front porch, right?

Noel Calhoun: Exactly.

ONTARIO UNIVERSITY DECLARES BANKRUPTCY

'An ugly stain for years to come': Laurentian University students, staff reeling from cuts

CBC/Radio-Canada 

4/13/2021

© Adam Kirkwood/Supplied Adam Kirkwood, a PhD student in the boreal ecology program at Laurentian University, one of the graduate programs left unscathed by cuts announced Monday, said Tuesday the school community is 'going through a lot.'

The emotionally charged reaction to deep cuts to staff and programs at Laurentian University continued to pour in Tuesday, a day after the news first hit students, staff and other interests in the Sudbury, Ont., community.

On Monday, roughly 100 faculty members lost their jobs and dozens of programs were axed.

Adam Kirkwood, a PhD student in Laurentian's boreal ecology program, one of the grad programs that avoided the cuts, said Tuesday he's experiencing, sadness, fear and guilt.

"I am one of the lucky ones where my supervisor wasn't terminated and my program wasn't terminated. But I'm watching everyone being cut and terminated, and all of my friends who are losing supervisors," he said.

"They're going through a lot. I don't even think they or their supervisors know what their plans are. And definitely there's a lot of fear for those students, and I feel absolutely terrible for them."

As Laurentian manoeuvres the insolvency process, the job and program cuts are the most stunning development yet, the result of an academic senate vote last week that aims to help the financially beleaguered university restructure operations.

Laurentian's court proceeding under the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) started Feb. 1. The insolvency process allows for creditor protection, so organizations can keep operating while undergoing changes to regain financial footing.

Kirkwood said people are reaching out and asking how this incredible situation unfolded.

"There's decades of mismanagement that came to a head and then, unfortunately, some decisions were made that weren't in the best interest of preserving the university," he said.

"The university has really just been reduced to a numbers game, and trying to satisfy creditors and balance the books rather than thinking about the people at the university and community of the university."

Kirkwood acknowledged finances are important for a university, but he doesn't believe it's a business.

"It's a place of higher education where people are able to go and learn, and develop critical thinking skills and learn about so many different aspects of life or science or art," he said.

"And if you're running it as a business, then things become a product. And I think that, at some point, defeats the purpose of what a university is purposed to do."

Earlier Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau weighed in on the evolving situation at Laurentian, shifting the focus to the Ontario government.

"Our francophone institutions, particularly for minority communities like franco-Ontarians, are extremely important that we protect," he told reporters in Ottawa.

Trudeau gave assurances that Minister of Official Languages Mélanie Joly has reached out to her Ontario counterparts "to see what their plan is to support and protect this institution."

"The federal government will be there to support. But it is a provincial jurisdiction, and therefore they need to figure out what the plan is. And we will be there to support because we know how important it is to protect official language minorities across the country."

Province on 'the sidelines'

On Tuesday morning, Sudbury MPP Jamie West delivered a passionate member's statement at the Ontario Legislature, detailing ways students, faculty and the broader community are being affected by the Laurentian situation.

West also called out the province for not stepping in to provide funding and prevent the cuts.

"Conservatives aren't defending francophone and Indigenous programs ... The Conservatives are responsible for every single one of these job losses, and [the] Conservatives could have stopped this from happening and are simply refusing to get off the sidelines."

Students, staff and faculty have felt as if they've been on the sidelines since Laurentian surprisingly launched its financial insolvency. Little has been said to the school community as administrators swiftly moved to try to find solutions.

Monday's cuts were a gut punch for people including political science student Katlyn Kotila.

"I found out the news on my program on Twitter ... but then to see it officially confirmed in the email was just absolutely heartbreaking," said Kotila.

"It's an absolute loss, not just for the university, but especially for students.These students came to Laurentian to study with academics who are top of the class in their field. Many of these professors are doing incredible things in the fields that they study."
Faculty, dismissed or not, also react

"I've got friends and colleagues whose lives are destroyed. It's brutal," said Albrecht Schulte-Hostedde, a professor in the department of biology and a Canada Research Chair.

"I have to go back to work, and how am I going to handle working for an administration that implemented this grossly inhumane and cruel plan? It's very difficult."

The biology department is not part of the School of the Environment, which has been shuttered, but the discontinued ecology and restoration biology programs are within the department where Schulte-Hostedde works.

"The entire legacy of the re-greening of Sudbury has been wiped out," said Schulte-Hostedde. "The university uses its expertise in environmental science and environmental studies in its marketing. Its strategic plan points out our expertise and productivity in those areas. It has wiped out the whole school of the environment.

"I am deeply deeply worried about my colleagues and friends. I am worried about the mental health state of all of the people who have endured this inhumane process we have been asked to go through," he said.

"Every aspect of what made Laurentian unique — its Indigenous character, the francophone programs — all of that stuff is just gone."
Losing academic programs will 'hurt,' prof says

Gone as well will be money flowing into the Greater Sudbury economy, something David Robinson, an associate professor of economics at Laurentian, said will be in the tens millions of dollars.

In the wake of the cuts, the professional programs were left intact.

"Which is kind of appropriate for the city; it's the right general direction," said Robinson.

"This is Canada's big mining town. Right? This is the mining university for Ontario. And I see that they haven't cut that part of the university."

© Yvon Theriault/CBC David Robinson, a Laurentian economics professor, says the cuts will come with 'a whole cascading bunch of effects,' including to the school's reputation.

But the more academic programs are gone, which "will hurt a bit," said Robinson.

"We don't have a lot of people coming to Sudbury," he said. "When you don't have a decent arts scene, it's hard to get partners to move to Sudbury in many cases.

"There is a whole cascading bunch of effects. The reputation effect is one. It doesn't look good for a city that has been seen as a dirty mining town — and had changed its image to a large extent — to suddenly have its intellectual sector collapsing. That doesn't look good at all."
Impact on Indigenous learning

A spokesperson for the Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario (CFS-Ontario), which represents 350,000 students, said French-language students are being targeted.

Midwifery, the only bilingual program of its kind and the only one in the North, is among the close to 40 French-language programs dropped, representing a big proportion of the cuts.

"Laurentian University is one of the most significant francophone institutions in the province," said Sébastien Lalonde, president of CFS-Ontario.

"Francophone students are being told that their education, language and culture aren't worth saving."

In a statement, CFS-Ontario also points out that Laurentian's mandate is tricultural, and a hub for Indigenous learning and research. It says the program cuts will have severe and negative impacts on Indigenous learning and language degrees.

"These groundbreaking programs have made significant contributions to Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination and decolonization through research and expansive curriculum," the statement said.

"These cuts counter the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada's Call to Action #16: 'We call upon post-secondary institutions to create university and college degree and diploma programs in Aboriginal languages.'"

"It is unacceptable that students, who have invested so much in their education, are impacted by financial challenges created by reckless administrative decisions and the erosion of public university funding," said Kayla Weiler, CFS-Ontario's national executive representative.

"The manufactured crisis at Laurentian could be stopped at any time by the Ontario government. The 2021 budget is the third budget in a row with reduced funding for post-secondary education. It is time to invest in all students no matter where they live in Ontario."

Push for provincial funding help

For its part, the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) is calling for the resignation of Minister of Colleges and Universities Ross Romano, and for the province to provide immediate investment in Laurentian.

"If Ross Romano had done his job, none of these cuts would have occurred," said OCUFA president Rahul Sapra.

"Romano and the Ford government knew about the depths of Laurentian's financial difficulties for months, if not years. They had numerous opportunities to take action to avert this crisis. Instead, they chose to do nothing and betrayed the trust of Ontarians."

For students like Kotila, whose future as a student is now up in the air, Monday's news will be "an ugly stain on Laurentian University for many years to come."

"We're losing so many incredible academics and in the process. We're also going to be losing many students who will likely leave and go on to pursue academics elsewhere now that their program is being cut," she said.

"I urge people to pay attention, because what happened at Laurentian can happen anywhere. And so hopefully this never has to happen to any other … post-secondary institution ever again."

‘Simpsons’ Star Hank Azaria Apologizes to ‘Every Single Indian Person’ for Voicing Apu

Antonio Ferme

VARIETY

4/13/2021

© Azaria: David Buchan/Variety/REX/Shutterstock

Hank Azaria has issued an apology for voicing Kwik-E-Mart owner Apu on “The Simpsons,” a controversial role he played for 30 years despite Apu being Indian.

“I apologize for my part in creating that and participating in that,” Azaria said. “Part of me feels I need to go round to every single Indian person in this country and apologize.”

Azaria, who began voicing the convenience store owner in 1990, spoke about the recent controversies surrounding his character on Dax Shepherd’s “Armchair Expert” podcast. In January 2020, he stepped down from voicing Apu on “The Simpsons.” The voice actor insists the character was created with good intentions but said there were real negative consequences to the portrayal.

“I really didn’t know any better,” Azaria said. “I didn’t think about it. I was unaware of how much relative advantage I had received in this country as a white kid from Queens.”

Azaria said Peter Seller’s performance in “The Party” inspired Apu’s voice on “The Simpsons.” Seller, the white actor who portrayed the gawky Hrundi V. Bakshi in the film, wore brownface and perpetuated Indian stereotypes. Looking back, Azaria said this was “a great example of white privilege relative advantage.”

“At the time, Indian people were very upset with that portrayal back in 1966,” Azaria said. “I couldn’t be possibly passing along structural racism more perfectly, at least in a show business context, by taking something that was already upsetting and going, ‘Oh, this is wonderful!”‘

Indian comic Hari Kondabolu outlined the negative stereotypes and racial microaggressions that Apu’s character represents in his documentary “The Problem With Apu,” which was released on truTV in 2017. Kondabolu brought in various Indian talents from Hollywood to share their personal stories of how white people bullied them by using Apu’s character. Many people used Apu’s ubiquitous line “Thank you, come again” as the punchline for their harmful and racist gestures.

Shortly after the film’s release, “The Simpsons” writers addressed the controversies surrounding Apu. In the episode “No Good Read Goes Unpunished,” Marge purchases an old fairytale book from her childhood to read to Lisa as a bedtime story. While reading the story, Marge began to realize how culturally offensive the book actually is. Toward the end of the episode, Lisa looks directly into the camera, saying: “Something that started decades ago and was applauded and inoffensive is now politically incorrect. What can you do?” She then looks over at a framed picture of Apu, which has the line “Don’t have a cow!” written on it.

Since stepping down from the role, Azaria said he has “read [and] spoke to people who knew a lot about racism, spoke to lots of Indian people and went to seminars.” While he still voices characters on “The Simpsons,” he is now a major proponent for casting actors of color to voice characters of color. Azaria said he slowly came to realize that Apu was the only representation of Indian people in American pop culture for 20 years.

“If that were the only representation of my people in American pop culture,” he said, “I don’t think I would’ve been crazy about that.”

The ocean can no longer be a climate victim
Michael Conathan, opinion contributor 

4/13/2021

Over the past several decades as the world has come to understand the threat of climate change, the ocean has been portrayed primarily as a victim. Alarm bells about warming, acidification, sea-level rise, coral bleaching, species migration and other symptoms have dominated headlines. But this narrative misses the greater point. The ocean is also one of the most powerful tools we have to help head off the worst consequences of global climate change.

© Getty Images The ocean can no longer be a climate victim

The ocean contains 96 percent of the water on Earth and serves as the foundation for and ultimate source of all life on the planet as well as the primary regulator of our global climate system. As Congress and the Biden administration consider their next round of investment on climate change and infrastructure, they must keep the ocean and its potential contributions squarely in their sights.

Earlier this week, a new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that estimates of the capacity of the ocean's "biological pump," a natural conveyor belt of organisms that pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere down into the depths, could be off by a significant margin. This would make the global target of keeping warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius even more difficult to achieve than previously thought.

The consequences of this revised estimate could be significant. The ocean absorbs between a quarter and a third of annual global carbon dioxide emissions - approximately equivalent to the total output of the European Union. According to a 2020 report from the High-Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy, ocean systems and technologies, including marine renewable energy production, can further provide up to one-fifth of the carbon reductions necessary to meet that 1.5 degree target by 2050.

The ocean's potential as a climate solution is only now beginning to emerge, and with the addition of one of the High-Level Panel's co-chairs and former NOAA Administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco to President Biden's climate team, the administration is in a prime position to act. Four areas of opportunity exist in the immediate term for Congress and the administration to boost federal engagement in ocean-based climate action.

First, we must institute policies to accelerate the transition to zero-carbon maritime transportation, including affiliated shoreside infrastructure. Over 90 percent of global trade moves by ship, and the maritime transportation industry as a whole emits approximately 2.9 percent of global greenhouse gasses - roughly equivalent to the total annual contribution of Germany or Japan. Deploying scalable, zero-emission shipping fuels and jumpstarting the process of electrifying coastal fleets such as Washington State's ferry system, the largest in the nation, are critical initial steps to reduce this footprint. And cutting emissions at port facilities, as called for in Biden's Healthy Ports program, will provide the double benefit of reducing carbon while producing cleaner air for port-adjacent communities that are often lower-income neighborhoods.

Second, healthy coastal habitats are efficient carbon sinks and provide myriad additional benefits to coastal regions, including protection from storm surges, erosion control and providing critical habitat for commercially and recreationally important species. A bipartisan coalition of legislators led by Reps. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) and Don Young (R- Ark.) have called for a $10 billion investment in coastal restoration projects that would begin to capitalize on this potential.

Furthermore, early efforts exploring the potential of cultivating kelp to remove and ultimately store carbon in the deep ocean seabed are showing great promise. Some engineered solutions are emerging as well, including negative emission production of hydrogen from seawater that can in turn be used as fuel. Government investment to help measure the efficacy and better understanding the ecological implications of these projects will spur private industry to further develop promising negative emission methodologies.

Third, we already know that most seafood already has a smaller carbon footprint than other meat products, but we can still do better. As in the maritime transportation industry, electrification of fishing fleets is an obvious starting point, but creative solutions abound. Emerging research is also showing that some species of kelp, when added to cattle feed, can eliminate over 80 percent of methane produced by cows. Development of sustainable aquaculture, regulated with strong environmental safeguards, can further reduce emissions while also putting a dent in our massive seafood trade deficit.

Fourth, expanding development of offshore wind and continuing to research other methods of ocean-based renewable energy can help drive our pivot to a renewable energy future. Offshore wind in particular has proven successful across Europe, in China and around the world, but has been slow to develop in the U.S. Crafting a thoughtful process of engagement with the fishing industry and other ocean users must be part of the solution moving forward to gain buy-in and clear hurdles if the Biden administration is to achieve its ambitious target of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity installed in U.S. waters by 2030.

Finally, in order to preserve the ocean's biomass that allows it to function properly as our planet's climate control system, we should continue to support the global goal of protecting 30 percent of the ocean by 2030. While the U.S. has nearly achieved this target in our waters, the vast majority of our fully protected marine reserves are in the remote Pacific. True conservation value will stem from safeguarding a diversity of marine ecosystems, including areas of the high seas, particularly those in close proximity to our Exclusive Economic Zone, such as the Sargasso Sea. After all, the biological pump, like all of our ocean ecosystems, only works efficiently if there is enough biomass in the ocean to keep it going.

As the urgency of addressing the existential threat of global climate change rises to prominence in policymaking, we face an all hands on deck situation. It's time that we recognize the power of the ocean to help shape our climate future - after all, it has forever been our planet's single greatest asset.

Michael Conathan is a senior ocean policy fellow with the Aspen Institute's Energy and Environment Program and a former Republican staff member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.

St. Vincent seeks water, funds as volcano keeps erupting

KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent — Leaders of volcano-wracked St. Vincent said Tuesday that water is running short as heavy ash contaminates supplies, and they estimated that the eastern Caribbean island will need hundreds of millions of dollars to recover from the eruption of La Soufriere

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© Provided by The Canadian Press

Between 16,000 to 20,000 people have been evacuated from the island’s northern region, where the exploding volcano is located, with more than 3,000 of them staying at more than 80 government shelters.

Dozens of people stood in lines on Tuesday for water or to retrieve money sent by friends and family abroad. Among those standing in one crowd was retired police officer Paul Smart.

“The volcano caught us with our pants down, and it’s very devastating,” he said. “No water, lots of dust in our home. We thank God we are alive, but we need more help at this moment.”

Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves said in a press conference on local station NBC Radio that St. Vincent will need hundreds of millions of dollars to recover from the eruption but did not give any details.

He added that no casualties have been reported since the first big blast from the volcano early Friday. “We have to try and keep that record,” he said. Gonsalves said some people have refused to leave communities closest to the volcano and urged them to evacuate.

Falling ash and pyroclastic flows have destroyed crops and contaminated water reservoirs. Garth Saunders, minister of the island’s water and sewer authority, noting that some communities have not yet received water.


“The windward (eastern) coast is our biggest challenge today,” he said during the press conference of efforts to deploy water trucks. “What we are providing is a finite amount. We will run out at some point.”

The prime minister said people in some shelters need food and water, and he thanked neighbouring nations for shipments of items including cots, respiratory masks and water bottles and tanks. In addition, the World Bank has disbursed $20 million to the government of St. Vincent as part of an interest-free catastrophe financing program.

Adam Billing, a retired police officer who lived and tended to his crops on land near the volcano, said he had more than 3 acres of plantains, tannias, yams and a variety of fruits and estimates he lost more than $9,000 worth of crops.

“Everything that (means) livelihood is gone. Everything,” said Billing, who was evacuated. “We have to look at the next couple of months as it's not going to be a quick fix from the government.”

The volcano, which had seen a low-level eruption since December, experienced the first of several major explosions on Friday morning, and volcanologists say activity could continue for weeks.

Another explosion was reported Tuesday morning, sending another massive plume of ash into the air. It came on the anniversary of the 1979 eruption, the last one produced by the volcano until Friday morning. A previous eruption in 1902 killed some 1,600 people.

“It’s still a pretty dangerous volcano,” said Richard Robertson with the University of the West Indies’ Seismic Research Center. “It can still cause serious damage.”

___

Coto reported from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Associated Press videographer Orvil Samuel contributed to this report.

Kristin Deane And DáNica Coto, The Associated Press

Caribbean island tackles water, food shortages after volcano eruption

By Robertson S. Henry and Kate Chappell

4/13/2021

© Reuters/ROBERTSON S. HENRY Local residents fill containers of water after a series of eruptions from La Soufriere volcano

KINGSTOWN, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (Reuters) - The tiny eastern Caribbean island of Saint Vincent was rocked by a fifth day of eruptions from the La Soufriere volcano on Tuesday as leaders warned of shortages of water and the potential need for hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild.

© Reuters/MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES An overview of La Soufriere volcano on Saint Vincent island

The explosion happened around 6 a.m., causing another billowing plume of smoke and ash as well as pyroclastic currents of ash and rock hurtling down the volcano's flanks. Officials have warned it could continue to be active for months.

© Reuters/ROBERTSON S. HENRY Local residents clear ash from a roof after a series of eruptions from La Soufriere volcano

Ash blankets much of the island, as thick as 8 inches (20 cm) in some parts. It has destroyed crops, contaminated water, killed animals and devastated infrastructure, also rendering some roads impassable, complicating search and rescue efforts.

So far, there have been no reports of casualties or injuries. Damages for an eruption in 1979 were $100 million. But residents are struggling to deal with supply shortages.

Video: Power outages hit Saint Vincent island amid volcano tremors (Reuters)


“We are still looking for drinking water and food,” said Jenetta Young Mason, 43, who fled from her home in the danger area to stay with relatives.

Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves said some supplies from neighboring countries had started rolling into the island nation of just over 100,000 residents, during a press conference broadcast on a local station. But more help was needed.

© Reuters/MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES A satellite image shows Richmond Vale waterfront on Saint Vincent island after the volcanic eruption

The Central Water and Sewage Authority has been unable to harvest any water from the water sources since the volcano erupted, government spokesman Sehon Marshall said, which has resulted in a more than 50% depletion of water storage.

Some Caribbean islands have delivered cots, food, masks and respiratory tanks, and the World Bank said it intended to disburse $20 million to the government via an interest-free catastrophe financing program.

Dormant for decades, the volcano first erupted on Friday, prompting between 16,000 and 20,000 people to evacuate from surrounding areas, with many staying in shelters near the capital of Kingstown.

© Reuters/CHANTEL WILLIAMS Smoke billows from the La Soufriere volcano in St Vincent

Government efforts to shelter people are being complicated by protocols to limit the spread of COVID, including caps on the number of people and testing and vaccination requirements.

One of the issues is locals' reluctance to take the vaccine. Kitron Sam, 34, who fled after the eruption, said that officials visited his shelter near Kingstown and offered the vaccine, but no one opted to take it.

(Reporting by Robertson S. Henry in Kingstown and Kate Chappell in Kingston; Editing by Sarah Marsh and Lisa Shumaker)