Canadian company Algoma Steel to go public again in takeover worth more than $1B US

Pete Evans 

© Yvon Theriault/ Radio-Canada CBC Although the company has changed names and ownership over the years, Algoma has been making steel in Sault Ste. Marie for more than a century.

Algoma Steel is to become a public company again as the century-old Canadian steelmaker has agreed to be taken over by New York-based acquisition firm Legato Merger Corp.

Officials from both companies will have more information about the proposed deal at a news conference on Tuesday morning, but the deal will give Algoma's current owners just over $1.1 billion US worth of new shares in the combined company.

Legato itself only went public in an initial public offering earlier this year, raising $236 million to fund acquisitions.

The company is what's known as a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, which are essentially publicly traded pools of money created solely to purchase other companies.

Legato shares trade on the Nasdaq, but once the deal goes through Algoma will file to list its shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange, too.

Legato seeks to buy companies in the renewable energy, infrastructure and industrial sectors, and Algoma fits the bill.

While Legato is new, Algoma has been around in one form or another for more than a century. After being founded in 1902, the company was acquired in 2007 by Indian conglomerate Essar Group for more than $1.6 billion, before entering insolvency proceedings in 2015 after the price of steel cratered.

Algoma emerged from those proceedings as an independent entity and has since set its focus to sustainability. Among other initiatives, the company is proposing to convert one of its coal-fired blast furnaces to an electric-arc system that would reduce its carbon emissions by more than three million tonnes a year.

The company currently has a production capacity of about 2.8 million tonnes of steel a year, which makes it the second largest steel company in Canada. It also employs roughly 2,700 people. That head count is not expected to change as a result of the all-stock deal, and Algoma's current management team will stay with the new company.

Steel prices have soared to their highest level in decades this year. Similar to other commodities, production and prices slowed to a crawl throughout 2020 as the world economy slowed down to deal with COVID-19. But now steelmakers can't keep up with demand.

Price of steel is booming

In February, rating agency Moody's raised the company's credit rating based on "an improvement in operating performance and credit metrics due to higher steel prices and the expectation that the company will generate positive free cash flow," Moody's said in a release.

"No [steel] market was spared in 2020, as demand and shipments were hurt by knock-on effects from the pandemic," Bloomberg Intelligence metals and mining analyst Andrew Cosgrove said in a report on the steel market last week. "A sharp snapback is expected to take hold in 2021 as shipments climb nearly 30 per cent, with the construction sector likely to drive about two-thirds of the increase, in our view."

Five more arrested in B.C. old-growth logging protest

PORT RENFREW, B.C. — Mounties say five more people have been arrested on southern Vancouver Island during protests against old-growth logging.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

RCMP say the arrests happened at an area called the Waterfall Camp, near Port Renfrew, B.C.

Three of those arrested Monday face civil contempt of court charges, while the other two face obstruction charges.

Police say 53 people have been arrested in total since an injunction started to be enforced last week.

Those arrested Monday were taken to Lake Cowichan RCMP for processing.

Activists say very little of the best old-growth forest remains in B.C. and Fairy Creek is the last unprotected, intact old-growth valley on southern Vancouver Island.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 24, 2021.

The Canadian Press

RED SCARE 2.0

Alberta asks universities to report on links with Beijing and Communist Party

ASK CNRL ABOUT THEIR LINKS

EDMONTON — Alberta's advanced education minister has sent a letter to four of the province's universities asking them to pause their pursuit of new or renewed partnerships with organizations linked with China or the Chinese Communist Party.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

A ministry spokesman says in an email that Demetrios Nicolaides has also asked the four comprehensive academic and research institutions to thoroughly review their relationships with entities that are potentially linked with the People's Republic of China and its governing party.

The letter asks that the review ensures "these ongoing partnerships follow stringent risk assessments and due diligence."

"I am deeply concerned about the potential theft of Canadian intellectual property and further concerned that research partnerships with the People’s Republic of China may be used by Chinese military and intelligence agencies," Nicolaides said in a statement.

"More needs to be done to curb foreign state infiltration into our research and innovation centres, including our post-secondary institutions."

The universities have 90 days to submit a report with the requested information to Alberta's Advanced Education Ministry.

The University of Calgary said in an email that it has received the letter and is reviewing it, but isn't able to comment at this time.

The University of Alberta acknowledged it, too, received the minister's letter and will be responding. It also referred to a statement made earlier this month by Walter Dixon, interim vice-president of research and innovation, which said the school has asked the federal government for guidance on the issue.

Dixon said the university looks forward to guidelines expected late next month from a working group of the federal government and universities that's dealing with national security as it relates to funding and research partnerships.

"A consistent national response on security matters and international engagement is necessary and we are fully committed to working with all levels of government to ensure that Canada’s core security interests are protected and advanced," Dixon said in the statement on May 4.

A policy statement from Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada in March warned members of the research community, particularly those involved in COVID-19 research, to take extra precautions to protect the security of their work.

"Canada’s world-class research, and its open and collaborative research environment, are increasingly targeted by espionage and foreign interference activities," the policy statement said, although it did not name a particular country.

Nicolaides said his priority is to work with post-secondary institutions to protect Canadian intellectual property, and to make sure they don't enter agreements that would undermine Canada's "core national interests."

He also said the province would welcome a "comprehensive national framework from Ottawa on these serious pressing issues," noting that national security and intelligence are primarily the federal government's domain.

Dixon's statement from earlier this month noted that international partnerships are important, and the University of Alberta has agreements with partners from over 80 different countries.

"International partnerships, which include research projects, teaching and mobility agreements, and international learning opportunities are what allow the academy to provide students, post-docs, and faculty with the experiences needed to ensure that knowledge flows around the globe," he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 24, 2021.

Rob Drinkwater, The Canadian Press

KENNEY/UCP GET AN 'F'

Ninety-five percent of school divisions will not pilot Alberta's draft curriculum this fall


(ANNews) - Ninety-five percent - or fifty-eight of the sixty-one school divisions across Alberta — have announced that they will not pilot the UCP’s draft of the K-6 curriculum this September.

Criticism of the curriculum has come from the Alberta Teachers Association (ATA), educational experts, deans of education, teachers, and over 40,000 Albertans who are a part of Albertans Against the Curriculum Facebook group.

A survey was conducted by the Alberta Teachers Association and it was revealed that less than one-in-five Albertans support the UCP’s draft of the K-6 curriculum.

Sixty percent of Albertans disapprove of the draft, including 38 percent who strongly disapprove of the Government’s handling of the curriculum.

Only 38 percent of people have said they approve of the curriculum — this marks the lowest approval rating tracked by Environics Research for the ATA in the last decade.

The UCP government has emphasized that there were over 100 teachers involved in the creation of the draft. However, ATA president Jason Schilling is suspicious of these claims because the government has not released an unfiltered report on the consultations.

“Albertans are saying to us that the curriculum is poorly done, and it is inappropriate for students. They also recognize that the problem was largely created because teachers were left out of the planning,” said Schilling.

Since the survey, the ATA has released a statement saying that, “The Government of Alberta needs to work alongside First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Elders and Knowledge Keepers, communities and organizations, to ensure that the curriculum is rebalanced to authentically include Indigenous ways of knowing, and Indigenous perspectives, experiences and stories in order to advance truth and reconciliation.”

In 2014, Alberta made a commitment to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada to include Indigenous knowledge in order to advance reconciliation.

On May 20, the Athabasca Tribal Council (ATC) demanded that the Government of Alberta cancel the draft because it ignores the history, culture and perspectives of Indigenous in the province.

Chief Allan Adam has said that Indigenous communities should be consulted on the draft, such as the Treaty 6, 7, and 8 Educators alliance. He also accused the UCP of erasing suggestions from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in K-2 and erasing information on treaties.

“This curriculum is blatantly meant to sustain and bolster systemic racism in the next generation,” said Adam. “The manner that the curriculum was developed and presented is disrespectful to all Albertans. This curriculum does not fulfill the commitments to truth and reconciliation and must be rescinded.”

The claims from Chief Adam caused Education Minister Adriana LaGrange to schedule a meeting with the Chief.

LaGrange’s spokesperson, Nicole Sparrow said, “Given the severity of these accusations it is disappointing that the chief did not raise these concerns with the minister directly.”

“In order to gather feedback directly from Chief Adam and the Athabasca Tribal Council, Minister LaGrange personally invited the chief to a subsequent meeting to discus the draft curriculum.”

The Chief’s sentiment however, is echoed by other divisions in Alberta. The Northland School Division (NSD) — which includes schools in Janvier, Fort McKay, Anzac, Conklin, and Fort Chipewyan — said that they rejected the curriculum because “the Indigenous perspectives and experiences that were included in the previous curriculum seem to be omitted.”

The entirety of the Fort McMurray Wood Buffalo schools divisions have also rejected the draft, as well as the Metis Nation of Alberta and the Confederacy of Treaty 6 First Nations.

And it is not just rural areas and Indigenous Nations who are against the draft as the Calgary School Board of Education (CBE) has announced that they will not take part in the pilot program either. Edmonton Public Schools and Edmonton Catholic Schools will also not take part in the draft.

Calgary will however, provide feedback to the government. "As the largest public school board in Alberta, we believe it is vitally important to provide Alberta Education with feedback on the draft curriculum," the CBE said in a release on Friday.

"In the fall, we will gather meaningful feedback through focus groups with classroom teachers and curriculum specialists. Staff, parents/guardians and community members are encouraged to continue providing feedback."

Despite all of the controversy and public outcry, the UCP government is still resolved to pilot the draft in the upcoming Fall semester.

The draft is expected to be fully implemented for all K-6 schools in the 2022-2023 school year.

Visit alberta.ca/currriculum to view the draft. Albertans can review the document and offer feedback on the curriculum until spring 2022.

Jacob Cardinal is an LJI reporter for Alberta Native News.

Jacob Cardinal, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Alberta Native News

AND WHAT OF CHILD LABOUR IN THE WEST

Factory boss defiant as sanctions bite in China's Xinjiang

AKSU, China (AP) — A backlash against reports of forced labor and other abuses of the largely Muslim Uyghur ethnic group in Xinjiang is taking a toll on China's cotton industry, but it's unclear if the pressure will compel the government or companies to change their ways.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Li Qiang, general manager of the Huafu Fashion yarn factory in Xinjiang, told reporters that even though the company lost money in 2020 for the first time in its 27-year history, it bounced back by shifting to domestic orders.

“This is now in the past,” Li said. “We’ve turned things around in the first quarter of this year.”

Li blamed a sharp fall in foreign orders, as customers including Adidas and H&M cut ties, on “fake news" in a 2019 Wall Street Journal story that said brand name apparel makers and food companies were entangled in China’s campaign to forcibly assimilate its Muslim population. Huafu also cited U.S. sanctions and the coronavirus pandemic.

In a crackdown since 2017 after a series of militant attacks, the Chinese government has detained a million or more people in Xinjiang, a major cotton-producing region in China’s northwest that is home to the Uyghurs and other ethnic groups. Critics also accuse it of torture, forced sterilization and cultural and religious suppression.

Apart from cotton, much of the world’s polysilicon for photovoltaic cells comes from Xinjiang. The U.S. is now weighing sanctions over the alleged use of forced labor in the production of solar panels.

Xinjiang officials deny the charges and brush off Western criticism. They recently took about a dozen foreign journalists to the sprawling Huafu complex in Aksu city, where 780,000 spindles churn out 100,000 tons of colored yarn annually for sportswear and other items.

The company said in a preliminary estimate last month that it earned 120 million-150 million yuan (about $20 million) in the first three months of this year, after a 405 million yuan ($63 million) loss in 2020 as sales fell 10 percent.

Evidence of forced labor comes from people who have left China and government documents, but it is difficult to prove definitively at specific factories since human rights experts and others are unable to investigate freely. Diplomats and journalists traveling independently to Xinjiang are followed, and most residents, wary of getting in trouble, are unwilling to talk critically.

“The government doesn’t want information flowing out of the region and they’ve done a good job of making that difficult,” said Scott Nova, the executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium in Washington.

An ethnic Kazakh woman from Xinjiang who fled to Kazakhstan said she was forced to work for a week sewing uniforms in a factory in 2018 after spending almost a year in detention.

Dina Nurdybai ran a clothing business with 30 employees before she was detained. She said the factory work was not voluntary. She was released after authorities realized she was not on a list of long-term detainees.

“If they say they are taking you to a factory, you say ‘yes,’ " she said. ”If you don’t go, they’ll say you have problematic thoughts and persecute you.”

Others also have said they or their relatives were coerced to work in factories.

The government says such testimonies are fabrications. One worker, Paziliya Tursan, said above the hum of spindles at Huafu that reports of forced labor are nonsense. As officials listened in, she said people at the factory stick together like pomegranate seeds, echoing a metaphor used by President Xi Jinping to describe ethnic unity in China.

The U.S. decided last year that the evidence was strong enough to ban imports of clothing, cotton, hair products and computer parts from about a half dozen companies. In January, it expanded the ban to all cotton and tomato products from Xinjiang, which produces processed foods such as tomato paste and about one-fifth of the world's cotton.

U.S. customs denied a request this month from Japanese retailer Uniqlo to release a shipment of men's shirts that had been stopped at a southern California port under the sanctions.

Guixiang, a Communist Party spokesperson in Xinjiang, said companies may lose customers in the short run but eventually become stronger as they and their employees work harder and find new markets. “In some sense, the stress can be transformed into a driving force for the companies,” he said.

China has a huge domestic market and demand is growing in Southeast Asia, the Mideast, Africa and Eastern Europe, said Peng Bo, a senior vice president at Founder CIFCO Futures, a financial derivatives firm in Beijing. Chinese manufacturers also have gained market share as the pandemic hobbled competitors in other countries.

“Though the international market is important to domestic brands, it is not irreplaceable, particularly the European and American markets,” he said.

On top of import bans, the U.S. Commerce Department has blocked the sale of U.S. technology and parts to more than two dozen companies linked to human rights abuses in Xinjiang, including Huafu. That adds to pressure to stop dealing with the company.

Technology companies have also been targeted. Commerce added Nanchang O-Film Tech, whose customers have included Apple and Lenovo, to the blacklist last July. The company has employed Uyghur workers brought to Nanchang from Xinjiang, some 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles) away, under restrictive conditions.

Its parent OFILM Group said it lost 1.9 billion yuan ($300 million) last year because overseas customers dropped contracts. It did not say which customers.

The forced labor allegations extended to cotton picking late last year with a BBC story and a report by U.S.-based researcher Adrian Zenz. His study, based largely on publicly-available Chinese government documents, found “strong indications” of coercion and concluded that “it must be assumed that any cotton from Xinjiang may involve coercive labor, with the likelihood of coercion being very high.”

China accused Zenz and the British public broadcaster of anti-China bias. Foreign journalists were taken to a 40-hectare (100-acre) cotton field that was being planted by machine, and officials said mechanization has eliminated the need for most workers.

Picking cotton is more difficult than planting it, though, and where it is mechanized in Xinjiang, it often depends on American technology in the form of John Deere machines. Deere said in a statement that U.S. sanctions have affected its business but declined to provide specifics.

The government says 70% of harvesting is mechanized, but that varies from place to place. Use of machine picking is more common in the north. In southern Xinjiang plots tend to be smaller and more scattered, with 53% of total acreage harvested by machine in 2020, up from 35% in 2019, according to the government. It acknowledged that farmers still plant and harvest by hand in many places.

Nova of the Workers Rights Consortium said companies should not buy from Xinjiang because of the “substantial risk” of forced labor at any factory and the inability to conduct a proper inspection.

“A Uyghur worker cannot speak freely and candidly about forced labor, particularly if they are a victim of forced labor,” he said. “And so when you’ve got a combination of risk and the inability to manage that risk via labor rights due diligence, the only responsible approach . . . is not to source from that particular place.”

___

Si Chen in Shanghai contributed.

Ken Moritsugu And Dake Kang, The Associated Press

100s of Dead Whales Are Washing up on the West Coast—Scientists Don't Know Why

A dead whale washed up on the shores of the San Francisco Bay Area late Friday, marking the 12th such incident in the region so far this year.

© rainngirl/Getty A stock image shows a gray whale, seen from above, spraying water. An increase in the animals' deaths across the west coast of North America since January 2019 has led to an unusual mortality event (UME) being declared.

The death is just one of many in what scientists have called an Unusual Mortality Event (UME) along the west coast of North America. Since 2019, it has seen hundreds of gray whale deaths.

Reports on Friday, May 21, said the gray whale had washed up on Pacifica State Beach. It was a 47-foot male according to tissue samples, Giancarlo Rulli, a spokesman for The Marine Mammal Center, told CBS Sacramento.

Marine biologists often conduct an examination called a necrospy to try and find out more about what caused the whale to die. However, a necrospy was not possible in this case because the animal had been dead for too long.

The whale becomes the tenth gray whale to be reported dead in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021, in addition to one pygmy sperm whale and a fin whale, according to Bay Area news outlet The Mercury News.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has said elevated numbers of gray whale strandings—in which whales get stranded on land—have taken place in the current UME since January 1, 2019, from Mexico through Alaska.

As of May 6, 2021, the NOAA reported a total of 454 gray whale strandings across Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. That figure will almost certainly have increased.

While it has not been possible to identify the cause of death for all of these animals, a number of them are suspected or determined to have been killed by ships.

The NOAA also said early findings have shown "evidence of emaciation" in several whales studied, meaning they appeared abnormally thin or weak. The agency said more research was needed because such findings are not consistent across all whales examined.

In April, researchers concluded that a fin whale that washed up near Fort Funston, California, on April 23 had probably died after it was struck by a ship. They found that the whale had suffered trauma to its neck.

That incident was the fifth whale death in the Bay Area in April alone.

Likewise, the gray whale which landed on the Pacifica State Beach on Friday is the fifth to be reported this month, The Mercury News reports.

A UME is defined by the Marine Mammal Protection Act as "a stranding that is unexpected; involves a significant die-off of any marine mammal population; and demands immediate response."

Anyone who spots a stranded or floating whale should report it immediately, the NOAA states. 

Ed Browne 

MAY 24,2021

 

Legitimation strategies for coal exits in Germany and Canada

INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED SUSTAINABILITY STUDIES E.V. (IASS)

Research News

 

Ending our dependence on coal is essential for effective climate protection. Nevertheless, efforts to phase out coal trigger anxiety and resistance, particularly in mining regions. The governments of both Canada and Germany have involved various stakeholders to develop recommendations aimed at delivering just transitions and guiding structural change. In a new study, researchers at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) compare the stakeholder commissions convened by the two countries, drawing on expert interviews with their members, and examine how governments use commissions to legitimize their transition policies.

In the study, the researchers identify similarities and differences in the broader contexts of the respective transitions. Coal-fired power generation plays a far more significant role in Germany than in Canada, for example. Nevertheless, there are many similarities; in both Canada and Germany, the coal sector is largely concentrated in rural, economically disadvantaged regions. As a result, concerns about job losses have hampered efforts to phase out coal-fired energy generation sooner rather than later. The federal systems of the two countries are not always conducive to a rapid energy transition: the Canadian provinces and Germany's Länder can put the brakes on national ambitions.

Under these circumstances, coming up with a roadmap for the coal phase-out was no easy task. "The national governments of Canada and Germany attempted to legitimize their respective decisions to phase out coal through the strategic involvement of key stakeholders and potential veto players. This was an attempt to strike a balance between different interests," says lead author Konrad Gürtler. The Canadian government set up a task force with a rather limited mandate that focused on achieving a local just transition for workers and communities. Germany's Coal Commission, on the other hand, had to navigate complex expectations around the timing and pathway for the coal phase-out, its impact on the energy transition, and structural change in the affected regions.

In focus: Climate justice, just transitions, and energy justice

In both cases, the governments pursued their legitimation strategies in a two-stage process, explains Gürtler: "Governments involved stakeholders, who in turn had to respond to the expectations of various societal groups. In the process, negotiations engaged with very different ideas of justice: Climate justice, fair transitions, energy justice." The Canadian task force had a strong focus on affected regions and on identifying and representing the needs of communities; in the case of the German Coal Commission, a wide range of stakeholders - from industry associations and trade unions to scientists and environmental activists - brought their concerns to the table.

In early 2019 the Canadian task force presented the government with recommendations for a plan of action, which the government intends to implement within the framework of its proposed "Just Transition Act". This legislation has not yet been passed, however. In Germany, the Coal Commission negotiated a minimal compromise, which was only partially adopted by the federal government. The implementation of this compromise has since been questioned by former members of the Coal Commission and could be overtaken by new developments, such as the ruling of the Federal Constitutional Court on the Climate Protection Act.

###

WATER IS LIFE
Water crisis ‘couldn’t be worse’ on Oregon-California border

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — The water crisis along the California-Oregon border went from dire to catastrophic this week as federal regulators shut off irrigation water to farmers from a critical reservoir and said they would not send extra water to dying salmon downstream or to a half-dozen wildlife refuges that harbor millions of migrating birds each year.  

© Provided by The Canadian Press

In what is shaping up to be the worst water crisis in generations, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said it will not release water this season into the main canal that feeds the bulk of the massive Klamath Reclamation Project, marking a first for the 114-year-old irrigation system. The agency announced last month that hundreds of irrigators would get dramatically less water than usual, but a worsening drought picture means water will be completely shut off instead.

The entire region is in extreme or exceptional drought, according to federal monitoring reports, and Oregon's Klamath County is experiencing its driest year in 127 years.

“This year’s drought conditions are bringing unprecedented hardship to the communities of the Klamath Basin,” said Reclamation Deputy Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton, calling the decision one of “historic consequence.” “Reclamation is dedicated to working with our water users, tribes and partners to get through this difficult year and developing long-term solutions for the basin.”

The canal, a major component of the federally operated Klamath Reclamation Project, funnels Klamath River water from the Upper Klamath Lake just north of the Oregon-California border to more than 130,000 acres (52,600 hectares), where generations of ranchers and farmers have grown hay, alfalfa and potatoes and grazed cattle.

Only one irrigation district within the 200,000-acre (80,940-hectare) project will receive any water from the Klamath River system this growing season, and it will have a severely limited supply, the Klamath Water Users Association said in a statement. Some other farmers rely on water from a different river, and they will also have a limited supply.

“This just couldn’t be worse,” said Klamath Irrigation District president Ty Kliewer. “The impacts to our family farms and these rural communities will be off the scale.”

At the same time, the agency said it would not release any so-called “flushing flows” from the same dam on the Upper Klamath Lake to bolster water levels downstream in the lower Klamath River. The river is key to the survival of coho salmon, which are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. In better water years the pulses of water help keep the river cool and turbulent — conditions that help the fragile species. The fish are central to the diet and culture of the Yurok Tribe, California's largest federally recognized tribe.

The tribe said this week that low flows from drought and from previous mismanagement of the river by the federal agency was causing a die-off of juvenile salmon from a disease that flourishes when water levels are low. Yurok fish biologists who have been testing the baby salmon in the lower Klamath River are finding that 70% of the fish are already dead in the traps used to collect them and 97% are infected by the parasite known as C. shasta.

“Right now, the Klamath River is full of dead and dying fish on the Yurok Reservation,” said Frankie Myers, vice chairman of the Yurok Tribe. “This disease will kill most of the baby salmon in the Klamath, which will impact fish runs for many years to come. For salmon people, a juvenile fish kill is an absolute worst-case scenario.”

Irrigators, meanwhile, reacted with disbelief as the news of a water shut-off in the canals spread. A newsletter published by the Klamath Water Users Association, which represents many of the region's farmers, blared the headline, “Worst Day in the History of the Klamath Project.” Farmers reported already seeing dust storms that obscured vision for 100 yards (91 meters), and they worried about their wells running dry.

About 30 protesters showed up Thursday at the head gates of the main dam to protest the shut-off and ask the irrigation district to defy federal orders and divert the water. The Herald and News reported that they were with a group called People’s Rights, a far-right organization founded by anti-government activist Ammon Bundy.

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, both Democrats, have declared drought emergencies in the region, and the Bureau of Reclamation has set aside $15 million in immediate aid for irrigators. Another $10 million will be available for drought assistance from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Ben DuVal, president of the Klamath Water Users Association, urged his members to remain peaceful and not let the water crisis “be hijacked for other causes.”

The seasonal allocations are the region's most dramatic development since irrigation water was all but cut off to hundreds of farmers in 2001 amid another severe drought — the first time farmers' interests took a backseat to fish and tribes.

The crisis made the rural farming region hundreds of miles from any major city a national political flashpoint and became a touchstone for Republicans who used the crisis to take aim at the Endangered Species Act, with one GOP lawmaker calling the irrigation shutoff a “poster child” for why changes were needed. A “bucket brigade” protest attracted 15,000 people who scooped water from the Klamath River and passed it, hand over hand, to a parched irrigation canal.

The situation in the Klamath Basin was set in motion more than a century ago, when the U.S. government began draining a network of shallow lakes and marshlands, redirecting the natural flow of water and constructing hundreds of miles of canals and drainage channels to create farmland. Homesteads were offered by lottery to World War II veterans.

The project turned the region into an agricultural powerhouse — some of its potato farmers supply In ’N Out burger — but permanently altered an intricate water system that spans hundreds of miles and from southern Oregon to Northern California.

In 1988, two species of sucker fish were listed as endangered under federal law. Less than a decade later, coho salmon that spawn downstream from the reclamation project, in the lower Klamath River, were listed as threatened.

The water necessary to sustain the coho salmon downstream comes from Upper Klamath Lake — the main holding tank for the farmers’ irrigation system. At the same time, the sucker fish in the lake need at least 1 to 2 feet (30 to 60 centimeters) of water covering the gravel beds they use as spawning grounds.

The drought also means farmers this summer will not flush irrigation water into a network of six national wildlife refuges that are collectively called the Klamath National Wildlife Refuge Complex. The refuges, nicknamed the Everglades of the West, support up to 80% of the birds that migrate on the Pacific Flyway. The refuges also support the largest concentrations of wintering Bald Eagles in the lower 48 states.

GOP 2022 GOING FOR SCHOOL BOARDS

How school board meetings could attract more diverse audiences and boost public trust

BROWN UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Schools in the U.S. are set to receive $123 billion in federal pandemic relief funding. Across the country, parents and school administrators are engaging in spirited debates about whether to teach critical race theory. And Americans are bitterly divided in their opinions about how and when to resume in-person instruction following rising rates of vaccination against COVID-19.

One might expect that given all that's at stake, school board meetings across the U.S. would be hotbeds of discussion. But in many cases, they're the same staid, sparsely attended affairs that they can often be.

"We have more than 13,000 school boards in the U.S., and each one of them meets monthly," said Jonathan Collins, an assistant professor of education at Brown University. "Everyone hates these things. People have told me they think going to school board meetings is like watching paint dry, like listening to nails on a chalkboard."

But after observing school board meetings in Southern California, Collins noticed not all of them were dull. Unlike many of its neighbors, the Burbank Unified School District's board didn't just solicit public comments -- it also responded to them, he said, eliciting two-way conversation.

Collins wondered: Could encouraging dialogue between citizens and their elected officials boost meeting attendance? The answer, according to his latest study, might be yes.

The study, published on Monday, May 24 in the American Political Science Review, found that giving the public more opportunities to engage in conversation with their school boards could significantly boost trust in local leaders and interest in attending public meetings -- especially among people of color and individuals from low-income households.

Collins' findings, when combined with conclusions from previous studies, imply that giving the public more opportunities to converse with elected leaders could increase civic engagement and lead to greater public trust in leaders -- which, in turn, could help school boards and city councils better represent their constituents.

"One thing I have found in my previous research is a correlation between student performance and democratic norms," Collins said. "If students are doing well, the district has stronger democratic norms -- meaning, there's respectful dialogue at meetings, there are fair and competitive school board elections, and the board operates with a certain level of transparency. So I wondered, how could school board meetings factor into that? What could draw more people to them, and what could make them more engaging?"

To find out, Collins engineered an online survey that required participants to watch one of three videos from school board meetings in different cities. A third of participants were served a video that showed a school board official opening the meeting floor to public comment, only to be met by silence. Another third watched a video that showed a school board yielding the floor to a community member, then rapidly moving on to other agenda items. And the final third watched a video where a member of the public had a chance to share concerns and receive a reply from board members.

Before and after watching the video, participants answered questions about their participation, and likely future participation, in school board meetings, perception of their own schools and school board, and opinions on the most pressing issues facing schools today.

Collins found that trust in school board members significantly increased among those who watched the video featuring deliberation between a concerned citizen and the board members. Among those who said they had little to no trust in school board members before watching the deliberation video, 27% changed their stance afterward, expressing high trust. By contrast, only 12% of those who initially expressed low trust reversed course after watching the first video featuring no public comment.

Many respondents also expressed increased interest in attending school board meetings after watching the videos. While 40% of respondents who watched the no-comment video expressed willingness to attend a public meeting in the future, that percentage climbed to 48% among those who watched the deliberation video.

Collins noticed the change in opinion was even more dramatic among people who had never attended a school board meeting before -- a group, Collins said, that is disproportionately made up of people of color and people from low-income households. Among those who were new to public meetings and watched the no-comment video, just 31% said they would be willing to attend another meeting -- but among those who watched the deliberation video, 42% said they would attend another meeting.

"I think a lot of people who have been socially marginalized tend to think, 'If I go to a meeting, will they actually hear what I have to say? Will they acknowledge my concerns? Will there be an opportunity for a dialogue?'" Collins said. "My findings clearly show that having discursive meetings could erase some of those concerns. When you're in a space where people are receptive to your voice, you feel like you belong there."

Generally, Collins said, those who attend school board meetings are overwhelmingly white, wealthy and educated -- and that's largely because they have more time and flexibility, they're more likely to have a social network that keeps them informed about upcoming meetings and pressing issues, and they're more likely to understand the bureaucratic language used by elected officials. While providing an opportunity for citizens to receive official responses to their concerns doesn't erase these realities of inequity, Collins believes it could still go a long way toward making other groups of people feel welcome and valued at meetings.

Thanks to a grant from the Spencer Foundation, Collins has begun to test that theory by conducting a series of in-person pilot tests in Providence. He expects to have initial findings by the end of June 2021. Until then, he hopes his virtual analysis inspires school districts to restructure board meetings with inclusivity in mind. Otherwise, they may not spend their federal money wisely, nor may they make the right decisions about reopening classrooms or establishing a critical race curriculum, he said.

"Education is synonymous with hope -- it offers this opportunity for something better," Collins said. "Even the biggest cynic on the school board probably has a fundamental desire to improve kids' experiences and give them a brighter future. I think the best way to do that is to understand all students' needs and to know where every parent is coming from. We want these meetings not to be illusions of democracy, but real examples of democracy at work."

Columbia Engineering team builds first hacker-resistant cloud software system

As the first system to guarantee the security of virtual machines in the cloud, SeKVM could transform how cloud services are designed, developed, deployed, and trusted

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCE

Research News

 

IMAGE: MICROVERIFICATION OF CLOUD HYPERVISORS view more 

CREDIT: JASON NIEH AND RONGHUI GU/COLUMBIA ENGINEERING

New York, NY--May 24, 2021--Whenever you buy something on Amazon, your customer data is automatically updated and stored on thousands of virtual machines in the cloud. For businesses like Amazon, ensuring the safety and security of the data of its millions of customers is essential. This is true for large and small organizations alike. But up to now, there has been no way to guarantee that a software system is secure from bugs, hackers, and vulnerabilities.

Columbia Engineering researchers may have solved this security issue. They have developed SeKVM, the first system that guarantees--through a mathematical proof--the security of virtual machines in the cloud. In a new paper to be presented on May 26, 2021, at the 42nd IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy, the researchers hope to lay the foundation for future innovations in system software verification, leading to a new generation of cyber-resilient system software.

SeKVM is the first formally verified system for cloud computing. Formal verification is a critical step as it is the process of proving that software is mathematically correct, that the program's code works as it should, and there are no hidden security bugs to worry about.

"This is the first time that a real-world multiprocessor software system has been shown to be mathematically correct and secure," said Jason Nieh, professor of computer science and co-director of the Software Systems Laboratory. "This means that users' data are correctly managed by software running in the cloud and are safe from security bugs and hackers."

The construction of correct and secure system software has been one of the grand challenges of computing. |Nieh has worked on different aspects of software systems since joining Columbia Engineering in 1999. When Ronghui Gu, the Tang Family Assistant Professor of Computer Science and an expert in formal verification, joined the computer science department in 2018, he and Nieh decided to collaborate on exploring formal verification of software systems.

Their research has garnered major interest: both researchers won an Amazon Research Award, multiple grants from the National Science Foundation, as well as a multi-million dollar Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) contract to further development of the SeKVM project. In addition, Nieh was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for this work.

Over the past dozen years, there has been a good deal of attention paid to formal verification, including work on verifying multiprocessor operating systems. "But all of that research has been conducted on small toy-like systems that nobody uses in real life," said Gu. "Verifying a multiprocessor commodity system, a system in wide use like Linux, has been thought to be more or less impossible."

The exponential growth of cloud computing has enabled companies and users to move their data and computation off-site into virtual machines running on hosts in the cloud. Cloud computing providers, like Amazon, deploy hypervisors to support these virtual machines.

A hypervisor is the key piece of software that makes cloud computing possible. The security of the virtual machine's data hinges on the correctness and trustworthiness of the hypervisor. Despite their importance, hypervisors are complicated -- they can include an entire Linux operating system. Just a single weak link in the code -- one that is virtually impossible to detect via traditional testing -- can make a system vulnerable to hackers. Even if a hypervisor is written 99% correctly, a hacker can still sneak into that particular 1% set-up and take control of the system.

Nieh and Gu's work is the first to verify a commodity system, specifically the widely-used KVM hypervisor, which is used to run virtual machines by cloud providers such as Amazon. They proved that SeKVM, which is KVM with some small changes, is secure and guarantees that virtual computers are isolated from one another.

"We've shown that our system can protect and secure private data and computing uploaded to the cloud with mathematical guarantees," said Xupeng Li, Gu's PhD student and co-lead author of the paper. "This has never been done before."

SeKVM was verified using MicroV, a new framework for verifying the security properties of large systems. It is based on the hypothesis that small changes to the system can make it significantly easier to verify, a new technique the researchers call microverification. This novel layering technique retrofits an existing system and extracts the components that enforce security into a small core that is verified and guarantees the security of the entire system.

The changes needed to retrofit a large system are quite modest--the researchers demonstrated that if the small core of the larger system is intact, then the system is secure and no private data will be leaked. This is how they were able to verify a large system such as KVM, which was previously thought to be impossible.

"Think of a house--a crack in the drywall doesn't mean that the integrity of the house is at risk," Nieh explained. "It's still structurally sound and the key structural system is good."

Shih-Wei Li, Nieh's PhD student and co-lead author of the study, added, "SeKVM will serve as a safeguard in various domains, from banking systems and Internet of Things devices to autonomous vehicles and cryptocurrencies."

As the first verified commodity hypervisor, SeKVM could change how cloud services should be designed, developed, deployed, and trusted. In a world where cybersecurity is a growing concern, this resiliency is highly in demand. Major cloud companies are already exploring how they can leverage SeKVM to meet this demand.

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About the Study

The study is titled "A Secure and Formally Verified Linux KVM Hypervisor."

Authors are: Shih-Wei Li, Xupeng Li, Ronghui Gu, Jason Nieh, John Zhuang Hui Department of Computer Science, Columbia Engineering

The study was supported in part by National Science Foundation grants CCF-1918400, CNS-1717801, and CNS-1563555.

Publication Details

The study will be presented at the 42nd IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy on May 26, 2021.

LINKS:

Paper: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~nieh/pubs/ieeesp2021_kvm.pdf

DOI: 10.1109/SP40001.2021.00049

http://engineering.columbia.edu/

https://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2021/

https://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Main_Page

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~nieh/

http://systems.cs.columbia.edu/

https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~rgu/

https://www.gf.org/announcement-2021/

https://www.amazon.science/research-awards/program-updates/2020-amazon-research-awards-recipients-announced

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ma7i8i8AAAAJ&hl=en

https://shihweili.com/

https://www.cs.columbia.edu

Columbia Engineering

Columbia Engineering, based in New York City, is one of the top engineering schools in the U.S. and one of the oldest in the nation. Also known as The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, the School expands knowledge and advances technology through the pioneering research of its more than 220 faculty, while educating undergraduate and graduate students in a collaborative environment to become leaders informed by a firm foundation in engineering. The School's faculty are at the center of the University's cross-disciplinary research, contributing to the Data Science Institute, Earth Institute, Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Precision Medicine Initiative, and the Columbia Nano Initiative. Guided by its strategic vision, "Columbia Engineering for Humanity," the School aims to translate ideas into innovations that foster a sustainable, healthy, secure, connected, and creative humanity.

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