Queensland scientists brave crocodiles and deadly jellyfish to regrow seagrass

James Cook University team hope replanting project will be a blueprint for restoring underwater meadows on Great Barrier Reef

Planting frames with seagrass in Mourilyan Harbour, Queensland. Scientists are trying to regrow seagrass meadows near Cairns. 

Photograph: James Cook University

Australian Associated Press
Sun 29 Aug 2021 

Researchers have been forced to avoid crocodiles, deadly jellyfish and even quicksand-like mud to replant seagrass beds south of Cairns as part of a project they hope to expand across tropical Australia.

The underwater meadows at Mourilyan Harbour were once thriving habitats, providing food for prawns, dugongs and green sea turtles.

But the three hectare-site was destroyed more than a decade ago by a series of La Niña events, including Cyclone Larry, and the sand banks it needed to regrow washed away.

“This was a case where we absolutely needed intervention for the grasses to come back,” Associate Professor Michael Rasheed said. “We were really concerned, this is never going to come back unless we help.”

The James Cook University team this week ventured into the harbour in small boats and released seagrass plants anchored to frames, sinking them to the seabed.


Great Barrier Reef: scientists discover 400-year-old giant coral

“We can’t get in the water to do this work because there are lots of big crocs about and stingers,” Rasheed said.

Crocodile sightings aren’t unknown and there are other challenges too, with the seabed made of a quicksand-like sediment that’s exposed at low tide.

There are 15 species of seagrass that live on the Great Barrier Reef but scientists don’t yet know how to help them recover from damage and it’s hoped the project will be a blueprint for restoring these environments.

“People usually think of coral on the Great Barrier Reef but there’s actually more seagrass than coral,” Rasheed said.

As well as providing a nursery for many different species, seagrass meadows are also effective carbon sinks – more than 30 times better at removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than tropical rainforests.

According to Rasheed, that makes them a potential weapon against climate change.

They can also filter out the nutrients and deal with the sediment flowing into tropical Queensland waters that are damaging the reef.

Early trials in 2020 found the seagrass grew on steel frames but these were not a long-term solution and the team is instead trying out biodegradable matting made from potato starch.

The researchers monitor how the seagrass is growing by flying drones over the site when the tide is low and taking high-resolution photos.

The project, run with volunteers and Indigenous rangers, is looking for more funding to rehabilitate meadows across tropical Australia and the Pacific.

In the chaos of Britain’s labour shortage, could workers forge better lives?

Our dysfunctional labour market was reliant on a pool of exploitable workers

A fruit picker at a farm in Hereford.

Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

Mon 30 Aug 2021 

Empty shelves, missing product lines and the rising sense of a country that may not be able to feed itself: despite still being underplayed by most of the media, the results of Britain’s labour shortages are now ubiquitous.

Fruit growers warn that their crops are simply being left to rot. For want of regular workers, meat-processing plants are set to employ prisoners. The shortage of lorry drivers means that McDonald’s has run out of milkshakes. After 18 months of misery and disruption, most of us seem to be responding with fatalistic shrugs, although the situation also brings to mind a cliched but pointed question: can you imagine the reaction if this was happening under a Labour government?

If you want to understand the starkest realities, a good place to look is the chunk of eastern England that encompasses Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire, where vast vegetable farms sit alongside food-processing businesses, and where such towns as Wisbech, Spalding and Boston have become bywords for migration from central and eastern Europe. I have been there many times, trying to understand an area of the country at the core of how Britain’s economy has been reshaped over the past three decades.

A few days ago I put in a call to Lionel Sheffield, the boss of a labour agency called Rapid Recruitment, based in Wisbech. The last time we met, in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 referendum, he told me the local labour market was heading towards some kind of crisis, but his firm’s books were still full of hundreds of people from EU countries, whom he directed towards work not just in the food industry, but also transport and manufacturing. Now, as Brexit has convinced people to return to their home countries, and new visa rules have ensured they will not be replaced by new migrants, things have passed a tipping point. Employers are “fighting over a dwindling pool of labour”, he says.

The standard line from the Home Office, parroted with a familiar populist zeal, is that “employers should invest in our domestic workforce instead of relying on labour from abroad”. But Sheffield insists that even if wages increase – and in food processing, he says, local hourly rates have recently gone up from the minimum wage of £8.91 to £9.50 – he operates in a part of the country with full employment, where British-born people tend to choose different kinds of work. Pay may well continue to rise, as much as the tight margins imposed by supermarkets will allow. Yet whether that will conjure up new armies of workers seems doubtful.

The result, for the moment, sounds like chaos. One company Sheffield deals with employs people to chop up carrots and onions for supermarket ready meals. But, as it runs low on workers, it faces another problem: insufficient numbers of lorries have been turning up to transport the processed veg to the next stage of production. As a result, even more food has been thrown away.

Which brings us to the kind of work that sits at the core of the crisis. The haulage industry is reckoned to be short of around 100,000 drivers. Some of this is to do with Brexit, but it also reveals deeper, more structural problems evident in many countries. For lorry drivers, median hourly pay stands at £11.80, work is often arduous and massively time-consuming, and the majority of the workforce is over 45. Via such services as Amazon Prime, we have been encouraged to believe that the costs of post and packaging can be waved away, and transport can somehow be organised for free – an insidious idea that has accelerated the downward slide of pay and conditions.

Adrian Jones, the Unite union’s national officer for road transport, says “a lot of chickens have come home to roost”. He is now seeing pay increases for drivers that are three or four times the rate of inflation, and he wants more. A fragmented industry, he says, ought to be compelled to agree a floor on pay and basic standards, as happens in the Netherlands. In the short to medium term, the haulage industry’s problems will be seen in confusion and economic disarray – but the sudden sense of urgency surrounding such proposals shows that fundamental things might already be changing for the better.

For decades, large swathes of the labour market have been run on the assumption that there will always be sufficient people prepared to work for precious little. But here and across the world, as parts of the economy have been shut down and furlough schemes have given people pause for thought, the idea that they need not stay in jobs that are exploitative and morale-sapping has evidently caught on.

In the UK, meanwhile, Brexit remains a disastrous and chaotic project – but, among its endless and unpredictable consequences, leaving the EU has cut off employers’ access to a pool of people who were too often exploitable. Time has thereby been called on one of the ways that our dysfunctional labour market was prevented from imploding.

A sudden flurry of short-term fixes – witness big companies’ offering signing-on bonuses for new recruits – ought to be greeted with derision, but elsewhere there are very interesting signs of change. Unite’s new general secretary is Sharon Graham, who says she is less interested in the union’s relationship with the Labour party than with the urgency of organising in workplaces. Last week her union’s press office suggested I talk to a 30-year-old union activist named David Imre, who came to the UK from Romania six years ago.

Two years ago Imre joined Unite, and he is now an official union convenor at a factory in Wales that processes chicken. The work, he told me, is “cold, hard – not easy”. A big part of the workforce is from Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. A few years ago, there were only 90 or so unionised workers at the factory; now, the figure is closer to 800.

Thanks to Brexit, Imre says, the factory is now “really, really short of people”. Six months ago, after pressure from the union, its basic hourly rate went from £8.93 to £9.50. He says he now wants entry-level pay to rise to at least £10.50. “I’m using this labour shortage to get more money for people,” he said.

Herein lies something that should not be overlooked in these strange, unprecedented times. Amid chaos and uncertainty, things that were not supposed to happen suddenly seem eminently possible.

So what’s so wrong with labour shortages driving up low wages?

For those who are part of Britain’s casualised workforce Brexit isn’t flawed – quite the opposite

Tesco is offering a £1,000 sign-on bonus for new lorry drivers, but calls for a relaxation of migration are unlikely to be successful.

 Photograph: Maureen McLean/REX/Shutterstock

Larry Elliott
Sun 29 Aug 2021 11.00 BST

The number of job vacancies has topped the 1m level for the first time. Firms are screaming out for staff. Labour shortages abound. Wage growth is accelerating. There are calls from industry lobby groups for the government to ease the pressure by granting more visas for EU workers.

At which point it may be worth taking a second or two to ask a simple question: if labour shortages are driving up the wages of low-paid workers then what is wrong with that?

There may well have been worse decades than the 2010s to be a wage earner but you would have to go back to the 19th century to find one comparable. It took 12 years for average earnings to exceed the level reached before the 2008 financial crisis – a dismal trend that led to entirely appropriate criticism not just of the UK’s economic model but of rising inequality.

If that way of doing things – in which the flipside of over-reliance on unskilled, cheap labour has been persistent underinvestment – is now coming apart then that is a welcome development and not a bad thing. There is something seriously wrong about an economy where more than half the people living below the official poverty line are from working households and where a large chunk of the welfare bill is spent supplementing the incomes of those who do not earn enough to get by.

Employers have only a limited range of options if they find themselves short of staff and it is not possible to call up reinforcements from overseas. They can invest more in labour-saving equipment; they can invest more in training to raise skill levels; or they can pay more in order to attract staff. It is not immediately obvious why any of these should be either impossible or undesirable.

Naturally, companies cannot solve immediate labour shortage issues by ramping up training or buying new kit. Both take time to organise and to have any real impact. That only really leaves the option of paying higher wages, which explains why Tesco is offering a £1,000 sign-on bonus for new lorry drivers.

Employers have expressed doubts whether higher pay will solve labour shortages either, although the basic laws of economics suggest that it will if the incentives are big enough. As things stand, it is the only real card companies have in their hands to play, because they are unlikely to get much joy out of the government with calls for a relaxation of migration rules.

There are a few reasons for this. The first is that there is no guarantee that easing controls would work. As Samuel Tombs, of the economics consultancy Pantheon Macro, points out, there are EU nationals who returned home during the pandemic last year who could come back to Britain if they chose to do so. “Legally, most of these people can return if they wish. Indeed, applications for pre-settled and settled status have exceeded the official number of EU nationals in Britain at the end of 2019,” he says. “Nonetheless, current labour shortages in sectors reliant on migrant labour indicate that enthusiasm to return is low.” That, of course, could change if EU nationals thought it was safe to come back and if the jobs on offer were well enough remunerated.

The second reason is that the government would rather not cope with labour shortages through migration. As the ministers responsible for the economy, it may be thought that the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, and the business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, would be in favour of plugging gaps in the workforce in this way, but that is not the case. Both think there are UK citizens who can be trained to fill the large number of vacancies.

The third reason is political, with the government seeking to entrench its support among low-paid, traditional Labour supporters, who backed Brexit and voted for the Conservatives at the 2019 election. Ministers sense that this section of the workforce is quite happy with a state of affairs where, for the first time in years, there is the possibility of screwing a decent wage rise out of their employer.

There has been much academic work done into the impact of migration on wages in the UK. The evidence is that where workers from overseas complement home-grown workers, they boost earnings. This tends to benefit those at the top end of the income scale.

It is a different story at the other end of the labour market, because wages are held down when migrant workers compete with domestic workers. The competition tends to be greatest in low-paid jobs, such as hospitality and social care.

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That is not quite the end of the story, because increasing the supply of overseas workers also boosts demand. The new employees are also consumers and spend the money they earn like everybody else. The extra demand creates more jobs, although mainly in low-paid sectors.

Against this backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brexit divided the nation in the way it did. If you were in a relatively well-paid job and not at risk of being replaced or undercut by a worker from overseas, you were likely to vote remain. The Polish plumber was cheaper, the Lithuanian nanny was better educated, so what was not to like?

If, on the other hand, you were part of Britain’s casualised workforce, needing two or more part-time jobs to get by, you were much more likely to vote leave, on the grounds that tougher controls on migration would lead to a tighter labour market, which in turn would push up wages.

For those who have nothing to fear from open borders, labour shortages are evidence Brexit is flawed. For those not so fortunate, it is doing what it was supposed to do.

Greece’s deadly wildfires were sparked by 30 years of political failure

The climate emergency and state neglect caused this disaster

Residents of Gouves on the Greek island of Evia watch as wildfires spread towards their homes. 

Photograph: Ayman Oghanna/Getty Images

Yanis Varoufakis
Sun 29 Aug 2021 

After the second world war, Greece’s countryside experienced two debilitating human surges – an exodus of villagers, then a most peculiar human invasion of its fringes. These two surges, aided by a weak state and abetted by the climate crisis, have turned the low-level drama of naturally redemptive forest fires into this summer’s heart-wrenching catastrophe.

After heatwaves of unprecedented longevity, wildfires across the summer months have so far destroyed more than 100,000 hectares (250,000 acres) of ancient pine forests. They have blackened swathes of Attica, scorched parts of ancient Olympia and obliterated north Evia’s magnificent forests – whose rural communities lost their homes, not to mention their livelihoods and landscapes.

To grasp why this is happening, we need to understand the trajectory of urban and rural development in Greece. War and poverty caused a mass exodus from the countryside that began in the late 1940s. Villagers who did not migrate to countries such as Germany, Canada and Australia descended upon Athens. Combined with lax urban planning, this surge of humanity quickly turned the Greater Athens area into a concrete jungle. Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, the same people dreamed of a partial return to the countryside, of a summer home in the shade of some pine trees, close to Athens and, preferably, in some proximity to the sea.

To these petty-bourgeois dwellings, which by the 1980s were strewn all over Attica, the mid-1990s added middle-class suburbia. Villas and shopping malls gradually invaded inland wooded areas bordering Athens, at a speed that reflected the economic growth fuelled with money borrowed from EU banks or provided via EU structural funding.

It is as if we were looking for trouble. Fire is a natural ally of Mediterranean pine forests. It helps clear the ground of old trees and allows young ones to prosper. By helping themselves to the wood daily and by employing tactical burning every spring, villagers once prevented these fires from running amok. Alas, not only did circumstances force the villagers to abandon the forests but, when they and their descendants returned as atomised urbanites to build their summer homes inside the untended forests, they did so bearing none of the traditional communal knowledge or practices.

Europe’s famous north-south economic divide has a counterpart in Greece’s forests. In countries such as Sweden or Germany, forests were intensely commodified. While this spelled the demise of ancient forests, and their replacement with arid plantations, farmland or grazing pastures, at least the countryside was not abandoned the way Greece’s was. In a sense, the sorry state of Greece’s countryside, the swift and unregulated urbanisation, and our feeble and corrupt state are all reflections of the country’s atrophic capitalism.


Two new wildfires in Greece trigger evacuation alerts for villages

Greek governments had been aware of the unsustainability of our model of land use since wildfires began to take revenge on us in the 1970s. Deep down, they knew: we had, collectively, violated nature, and now nature was exacting its long and drawn-out revenge. Convinced, however, that their re-election chances were doomed if they dared tell voters that maybe they should give up on the dream of that cabin in the forest, abandon the plan to suburbanise pine forests, governments chose the easy path: they blamed warm winds, fiendish arsonists, bad luck, even the odd Turkish saboteur.

Collective responsibility was the first casualty of every inferno. On 23 July 2018, at a seaside settlement north of Athens known as Mati, a demonic fireball incinerated 103 people within minutes – including a friend. The cause was obvious to anyone willing to take a disinterested look at the way the dense settlement had been inserted into an ageing pine forest, with narrow lanes offering no realistic chance of escape from the inevitable fire.

Alas, neither the government nor the opposition dared to admit the obvious: that we should never have allowed that settlement to be built. Instead, they yelled at each other endlessly, playing a blame game that disrespected the victims, society, nature.

Even when governments tried their hand at modernising their practices, they made things worse. In 1998, in a bid to professionalise firefighting, the bush firefighting unit (hitherto run by the forestry commission) was disbanded and folded into the urban fire brigade. The resulting economies of scale came at a cost: the termination of the large-scale forest clearing effort that the bush firefighting unit used to undertake every winter and spring.

Following an urban bureaucracy’s natural instinct to favour hi-tech solutions, and to look down upon traditional practices, the unified fire brigade effectively withdrew from the forests and concentrated instead on a strategy of setting up firewalls around built-up areas, while bombarding forest fires from the air – using aircraft that more often than not cannot fly due to adverse conditions.

Then, in early 2010, came the Greek state’s undeclared bankruptcy. Soon, dozens of EU and IMF officials – the infamous troika – would arrive in Athens to impose the world’s harshest austerity programme. Every budget was ruthlessly slashed, including those aimed at citizen and nature protection. Thousands of doctors, nurses and, yes, firefighters were fired. In 2011, the fire brigade’s overall budget was cut by 20%.

In the spring of 2015, a senior fire brigade officer told me that at least another 5,000 firefighters were needed to offer basic protection in the following summer. As Greece’s finance minister at the time, I drew up plans to exact savings from other parts of the budget to rehire a modest number of firefighters and doctors (2,000 altogether). Upon hearing this, the troika immediately condemned me for “backtracking” and issued a clear warning that, if I insisted, the negotiations at the Eurogroup would be terminated – shorthand for announcing the closure of Greece’s banks.

Since then the only real change has been the steady rise of temperatures, courtesy of accelerating climate breakdown. This summer’s firestorm was utterly foreseeable – as was the inability of our state to respond effectively. And the EU? Did it send dozens of staff to micromanage events on the ground, like it had done when imposing austerity? Unlike the assistance Greece received from individual European governments, including post-Brexit Britain’s, the EU institutions were conspicuous by their absence.

The terrifying question is: what next? The spectre of a new threat to Greece’s forests is hanging over the land. It is the current rightwing government’s eagerness to subcontract reforestation to private multinational businesses. In search of a quick euro, they peddle fast-growing, genetically modified trees that have no place in the Mediterranean and are inimical to our flora, fauna and traditional landscape. Unlike the awful impact of the state’s bankruptcy on our people, which one day we hope to reverse, this assault on our native forests will be irreversible.

Yanis Varoufakis is the co-founder of DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement), former finance minister of Greece and author of And the Weak Suffer What They Must?, Europe’s Crisis and America’s Economic Future

Afghanistan collapsed because corruption had hollowed out the state


The Afghan state was held together by theft, extortion and nepotism – at the highest levels

‘One reason the Afghan military collapsed so quickly was because, in part, it did not actually exist.’ Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers at a military base in Herat province. Photograph: Hoshang Hashimi/AFP/Getty Images

Zack Kopplin
Mon 30 Aug 2021 

When the Taliban swept into Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, the militant group faced almost no resistance. The country’s now former president, Ashraf Ghani, fled to the United Arab Emirates, accused by one of his own ambassadors of stealing $169m (£123m) on his way out – and the Afghan military melted away without a fight. President Joe Biden blamed the Afghan people for the Taliban’s conquest. “We gave them every chance,” he said. “We couldn’t provide them the will to fight for their future.”

But blaming Afghan citizens, some of whom may be tortured or killed in the near future, for their country’s collapse is wrong and immoral. The Taliban victory is the product of the corruption and cronyism of elites – especially senior US military personnel and Afghan politicians.

Corruption in Afghanistan has long been an open secret among international observers and its own citizens. In 2020, Transparency International ranked Afghanistan among the top 20 most corrupt countries in the world. Reports of US government funds flowing into the pockets of warlords and criminal syndicates were common, while nepotism marred public trust in successive administrations. If the Afghan people – and its military – refused to fight for the state, it was, in part, because they had no faith in it.

One reason the Afghan military collapsed so quickly was because, in part, it did not actually exist. In July, President Biden claimed that the Afghan army had 300,000 troops, but the Pentagon knew those numbers were inflated. Afghan military commanders had been pocketing extra money allocated for fake soldiers. “The number of ghost personnel may go into the tens of thousands,” said John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction, in a 2017 speech. A West Point report, released in January, estimated the Afghan government had a real fighting force of only 96,000. And by the time Kabul fell, these soldiers were reportedly no longer receiving a salary, or even food.

Not only did the Afghan military exist largely on paper, but through US military contractors, the Pentagon was inadvertently financing the Taliban. A 2009 report in the Nation cited US military officials who estimated that between 10% and 20% of the money from Pentagon logistics contracts in Afghanistan – hundreds of millions of dollars – went to the Taliban. “Afghanistan’s intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, had alerted the American military to the problem,” reported the Nation. But 10 years later, the payments were allegedly still happening. In 2019, a group of families who had lost loved ones to the Taliban sued a different set of military contractors for allegedly paying off the Taliban. (The case is ongoing.)

Another stream of Taliban financing, facilitated by the Pentagon and Afghan elites, was the exploitation of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth.

In April, I co-authored an investigation for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) that implicated the Afghan president and his family in mining corruption, along with well-connected US military contractors.

An estimated $1tn worth of minerals lies buried under the country’s surface. Before the Taliban takeover, Afghan law prohibited companies from buying minerals from small unregistered mines. One reason for this is because many of these mines were controlled by the Taliban, other terrorist groups, or local warlords. Buying from these mines meant financing the enemy. But our reporting found that there was one company that managed to get an exception to this rule, apparently with the approval of the office of President Ghani.

His office signed off on extralegal rights for the Afghan subsidiary of a US military contractor, SOS International (SOSi), to acquire chromite, a valuable component in stainless steel, from unlicensed mines in six Afghan provinces. The company built a factory outside Kabul and planned to crush and export the chromite.

SOSi is deeply tied to the American military and intelligence services. The company recruited heavily from the office of the former CIA director and top American commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, securing significant political heft in the process. “It’s an open secret that SOSi is essentially a front for the [US Department of Defense],” one high-ranking Afghan official told us.

But SOSi had an even more important connection. Our OCCRP investigation revealed that the president’s brother, Hashmat Ghani, owned 20% of SOSi’s subsidiary, according to confidential documents leaked from an Emirati secrecy haven.

Beyond any mineral money flowing to the Taliban, this deal reflects the broader reasons Afghanistan collapsed. Corruption hollowed out state institutions and left Afghan citizens unwilling to fight for a government that, just like the Taliban, abused its own people, although in this case through theft, extortion and nepotism rather than outright violence and repression.

But the SOSi deal does not just implicate the highest levels of the country’s government, but powerful Americans and US companies too.

The Afghan state and army was in large part a facade, held up only by the American occupation, and it’s no surprise that Afghans were unwilling to fight and die for it any longer. But its failure isn’t on them. Afghanistan fell because after looting all they could from the country, American and Afghan elites gave up and fled, leaving the Afghan people behind. Who would fight for a broken system?

Zack Kopplin is an investigator at the Government Accountability Project

Who’s to blame for the Afghanistan chaos? Remember the war’s cheerleaders

Today the media are looking for scapegoats, but 20 years ago they helped facilitate the disastrous intervention

‘Cheerleading for the war in Afghanistan was almost universal, and dissent was treated as intolerable.’ A US marine with evacuees at Kabul airport. 

Photograph: U.S. Central Command Public Affairs vis Getty Images

George Monbiot

Wed 25 Aug 2021 

Everyone is to blame for the catastrophe in Afghanistan, except the people who started it. Yes, Joe Biden screwed up by rushing out so chaotically. Yes, Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab failed to make adequate and timely provisions for the evacuation of vulnerable people. But there is a frantic determination in the media to ensure that none of the blame is attached to those who began this open-ended war without realistic aims or an exit plan, then waged it with little concern for the lives and rights of the Afghan people: the then US president, George W Bush, the British prime minister Tony Blair and their entourages.

Indeed, Blair’s self-exoneration and transfer of blame to Biden last weekend was front-page news, while those who opposed his disastrous war 20 years ago remain cancelled across most of the media. Why? Because to acknowledge the mistakes of the men who prosecuted this war would be to expose the media’s role in facilitating it.

The main lesson from Afghanistan is that the ‘war on terror’ does not work
Mary Kaldor

Any fair reckoning of what went wrong in Afghanistan, Iraq and the other nations swept up in the “war on terror” should include the disastrous performance of the media. Cheerleading for the war in Afghanistan was almost universal, and dissent was treated as intolerable. After the Northern Alliance stormed into Kabul, torturing and castrating its prisoners, raping women and children, the Telegraph urged us to “just rejoice, rejoice”, while the Sun ran a two-page editorial entitled “Shame of the traitors: wrong, wrong, wrong … the fools who said Allies faced disaster”. In the Guardian, Christopher Hitchens, a convert to US hegemony and war, marked the solemnity of the occasion with the words: “Well, ha ha ha, and yah, boo. It was … obvious that defeat was impossible.

The Taliban will soon be history.”

The few journalists and public figures who dissented were added to the Telegraph’s daily list of “Osama bin Laden’s useful idiots”, accused of being “anti-American” and “pro-terrorism”, mocked, vilified and de-platformed almost everywhere. In the Independent, David Aaronovitch claimed that if you opposed the ongoing war, you were “indulging yourself in a cosmic whinge”.

Everyone I know in the US and the UK who was attacked in the media for opposing the war received death threats. Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress who voted against granting the Bush government an open licence to use military force, needed round-the-clock bodyguards. Amid this McCarthyite fervour, peace campaigners such as Women in Black were listed as “potential terrorists” by the FBI. The then US secretary of state, Colin Powell, sought to persuade the emir of Qatar to censor Al Jazeera, one of the few outlets that consistently challenged the rush to war. After he failed, the US bombed Al Jazeera’s office in Kabul.

The broadcast media were almost exclusively reserved for those who supported the adventure. The same thing happened before and during the invasion of Iraq, when the war’s opponents received only 2% of BBC airtime on the subject. Attempts to challenge the lies that justified the invasion – such as Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and his supposed refusal to negotiate – were drowned in a surge of patriotic excitement.

So why is so much of the media so bloodthirsty? Why do they love bombs and bullets so much, and diplomacy so little? Why do they take such evident delight in striking a pose atop a heap of bodies, before quietly shuffling away when things go wrong?

An obvious answer is the old adage that “if it bleeds it leads”, so there’s an inbuilt demand for blood. I remember as if it were yesterday the moment I began to hate the industry I work for. In 1987, I was producing a current affairs programme for the BBC World Service. It was a slow news day, and none of the stories gave us a strong lead for the programme. Ten minutes before transmission, the studio door flew open and the editor strode in. He clapped his hands and shouted: “Great! 110 dead in Sri Lanka!” News is spectacle, and nothing delivers spectacle like war.

Another factor in the UK is a continued failure to come to terms with our colonial history. For centuries the interests of the nation have been conflated with the interests of the rich, while the interests of the rich depended to a remarkable degree on colonial loot and the military adventures that supplied it. Supporting overseas wars, however disastrous, became a patriotic duty.

For all the current breastbeating about the catastrophic defeat in Afghanistan, nothing has been learned. The media still regale us with comforting lies about the war and occupation. They airbrush the drone strikes in which civilians were massacred and the corruption permitted and encouraged by the occupying forces. They seek to retrofit justifications to the decision to go to war, chief among them securing the rights of women.

But this issue, crucial as it was and remains, didn’t feature among the original war aims. Nor, for that matter, did overthrowing the Taliban. Bush’s presidency was secured, and his wars promoted, by American ultra-conservative religious fundamentalists who had more in common with the Taliban than with the brave women seeking liberation. In 2001, the newspapers now backcasting themselves as champions of human rights mocked and impeded women at every opportunity. The Sun was running photos of topless teenagers on Page 3; the Daily Mail ruined women’s lives with its Sidebar of Shame; extreme sexism, body shaming and attacks on feminism were endemic.

Those of us who argued against the war possessed no prophetic powers. I asked the following questions in the Guardian not because I had any special information or insight, but because they were bleeding obvious. “At what point do we stop fighting? At what point does withdrawal become either honourable or responsible? Having once engaged its forces, are we then obliged to reduce Afghanistan to a permanent protectorate? Or will we jettison responsibility as soon as military power becomes impossible to sustain?” But even asking such things puts you beyond the pale of acceptable opinion.

You can get away with a lot in the media, but not, in most outlets, with opposing a war waged by your own nation – unless your reasons are solely practical. If your motives are humanitarian, you are marked from that point on as a fanatic. Those who make their arguments with bombs and missiles are “moderates” and “centrists”; those who oppose them with words are “extremists”. The inconvenient fact that the “extremists” were right and the “centrists” were wrong is today being strenuously forgotten.


George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Not open for humans’: Covid changes east Asia’s Ghost Month but free spirits remain

Pilgrims transport water lanterns during the Hungry Ghost Festival in Keelung, Taiwan. Photograph: Billy HC Kwok/Getty Images


Households prepare offerings in prayer for their ancestors and gods, but many temples are closed

Helen Davidson and Chi Hui Lin in Keelung, Taiwan
@heldavidson
Mon 30 Aug 2021 

On the 15th day of Ghost Month, when the gates to hell are believed to open and spirits walk the earth, Taoist masters are invited to the Zhupu Altar, a massive temple built on a hillside in Keelung, northern Taiwan. The masters hold a ceremony to assist the spirits of those who died without family or friends to pray for them, known as “hungry ghosts” but commonly referred to as good brothers and sisters to avoid offence.

Ghost Month is marked across east Asia, including Hong Kong, southern China, Indonesia and Malaysia. In Taiwan, Keelung is a significant site, with a history of violent disputes during the Qing dynasty, and it hosts the island’s biggest events. The ceremonies often draw tens of thousands of onlookers from afar, but these are Covid times.

After a 15-minute hike to the gate, visitors are greeted with barriers blocking the entrance and police asking cars to leave. An officer says: “This year the ceremony is not open for humans!”


Taiwan hits zero Covid cases for first time since outbreak in May

Asked who is inside, he replies: “They are the staff and the good brothers”.

Across the world, religions that have built their observance around mass gatherings have had to rewrite traditions to avoid becoming superspreader events.

The pandemic has brought extra significance to traditions revering those passed. Taiwan lost more than 800 people in the last three months, with untold more among the large diaspora community in countries hit far harder by the virus.

“One of the really interesting aspects of thinking about ghosts and ghostliness this past year and a half for me has been the two temporalities of being in the US with family back in Taiwan,” said Eileen Chengyin Chow, a professor in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, who lives between the US and Taiwan, which recorded no cases for more than 250 days last year.

“While I thoroughly thrilled at being in a space that felt safe and untouched and life seemed to go on as usual, it felt unaccountably sad, actually. Because the US at that point had been many, many months of grief and absence.”

Pilgrims burn and release a water lantern into the sea during the Hungry Ghost Festival in Keelung, Taiwan. The lanterns are placed in the water and lit on fire guiding spirits to reincarnation. 

Photograph: Billy HC Kwok/Getty Images

Taiwan is coming to the end of its worst Covid-19 outbreak but many – including those at the Keelung temples - are not ready yet. On Sunday, Zhupu Altar put on a lightshow, lit firecrackers, and prayed for the gods, the ghosts, and an end to the pandemic, but those still mortal had to watch online.

In Taoist, Buddhist and east Asian folklore, Ghost Month refers to the seventh month of the lunar calendar when the gates of the underworld open, and spirits are freed to search for food, or perhaps for innocent lives who can take their place and allow them to move on.

Across Taiwan, households prepared offerings of food, alcohol, candles, flowers, washbowls and towels, in prayer for their ancestors and gods, and to placate the hungry ghosts. The streets filled will smoke as they burned paper money – gold for the gods and silver for the ghosts – in small metal drums.

There are lists of taboos: don’t swim at night just in case drowned ghosts drag you under the water, don’t whistle or hang your laundry at night, don’t turn around to someone calling your name. It’s also a bad month to buy a new car or house, but many will tell you that if you’re not superstitious it’s a great time to get a deal.

The Hungry Ghost Festival runs from 10 August to 7 September with traditional operas, puppet shows and concerts organised by believers to appease roaming spirits. Photograph: Pichi Chuang/Reuters

The traditions adapt to the times – in Singapore, residents reported people burning paper vaccines for their ancestors. In Taiwan, far more people seemed to be ignoring the taboo against swimming, perhaps because a summer-long Covid ban on swimming venues had only just lifted.

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“The last generation believes in those taboos but not much anymore today,” Zhang Ru Song, the head of Keelung’s Qingan Temple, says. “The last generation is more sensitive to the old and traditional god and ghosts concepts. Nowadays, we only remind each other to try to avoid water activities.”

Generally, people use this time to remember their ancestors and remember where did they come from, Zhang says. “And help those ghosts who have no one to pray to them, in order to keep everyone safe.”

Some suspicions are still common among younger generations. A recent survey of Taiwan office workers found a third of respondents avoid working overtime during Ghost Month. The poll found 40% of office workers had reported strange encounters in the late hours. More than 70% reported “eerie sounds” from office corners, while others said they heard footsteps, saw windows open on their own and elevators arrive on their floor without being called, or heard toilets flushing in an empty bathroom.

In Keelung, Zhang says there were fewer households praying this year. The events were much simpler with communities sending representatives to participate on their behalf, to reduce the Covid risk.

“We still kept the tradition and held the events, and their sincere hearts were still praying the same.”

Over-50s want climate crisis addressed ‘even if it leads to high prices’

Research finds almost two-thirds of older people want UK government to move faster on green initiatives

Separate research suggests the average cost of greening a home, such as installing solar panels, is £8,100 but rises to £25,800 for homes with F and G energy efficiency ratings. Photograph: Clynt Garnham Renewable Energy/Alamy


Kalyeena Makortoff
@kalyeena
Mon 30 Aug 2021

The majority of over-50s believe the UK government should be doing more to address the climate crisis, even if it leads to higher prices, a study has found.

A survey of more than 500 people aged 50 and over found that almost two-thirds want ministers to move faster on climate initiatives, regardless of whether it meant products and services would be more expensive over time, or more difficult to access.

Stuart Lewis, the founder of Rest Less, which conducted the study, said: “Our research shows that midlifers feel a huge sense of responsibility for the health of the planet and their role in reducing climate change.”

Rest Less, a website that supports and provides advice to older people, also found that only a minority of older people said they were unconcerned about the climate crisis, challenging assumptions about a generational divide on environmental issues.

More than two in three people polled said they had bought fewer clothes to cut down on waste in recent years, while half reduced their vehicle use and consumed less meat and dairy. One in five said they only bought seasonal food, while half said they had reduced home energy use.

“The vast majority of midlifers we surveyed are already making changes to their own habits, from recycling more to consuming less, changing their travel habits, with some even giving up their car altogether,” Lewis said.

However, the findings come as other research showed older homeowners were unlikely to receive significant financial benefits from greening their properties.

The government is aiming to upgrade as many homes as possible to an average energy efficiency rating of C by 2035. But the average cost of improvements – which could mean insulating water tanks and lofts, or installing solar panels and heat pumps – can be much higher for older people because they tend to own older and less energy efficient homes.

A study by Nationwide building society found the cost of improvements was about £8,100 on average, but rose to £25,800 for homes with a F or G energy efficiency rating.

The average annual savings of greening a home are estimated at about £1,780 a year, meaning owners of older properties would only reap financial benefits after 14 years.

“This suggests a need for further incentives to help decarbonise homes,” said Andrew Harvey, Nationwide’s senior economist.

Meanwhile, better energy performance certificates (EPCs) are having a limited impact on house prices. While the worst performing homes were valued 3.5% less than the average home, the greenest only attracted a premium of about 1.7%, Nationwide said.

The financial implications could “disincentivise” older property owners from taking action, Harvey said. “However, the value that people attach to energy efficiency is likely to change over time, especially if the government takes measures to incentivise greater energy efficiency in future to help ensure the UK meets its climate change obligations.”

Abortion will effectively be banned in Texas if ‘sue thy neighbor’ law is allowed to take effect

Federal court will soon rule on new law allowing anyone to sue abortion providers or people who help women get abortions

Thousands of protesters rallied in May against the restrictive new abortion law in Austin, the state capital.

 Photograph: Sergio Flores/Getty Images

Jessica Glenza
@JessicaGlenza
Mon 30 Aug 2021

Texas could become the first state in decades to ban most abortions, if a federal court allows a law called SB8 to take effect on 1 September.

SB8 effectively puts a $10,000 “bounty” on the head of abortion providers and anyone else who helps a woman obtain an abortion past roughly six weeks’ gestation, by allowing private citizens to sue those who “aid and abet” women in exercising this constitutional right.


Opponents have warned the law could also provide a backdoor to attack other controversial civil rights, such as gun rights or free speech.

“The law is really unprecedented in the sense that it bans abortion, but then has no government criminal penalties to enforce the law,” said Brigitte Amiri, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project, and an attorney representing a group of plaintiffs who have sued to stop the law from going into effect.

“It authorizes anyone in the country to file a lawsuit against any abortion provider, or anyone who helps someone get an abortion, and seek a penalty of that person of at least $10,000 per abortion,” said Amiri.

Abortion became legal across the United States following the 1973 supreme court decision Roe v Wade. The decision provided women a constitutional right to abortion up to the point a fetus can survive outside the womb, generally around 24 weeks. A full-term pregnancy is 39 weeks.


Planned Parenthood files lawsuit against Texas’s extreme abortion ban

However, that right has been under assault by state legislators for decades, and incursions on abortion rights became particularly aggressive after Tea Party Republicans helped win control of state legislatures in 2011.

In addition to a $10,000 penalty, SB8 would saddle violators of the law with their opponents’ attorneys fees. It provides no such relief for defendants, even if they win. The result would be crushing legal expenses and duplicative lawsuits that would in effect end abortion access in Texas.

Proponents of the law – including a self-described virgin and traveling preacher, and a well-heeled former Texas solicitor general – have already found success in the strategy. In Lubbock, Texas, a similar law was passed via referendum and has forced a Planned Parenthood in the city of 253,000 to stop providing abortions while it fights the case in federal court.

The new law, called “heinous” and the “sue thy neighbor” law by opponents, is part of a three-prong strategy to end abortion in Texas, including a separate ban on the most common surgical abortion procedure after 15 weeks’ gestation, and a third campaign to outlaw medication abortion after seven weeks’ gestation.

“Our creator endowed us with the right to life and yet millions of children lose their right to life every year because of abortion,” Greg Abbott, Texas’s Republican governor, said at a signing ceremony, the Texas Tribune reported in May. Abbott had in effect banned abortion for one month in April 2020 by arguing it was not “immediately medically necessary” because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Lawyers representing 20 abortion providers are hopeful they will prevail. However, a reprieve in the form of an injunction could come just hours before the law goes into effect, and any delay holds the potential to throw abortion access in Texas into chaos.

“It’s astounding, because what it is doing is deputizing private citizens to become prosecutors in a way,” said Nina Ginsberg, a criminal defense attorney who recently examined how states have built a criminal framework to prosecute abortion should Roe v Wade be overturned, in a report for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Should SB8 succeed, it would ban about 85% of abortions, since most women do not know they are pregnant at six weeks. Although proponents describe SB8 as a “fetal heartbeat” bill, the term can be misleading because, though embryos have cardiac activity at this stage, they do not have functioning hearts.

SB8’s provisions, which allow anyone, anywhere, unconnected to an event to sue, make it highly unusual both as an abortion law and in terms of civil litigation broadly. It would essentially upend the way civil courts consider “standing”, the concept that people must be sued where they live or work and by plaintiffs who have been harmed in some way.

The law is so broad and unconventional that more than 370 Texas lawyers, former judges, legal professors and local officials signed an open letter opposing it.

The Rev Daniel C Kanter, senior minister at First Unitarian church in Dallas, said he became a plaintiff in the suit against the law because outlawing abortion allows “justice and compassion” to be “overrun by ideological issues” – but also because he could be sued under its provisions, limiting his ability to advise pregnant women on options to terminate a pregnancy.

“This is an incredibly dangerous thing, especially around religious liberty,” said Kanter.

Dozens of tiny towns across Texas and Nebraska have adopted measures similar to Texas’s SB8, calling themselves “sanctuary cities for the unborn”. However, those ordinances have had little more than a chilling effect on women, since abortion providers rarely operate in such rural locations.

A hearing on Monday on whether the court should block the law is expected to last several hours with witness testimony. A decision is expected on Tuesday, and any decision is expected to be appealed to the conservative fifth circuit court of appeals.

Cape Cod: eight great white sharks seen feeding on humpback whale carcass

Expert marvels at ‘biggest smorgasbord a shark could dream of’ Researchers monitor unusual humpback mortality event

A great white shark. Eight were seen around the whale carcass off Cape Cod. 

Photograph: Stephen Frink/Getty Images

Richard Luscombe
@richlusc
Mon 30 Aug 2021

For those aboard a recent whale watching cruise off Cape Cod, the decomposing carcass of a year-old humpback calf floating in the waters of the Stellwagen Bank national marine sanctuary made for a heartbreaking sight.


Experience: I was attacked by two sharks at once

But it turned into a camera-ready moment, and a rare bonanza for shark researchers, when two large great whites showed up and started feasting on the remains.

A short video clip captured by the crew of Captain John Boats and posted to Facebook shows the apex predators, one estimated to be at least 18ft, devouring what one whale expert, Peter Corkeron of the New England Aquarium, called “the biggest smorgasbord a shark could ever dream of”

“People on board were pretty excited,” boat captain John Goggin told the Boston Herald. “There was a lot of yelling: ‘Oh my God! Wow!’”

Over the next two days, eight great whites showed up along with blue sharks and numerous species of seabird, according to researchers funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).

In partnership with the Massachusetts division of marine fisheries, researchers were able to tag five great whites. Six of those which turned up to feed were already known to the researchers. The two making their first appearances were adult females, the experts said.

The Noaa-funded group posted to Facebook its own extraordinary two-minute video of the mid-August encounter, showing a packed tourist boat in the background. The carcass, they said, would provide nourishment to marine creatures for months.

The researchers’ good fortune extended to the whale scientists of the Center for Coastal Studies, a nonprofit from Provincetown, Massachusetts, which identified the humpback as an unnamed 2020-born male calf of an adult whale called Venom.

“This is an individual who was well known to CCS scientists, as well as whale watchers off the coast of Massachusetts,” the group said in a Facebook update.

“The cause of his death is not known at this time. While it is sad to learn that an individual has died, documenting these events is essential for long-term population studies. These efforts are also critical to understand the ongoing humpback whale unusual mortality event along the Atlantic coast.”

The statement ended with a warning: “Remember to keep your distance from whale carcasses, whether at sea or on land. Conditions can be more dangerous than they appear, especially if predators are in the area.”

 

Alberta Human Rights Commission dismisses Edmonton mask complaints

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Two men argued their disability prevented them from wearing masks inside stores

Natasha Riebe · CBC News · Posted: Aug 30, 2021 6:00 AM MT | Last Updated: 4 hours ago

Shoppers are seen at a Costco in Toronto on Nov. 24, 2020. A man saying a disability exempted him from wearing a mask was removed by police from a Costco Warehouse in Edmonton in November 2020. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)

The Alberta Human Rights Commission has dismissed a pair of complaints filed by two men who say they were discriminated against when they didn't wear masks inside retail stores last fall.

One incident took place at a Costco store last November and the other at a Peoples Jewellers store in October. 

The decisions were released Aug. 16, 2021, signed by Michael Gottheil, chief of the commission and tribunals.

In both cases, Gottheil found the companies were reasonable in insisting customers and employees wear masks to protect public health during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

On Nov. 17, 2020, Peter Szeles went into a Costco in Edmonton and told staff he had a disability that exempted him from wearing a face mask.

• Vaccination requirements aren't discrimination, head of Canadian Museum for Human Rights says

An employee suggested Szeles could wear a face shield instead, but he refused. Szeles argued that a face shield was stigmatizing, was meant to single him out as a person with a disability and would subject him to humiliation. 

An altercation ensued, the police were called over and Szeles was removed from the store, the written decision says. 

A clip of the interaction is also posted on Szeles's Facebook page. The video shows Szeles on his knees, refusing to stand up and leave the store, with two officers carrying him out and putting him in a police van.

st 2021. 1:53

Costco submitted several arguments in response to Szeles's complaint, including that it provided appropriate alternatives, like the option to wear a face shield in the store and various online shopping and home delivery options. 

In the second case, James Beaudin was blocked from entering a Peoples Jewellers store in Edmonton. He said health reasons prevented him from wearing a mask. 

The store staff pointed out alternatives, including phone and online shopping, with free delivery or curb-side pickup. Beaudin objected, but the store staff was firm, and he was told to leave, the written decision says.

Balance of rights

Jessica Eisen, a University of Alberta law professor specializing in human rights, said the commission's decisions are understandable based on the Alberta Human Rights Act. 

According to the decisions, the companies showed they were responding in good faith to the seriousness of the pandemic, she said. 

"They presented lots of evidence to the effect that there was a really good reason for these policies — they were needed to protect their employees and to protect the other customers in the stores," she said. 

Eisen said human rights laws are based on balance. 

"I think a lot of people are under the misconception that human rights acts and codes generally protect people's right to do whatever they want in all circumstances," Eisen said. "In fact, human rights laws are designed to protect fundamental interests in a range of circumstances." 

Discrimination on the basis of race, religion and disability is covered in human rights legislation, but in these cases, businesses showed they were trying to do the right thing in protecting people's health while providing options to customers, she said. 

• Companies are implementing vaccine mandates. Can employees reject them?
• Alberta Health Services fields 4,000 complaints about COVID-19 infractions

The two decisions are among more than 100 complaints the Alberta Human Rights Commission has received since March 2020 related to mandatory masks and vaccines. Cam Stewart, a spokesperson with the HRC, said the commission has accepted them as formal complaints and is in the process of reviewing them. 

Most complaints are resolved in conciliation, investigation or at the director's office before going to a tribunal hearing, he noted.

While investigators are going through the complaints process, the details of the complaints are confidential, Stewart said. 

Drought shrinks Canada's wheat crop to 14-year low, shrivels canola harvest

Rod Nickel
Reuters

Staff
Monday, August 30, 2021 9:23AM EDT

RELATED IMAGES


Durum wheat is shown in a field at Farmer and Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan President Todd Lewis’s farm near Gray, Sask., on Thursday, July 29, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Kayle Neis

WINNIPEG -- Drought has shriveled Canada's wheat crop to its smallest in 14 years, and its canola harvest to a nine-year low, a government report showed on Monday.

Parched soils and record-hot temperatures in Canada's western crop belt sharply reduced farm yields of one of the world's biggest wheat-exporting countries and largest canola-growing nation. The drought has forced millers and bakers to pay more for spring wheat, and drove canola prices to record highs.

Statistics Canada, in this year's first report on crop production, estimated the all-wheat harvest at 22.9 million tonnes, down 35 per cent from last year and slightly larger than the average trade expectation of 22.6 million tonnes. Canola production looked set to reach 14.7 million tonnes, down 24 per cent from last year, and also larger than the average trade forecast of 14.1 million tonnes.

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"I think buyers around the world have already made major shifts," said Brian Voth, president of IntelliFARM, a farmer advisory service. "A lot of rationing has to happen."

Canola importers may turn to Ukraine, western Europe and Australia for substitutes, while U.S. mills that depend on Canadian wheat to produce flour may need to blend in wheat from other countries, Voth said.

Harvests are small, but not as tiny as some expected, Voth said, adding that some of his farmer clients in Manitoba produced better yields than they expected.

ICE Canada November canola futures were little changed after the report, trading up 0.4 per cent. Canola, a cousin of rapeseed, is used largely to produce vegetable oil.

Minneapolis spring wheat futures also traded slightly higher.

Statscan used satellite imagery and agro-climatic data up to July 31 for the report. It will provide updated crop estimates on Sept. 14.

(Reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg; Editing by Susan Fenton)