Arbitrator: Official wrongly fired in Flint water scandal


- In this Feb. 5, 2018, file photo, defendant Liane Shekter Smith listens during a preliminary examination in the cases of four defendants, all former or current officials from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, in Flint, Mich. Shekter Smith, the only Michigan official fired in the Flint water disaster, was likely a “public scapegoat” who lost her job because of politics, an arbitrator said in ordering $191,880 in back pay and other compensation. (Jake May/The Flint Journal via AP, File)


DETROIT (AP) — The only Michigan official fired in the Flint water catastrophe likely was a “public scapegoat” who lost her job because of politics, an arbitrator said in ordering $191,880 in back pay and other compensation.

It’s a remarkable victory for Liane Shekter Smith, who served as head of the state’s drinking water office when Flint’s water system was contaminated with lead. She was removed and then fired in 2016 and subsequently faced criminal charges in one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.

Shekter Smith was dismissed while engineers in her department — the “boots on the ground” in Flint — were suspended with pay before ultimately returning to work, the arbitrator said in a 22-page report obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press.

Sheldon Stark said the state had failed to offer enough evidence to justify the firing of Shekter Smith, who had an “exemplary” record in government.

The arbitrator noted that Keith Creagh, director of the Department of Environmental Quality, fired Shekter Smith without even speaking to her about Flint or waiting for a state police investigation that exonerated her.

“No one ever asked (Shekter Smith) for her story,” Stark said.

“Politics and the need for a public scapegoat helps explain why Shekter Smith might have been terminated when so many others who were directly involved and actually did make” decisions in Flint were not fired, Stark said in his September report.

He ordered $166,053 in lost wages before a likely spring 2017 retirement and $25,827 in 401(k) retirement compensation. The state agency, which now is known as the Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy, declined to comment on the arbitrator’s decision but said an appeal was being considered.

A message seeking comment was left for Shekter Smith’s attorney.

“I’m dumbfounded. She was their boss,” said LeeAnne Walters, a Flint resident who is credited with exposing the lead contamination. “The system just spit in the face of every resident who died or was harmed. She should not be compensated for harming people.”

Walters took her concerns to Shekter Smith in 2015 but felt “an air of untouchability.”

The department defended the firing in a legal brief.

“Part of accepting a high-level position in government is also to accept responsibility for oneself and for the actions of those one supervises and accountability for results,” the agency told the arbitrator.

In 2014-15, Flint’s water was pulled from the Flint River, a money-saving decision that was made by state-appointed managers who were running the ailing city. The highly corrosive water wasn’t properly treated before it flowed through aging pipes to roughly 100,000 residents, causing lead to leach from old pipes.

The disaster in majority-Black Flint has been described as environmental racism. In 2016, a task force appointed by then-Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, said his environmental agency misapplied lead-and-copper rules and “caused this crisis to happen.”

The arbitrator’s report reveals behind-the-scenes moves by Snyder’s influential fix-it man, Rich Baird, who asked Creagh to take control of the department after a director quit amid the scandal.

Creagh testified that Baird “encouraged Shekter Smith’s termination.”

Richard Benzie, who supervised the state engineers making key decisions in Flint, was not disciplined but “promoted and given more responsibility!” the arbitrator said in highlighting different treatment.

After her discharge, Shekter Smith was charged with misconduct in office and neglect of duty, and put on notice that an involuntary manslaughter case would be pursued because bacteria in the water were linked to a fatal outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease.

But charges were dropped in 2019 in exchange for a no-contest plea to an obscure misdemeanor. The case was erased after a year, under a deal with special prosecutor Todd Flood.

Flint’s water quality greatly improved after it returned to a regional water supplier and replaced thousands of lead or steel service lines. Meanwhile, nine people, including Snyder and Baird, were charged with crimes in January after a new investigation. Their cases are pending.

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Follow Ed White at http://twitter.com/edwritez

Chapelle special spurs Netflix walkout; ‘Trans lives matter’

By ALEX VEIGA and LYNN ELBER

yesterday

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People protest outside the Netflix building on Vine Street in the Hollywood section of Los Angeles, Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2021. Critics and supporters of Dave Chappelle's Netflix special and its anti-transgender comments gathered outside the company's offices Wednesday. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Netflix employees who walked out Wednesday in protest of Dave Chappelle’s special and its anti-transgender comments were joined by allies who chanted “Trans lives matter,” getting pushback from counterprotesters who also showed up.

A pre-noon rally at a Netflix office-studio complex drew about 100 people, most on the side of an estimated 30 workers at the streaming giant that joined in afterward. Some were willing to identify themselves as Netflix employees, but all declined to provide their names.

Joey Soloway, creator of the groundbreaking Emmy-winning comedy “Transparent,” was among the speakers at the rally.

Chappelle’s decision to share “his outrage as comedic humiliation in front of thousands of people, and then broadcasting it to hundreds of millions of people is infinitely amplified gender violence,” they said.

“I want trans representation on the Netflix board, this (expletive) week,” the writer-director said.

Ashlee Marie Preston, an activist and the event’s organizer, addressed the rally and spoke to The Associated Press afterward. She said that calling out Chappelle for his remarks wasn’t enough.

“It was important to shift the focus to the people that sign the checks, because Dave Chappelle doesn’t sign checks, Netflix does,” Preston said. “If we have companies like Netflix who aren’t listening to their employees, who are forcing their employees to participate in their own oppression, that’s unacceptable.”

“We’re here to keep people accountable. We’re not going anywhere,” she said, adding that efforts are underway to start a dialogue with Netflix executives.

There were a few moments of shoving and pushing among the competing demonstrators, but the conflict was mostly limited to a war of words.

Leia Figueroa, a student from Los Angeles, doesn’t work at Netflix but said she wanted to back the walkout. While the streaming service offers positive fare for the LGBTQ community, she said, it’s having it both ways by also offering a show like Chappelle’s that includes disparaging comments about trans women.

If Netflix wants to be “an apolitical platform then they should be that,” Figueroa said. “But they’re saying things like ‘Black lives matter’ and ‘We don’t stand for transphobia.’ If you say things like that, then you have to be vetting all of your content to reflect your values.”

As she spoke, a protestor shouted, “We like jokes.”

“I like funny jokes, and transphobia is not a joke,” Figueroa replied.

Belissa Cohen, a former journalist, said she was on hand to “support Netflix’s decision not to pull” the special.

“We want to show that there isn’t unanimous support about transgender ideology when it comes to Netflix viewers,” Cohen said.

She was among about a dozen people who carried placards reading “Free speech is a right” and “Truth is not transphobic.” Opposite them were those carrying signs that included “Black Trans Lives Matter” and “Transphobia is not Funny.”

Elliot Page, who stars in Netflix’s “The Umbrella Academy” and is transgender, tweeted that he stands with the trans, nonbinary and people of color working at Netflix who are “fighting for more and better trans stories and a more inclusive workplace.”

Team Trans(asterisk), which identifies itself as supporting “trans people working at Netflix trying to build a better world for our community,” posted what it called a list of “asks” being made of Netflix by trans and nonbinary workers and allies at the company.

They are calling on the company to “repair” its relationships with staff and the audience with changes involving the hiring of trans executives and increased spending on trans and nonbinary creators and projects.

“Harm reduction” is another demand, which according to the list includes acknowledgment of what it called Netflix’s “responsibility for this harm from transphobic content, and in particular harm to the Black trans community.”

It also called for disclaimers to flag content that includes “transphobic language, misogyny, homophobia” and hate speech.

In a statement, the media watchdog group GLAAD said it salutes the Netflix’s employees, allies and LGBTQ and Black advocates “calling for accountability and change within Netflix and in the entertainment industry as a whole.”

The employees who walked out uniformly referred reporters to the GLAAD statement.

Netflix ran into a buzz-saw of criticism not only with the special but in how internal memos responded to employees’ concerns, including co-CEO Ted Sarandos’ assertion that “content on screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm.”

Sarandos also wrote that Netflix doesn’t allow titles that are “designed to incite hate or violence, and we don’t believe ‘The Closer’ crosses that line.”

In interviews Tuesday, Sarandos said he failed to recognize that “a group of our employees was really hurting,” as he told The Wall Street Journal, and that his comment about the effect of TV on viewers was an oversimplification.

Terra Field, who identifies herself on Twitter as a senior software engineer at Netflix and as trans, posted tweets critical of Chappelle’s special immediately after it aired and the comments were widely shared.

In her posts, Field said the comic was being criticized not because his remarks are offensive but for the harm they do to the trans community, especially Black women. Field included a list of trans and nonbinary men and women of color who she said had been killed, adding in each case that the victim “is not offended.”

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Across Africa, major churches strongly oppose LGBTQ rights

THROUGH IMPRISONMENT AND LYNCHING

By KWASI GYAMFI ASIEDU, CHINEDU ASADU, RODNEY MUHUMUZA and MOGOMOTSI MAGOME

PHOTO ESSAY 1 of 9

Associate Pastor Caroline Omolo stands for a portrait at the Cosmopolitan Affirming Community church, which serves a predominantly LGBTQ congregation, in Nairobi, Kenya Monday, Oct. 11, 2021. “They have always organized a group to maybe silence us or make the church disappear,” Omolo says. “They don’t want it to appear anywhere.” (AP Photo/Brian Inganga)

In Ghana, home to a diverse array of religions, leaders of major churches have united in denouncing homosexuality as a “perversion” and endorsing legislation that would, if enacted, impose some of the harshest anti-LGBTQ policies in Africa.

In Nigeria, the umbrella body for Christian churches depicts same-sex relationships as an evil meriting the lengthy prison sentences prescribed under existing law.

And in several African countries, bishops aligned with the worldwide United Methodist Church are preparing to join an in-the-works breakaway denomination so they can continue their practice of refusing to recognize same-sex marriage or ordain LGBTQ clergy.

In the United States, Western Europe and various other regions, some prominent Protestant churches have advocated for LGBTQ inclusion. With only a few exceptions, this hasn’t happened in Africa, where Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and Lutheran leaders are among those opposing such inclusion.

“The mainstream churches — all of them — they actually are totally against it,” said Caroline Omolo, associate pastor at the Cosmopolitan Affirming Community in Nairobi, Kenya. It is a rare example of a church in Africa serving a predominantly LGBTQ congregation.

“They have always organized a group to maybe silence us or make the church disappear,” Omolo said. “They don’t want it to appear anywhere.”

Ghana, generally considered more respectful of human rights than most African countries, now faces scrutiny due to a bill in Parliament that would impose prison sentences ranging from three to 10 years for people identifying as LGBTQ or supporting that community. The bill has been denounced by human rights activists even as Ghanaian religious leaders rally behind it.

“Their role in perpetuating queerphobia and transphobia is clear and it’s very troubling and dangerous,” said Abena Hutchful, a Ghanaian who identifies as queer and co-organized a recent protest against the bill in New York City.

“The bill’s strongest supporters claim to be doing this in the name of religion,” says Graeme Reid, director of Human Rights Watch’s LGBT Rights Program. He called the measure “a case study in extreme cruelty.”

The lawmakers proposing the bill said they consulted influential religious leaders while drafting it. Among those endorsing it are the Christian Council of Ghana, the Ghana Catholic Bishops’ Conference and the country’s chief imam.

“We don’t accept murderers, why should we accept somebody who is doing sex in a sinful way?” Archbishop Philip Naameh, president of the bishops’ conference, told The Associated Press. “If you take a stance which is against producing more children, it is a choice which is injurious to the existence of the Ghanaian state.”

The Christian Council — whose members include Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian and Anglican churches — considers homosexuality “an act of perversion and abomination,” according to its secretary general, the Rev. Dr. Cyril Fayose of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church.

“Homosexuality is not a human right and we reject it in all uncertain terms,” he declared earlier this year.

In Africa’s most populous country, the Christian Association of Nigeria has threatened to sanction any church that shows tolerance for same-sex relationships.

Such acceptance “will never happen,” Methodist Bishop Stephen Adegbite, the association’s director of national issues, told the AP.

Asked about Nigeria’s law criminalizing same-sex relationships with sentences of up to 14 years in prison, Adegbite said there are no alternatives.

“The church can never be compromised,” he declared.

Such comments dismay Nigerian LGBTQ activists such as Matthew Blaise, who told the AP of being manhandled by a Catholic priest distraught that Blaise wasn’t heterosexual.

“The church has been awful when it comes to LGBTQ issues, instead of using love as a means of communicating,” Blaise said.

In Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos, Catholic Archbishop Alfred Adewale Martins told the AP that Catholic teaching “recognizes in the dignity of every human person.” However, he said LGBTQ people who enter into same-sex relationships are leading “a disordered way of life” and should change their behavior.

Nigeria is home to one of the United Methodist bishops, John Wesley Yohanna, who says he plans to break away from the UMC and join the proposed Global Methodist Church. That new denomination, likely to be established next year, results from an alliance between Methodists in the United States and abroad who don’t support the LGBT-inclusive policies favored by many Methodists in the U.S.

Bishops Samuel J. Quire Jr. of Liberia and Owan Tshibang Kasap of the UMC’s Southern Congo district also have indicated they would join the breakaway.

Wilhemina Nyarko attends a rally against a controversial bill being proposed in Ghana's parliament that would make identifying as LGBTQIA or an ally a criminal offense punishable by up to 10 years in prison, in the Harlem neighborhood of New York on Monday, Oct 11, 2021. "It's a scary bill," says Nyarko, who is from Ghana and has lived in New York for thirty years. "I felt I needed to come and support this." (AP Photo/Emily Leshner)

The Rev. Keith Boyette, a Methodist elder from the United States who chairs the Global Methodist initiative, said the African bishops’ views reflect societal and cultural attitudes widely shared across the continent.

“Same-sex orientation is viewed negatively,” he said. “That’s true whether a person is from a Christian denomination, or Muslim or from a more indigenous religion.”

In Uganda, where many LGBTQ people remain closeted for fear of violence and arrests, there is a retired Anglican bishop who in 2006 was barred from presiding over church events because he voiced empathy with gays.

In decades of ministering to embattled LGBTQ people, Christopher Senyonjo said he learned that sexuality “is a deep, important part of who we are. We should be free to let people be who they are.”

“Ignorance is a big problem in all this,” Senyonjo told the AP. “When there is ignorance, there is a lot of suffering.”

In 2014, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed a harsh anti-gay law that, in its original version, prescribed the death penalty for some homosexual acts. Later that year, amid intense international pressure, a judicial panel annulled the legislation on a technicality.

However, a colonial-era law criminalizing sex acts “against the order of nature” remains in place.

Frank Mugisha, a prominent gay activist in Uganda, described church leaders as “the key drivers of homophobia in Africa.” Some Anglican leaders, he said, have deepened their hostility toward LGBTQ people in a bid to not lose followers to aggressively anti-LGBTQ Pentecostal churches.

In all of Africa, only one nation — South Africa — has legalized same-sex marriage. Even there, gay and lesbian couples often struggle to be accepted by churches, let alone have their marriages solemnized by clergy.

“People tell me, ‘I grew up in this church, but now I am not accepted,’” said Nokuthula Dhladhla, a pastor with the Global Interfaith Network, which advocates for LGBTQ rights within the religious sector.

She said some religious leaders are privately supportive of same-sex marriage, but reluctant to do so openly for fear of being sidelined by their more conservative peers.

South Africa’s Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, world-renowned for his opposition to apartheid, has been an outspoken supporter of LGBTQ rights.

“I would not worship a God who is homophobic,” he once said. “I would refuse to go to a homophobic heaven. No, I would say ‘Sorry, I would much rather go to the other place.’”

Caroline Omolo, the activist pastor in Nairobi, said some Kenyan religious leaders blame LGBTQ people for the coronavirus pandemic.

“When we say we are still serving God, they don’t see something that’s possible,” she said. “They think it’s something unfamiliar and should be stopped.”

However, she said some faculty and students at Kenya’s theological schools support her LGBTQ church, which has about 300 members.

“The students, we call them the future generation, leaders of tomorrow,” she said. “When we have that population on our side, I believe there’s nothing that can shake us.”

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Asiedu reported from New York, Asadu from Lagos, Nigeria; Muhumuza from Kampala, Uganda; and Magome from Johannesburg, South Africa. Associated Press writers Cara Anna in Nairobi, Kenya, and David Crary in New York contributed.

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support from the Lilly Endowment through The Conversation U.S. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Cargo backlog creates traffic headaches on sea and land



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Parked cargo container trucks are seen in a street, Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2021 in Wilmington, Calif. California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday issued an order that aims to ease bottlenecks at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach that have spilled over into neighborhoods where cargo trucks are clogging residential streets. (AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu)


LOS ANGELES (AP) — A Los Angeles neighborhood just outside the nation’s busiest port complex has become a perpetual traffic jam, with trucks hauling cargo containers backed up day and night as workers try to break through an unprecedented backlog of ships waiting to unload.

About 40% of all shipping containers entering the U.S. come through the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports. The logjam of ships has interrupted the global supply chain and last week prompted the Biden administration to allow the port complex to operate 24 hours a day to try to get goods unloaded and out to consumers.

Since then, residents of the Wilmington neighborhood just north of the ports have complained that trucks are backed up in the streets at all hours. Meanwhile, cargo companies running out of space to store containers off-loaded from ships are stacking them outside overloaded warehouses and in parking lots.

This week a container slid off a truck making a turn on a narrow street, pancaking a parked car. Nobody was hurt, but local officials say with so many trucks crammed into a small area it was an accident waiting to happen.

“This is becoming an issue of safety,” said Jacob Haik, deputy chief of staff for LA City Councilman Joe Buscaino, who represents the working-class area. Haik said the city would start issuing citations to firms that stack containers unsafely or whose trucks clog streets.

As of Tuesday, there were 63 ships berthed at the two ports and 96 waiting to dock and unload, according to the Marine Exchange of Southern California that oversees port vessel traffic. On Monday, the number of ships waiting to enter the ports hit a record 100.

Wilmington resident Sonia Cervantes said her driveway was blocked by a truck as she tried to leave for work at 6:30 a.m. Her whole block is fed up with the traffic, she said.

“It’s a bunch of neighbors that are very upset because it’s a non-stop situation,” Cervantes told CBS LA.

Maria Arrieran, who owns the UCTI Trucking Company along with her husband, Frank, said she sympathizes with the community, but the truck traffic is a result of limited container storage.

“It’s an ongoing problem. We’re just trying to get these truckers in and out,” she said Wednesday. “I’m literally out on the streets directing traffic.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday issued an executive order that aims to ease the backlog. He directed California government agencies to look for state-owned properties that could temporarily store goods coming into the ports. Newsom, a Democrat, asked the state’s Department of General Services to review potential sites by Dec. 15.

He also ordered the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development to examine other properties not owed by the state, such as private or locally owned parcels, that could also be used for storage, though he didn’t give a timeline for that review.

Newsom’s order is a start, Haik said, but he urged the governor to also allow cities to make it easier to change zoning rules. The city has identified several port-owned plots that could be quickly paved and transformed into storage sites if not for existing red tape, he said.

“The lots are quite small. But if you could pull together 10 or 12 lots, and put 40 containers on each of them, that’s 500 containers,” Haik said. “That’s some serious relief.”

More relief could come by diverting cargo ship traffic to the Port of Oakland. Mayor Libby Schaaf told KRON-TV on Wednesday that her city’s port “has unused capacity right now” and Oakland can “take some of those ships off your hands, L.A.”

Newsom’s order also directed the state’s transportation agency to look for freight routes where vehicle weight limits can be exempt to help with the movement of goods. He asked his administration to come up with port and transportation improvements that could be included in the next state budget, which he will introduce in January.

A coalition of business groups including retailers, truckers, grocers and others said Wednesday that Newsom’s order doesn’t go far enough.

“There are additional real, tangible actions the governor could take to meet the moment and tackle this crisis head-on, but convening taskforces in 2022, delaying urgent actions for at least a month, and pushing funding discussions to the January budget proposal do not provide the sense of urgency needed to address this crisis now,” the coalition said in a letter.

The group urged Newsom to take drastic steps including suspending air quality rules governing truck emissions, allowing cities to drop prohibitions on unloading goods at stores after hours and expediting permitting processes for warehouses.

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Associated Press writer Kathleen Ronayne in Sacramento, California, contributed to this report.

Israeli minister sees opportunity at UN climate conference

By JOSEF FEDERMAN

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Israel's new Minister of Environmental Protection, Tamar Zandberg, poses for a portrait in her office in Jerusalem, Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2021. Zandberg has set some ambitious goals: She believes she can use her office to play an important role in the global battle against climate change while also promoting peace in the volatile Middle East.

 (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)


JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s new environmental protection minister has set some ambitious goals: She believes she can use her office to play an important role in the global battle against climate change while also promoting peace in the volatile Middle East.

Tamar Zandberg laid out her agenda in an interview with The Associated Press ahead of the upcoming U.N. climate conference in Glasgow. She says Israel, despite its small size and own inability to reach the global goal of zero net emissions by 2050, has the potential to be a key player.

Zandberg said the country is eager to share its expertise in green technologies. Israel is widely considered a world leader in areas such as solar energy storage, sustainable protein alternatives, agriculture technology and desalination.

“These are fields where Israel is already in the cutting edge frontier of global innovation, and we hope that this is something that small Israel can contribute to bigger countries than us to adjust better to the new climate reality,” she said.

Major countries, including China and India, have become important markets for Israeli environmental technologies. Zandberg said she already has held a pair of meetings with her counterpart in the United Arab Emirates, which established diplomatic ties with Israel just over a year ago, and that the two countries have teams working together on issues like agriculture and water in the arid Middle East.

Israel and Jordan last week held a signing ceremony on a new water-sharing agreement, and Zandberg said the two countries are having “extensive talks” on various environmental issues.

“Our neighbors share our region and share our climate,” she said. “So it’s only natural that we will face them together. That can contribute to climate change, but also to the regional stability and to our peace in the Middle East.”

Zandberg took office in June as part of Israel’s new government — a diverse patchwork of small and midsize parties spanning the political spectrum. This includes deep ideological differences over how to handle the decades-long conflict with the Palestinians.

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett heads a religious, ultranationalist party that opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state, and Bennett, a former leader of the West Bank settlement movement, has ruled out peace talks with the Palestinians.

Zandberg’s Meretz party is the most dovish member of the eight-party coalition and supports a two-state solution with the Palestinians. As part of the coalition deal, forged to prevent the country from plunging into a fifth election in a two-year span, all members were forced to compromise on their core beliefs.

Zandberg acknowledged some frustration with the limitations created by the political reality, but said environmental cooperation provides an opportunity to improve the atmosphere and lay the groundwork for future negotiations. She said she has met with her Palestinian counterpart, and that professional teams meet regularly to work on issues of mutual concern, such as protecting shared water resources.

“We live here together and we share the land and we share the air and share the water,” she said. “The better we communicate, the better our peoples will live.”

At home, Zandberg has a long to-do list.

Israel has acknowledged it will fall short of the goal of the international community to reach zero net emissions by 2050. It expects to reduce emissions by 85% by that time. Environmentalists have cited a lack of political will by previous governments and the country’s reliance on newly discovered natural gas for energy for the lower target.

Zandberg said this figure was calculated based largely on a situation inherited from previous governments. She also said Israel’s relatively high population growth is an obstacle. And while Israel lags on its own renewable energy goals, she said the government is determined to help the world reach the zero-emissions target through its technology exports and to do more on the domestic front.

“That’s our goal to close that gap,” she said. “We are working on new climate legislation for the first time in the Israeli parliament. We are working on the series of implementation plans, how to take the low carbon economy governmental declaration and make it a reality in sectors of energy, transportation, waste, agriculture. So we are serious.”

There are other challenges. The Dead Sea, which is actually a salty lake situated at the lowest place on earth, is slowly shrinking. This is the result of years of water diversion from the Jordan River for drinking and agriculture and from damage caused by mineral-extraction companies. A secretive oil pipeline deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates has raised fears that an oil spill might one day destroy the Red Sea coral reefs, prized by scientists for their unique resilience against warming seas. Water resources that traverse Israel and the occupied West Bank are threatened by sewage and pollution.

Zandberg said her team is involved in negotiations to ensure that Dead Sea factories, which are among Israel’s worst polluters, address environmental concerns as licenses are renewed in the coming years. The Israel-UAE pipeline is now under review by the government, “and we will express our concerns in those discussions,” she said. Zandberg has been pushing for a new tax on single-use plastics to go into effect next year.

Gidon Bromberg, the Israeli director of EcoPeace, an environmental advocacy group with offices in Israel, Jordan and the West Bank, said it is too early to judge Zandberg’s performance. But he said her appointment has raised hopes that Israel can finally make some progress on long-festering issues.

“We’re in a very unique position where we have a minister of environment who is extremely committed to the issue and wants to succeed,” Bromberg said. “You have an environment minister who’s an environmentalist.”

Whether she succeeds, he said, will depend in part on her political skills, largely her relationship with Bennett. Despite their different backgrounds, Bromberg said that so far they appear to have a good rapport.

“It’s still very early days. The issues are enormous,” he said.

Climate change makes drought recovery tougher in U.S. West


A pedestrian carries an umbrella while crossing a street at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2021. Showers drifted across the drought-stricken and fire-scarred landscape of Northern California on Wednesday, trailed by a series of progressively stronger storms that are expected to bring significant rain and snow into next week, forecasters said. 

(AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Californians rejoiced this week when big drops of water started falling from the sky for the first time in any measurable way since the spring, an annual soaking that heralds the start of the rainy season following some of the hottest and driest months on record.

But as the rain was beginning to fall on Tuesday night, Gov. Gavin Newsom did a curious thing: He issued a statewide drought emergency and gave regulators permission to enact mandatory statewide water restrictions if they choose.

Newsom’s order might seem jarring, especially as forecasters predict up to 7 inches (18 centimeters) of rain could fall on parts of the Northern California mountains and Central Valley this week. But experts say it makes sense if you think of drought as something caused not by the weather, but by climate change.

For decades, California has relied on rain and snow in the winter to fill the state’s major rivers and streams in the spring, which then feed a massive system of lakes that store water for drinking, farming and energy production. But that annual runoff from the mountains is getting smaller, mostly because it’s getting hotter and drier, not just because it’s raining less.

In the spring, California’s snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains was 60% of its historical average. But the amount of water that made it to the reservoirs was similar to 2015, when the snowpack was just 5% of its historical average. Nearly all of the water state officials had expected to get this year either evaporated into the hotter air or was absorbed into the drier soil.

“You don’t get into the type of drought that we’re seeing in the American West right now just from ... missing a few storms,” said Justin Mankin, a geography professor at Dartmouth College and co-lead of the Drought Task Force at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “A warm atmosphere evaporates more water from the land surface (and) reduces (the) amount of water available for other uses, like people and hydropower and growing crops.”

In this April 21, 2021, file photo, California Gov. Gavin Newsom holds a news conference in the parched basin of Lake Mendocino in Ukiah, Calif., where he announced he would proclaim a drought emergency for Mendocino and Sonoma counties. Much of California is seeing the first heavy rain of the season this week. But that didn't stop Gov. Gavin Newsom from expanding a drought emergency declaration to the entire state and giving regulators permission to enact mandatory water restrictions. (Kent Porter/The Press Democrat via AP, File)

California’s “water year” runs from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30. The 2021 water year, which just ended, was the second driest on record. The one before that was the fifth driest on record. Some of the state’s most important reservoirs are at record low levels. Things are so bad in Lake Mendocino that state officials say it could be dry by next summer.

Even if California were to have above-average rain and snow this winter, warming temperatures mean it still likely won’t be enough to make up for all the water California lost. This past year, California had its warmest ever statewide monthly average temperatures in June, July and October 2020.

Jeanine Jones, interstate resources manager for the California Department of Water Resources, said people should not think about drought “as being just this occasional thing that happens sometimes, and then we go back to a wetter system.”

“We are really transitioning to a drier system so, you know, dry becomes the new normal,” she said. “Drought is not a short-term feature. Droughts take time to develop, and they usually linger for quite some time.”

Water regulators have already ordered some farmers and other big users to stop taking water out of the state’s major rivers and streams. Mandatory water restrictions for regular people could be next.

In July, Newsom asked people to voluntarily reduce their water use by 15%. In July and August, people cut back 3.5%. On Tuesday, Newsom issued an executive order giving state regulators permission to impose mandatory restrictions, including banning people from washing their cars, using water to clean sidewalks and driveways and filling decorative fountains.

State officials have warned water agencies that they might not get any water from the state’s reservoirs this year, at least initially. That will be very challenging, said Dave Eggerton, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies.

But he said he believes Californians will start to conserve more water soon with the help of a statewide conservation campaign, which will include messages on electronic signboards along busy highways.

“It’s going to happen,” he said. “People are starting to get the message, and they want to do their part.”

Climate crisis: Why do we need COP anyway?

With COP26 to get underway in Glasgow in a few weeks, let's assess what has been achieved — and what hasn't — over the past quarter of a century of climate conferences.


Many young people have been vocal about what they expect from COP26

It's nearly time that the Conference of the Parties (COP), the supreme decision-making body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), takes place, this time in Glasgow from October 31 until November 12.

At the COP's very first meeting, in Berlin in 1995, the members already saw the need to reduce emissions and agreed to meet annually to discuss how to maintain control over global warming.

But what concrete actions have 25 years of these meetings resulted in so far? According to most climate change activists, not that many.

Greta Thunberg recently told the Guardian: "Nothing has changed from previous years really. … We can have as many COPs as we want, but nothing real will come out of it."

So do we really still need COP?

The Paris Accord: COP's biggest milestone

Though experts agree that important progress was not made at all of these annual meetings — and the pace of decision-making has been slower than expected — they say COP's most vital achievement so far has been the Paris Agreement of COP21, the biggest global treaty against climate change yet.

It was a historic moment when the Paris Accord was signed by almost all nations in the world after decades of negotiation

It may have taken 20 years of negotiations to get there, but, in 2015, the Paris Accord was finally adopted by 196 countries, declaring the goal of limiting an increase in global average temperatures to well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F), with a target of 1.5 C, over preindustrial levels.

And this has provoked a major change in terms of climate action and where we are heading, David Ryfisch, team leader for international climate politics at the nongovernmental environment and development organization Germanwatch, told DW.

"I believe that the Paris Accord is the starting point for a whole series of change," Ryfisch said. "It's a signal that has been sent to the real economy, to other actors, that the intent by countries is real and that it will have real-world implications."

COP and its Paris Accord have already translated into action, Ryfisch said, from the dramatic drop in the cost of clean energy, to the financial sector's moving away from fossil fuels and unwillingness to insure new coal projects any longer, to countries' signing up for a quick phaseout of coal, as well as internal combustion engines.
CO2 challenge

Still, it's hard to really grasp tangible impacts the accord has had.

The challenge for COP and the Paris Accord is that it revolves around CO2, a greenhouse gas that has caused most of the observed warming we've had.

The word has to dramatically reduce its CO2 emissions in order to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius

"CO2 is our main issue if we want to address the climate problem," Paul Young, climate scientist at Lancaster University, told DW.

"CO2 just pervades everything, the whole economy," Young said. "And it is quite hard to turn that oil tanker around. Carbon dioxide is not something we can just swap out with another chemical."

Charles Parker, a political scientist at the University of Uppsala in Sweden who has focused his research on climate change politics, leadership and crisis management, offered a similar analysis.

"We ultimately need to find substitutes for fossil fuels and find low-carbon and no-carbon energy sources. But there are many vested interests, veto players and lobby groups who have no interest in doing that," he said.

Setting ambitious targets

That's why the target negotiations at COP are so vital.

Every country that signed the Paris Agreement had to make pledges, also known as nationally determined contributions, or NDCs, for how they plan on reducing their emissions. Over time, they have to make these targets more ambitious, which is called the ratcheting mechanism. So, every five years, they have to submit new, updated NDCs on how they want to keep the promises made in 2015.

"What we've seen between 2015 and 2020 is that these targets have significantly improved already, not sufficient to be in line with 1.5 degrees, but they have significantly improved. That is the first clear signal that something is working," Ryfisch said.

The problem many critics see is that there aren't any financial or legal sanctions if countries don't reach their targets. The sanctioning comes rather through public pressure, Ryfisch said, as countries have a reputation to lose.

"So then it actually comes down to the role of civil society, youth movements and academia to question their respective countries. Obviously, that works better in some countries than others. But there is a symbiosis between what came out of Paris and the actions that we saw on the ground by civil society over the past years," he said.
COP and climate action: A symbiosis

Another sign that points to this symbiosis are two recent court cases in Europe. Germany's Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the freedoms and fundamental rights of young people have been violated by insufficient climate protection from the state.

A coalition of environmental groups is calling for a Europe-wide ban on fossil fuel advertising ahead of COP26

And in the Netherlands, a court-ordered gas company Shell to reduce its worldwide CO2 emissions by 45% by 2030, compared to 2019 levels.

"Now that we've seen these success cases, I believe that more companies and potentially countries will be brought in front of courts," Ryfisch said.

He believes this will result in a chain reaction and trigger companies and countries to take action instead of also being dragged before court.

"All of that would not have been possible without COP," he said.

So, despite its shortcomings, experts believe having a global governance meeting such as COP is crucial for the future of the climate.

"I absolutely believe we need COP. We are now in the decisive decade where we can still stay within the 1.5-degree limit. Glasgow has to show that 1.5-degree is the limit," Ryfisch said.

But that won't be easy to reach. According to the UN, the world is on a catastrophic way to 2.7 degrees of heating by the end of the century unless wealthy nations commit to tackling emissions now.

7 WAYS AFRICA IS ADAPTING TO CLIMATE CHANGE

Feeding frenzy

Locusts, boosted by drought, heavy rains and warm temperatures, have devastated crops in East Africa. Pesticides can help, though they're not exactly environmentally friendly. Scientists in Nairobi have experimented with fungi and other microbes to make safer poisons. They've also used the locusts' unique smell, which changes as they mature, to break up swarms and even drive them to cannibalism.

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Global governance challenge

Experts believe that COP meetings are not only not superfluous, but that they will be needed in the coming years to establish a fair way of how to reach these targets.

Given that developed countries have fallen short of their promises to reduce emissions, they need to find a way to make up for that so that developing countries are not bearing the brunt, Ryfisch said.

"We have to understand that there is a need for development in many countries, but it cannot take the same fossil fuel-intense path that the Global North has taken," he said.

Parker said that was why it's of the utmost importance for developed countries to show solidarity and financially support developing countries.

"So that's another test of Paris," he said.

Ryfisch is optimistic, though, that the Paris Agreement will hold up to the test.

"Over the past years, I've seen the turning point. I see the acceleration of the action and I see that things are happening and that finally, COP is delivering what we would have hoped it had delivered already in the past decades," he said.

Scientists identify new chemicals in air pollution that trigger asthma in kids

By HealthDay News

Researchers have newly identified chemicals in air pollution, and combinations of those chemicals, that trigger asthma in children. 

File Photo by Terry Schmitt/UPI | License Photo

Dust mites and smoke are known triggers of asthma in children. Now, scientists have identified previously unknown combinations of air pollutants that appear tied to the respiratory disorder.

"Asthma is one the most prevalent diseases affecting children in the United States. In this study, we developed a list of air pollutants a young child may be exposed to that can lead to longer-term problems with asthma," said senior study co-author Dr. Supinda Bunyavanich, a professor of pediatrics and genetics and genomic sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.

"Our results show how breathing individual and combinations of pollutants may lead to poor asthma outcomes. We hope that having a more comprehensive, holistic view of air pollution may one day be able to reduce the chances that children will be burdened by asthma," Bunyavanich said in a hospital news release.

The team used a machine learning algorithm to assess potential early exposure to dozens of pollutants among 151 children with mild to severe asthma.

While some of those asthma cases were associated with a single, known air pollutant, others seemed connected to mixtures of pollutants never before linked with asthma.

The researchers identified 18 individual chemicals that may be linked to poor asthma outcomes among children. This was defined as requiring daily asthma-controlling medication or having to go to an emergency room or be hospitalized due to asthma.

The investigators also discovered new associations between childhood asthma outcomes and 20 pollutant mixtures. Several of the pollutants in the mixtures had never been linked to long-term asthma risk.

The findings were published recently in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Asthma affects about 7% of U.S. children, causing them to wheeze and cough.

Previous research has shown that exposure to some specific types of air pollution increases a child's risk of asthma, but the effects of a mixture of pollutants has been unclear.

"Like many scientists, we wanted to provide a more comprehensive picture of how air toxics contribute to childhood asthma," said senior study co-author Gaurav Pandey, assistant professor of genetics and genomic sciences at Mount Sinai.

"Traditionally, for technical reasons, it has been difficult to study the health effects of more than one toxic at a time. We overcame this by tapping into the power of machine learning algorithms," Pandey said in the release.More information

The American Lung Association has more on childhood asthma.

Copyright © 2021 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Reports: Health problems tied to global warming on the rise

By SETH BORENSTEIN

today

In this Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2020 file photo, a jogger runs along McCovey Cove outside Oracle Park in San Francisco, under darkened skies from wildfire smoke.Health problems tied to climate change are all getting worse, according to two reports published in the medical journal Lancet on Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2021. An unprecedented Pacific Northwest and Canadian heat wave hit this summer, which a previous study showed couldn't have happened without human-caused climate change. (AP Photo/Tony Avelar)

Health problems tied to climate change are all getting worse, according to two reports published Wednesday.

The annual reports commissioned by the medical journal Lancet tracked 44 global health indicators connected to climate change, including heat deaths, infectious diseases and hunger. All of them are getting grimmer, said Lancet Countdown project research director Marina Romanello, a biochemist.

“Rising temperatures are having consequences,” said University of Washington environmental health professor Kristie Ebi, a report co-author.

This year’s reports — one global, one just aimed at the United State s — called “code red for a healthy future,” highlight dangerous trends:

— Vulnerable populations — older people and very young — were subject to more time with dangerous heat last year. For people over 65, the researchers calculated there were 3 billion more “person-day” exposures to extreme heat than the average from 1986 to 2005.

— More people were in places where climate-sensitive diseases can flourish. Coastline areas warm enough for the nasty Vibrio bacteria increased in the Baltics, the U.S. Northeast and the Pacific Northwest in the past decade. In some poorer nations, the season for malaria-spreading mosquitoes has expanded since the 1950s.

“Code Red is not even a hot enough color for this report, ” said Stanford University tropical medicine professor Dr. Michele Barry, who wasn’t part of the study team. Compared to the last Lancet report, “this one is the sobering realization that we’re going completely in the wrong direction.”

In the U.S., heat, fire and drought caused the biggest problems. An unprecedented Pacific Northwest and Canadian heat wave hit this summer, which a previous study showed couldn’t have happened without human-caused climate change.

Study co-author Dr. Jeremy Hess, a professor of environmental health and emergency medicine at the University of Washington, said he witnessed the impacts of climate change while working at Seattle emergency rooms during the heat.

“I saw paramedics who had burns on their knees from kneeling down to care for patients with heat stroke,” he said. “”And I saw far too many patients die” from the heat.

Another ER doctor in Boston said science is now showing what she has seen for years, citing asthma from worsening allergies as one example.

“Climate change is first and foremost a health crisis unfolding across the U.S.,” said Dr. Renee Salas, also a co-author of the report.

George Washington University School of Public Health Dean Dr. Lynn Goldman, who was not part of the project, said health problems from climate change “are continuing to worsen far more rapidly than would have been projected only a few years ago.”

The report said 65 of the 84 countries included subsidize the burning of fossil fuels, which cause climate change. Doing that “feels like caring for the desperately ill patient while somebody is handing them lit cigarettes and junk food,” said Dr. Richard Jackson, a UCLA public health professor who wasn’t part of the study.

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Read more stories on climate issues by The Associated Press at https://www.apnews.com/Climate

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Couple in flooded India region float to wedding in a cooking pot

 

Oct. 20 (UPI) -- An Indian couple living in a region that experienced severe flooding took an unusual vehicle to reach their wedding venue -- a cooking pot.

Akash Kunjumon said he and his wife, Aishwarya, were legally married Oct. 6, but their wedding ceremony was planned for Oct. 18.

Kunjumon said the ceremony was originally to have been held at a temple at Thalavady, but recent floods caused the religious building to be filled with water, so the event was moved to a nearby hall with a stage that had not been submerged.

"Although we tried to arrange a small boat to reach the venue, none was available," Kunjumon told The Hindu.

He said officials at the temple provided an alternative solution.

"People from the temple arranged the pot for us," he told The Washington Post.

The couple climbed into a large cooking pot, and a video shows them being pushed through the floodwaters to reach the event hall.

"We traveled in that pot for at least 20 minutes to get to the venue," Kunjumon said.

He said the volunteers pushing the pot had to fight "a strong undercurrent" to get them to their wedding.

"My father swam to the temple and my mother, grandmother and sisters used another pot," Kunjumon said. "The photographer had to struggle. But he knew the story and was ready to take the risk."