Granholm to tour nuclear program at South Carolina HBCU

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is visiting South Carolina this week, stopping at a historically Black university to tout what the Biden administration says is a commitment to funding nuclear engineering at such institutions around the country.

On Thursday, Granholm is set to tour the nuclear engineering program at South Carolina State University, officials told The Associated Press. Along with U.S. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, an alumnus of the Orangeburg school, Granholm plans to discuss federal funding for programs related to science, technology, engineering and math at historically Black colleges and universities.

The visit, Granholm's first to South Carolina as secretary, comes as President Joe Biden and other officials tout progress made in implementing the administration's $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package, following setbacks on other issues including voting rights and other economic efforts.

The South Carolina trip also features a roundtable discussion between Granholm and HBCU leaders, as well as a visit to Clemson University’s Wind Test Facility, which tests wind turbine drivetrains. It follows Granholm's discussion of similar funding initiatives during trips to other HBCUs.

At Howard University in May, she announced more than $17 million in funding to support college internships, research projects and opportunities to bolster investment in underrepresented HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions. According to the administration, efforts like that one underscore a commitment to helping strengthen an energy-focused pipeline from such schools.

South Carolina State is the only HBCU in the country to offer a four-year nuclear engineering program. In June, the Energy Department awarded more than $2.85 million aimed at nuclear and particle physics research trainee programs for students at HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions.

S.C. State is often a popular stop for national-level Democrats campaigning in South Carolina, thanks in part to the area’s heavily Black and Democratic electorate, as well as its connection to Clyburn, the state's sole congressional Democrat and the highest-ranking Black member of Congress.

Clyburn's public endorsement of Biden ahead of South Carolina's 2020 primary helped the then-candidate overcome a string of earlier losses, serving as an awaited signal for many Black voters that Biden would be the candidate to stand up for their interests.

But Republicans, including former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, have also toured the nuclear research facilities, with Haley stopping by the school in April in one of her first public appearances since moving back to her home state and possibly ramping up for a future run at higher office.

At Clyburn’s behest, Biden gave the December commencement address to S.C. State graduates, saying he would be “proposing historic investment to create and expand HBCU programs in high-demand fields like cybersecurity, engineering and health care.”

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Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP.

Meg Kinnard, The Associated Press

Pakistani police arrest media owner after scuffle in capital

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Pakistani authorities Wednesday raided the home of a media owner and arrested him after a dramatic scuffle in which the man fired a pistol toward police and hit one officer in the head with the weapon, injuring him, police said.

Mohsin Baig, owner and editor-in-chief of news outlet Online and the Urdu-language Daily Jinnah newspaper, was arrested days after he appeared on a TV talk show. On the show he suggested that Prime Minister Imran Khan had showed favoritism by granting an award to a government minister, Murad Saeed, with whom he has a close friendship.

Authorities say police and the Federal Investigation Agency went to Baig’s home on a complaint from Saeed, who is the minister of communication. In his complaint, Saeed had accused Baig of tarnishing his character.

As officers tried to arrest Baig, he pulled out a pistol and fired in their direction but didn’t hit anyone, said Mohammad Ali, a police inspector. Pictures circulating on social media showed Baig beating an officer from the Federal Investigation Agency. Baig was then arrested.

Police later opened a separate case against Baig on charges he attacked FIA officers and injured one of them.

Baig’s family told reporters that police and officials from FIA arrested him without giving any reason for the arrest.

Baig’s arrest drew condemnation from Pakistani journalists on social media. Dozens of journalists also rallied outside Baig’s media house to express solidarity with him.

The government gave no immediate comment.

Pakistan has long been an unsafe country for journalists. In 2020, it ranked ninth on the Committee to Protect Journalists’ annual Global Impunity Index, which assesses countries where journalists are regularly killed and the assailants go free.

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Associated Press writer Asim Tanveer in Islamabad contributed.

Munir Ahmed, The Associated Press

Edmonton Public Schools to spend $6M on HEPA filters for classrooms

PROVINCE SHOULD FUND THEM FOR ALL SCHOOLS
Caley Gibson 

The Edmonton Public School Board has been given approval from the province to spend millions of dollars in reserve funding on improving ventilation in its classrooms.

On Tuesday, EPSB chair Trisha Estabrooks said the minister of education approved the board's request to access $6 million in reserve dollars to purchase HEPA filters.

"This is good news," Estabrooks said.

"HEPA filters will go a long way in terms of increasing our ability to take what we keep calling our 'layered approach' to mitigating the spread of COVID and keeping our classrooms and our kids and our staff as safe as possible."

Read more:
Edmonton schools making changes to air filtration as calls grow for HEPA filters

Estabrooks said parents have also been pushing for this, with many sharing their concerns about air quality during public board meetings.

"To finally see some guaranteed action on this, I think, is really positive news and a good step forward," she said.

"I wish it had happened sooner, to be frank."

Ontario’s investment in improving school air quality provides benefits beyond pandemic, experts say

The Public Health Agency of Canada says proper ventilation can help reduce the risk of COVID-19 and the use of HEPA filters could be considered as additional protection.

The board heard Tuesday that the number of self-reported cases of COVID-19 within public schools is on the decline. However, Estabrooks noted it remains to be seen how the school community may be impacted by the decision to lift the mask mandate for children in schools, which came into effect on Monday.

Apple’s Severance turns office life into purgatory

Andrew Webster - 
The Verge


True work-life balance can be as hard to achieve as inbox zero. It’s so challenging, in fact, that the characters in Severance go to a particular extreme to reach it: brain surgery. The show, which is streaming on Apple TV Plus, takes its name from a surgical procedure in which someone’s brain is essentially severed in two, creating two distinct persons: one for work, one for home life. The result is a show that feels a bit like a cross between Black Mirror and The IT Crowd, exploring the horrors of capitalism and technology with a banal kind of cheer.

At the center of the story is a company called Lumon Industries, an Amazon-style megacorporation that dabbles in a little of everything. (“What don’t they make,” one character asks early on.) This means there are lots of sensitive documents to sort through. In lieu of an NDA for those tasked with sorting, the company uses a procedure called severing, in which access to someone’s memories becomes “spatially dictated.” Basically, your memories are tied explicitly to a place. What happens in the records department at Lumon headquarters stays there.

It may sound like a novel way of separating your life, with work troubles staying at work, so you can focus on the rest. In practice, the procedure creates two minds in the same body: one living a normal life, the other trapped in a hellish existence where they can never leave the office. And the two are never able to interact.


© Image: Apple

Apple’s Severance turns office life into purgatory

You’re first introduced to how this plays out through Helly (Britt Lower), a new Lumon recruit who wakes up on a conference table with no memory of where she is or how she got there. As her new manager, Mark (Adam Scott), starts asking her questions, she realizes she doesn’t remember anything at all. Not even her name. And everyone in her department is in the same position; the only life they know is inside of the office.

]
Where the show succeeds the most is in painting just how messed up this really is for the people stuck in the office. Think about it: all of the good parts of their day don’t happen to them. They don’t even sleep. For them, they leave the office one second, and the next, they’re right back. Mark says that he can feel the effects of sleeping, but it’s not something any of them actually experience for themselves. Life is just nonstop work — a never-ending purgatory inside of a cubicle. To make matters worse, they don’t have a say in being there either. The only way to quit is to file a request with their other self, and since that self has no idea how bad things are inside the office, the answer always comes back no.

Lumon tries to paint over this nightmare scenario with a kind of blind optimism. Employees get excited about having a melon party and work hard so that they can get caricatures drawn of themselves. (That work involves a Minesweeper-like file system for encrypted data where workers need to find the “scary” numbers in a spreadsheet, which they do on delightfully retrofuturistic computers that wouldn’t look out of place in Loki.) Negativity is not permitted, and handshakes are available on request.


© Image: Apple

Apple’s Severance turns office life into purgatory

The office is clean and mostly empty, but there’s a darkness lurking underneath. In order to improve their “mental wellbeing,” after periods of prolonged stress, employees go to wellness sessions that involve silently listening to some (probably made-up) facts about their non-office doppelgänger. The office manager, Milchick (Tramell Tillman), seems very calm and pleasant right up until he is most definitely not. And when someone breaks the rules, they’re forced into the “break room,” which involves an unsettling kind of punishment that I won’t spoil. You can’t even sneak messages to the outside work, thanks to some sci-fi tech in the elevator that detects any symbols. There’s also a not-so-subtle religious quality to how employees are forced to view Lumon and its founder, sort of an extreme version of the cult-like fandoms that form around tech moguls like Elon Musk.

The doppelgängers, meanwhile, go on blissfully unaware of just how bad things are. Life is normal, except they skip over the work bits and have to deal with very nosy questions about what being severed is like. In Mark’s case, he took on the job in hopes of coping with the loss of a loved one; he figured eight hours of not remembering the pain would help. That, of course, turned out not to be the case. His days are still just as sad, only a bit shorter now.

The set-up has been enough to suck me into the show’s initial two episodes. In a time when the boundaries between work and life are blurring more than ever, it’s fascinating to watch these characters go in the exact opposite direction, distanced so far from work that they don’t even know what their job really is. It’s something I might even consider... if it weren’t for the whole “office hellscape” thing.

The real tension of Severance comes when Mark’s two lives start to converge, and his real-world persona is confronted with the realities of Lumon and the procedure’s impact. It’s too early to tell if that storyline will carry the show for an entire nine-episode-long season. But the way the show explores its core conceit with such detail and seriousness has helped it get off to a great start — and made me realize that I should probably clock out on time more often.

Severance starts streaming on Apple TV Plus on February 18th with two episodes, with a weekly release schedule after that.

WHITE COLLAR WORKERS

Working from home is more productive than going to the office, U.K. data shows

Working from home can be more productive than going into the office, according to data released by the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics.


Despite high productivity levels while working from home, as shown in the U.K. and Canada, some experts worry about burnout as increased productivity can lead to more stress.

Courtney Greenberg - National Post

A main point of the report revealed that October to December 2021 was the first quarter “in which output per worker was above pre-coronavirus pandemic levels” by 2.3 per cent. During the same time period, output per hour worked was also higher than the 2019 average. These findings indicate that productivity was not hugely impacted by working from home, even with the spread of the Omicron variant.

The report — which is an estimate based on U.K. gross domestic product and the most recent labour market statistics — is insightful but not final.

“I would say we have learned to work from home in a way that avoids significant productivity losses, but that’s as far as I would go,” Bart Van Ark, a professor of productivity studies at the University of Manchester, told the Daily Mail.

Researchers in Canada looked into the productivity of employees switching to remote work (or teleworking) after being in an office before the pandemic. The majority of them — 90 per cent — said they were “at least as productive at home,” in the Statistics Canada study released in April 2021.

“More than half (58%) reported accomplishing about the same amount of work per hour while roughly one third (32%) reported accomplishing more work per hour,” the report explained. “The remaining 10% mentioned that they accomplished less work per hour while working at home than they did previously in their usual place of work.”

Despite the increased productivity working at home — as shown in the U.K. and Canada — some experts worry about burnout and stress.

“I don’t think it’s an expectation so much in terms of companies saying, ‘Well, now you can work 10 hours a day.’ I think the expectation is around the production,” Janet Candido, founder and principal of Candido Consulting Group, told CTV News. “They’re burning out. They’re exhausted.”

Output in the U.K. report was measured by “gross value added (GVA) in chained volume measures (CVM), which is an estimate of the volume of goods and services produced for final use by an industry, and in aggregate for the UK, after adjusting for price changes. It is calculated as turnover (sales) minus purchases (intermediate consumption).”

The pandemic changed how Canadians work — and how they want to work: poll

Working from home could cost feds $260 million in lost tax revenue

Flowers Growing in Antarctica Are the Latest Sign of Environmental Catastrophe

Molly Taft - Tuesday
Gizmodo
Thumbnail; Antarctic hair grass growing on rocks at Couverville Island, Antarctica.


Some cute little plants in Antarctica are flourishing in warmer temperatures—an ominous sign for rest of the continent and the world. A study published Monday in Current Biology finds that the continent’s only flowering plants have been growing rapidly in the past decade, thanks to warmer temperatures.

“Antarctica is acting as a canary in a coal mine,” Nicoletta Cannone, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of ecology at Italy’s University of Insubria, wrote in an email.

Antarctica’s harsh landscape means that plants are few and far between, and only two are able to flower. The study looked at the spread of these two unicorns, Deschampsia antarctica, a type of grass, and Colobanthus quitensis, which sprouts tiny yellow flowers, between 2009 and 2018. These plants, Cannone said, “have a well-adapted metabolism to the harsh Antarctic climate: they are able to photosynthesize at temperatures below zero and covered by snow and can restart their growth at the end of the long Antarctic winter.”

While the plants live across parts of the Antarctic islands and some of the peninsula, Cannone and her team concentrated their observations of the plants on Signy Island, in the South Orkney Islands range, because of a robust historical dataset related to the plants’ growth. The scientists then compared the growth rate over this nine-year period to previous surveys of growth taken since the early 1960s.

It turns out the plants are loving the warmer weather. The researchers found that Colobanthus grew five times faster between 2009 and 2018 compared to growth rates between 1960 and 2009. Deschampsia, meanwhile, really took off, growing 10 times more in the past decade than before. Signy Island has seen an overall increase of 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in mean annual average air temperature between 1960 and 2018; it’s clear that these plants are benefiting from the new balmy environment.

“Our work provides the first evidence of accelerated impacts of climate warming in Antarctica,” Cannone said. Plants, she wrote, “are the best bio-indicator of the terrestrial ecosystems as they can’t avoid climate warming by moving” like animals can.

While the continent isn’t seeing as rapid of climactic changes as the Arctic, new research increasingly shows that Antarctica is not immune to warming, as some scientists previously theorized. A study published in 2020 found that Antartica has warmed three times faster than the rest of the world over the past 30 years. In the past few decades, Antarctica has also seen a pretty nerve-wracking amount of ice loss: Between 2008 and 2015, ice loss into the ocean in the continent increased by 36 billion gallons per year, while a 2019 study found that a quarter of Antarctic glaciers have now destabilized compared to measurements taken in 1992. Several key glaciers that act as backstops for large amounts of ice, like the Thwaites Glacier—known, ominously, as the Doomsday Glacier—have shown incredibly worrying signs of stress in recent years.

There are probably some non-climate factors helping the flowers flourish, according to the study. The Antarctic fur seal rests and molts on Antarctic islands like Signy, and all that blubbery on-land seal activity can seriously disturb plant populations. The study found that these seals have been less present in recent years on Signy Island, which may be helping the plants.

But overall, it’s clear that warmer weather driven by climate change is accelerating the growth of these plants, at a much faster rate than scientists expected.

“We were surprised of the speed of the acceleration detected here, because we were confident to record an increase of these plants between our surveys but we could not hypothesize an event of such magnitude,” Cannone wrote. “Our statistical analyses show clearly the link between summer warming and plant growth.”

More: Pink Snow in the Italian Alps Is a Cute Sign of Environmental Catastrophe

Panel agrees with Canada that Trump-era U.S. solar panel tariffs violate USMCA

(NAFTATOO)

WASHINGTON — When it comes to trade dispute victories in the post-NAFTA era, Canada just tied it up, 1-1.

A dispute resolution panel has agreed that tariffs on Canadian-made solar products imposed in 2018 by former president Donald Trump violated the terms of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

The panel's final report, released Tuesday, found that by keeping Canadian exports subject to its so-called "safeguard measures," the U.S. was in violation of its obligations under the deal.

The agreement includes language that allows partners to escape such unilateral measures, provided that the levels of their imports are neither a significant share of total imports or contributing to the "serious injury" the measures are meant to prevent.

Canada was hit with tariffs even though the U.S. International Trade Commission had already concluded solar exports stateside averaged less than two per cent over the course of its investigation — not enough to qualify as either a substantial share of total imports or enough to hurt domestic producers.

"The president's proclamation contained no explanation of why that less than two per cent figure … demonstrates that Canada had achieved a 'substantial share' of total imports," the decision reads.

Canada argued that the U.S. violated the agreement "by failing to exclude imports from Canada from its safeguard measure," which "had the effect of reducing imports of Canadian (solar) products and not allowing for reasonable growth."

The U.S. countered by saying that because the USMCA had not taken effect when the tariffs were originally imposed, they could not be challenged under the new agreement — even though Canada's efforts to dispute the tariffs under NAFTA's rules were essentially rebuffed.

It also argued that Canada was consistently in the top 10 sources of imports prior to the USITC's investigation and that imports from Canada were growing substantially between 2012 and 2015.

The U.S. also noted that Canadian Solar, a Guelph-based producer, ranks as one of world's largest manufacturers of solar components, "with substantial production of (solar) cells and modules in China."

International Trade Minister Mary Ng said the panel's ruling "unequivocally confirmed" that the tariffs are "unjustified and in violation" of the new agreement, which Canada refers to as CUSMA.

"Canada will work toward the complete removal of these unjustified tariffs," Ng said in a statement. Exports of solar products to the U.S. have declined by as much as 82 per cent since the tariffs were imposed, her office noted.

"Canada will also ensure that our solar industry, as well as all Canadian industries and workers, can fully benefit from CUSMA."

Ng also acknowledged U.S. President Joe Biden's declaration earlier this month that both extended the measures and also authorized U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai to sit down with Canada and Mexico to negotiate a resolution.

Such a resolution would require confirmation that neither country's imports to the U.S. would "undermine the effectiveness of the action," the declaration reads.

"If the USTR subsequently determines … that such an agreement is not effective, the USTR is authorized … to terminate any previous suspension of the action with respect to imports of Canada or Mexico."

Tai's office acknowledged the decision late Tuesday, saying it "reaffirmed the president's authority to make exclusion determinations in safeguard proceedings."

"We will continue to review the report and work with Canada to resolve the dispute."

The decision is the second final report to be issued in a major USMCA dispute between Canada and the U.S. since the agreement took effect in July 2020.

Last month, arbitrators sided with the U.S. in its complaint that Canada was denying American dairy producers fair access to the supply-managed market north of the border.

Canada has also joined Mexico in a request for a dispute resolution panel over how the U.S. is choosing to interpret the all-important auto rules of origin that define what constitutes U.S., Mexican and Canadian content.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 15, 2022.

James McCarten, The Canadian Press

Bill Gates and Chris Sacca invest in energy storage start-up Antora to help heavy industry go green

Catherine Clifford -  CNBC

Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Lowercarbon Capital co-led a $50 million financing round in Antora Energy, a start-up looking to decarbonize industrial processes.

The thermal battery would store heat from solar and wind farms and provide an alternative to the natural gas boilers that are used by heavy industrial processing companies.

Antora CEO Andrew Ponec said the technology can work now because of the plummeting price of renewable energy in recent years.


© Provided by CNBC

An artist rendering of an Antora Energy

Decarbonization at the scale necessary to meet global warming mitigation targets will require a radical rethinking of global infrastructure. Heavy industry is a large and often overlooked piece of the puzzle.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has researched the issue extensively. In his 2021 book, "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster," Gates wrote that the process of making things like cement, steel and plastic is the single biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. That's largely because the high-temperature heat needed for industrial processes typically comes from natural gas.

Gates, through investing arm Breakthrough Energy Ventures, is now backing a start-up that's at the very early stages of addressing the problem through technology.

Founded in 2018, Antora Energy takes zero emissions energy from renewable energy sources, like wind and solar farms, and converts that to heat, which it stores in solid carbon blocks that are insulated in a kind of thermal battery. From there, the stored energy is used as heat in industrial processes needed to make materials like cement and steel, or it's converted into electricity.

In its efforts to reach its ambitious goals, Antora said Wednesday that it raised $50 million in a financing round led by Breakthrough and Chris Sacca's Lowercarbon Capital. Energy giant Shell's venture arm also contributed to the deal.

The Antora thermal battery is meant to replace a natural gas boiler and will be similar in size to a small house or a large truck trailer. If Antora is successful, it will be selling to large industrial companies, providing a zero-emissions alternative at a lower price.

"Antora makes heat and electricity from solar at prices cheaper than burning gas," Sacca wrote in an email. "The oil and gas industry can deny climate change all they want, but buyers will always choose the lower price option, and that means lights out for fossil fuels."


© Provided by CNBC

Bill Gates and Chris Sacca invest in energy storage start-up Antora to help heavy industry go green

For now, Antora is still a lab project. CEO Andrew Ponec said he doesn't expect deployments to begin until late 2023.

"It's only in the last few years that you've had wind and solar get cheap enough that you may be able to compete directly with fossil fuels for something like industrial heat," Ponec said in an interview. "It wouldn't make sense to do what we're doing if you didn't have that massive shift in the energy landscape over the last few years."

Ponec has been around the industry long enough to see the change. He previously started Dragonfly Systems, a solar company that was acquired by SunPower in 2014. A couple years after the acquisition, he went back to Stanford to complete his degree in energy systems engineering.

That's where he met co-founder Justin Briggs. They connected with David Bierman, who had just launched a company with the same vision. The three joined forces to start Antora.

"The biggest opportunity that we saw was how to take all of this very inexpensive wind and solar and apply it to different areas of the economy that produce a lot of carbon," Ponec said.


© Provided by CNBC

The Antora Energy prototype being assembled.

A toaster for blocks of carbon

The industrial market isn't as visible to the public as consumer-focused products like Tesla's electric cars. But it's just as critical when it comes to decarbonization.

"Finding climate friendly solutions to supply high temperature thermal heat for industrial processes is an important and difficult challenge that we are trying to address," said Carmichael Roberts, an investor at Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

Ponec said Antora's technology acts "just like a toaster." The machine heats up carbon, which is then insulated, holding the energy as heat until it's needed for things like making cement and steel.

"The calcination of limestone only occurs at temperatures above 1,000 Celsius, and so you have to have very high temperature storage in order to to drive that reaction to make cement," Ponec said.

To reach those levels of heat, the energy has to be stored at even higher temperatures, because "temperature only flows downhill," Ponec said.

It may seem counterproductive to build decarbonization technology that depends on carbon.

Ponec says there are two reasons for it. First, the chemical properties of carbon allow it to stay in solid form until heated to 3,600 degrees Celsius, the hottest temperature of any element. Thus, there's no concern it will melt or vaporize.

The second reason, Ponec said, is that carbon is cheap, and solid carbon is already used in the aluminum and steel industries, so supply chains are up and running.

"Low cost is clearly good, and existing supply chains was a must," Ponec said. "We've seen too many promising climate companies struggle to scale up despite promising technology."

Bender Voice Actor John DiMaggio Says ‘The Entire Cast’ Deserves Better Pay For ‘Futurama’ Revival

Brent Furdyk - ET Canada

© Photo by Barry King/WireImage


Fans are rallying to the support of voice actor John DiMaggio, best known for portraying booze-swilling robot Bender in animated comedy "Futurama".

According to a report from Deadline, fans celebrated the announcement that Hulu was reviving the cult hit — until news emerged that DiMaggio was unable to come to a deal to reprise the character he's voiced since the series' first season in 1999.

While Hulu finalized plans today to order 20 new episodes, most of the series' voice cast have signed on, including Billy West (who voices Fry and Professor Farnsworth) and Katey Sagal (Leela), in addition to actors Tress MacNeille, Maurice LaMarche, Lauren Tom, Phil LaMarr, and David Herman.

DiMaggio, however, was reportedly unable to come to a deal with 20th Television Animation, which produces the series; as a result, reports Deadline, Bender and the other roles he voices are being recast in advance of the first table-read next week, although "there is still a desire on both sides for him to return."

“Negotiations are a natural part of working in show business. Everyone has a different strategy and different boundaries… Some accept offers, some hold their ground," he continued. “Bender is part of my soul and nothing about this is meant to be disrespectful to the fans or my ‘Futurama’ family. It’s about self-respect. And honestly, [it’s about] being tired of an industry that’s become far too corporate and takes advantage of artists’ time and talent."

Finally, he added, “I wish I could give you every detail so you would understand, but it’s not my place. Thanks again for the love everyone. Still hoping for the best.”

Irate fans have been saying a lot about the situation — and DiMaggio has been retweeting some of the choicer comments.

In a tweet on Tuesday, DiMaggio addressed the dispute: "I don't think that only I deserve to be paid more. I think the entire cast does."

Nepal arrests dozens in protest against US grant

© PRAKASH MATHEMA


Nepali police fired tear gas and water cannon and arrested 77 demonstrators in the capital Kathmandu as several hundred people protested against a $500-million US grant, authorities said.

"The protestors were arrested after they pelted stones and tried to push into the restricted area (near parliament)," police spokesman Bishnu Kumar KC told AFP.

Nepal signed the Millenium Challenge Corporation (MCC) pact in 2017 to fund infrastructure projects but the government is struggling to get parliament to ratify it by a February 28 deadline.

Major opposition comes from Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba's own coalition partners including Maoist politicians -- seen as traditionally close to China -- who say it undermines Nepal's sovereignty.

Local media has reported that Chinese officials have lobbied Nepali politicians about their concerns, seeing the grant as a covert US push to increase Washington's influence.

Indian daily the Hindustan Times reported on Tuesday that Washington believes that China is behind a disinformation campaign against the pact.

"Should outside influence and corruption cause parliament not to ratify, it would be deeply concerning for the US, and a loss for the people of Nepal," the paper quoted a US State Department spokesperson as saying.

Prakash Sharan Mahat, spokesperson of the ruling Nepali Congress party said that backtracking from the commitment will only erode Nepal's credibility.

"This grant is expected to help spur the economic growth in Nepal... We will continue to hold dialogue with other coalition partners as well as other political parties to mobilise their support to present the MCC Compact in the next session of the parliament," he said.

The Millennium Challenge, created by the US Congress in 2004, offers large-scale grants to support economic growth and reduce poverty, according to Washington.

pm/stu/je