Drought conditions expected to worsen this spring, NOAA says


Dried lake bed bakes in the sun at Nicasio Reservoir in Nicasio, Calif., on July 10. NOAA predicted that for the second year in a row, drought conditions will worsen in the western U.S. due to a dry, hot spring. 

File Photo by Terry Schmitt/UPI | License Photo

March 18 (UPI) -- Below-average precipitation and above-average temperatures this spring are expected to worsen widespread drought across much of the U.S. West, national forecasters have predicted in a spring outlook report.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center said 60% of the contiguous United States is under moderate to exceptional dry conditions this week, and that will only worsen as spring advances.

"Severe to exceptional drought has persisted in some areas of the West since the summer of 2020 and drought has expanded to the southern Plains and Lower Mississippi Valley," said Jon Gottschalck, chief of the Operational Prediction Branch at the Climate Prediction Center. "With nearly 60% of the continental U.S. experiencing minor to exceptional drought conditions, this is the largest drought coverage we've seen in the U.S. since 2013."

Gottschalck said it's likely some drought areas will become worse, increasing wildfire risk across the Southwest, Southern Plains and Central Plains. Drought conditions aren't likely to improve until late-summer monsoon season.

Above-average temperatures are expected in the Southern Rockies and Southern Plains, with below-average temperatures most likely in the Pacific Northwest and southeast Alaska.

Despite drought conditions in the West, NOAA said above-average precipitation is expected in parts of the Great Lakes, Ohio Valley, mid-Atlantic and the west coast of Alaska. There's a minor-to-moderate flood risk in the eastern United States and Alaska.

"Due to late fall and winter precipitation, which saturated soils and increased streamflows, major flood risk potential is expected for the Red River of the North in North Dakota and moderate flood potential for the James River in South Dakota," said Ed Clark, director of NOAA's National Water Center.

Biden hails 'bold' ideas of new biomedicine research agency


President Joe Biden meets with researchers and patients to discuss ARPA-H, a new health research agency dealing with curing cancer and other health innovations, in the South Court Auditorium at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Friday. 

Photo by Chris Kleponis/UPI | License Photo


March 18 (UPI) -- President Joe Biden on Friday praised the government spending bill Congress passed this week for creating an agency focused on breakthroughs in biomedicine.

He said the Advanced research Projects Agency for Health will seek to precent, detect and treat diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer's and diabetes. He thanked members of Congress for ensuring the agency received $1 billion in funding through the government spending bill.

Biden said the ARPA-H is modeled on the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, which focuses on breakthroughs in security technologies.

"Like DARPA, ARPA-H will pursue ideas that break the mold on how we normally support fundamental research and commercial products in this country," he said during an event in the South Court Auditorium at the White House. "Ideas so bold no one else, not even the private sector, is willing to give them a chance or to sink a lot of money into trying to solve."

Biden met with researchers and patients to discuss the new initiative, including a patient who uses a prosthetic arm that provides a sense of touch thanks to DARPA research. He also spoke with Alondra Nelson, director of the Office on Science and Technology, and presidential science adviser Francis Collins, "to talk about how we ensure ARPA-H ... harnesses the powers and possibilities of science and technology to benefit all of America; to focus on equity, because every American should have access to cutting-edge healthcare innovations; and to ... make the impossible possible."

US to declare Rohingya repression in Myanmar a ‘genocide’

By MATTHEW LEE

Rohingya women and children sit by a fire on a beach after their boat was stranded on Idaman Island in East Aceh, Indonesia, late Friday, June 4, 2021, after leaving a refugee camp in Bangladesh, officials said. U.S. officials say the Biden administration intends to declare that Myanmar's years-long repression of the Rohingya Muslim population is a “genocide.” Two officials say Secretary of State Antony Blinken plans to announce the long-anticipated designation on Monday, March 21, 2022. (AP Photo/Zik Maulana)


WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration intends to declare that Myanmar’s years-long repression of the Rohingya Muslim population is a “genocide,” U.S. officials said Sunday.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken plans to make the long-anticipated designation on Monday at an event at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, according to the officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the move had not yet been publicly announced.

The designation does not in and of itself portend drastic new measures against Myanmar’s military-led government, which has already been hit with multiple layers of U.S. sanctions since the campaign against the Rohingya ethnic minority began in the country’s western Rakhine state in 2017.

But it could lead to additional international pressure on the government, which is already facing accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Human rights groups and lawmakers have been pressing both the Trump and Biden administrations to make the designation

At least one member of Congress, Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, welcomed the anticipated step, as did Refugees International.

“I applaud the Biden administration for finally recognizing the atrocities committed against the Rohingya as genocide,” he said in a statement released immediately after the State Department announced that Blinken would deliver remarks on Myanmar at the Holocaust Museum on Monday and tour an exhibit entitled “Burma’s Path to Genocide.” Myanmar is also known as Burma.

“While this determination is long overdue, it is nevertheless a powerful and critically important step in holding this brutal regime to account,” Merkley said. “Such processes must always be carried out objectively, consistently, and in a way that transcends geopolitical considerations.”

The humanitarian group Refugees International also praised the move. “The U.S. genocide declaration is a welcome and profoundly meaningful step,” the group said in a statement. “It is also a solid sign of commitment to justice for all the people who continue to face abuses by the military junta to this very today.”

Merkley called on the administration to continue the pressure campaign on Myanmar by imposing additional sanctions on the government to include its oil and gas sectors. “America must lead the world to make it clear that atrocities like these will never be allowed to be buried unnoticed, no matter where they occur,” he said.

More than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled from Buddhist-majority Myanmar to refugee camps in Bangladesh since August 2017, when the Myanmar military launched a clearance operation in response to attacks by a rebel group. Myanmar security forces have been accused of mass rapes, killings and the burning of thousands of homes.

USA

Report: Median household income climbs over past five years ending 2020

The median households for U.S. residents increased from 2015 to 2020 while the country became more diverse, according to the new five-year American Community Survey estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau

 File Photo by Gil C/Shutterstock

March 18 (UPI) -- The median household income for U.S. residents increased from 2015 to 2020 while the country became more diverse, according to the new five-year American Community Survey estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau.

According to the new report, the median household income increased to $64,994 compared with the previous five-year period, adjusted for inflation. Those incomes increased in 48 states and the District of Columbia and decreased in Alaska. There were no statistical differences in Wyoming and Puerto Rico, the report said.

The overall poverty rate dropped over the same period from 15.5% to 12.8%. Poverty declined in 1,294 counties while increasing in 85 counties. There was no significant change in 1,840 counties.

"Across these two time periods, the poverty rate decreased in 49 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, while the change in the poverty rate in Alaska was not statistically significant. No state had an increase in poverty," the report said.

RELATED Census Bureau: Black, Latino, Indigenous populations undercounted in 2020

The report said the White population remained the largest ethnic group in the United States but those claiming two or more races also increased over the past five years.

Those of Hispanic or Latino population, which includes people of any race, grew at a faster pace between 2011-2015 and 2016-2020 than the population that was not of Hispanic or Latino origin.

More than 204 million identified themselves as White alone while 41.1 million identified themselves as Black alone. Some 19.8 million identified themselves as Asian alone. Another 3 million identified themselves as both Black and White.

The Hispanic and Latino population grew from 17.13% in 2011-2015 to 18.2% in 2016-2020.

"The observed changes in the overall racial distributions could be due to a number of factors, including demographic change," the report said. "However, we expect they were largely due to the improvements to the design, processing and coding of the race and ethnicity questions, which enabled a more thorough and accurate depiction of how people prefer to self-identify."

Time to retool census? Some think so after minorities missed
By MIKE SCHNEIDER

Census Bureau Director nominee Robert Santos, testifies before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee, Thursday, July 15, 2021, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Santos said Monday, Feb. 21, 2022, that he has gone on a listening tour with stakeholders and the agency is making permanent community outreach efforts in an effort to restore any trust that was lost following attempts by the Trump administration to politicize the nation's head count.

 (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

Is it time to rethink the census and other surveys that measure changes in the U.S. population?

Policymakers and demographers have been asking that question since results released by the U.S. Census Bureau this month showed Black, Hispanic, American Indian and other minority residents were undercounted at greater rates in 2020 than in the previous decade.

On the top of that, results from a version of its most comprehensive survey that compares year-to-year changes in U.S. life had to be mostly scrapped because disruptions caused by the pandemic produced fewer responses in 2020.

“The current model of coming up with a master address list, mailing everybody an invitation — like you’re inviting people to a party and hoping they respond, and if not, you’re going to track them down — I think it’s an obsolete system,” said Arturo Vargas, CEO of NALEO Educational Fund, a nonpartisan nonprofit that supports Latino political engagement.

The undercounts in the 2020 census were blamed on the pandemic, natural disasters and political interference from the Trump administration, but undercounts of racial and ethnic minorities are nothing new to the census; they’ve been persistent for decades.

In recent years, the cost of censuses and surveys have grown while public participation rates for surveys have declined. The bureau’s biggest between-census effort to take the measure of the U.S. population, the American Community Survey, produces 11 billion statistics from interviews with 3.5 million households each year, and the once-a-decade census tallies every U.S. resident for a count used in divvying up federal funding and congressional seats among the states as well as redrawing political districts.

“What we have today largely is still a 20th century, survey-centric statistical system,” Ron Jarmin, the chief operating officer of the Census Bureau, said last December when he was serving as the agency’s acting director.

Even before the release of the 2020 report card earlier this month, the Census Bureau had been developing new ways of gathering data. Chief among them is the embryonic Frames Program that would combine all kinds of data sets, including administrative records from the private sector and government agencies, as well as surveys and censuses that have been staples of Census Bureau data-gathering for decades.

Under the concept, one data set such as an individual’s IRS file would be linked to another, such as the individual’s Census Bureau survey response. Eventually, data related to people’s addresses, demographics, businesses and jobs would all be linked together.

In 2030, when the next census takes place, the program could help count people with good administrative records or links to other records, and more resources could be devoted toward households that are the hardest to count, Census Bureau Director Robert Santos said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

“We are looking to take advantage of existing technology, and that necessarily includes the merging of large databases on people, not to create a Big Brother society, but to supplement and reduce the burden on our population when it comes time to gather data,” said Santos, who was appointed by President Joe Biden.

Relying on administrative records may have its own problems because some groups, such as people in the country illegally, often have little paper trail.

Besides naming an unusually high number of political appointees to the Census Bureau, the Trump administration unsuccessfully attempted to use administrative records to get a tally of the number of people in the country illegally so they could be eliminated from the count used for allocating congressional seats.

Any effort to revamp how the count is conducted will need to be protected from similar efforts to misuse the count for political purposes, said Paul Ong, a professor emeritus of urban studies at UCLA.

“The 2020 enumeration was a wakeup call,” Ong said. “The Census Bureau has a very important and fundamental function in our society. It is the keeper of our demographic truths.”

From a purely civic perspective, Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former congressional staffer who specializes in census issues, worries a greater reliance on administrative records at the expense of public participation will be one less thing that engages everyone in the U.S., no matter their background.

“If you are in a millionaire’s mansion or living in a tent under a bridge, you matter to the census,” Lowenthal said.

The Census Bureau has been at the forefront of advances in data gathering and processing — whether using punch cards and electronic tabulators at the end of the 19th century or employing the first modern computer installed by a civilian government agency for the 1950 census. For the 2020 census, it tried several new approaches.

For the first time, the internet was the primary mode for answering the census questionnaire, and the 2020 census was the first to use administrative records from places like the Social Security Administration to fill in data gaps for households that didn’t respond. Bureau statisticians also are blending other data sets with census data for the first time to create yearly population estimates.

The Census Bureau could improve the accuracy of the undercounted communities if Congress would allow it to use a statistical method that adjusts the population count to compensate for undercounts, Lowenthal said. That statistical tool has been prohibited for the count used for dividing congressional seats among the states for more than two decades.

Outreach to overlooked communities and more consistent funding from Congress also needs to be in the mix, said Allison Plyer, chief demographer of The Data Center in New Orleans.

“There isn’t going to be a silver bullet,” said Plyer, former chair of the bureau’s scientific advisory committee. “All of these things need to work together in concert.”

___

Follow Mike Schneider on Twitter at https://twitter.com/MikeSchneiderAP

SEND UKRAINE IRON DOME
Zelenskyy evokes Holocaust as he appeals to Israel for aid
By JOSEF FEDERMAN

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A woman wears a flower crown in the colors of the Ukranian flag in Habima Square in Tel Aviv, Israel, to watch Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a video address to the Knesset, Israel's parliament, Sunday, March 20, 2022. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)


JERUSALEM (AP) — Ukraine’s president on Sunday called on Israel to take a stronger stand against Russia, delivering an emotional appeal that compared Russia’s invasion of his country to the actions of Nazi Germany.

In a speech to Israeli lawmakers over Zoom, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said it was time for Israel, which has emerged as a key mediator between Ukraine and Russia, to finally take sides. He said Israel should follow its Western allies by imposing sanctions and providing arms to Ukraine.

“One can ask for a long time why we can’t accept weapons from you or why Israel didn’t impose sanctions against Russia, why you are not putting pressure on Russian business,” he said. “It is your choice, dear brothers and sisters.”

Zelenskyy, who has carefully catered a series of similar parliamentary speeches to his audiences, made frequent references to the Holocaust as he tried to rally support. The comparisons drew an angry condemnation from Israel’s national Holocaust memorial, which said Zelenskyy was trivializing the Holocaust.

Zelenskyy accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of trying to carry out a “final solution” against Ukraine -- using the Nazi term for its planned genocide of 6 million Jews during World War II.

“You remember it and will never forget it for sure,” he said. “But you should hear what is coming from Moscow now. They are saying the same words now: ‘final solution.’ But this time it’s about us, about the Ukrainian question.”

Zelenskyy, who himself is Jewish, also noted that a Russian missile slammed into Babi Yar -- the spot of a notorious Nazi massacre in 1941 that now hosts Ukraine’s main Holocaust memorial.

“The people of Israel, you saw how Russian rockets hit Babi Yar. You know what this place means, where the victims of the Holocaust are buried,” he said.

The use of such sensitive language was a clear attempt by Zelenskyy to connect with his audience. Israel was founded in 1948 as a refugee for Jews in the wake of the Holocaust. The country is home to tens of thousands of elderly survivors, and many of its leaders are children of survivors.

Putin has also has sought to paint his enemies in Ukraine as neo-Nazis as he tries to legitimize his war in Ukraine. But historians, noting that Ukraine is a democracy led by a Jewish president, have condemned his use of such terminology as disinformation and a cynical ploy to further the Russian leader’s aims.

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, whose late father was a Holocaust survivor, thanked Zelenskyy for the speech.

“We will continue to assist the Ukrainian people as much as we can and we will never turn our backs to the plight of people who know the horrors of war,” Lapid said.

But Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial, which had previously condemned Putin’s Nazi references, also harshly criticized Zelenskyy, without naming him.

“Propagandist discourse accompanying the current hostilities is saturated with irresponsible statements and completely inaccurate comparisons with Nazi ideology and actions before and during the Holocaust,” it said. “Yad Vashem condemns this trivialization and distortion of the historical facts of the Holocaust.”

The Israeli public has been largely supportive of Ukraine since Russia invaded its western neighbor on Feb. 24. Several thousand people, many holding Ukrainian flags, gathered in a central Tel Aviv square to watch his speech on a large screen.

But Israel’s government has been much more cautious as it carves out a role as a mediator in the war. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett paid a surprise visit to Moscow to meet with Putin on March 5. Since then, he has spoken to the Russian leader at least twice and to Zelenskyy at least six times, according to his office.

While Israel’s foreign minister has strongly condemned the invasion, Bennett has used more tepid language to maintain an air of neutrality.

With large Jewish populations in both Ukraine and Russia, Israel is wary of antagonizing either side. Israel also has good working relations with the Russian military in neighboring Syria -- where both sides’ maintain a special hotline to make sure their air forces do not come into conflict.

Israel has delivered tons of humanitarian aid to Ukraine and is set to open a special field hospital in western Ukraine later this week. But it has rejected pleas to provide arms or impose sanctions against Russia or its oligarchs, some of whom are Jewish and have strong ties to Israel.

Zelenskyy said it was time for this to change.

“Everyone in Israel knows that your missile defense is the best. Everyone knows that your weapons are strong, everyone knows that you are great and you know how to defend your national interests, interests of your people and you can definitely help defend ours,” he said.

OUTLAW THEM

Ukraine war is backdrop in US push for hypersonic weapons

By DAVID SHARP

This handout photo provided by the U.S. Navy shows a common hypersonic glide body (C-HGB) launching from the Pacific Missile Range Facility, in Kauai, Hawaii, March 19, 2020, during a Department of Defense flight experiment. The department is working in collaboration with industry and academia to field hypersonic war-fighting capabilities. (Luke Lamborn/U.S. Navy via AP)


PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Lagging behind Russia in developing hypersonic weapons, the U.S. Navy is rushing to field its first, with installation on a warship starting as soon as late next year.

The United States is in a race with Russia and China to develop these weapons, which travel at speeds akin to ballistic missiles but are difficult to shoot down because of their maneuverability.

The Russian military says it already deployed hypersonic missiles, claiming on both Saturday and Sunday to have deployed them against targets in Ukraine marking the weapon’s first use in combat. The Pentagon couldn’t confirm a hypersonic weapon was used in the attacks.

The American military is accelerating development to catch up.

The U.S. weapon would launch like a ballistic missile and would release a hypersonic glide vehicle that would reach speeds seven to eight times faster than the speed of sound before hitting the target.

In Maine, General Dynamics subsidiary Bath Iron Works has begun engineering and design work on changes necessary to install the weapon system on three Zumwalt-class destroyers.

The work would begin at a yet-to-be-named shipyard sometime in fiscal year that begins in October 2023, the Navy said.

Hypersonic weapons are defined as anything traveling beyond Mach 5, or five times faster than the speed of sound. That’s about 3,800 mph (6,100 kph). Intercontinental ballistic missiles far exceed that threshold but travel in a predictable path, making it possible to intercept them.

The new weapons are maneuverable.

Existing missile defense systems, including the Navy’s Aegis system, would have trouble intercepting such objects because maneuverability makes their movement unpredictable and speed leaves little time to react.

Russia says it has ballistic missiles that can deploy hypersonic glide vehicles as well as a hypersonic cruise missile.

The U.S. is “straining just to catch up” because it failed to invest in the new technology, with only a fraction of the 10,000 people who were working on the program in the 1980s, said U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, a Tennessee Democrat who’s chair of a subcommittee that monitors the program.

“If we want to pursue parity, we will need to back this effort with more money, time, and talent than we are now,” he said.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine serves as a backdrop as the Pentagon releases its budget proposal that lays out its goals for hypersonics and other weapon systems later this month.

The three stealthy Zumwalt-class destroyers to be equipped with the new weapons have plenty of space to accommodate them — thanks to a design failure that works to the Navy’s advantage in this instance.

The ships were built around a gun system that was supposed to use GPS-guided, rocket-boosted projectiles to pound targets 90 miles (145 kilometers) away. But those projectiles proved to be too expensive, and the Navy canceled the system, leaving each of the ships with a useless loading system and a pair of 155-mm guns hidden in angular turrets.

The retrofit of all three ships will likely cost more than $1 billion but will give a new capability to the tech-laden, electric-drive ships that already cost the Navy $23.5 billion to design and build, said Bryan Clark, a defense analyst at the Hudson Institute.

“The engineering is not that hard. It’ll just take time and money to make it happen,” Clark said.

The Navy intends to field the weapons on the destroyers in the 2025 fiscal year and on Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarines in the 2028 fiscal year, the Navy said.

The destroyers would be based in the Pacific Ocean, where they would be a deterrent to China, should it become emboldened by Russia’s attack on Ukraine and consider attacking Taiwan, Clark said.

The U.S. focus on hypersonic weapons represents a pivot after hesitating in the past because of technological hurdles. Adversaries, meanwhile, continued research and development.

Russia fired off a salvo of Zircon hypersonic cruise missiles in late December, heralding the completion of weapon testing.

But Russia may be exaggerating the capability of such super weapons to compensate for weakness in other areas, said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute.

For the time being, Russia doesn’t have many of the weapons, and it’s unclear how effective they are, he said.

Urban mining transforms Brazil neighborhoods into ghost town

By ERALDO PERES

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PHOTO ESSAY
Homes stand abandoned in Maceio, Alagoas state, Brazil, Sunday, March 6, 2022. The homes have been abandoned because of the threat of ground subsidence caused by the Braskem mine that has forced more than 55 thousand people from their homes. 

(AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)


MACEIO, Brazil (AP) — This part of Maceio, the capital of Brazil’s northeastern Alagoas state, used to buzz with the sounds of cars, commerce and children playing. It went silent as residents evacuated en masse, eager to escape the looming destruction of their homes, which were cracking and crumbling.

Beneath their floors, the subsurface was riddled with dozens of cavities: the legacy of four decades of rock salt mining in five urban neighborhoods. That caused the soil above to settle and structures atop it to start coming apart. Since 2020, the communities have hollowed out as tens of thousands of residents accepted payouts from petrochemical company Braskem to relocate.

Few holdouts remain, several of whom told The Associated Press they imagine the ground under their feet resembling Swiss cheese. Still, Paulo Sergio Doe, 51, said he will never leave his home in the Pinheiro neighborhood where he grew up.

“The company can’t impose what it wants overnight to do away with the lives and histories of so many families,” he said in an interview outside his home.

Braskem is one of the biggest petrochemical companies in the Americas, owned primarily by Brazilian state-run oil company Petrobras and construction giant Novonor, formerly known as Odebrecht.

The company isn’t forcibly evicting anyone, though those still here said it feels that way. It reached an agreement with prosecutors and public defenders to compensate families so they could uproot and start over elsewhere. By Braskem’s count, 97.4% of affected homes — more than 14,000 — are now vacant, the company said in its 2021 earnings call on Thursday.

The 55,000 evacuees left behind not just neighbors and friends, but also jobs; 4,500 mostly small- and medium-sized businesses that sustained 30,000 people were shuttered, according to a study The Federal University of Alagoas published last year. Among those businesses were local supermarkets and a ballet school that operated for 38 years, according to Adriana Capretz, part of the university’s work group to monitor the neighborhoods.

The exodus is evident from above; departing residents salvaged everything they could sell for extra cash, including their roof tiles. Their removal allows unimpeded views inside the once-occupied spaces.

The amount Braskem offered wasn’t enough for Natalícia Gonçalves. The retired teacher, 77, also said she felt too old to start fresh. So she watched as everyone in Pinheiro left her. Now she lives inside a makeshift fortress behind boards and plants aimed at deterring would-be burglars. Braskem security guards do rounds on motorcycles, briefly interrupting the evenings’ eerie silence.

“They’ve already done everything to force me to go, but I have my rights,” she said from behind her home’s fortified exterior. “I’m afraid, especially at night when no one is around. The light is dim, there’s hardly any. I protect myself with my plants, but I’m alone, with God.”

Braskem has so far disbursed about 40% of the more than 5 billion reais (about $1 billion) it has set aside for relocation, compensation of individuals including residents and local employees and the transfer of facilities like schools and hospitals, the company said in its earnings call. It is directing 6 billion reais more for closing and monitoring the salt mines, as well as social, environmental and urbanistic measures.

Wrapping up the call, Braskem’s CEO Roberto Lopes Pontes Simões highlighted the company’s year, including “all the advance we had in Maceio” in having relocated nearly everyone from the neighborhoods.

No house has been swallowed by the earth, nor was any person killed. Capretz, a professor in the university’s architecture and urbanism school, said that doesn’t mean heartache was avoided.

“The tragedy is happening, not just regarding the geological phenomena but, primarily, because there are cases of people who committed suicide, many who became sick with depression, lost their social lives, family ties, friends and neighbors,” Capretz said as she walked through the Bebedouro neighborhood. “None of that is being considered by Braskem.”

The company’s press office said in a lengthy response to AP questions that it provides free psychological consultations to any residents participating in the compensation and relocation program. It said the program was created based on law and legal rulings in similar cases and said compensation offers are always presented to individuals alongside their lawyer or a public defender.

But negotiations can be clouded by sentiment; the price of a house isn’t the same as the value of a home.

Quitéria Maria da Silva, 64, and her grandson were waiting for the rest of their family to come play dominos on a table they set up beneath the only lamppost on their street that’s still functional. Even as da Silva said she would move were Braskem to pay her requested amount, she expressed ambivalence:

“I always lived in my house and now, if I have to leave here, where will I go?” 

___ AP reporter David Biller contributed from Rio de Janeiro

Labor foe Schultz returns as Starbucks union effort grows

By DEE-ANN DURBIN

Pam Blauman-Schmitz, who was a union rep at Starbucks in the mid-1980's, poses for a photo in front of a Starbucks coffee shop Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2022, in Seattle. Starbucks, now facing union elections at more than 100 U.S. stores, has spent decades fighting unionization. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)


From the time he bought Starbucks in 1987 to the time he stepped down as chairman in 2018, Howard Schultz consistently — and successfully — fought attempts to unionize Starbucks’ U.S. stores and roasting plants.

But Schultz — who was recently named Starbucks’ interim chief executive — never confronted a unionization movement as big and fast-growing as the current one. Six U.S. Starbucks stores have voted to unionize since December, and at least 140 more in 27 states have filed petitions for union elections.

It’s unclear how Schultz will tackle the issue when he returns to the company in April.

“He took it really personally that his workers wanted to be part of a union, because he thought with him in charge they wouldn’t need it,” said Pam Blauman-Schmitz, a retired union representative who worked to organize Starbucks’ first stores in the early 1980s. “He would say stuff like, ’Maybe you need unions in the coal mines, but not at Starbucks stores.”

Starbucks announced March 16 that its CEO of five years, Kevin Johnson, was retiring. The company tapped Schultz to serve as interim CEO until it finds a permanent replacement by this fall. Schultz, 68, who has held the honorary title of chairman emeritus since 2018, is also rejoining the company’s board.

It is not yet clear if Schultz will try to amp up the fight against unionization. But Timothy Hubbard, assistant professor of management at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, said he is well-positioned to do so.

“My sense is that if they want to shut down the unions, this is the best course of action,” Hubbard said. “Schultz has what it takes to tackle a hard topic like unions.”

Schultz did not respond to attempts to contact him through his website or his family’s foundation.

In a November letter to employees, posted just before the first unionization votes at three stores in Buffalo, New York, Schultz said he tried to create the kind of company that his blue-collar father never had the chance to work for.

He recalled the “traumatic moment” his family had no income after his father suffered a workplace injury, and said that’s why Starbucks has benefits like health care, free college tuition, parental leave and stock grants for employees.

“No partner has ever needed to have a representative seek to obtain things we all have as partners at Starbucks. And I am saddened and concerned to hear anyone thinks that is needed now,” Schultz wrote.

But to many union organizers, who complain of inconsistent hours, poor training, understaffing and low wages, Shultz’s words fell flat.



“A lot of people felt like they were being lectured to by a disappointed father because they weren’t grateful,” said Jaz Brisack, a Starbucks barista and labor organizer who heard Schultz speak at an employee forum in Buffalo last fall.

Others say they’ve seen outright anger from Schultz over unions.

Blauman-Schmitz said as soon as Schultz bought Starbucks in 1987, he reneged on a labor agreement that had been reached between the company and the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represented six Seattle-area stores and a roasting plant. Schultz wanted a new contract with weaker benefits and job protections, said Blauman-Schmitz, who has since retired from the union.

One day, she said, Schultz spotted her passing out flyers in the roasting plant and rushed toward her, screaming and red in the face.

Anne Belov was working part-time in the roasting plant and sat on the union negotiating committee. She had always gotten glowing performance reviews, but after Schultz took over, she was suddenly being reprimanded constantly. Belov left the company in 1988.

“You could see the writing on the wall. As the company grew, it was not going to continue to be possible to act on the good faith of the people who controlled all the power,” she said.

Schultz soon swept the union out. In his 1997 book, “Pour Your Heart Into It,” he recalled how a barista who opposed the union began a campaign to decertify it. By 1992, the union no longer represented the stores or the roasting plant. Schultz saw that as a sign that workers trusted him.

“If they had faith in me and my motives, they wouldn’t need a union,” he wrote.

Still, efforts to unionize Starbucks didn’t go away, and the company continued to fight them. Starbucks had to reinstate fired workers or pay to settle labor law violations numerous times in the early 2000s.

Last year, the NLRB found that Starbucks unlawfully retaliated against two Philadelphia baristas who were attempting to unionize. The NLRB said Starbucks monitored the employees’ social media, unlawfully spied on their conversations and ultimately fired them. It ordered Starbucks to stop interfering with workers’ right to organize and offer reinstatement to the two workers.

More recently, on March 15, the NLRB issued a complaint against Starbucks alleging that district and store managers in Phoenix spied on and threatened workers who supported unionizing. The complaint says Starbucks suspended one union supporter and fired another.

Starbucks did not make anyone available to comment.

In a letter to employees in December, Starbucks North America President Rossann Williams said the company will respect the legal process and bargain in good faith. But the company insists its stores function better when it works directly with employees.

The outcome of the current unionizing effort is unclear. The number of stores that have petitioned for union elections is still only a fraction of Starbucks’ 9,000 company-owned stores in the U.S. And Starbucks has the resources to keep fighting, with annual revenue of $29 billion last year.

But Brisack said this unionizing effort is also stronger than past ones, which were thwarted by high worker turnover and resource-starved unions. Organizers now have the backing of Workers United — an arm of the 2 million-member Service Employees International Union — and a union-friendly president in the White House. Brisack said the pandemic also fueled workers’ outrage.

The climate is also changing. Dan Cornfield, a labor expert and professor of sociology at Vanderbilt, said U.S. polling shows growing public support for unions since the Great Recession. That’s a big difference from the 1980s, when Starbucks first fought back unions.

“By taking an anti-union stand from the Reagan era, they are actually potentially jeopardizing their customer base,” Cornfield said.

MLB deal took 11 months of bargaining, most moves at end
By RONALD BLUM

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New York Mets pitcher Max Scherzer, right, speaks as Bruce Meyer, chief union negotiator, listens during a news conference Tuesday, March 1, 2022, in Jupiter, Fla. Major League Baseball has canceled opening day. Commissioner Rob Manfred announced Tuesday the sport will lose regular-season games over a labor dispute for the first time in 27 years after acrimonious lockout talks collapsed in the hours before management's deadline. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)


NEW YORK (AP) — Rob Manfred had just made a 6 o’clock decision to cancel a second week of games, and MLB Deputy Commissioner Dan Halem was thinking the lockout could go on quite a while longer.

Then at 6:24 p.m. on March 9, a new proposal from union deputy general counsel Matt Nussbaum plopped into his inbox.

By the time Halem left the office that night, he recalled thinking: “I thought we had a chance to get it done.”

After 11 months of bickering in bargaining, Major League Baseball’s labor contract came together in just a few hours on March 10.

Talks had broken off over an international draft, but Halem’s outlook changed in the short time between Manfred green-lighting the cancellation announcement and MLB’s publication of the news release at 6:30 p.m.

Labor relations in baseball is a mix of banter and bluster, tenacity and tedium, revising and resisting.

In the end, there was not a single face-to-face meeting in the final 24 hours as the sides negotiated on the telephone and through email.

Manfred’s cancellation decision came four hours after the last in-person session. MLB staff sent the union an edit of Nussbaum’s email that night, and after some back-and-forth in the morning, players accepted.

Manfred convened a Zoom of the labor policy committee at 10:30 a.m. on March 10, and at noon Senior Vice President Patrick Houlihan emailed to chief negotiator Bruce Meyer, general counsel Ian Penny and Nussbaum what was labeled a best-and-final offer to preserve a 162-game season and full pay, attaching a 3 p.m. deadline.

The union executive board met by Zoom starting at 1 p.m., and Meyer texted Halem a little before 2 p.m. asking for more time.

Veteran baseball writer Jon Heyman tweeted the balloting in what appeared to be real time, first at 2:50 p.m.: “Union executive board appears to be voting against approval.” Then at 3:07: “Team votes are coming on now. ... So far players are going against the executive council.”

At 3:17 management negotiators heard cheers erupt from elsewhere on the floor of MLB’s Rockefeller Center office. They were a response to his tweet: “Union votes yes on deal.”

The final vote was 26-12 in favor, with the executive subcommittee all opposed and the team player representatives 26-4 for approval.

About 20 minutes later, Meyer called Halem to deliver the news, and at 6 p.m. the 30 owners unanimously approved during their own Zoom.

“We had 38 guys on our executive board who were intimately involved in every step of the way — either they took part directly in meetings or they were being briefed multiple times a day,” Meyer said.

“Everything that we did was done based on the input and guidance from the board. We obviously wanted to explore all possibilities of getting a fair deal without missing games. If there wasn’t a fair deal to be had, then guys were prepared to do whatever is necessary. Ultimately, a majority of guys believed that the deal we had on the table was a good deal and worth taking without the risk of missing games.”

Collective bargaining in sports is a process of posturing by management and players who refuse to reveal bottom-line positions until the last possible moment before big money is in danger.

Meyer, a bespectacled, bearded 60-year-old sports law attorney and litigator who spent 30 years at Weil, Gotshal & Manges, was hired by the union in August 2018 as senior director of collective bargaining and legal.

Halem, a 55-year-old former Proskauer partner, joined MLB in 2007 and took over as MLB’s chief negotiator ahead of the 2016 agreement.

Bargaining has a Rashomon effect on the parties.

MLB felt an initial turning point was on Feb. 28 during 16 hours of talks in Jupiter, Florida, that would stretch until 2 a.m. the next morning. A two-on-two meeting among Halem, executive vice president Morgan Sword, Meyer and union director of player services Kevin Slowey started just after 7 p.m. and lasted almost an hour in a second-floor office next to a conference room. The sides discussed what could lead to a framework of various packages and trades.

Meyer remained pessimistic, focused on the large gap in numbers and was convinced management was trying to spin an unwarranted upbeat outlook.

There had been 15 largely unproductive core bargaining sessions leading up to the lockout on Dec. 2 plus 22 days of meetings on other issues. Initial presentations were made April 20 and the first proposal on May 6. Because of the pandemic, sessions were held over Zoom and dominated to some extent by speeches.

The sides met in person on Aug. 16 in Denver, when MLB made an economic offer. The union responded on Oct. 29, the day of World Series Game 3. There were four more meetings during the first few weeks of November, then three starting Nov. 29 at the Four Seasons Resort at Las Colinas in Irving, Texas, site of the union’s executive board meeting. Players made an offer, and MLB concluded there was little to respond to.

“It was clear there wasn’t going to be a deal before the deadline,” Halem said.

Bargaining broke off, and management’s negotiators left the hotel about nine hours before the contract expired at midnight EST. While MLB prepared for a signing freeze, teams feverishly concluded a one-day record of $1.4 billion in contracts to 27 players.

Economic negotiations didn’t resume until Jan. 13, and then only with another Zoom. The sides held a core economic meeting in person for the first time since the lockout on Jan. 24 at the union’s New York office, and players withdrew their proposal to liberalize free agency with an age-based backstop.

The sides met again the following day and MLB eliminated its plan to cut salary arbitration eligibility and also for the first time agreed to the union’s concept of a pre-arbitration bonus pool, though at $10 million to the union’s $105 million.

What followed was a series of glacially paced sessions that reinforced spring training would not start as scheduled on Feb. 16. MLB’s request for a federal mediator was rejected by the union and a Feb. 17 session lasted just 15 minutes. At a one-on-one side session after, Halem told Meyer a deal would have to be reached by Feb. 28 to salvage March 31 openers.

Talks shifted on Feb. 21 to Roger Dean Stadium, the spring training home of the St. Louis Cardinals and Miami Marlins, less than three miles from the home of Max Scherzer, whose $43 million salary tops the majors. With more than a dozen players and several owners on hand, the sides spent four straight days mostly feeling each other out, testiness increasing and players pounding the table and shouting at Halem and owners in frustration over management’s lack of movement on tax proposals.

A one-on-one meeting that Friday on Feb. 25 between Manfred and union head Tony Clark started at just before 4 p.m. and lasted about 30 minutes on the possible path to deal. It was the first sign of movement.

There was slightly more intense bargaining over the weekend, but not until Monday’s marathon of 13 sessions over 16 1/2 hours was extensive progress made.

“I haven’t had so little sleep since college,” Yankees manager general partner Hal Steinbrenner said.

MLB voiced more confidence than the union and extended Manfred’s deadline to save opening day until 5 p.m. Tuesday. But after a union conference call, talks stalled again with each side lashing out.

Manfred held a news conference in the left-field corner as the deadline passed, canceling a week of games. Two hours later, the union held its own media session 5 1/2 miles away at the Wyndham Grand Jupiter, with Scherzer and reliever Andrew Miller flanking Clark and Meyer, and more than a dozen players sitting in the audience to lend support.

Bargaining resumed on Sunday, March 6, with the union making minor movement, what would turn out to be the start of five straight days of negotiations culminating in the deal. By then, there had been enough progress that MLB counsel Vanish Grover and Justin Wiley started preparing what would become a 20-page memo outlining terms that Halem would send on the evening of March 10 to club control persons.

On Monday, Manfred got approval from the labor policy committee for the Tuesday deadline to cancel another week while telling the union it was the last time to get in 162 games and keep full pay, That was conveyed during a three-on-three meeting at the union office that started at 3:30 p.m.

“The use of deadlines and extending deadlines and figuring out when to set them and when to back off them is part of the art of collective bargaining,” Manfred said.

MLB extended that deadline to Wednesday during 16 1/2 hours of talks that recessed at 2 a.m. to allow another player meeting in the morning. That became the day of hang-ups over the draft, which included the final in-person meeting, when three union officials make a three-block walk through a wintry mix of snow and rain to hand-deliver an offer.

Manfred’s fifth deadline was the one that worked, enabling the season to start a week behind schedule on April 7.

“The deal got better and better for us at every stage, including even in the last 24 hours,” Meyer said. “Players generally don’t appreciate being given deadlines. They don’t react well to it. Having said that, there were certain aspects of the calendar that did affect the parties’ assessment of where they were.”

MLB’s luxury tax threshold offer rose from $214 million on Feb. 26 to $220 million two days later and $230 million on March 8. For 2026, the figure rose from $222 million on Feb. 26 to $244 million by the end.

Similarly, the pre-arbitration bonus pool increased from $10 million on Jan. 25 to $40 million on March 8 and $50 million in the final deal.

The executive subcommittee thought the union could have pushed for more — seven of the eight earned $12 million or more last year, and five are represented by the game’s leading agent, Scott Boras. The majority of the larger executive committee took the deal in what the union said showed the democratic nature of a union that encouraged widespread attendance on the Zooms.

“We don’t tell teams how to vote or who to vote for for player reps,” Meyer said. “Teams obviously make their decisions. Some clubhouses, they tend to be younger guys. Other clubhouses, they’re veterans.”

A contract was reached on the 99th day of the lockout, 325 days into negotiations that took longer than a season. There was no joint news conference, instead media sessions separated by three city blocks and one day, an indication the 2026-27 negotiations may have the same tone.

Just 161 1/2 hours after the start of Manfred’s news conference to announce the lockout’s end, Boston’s Michael Feliz threw the first pitch of spring training, a fastball high taken by Minnesota’s Byron Buxton before a crowd of 8,303 at JetBlue Park in Fort Myers, Florida.

Baseball was back to some semblance of normal.

___

More AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/MLB and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

Understaffing leaves after-school programs with unmet demand
By CAROLYN THOMPSON

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Rico X poses at his home March 14, 2022, in Hermitage, Tenn. X, who oversees the before- and afterschool programs run by the YMCA of Middle Tennessee, says enrollment has had to be capped as parents return to work after the COVID pandemic because of staff shortages, leaving capacity at about 70% of what it was before the pandemic. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)


The return to classrooms for the nation’s schoolchildren has not meant a return to work for many of their parents who, with workdays that outlast school days, are finding crucial after-school programs in short supply.

School-based providers list difficulties hiring and retaining staff as the biggest reasons they have not fully rebounded from pandemic shutdowns and they say they are as frustrated as the parents they are turning away.

“We’re in a constant state of flux. We’ll hire one staffer and another will resign,” said Ester Buendia, assistant director for after-school programs at Northside Independent School District in Texas. “We’ve just not been able to catch up this year.”

Before the pandemic, the San Antonio district’s after-school program had 1,000 staff members serving more than 7,000 students at its roughly 100 elementary and middle schools. Today, there are less than half that number of employees supervising about 3,300 students. More than 1,100 students are on waiting lists for the program, called Learning Tree, which provides academic, recreational and social enrichment until 6:30 p.m. each school day.

It’s difficult to conclude how many parents of school-age children have been unable to resume working outside the home because of gaps in available care. But surveys point to a cycle of parents, mostly mothers, staying home for their children because they are unable to find after-school programming, which then causes staffing shortages at such programs that rely heavily on women to run them.

“There’s no doubt really that these after-school programs — the lack of after-school programs at this stage — are limiting women in particular being able to reenter the workforce,” said Jen Rinehart, vice president for strategy and programming at the nonprofit Afterschool Alliance, which works to increase programming.

“If women don’t return to the workforce then we don’t have the staff we need for these after-school opportunities, so it’s all very tangled together,” she said.

An Afterschool Alliance survey found an all-time high of 24.6 million children were unable to access a program at the end of 2021, though cost as well as availability was a barrier. Of more than 1,000 program providers surveyed, 54% had waiting lists, a significantly greater percentage than in the past.

Wells Fargo reported that labor shortages in child care, where women account for 96% of the workforce, are more acute than in other industries also struggling to find reliable employees. Employment was 12.4% below its pre-COVID-19 level at the beginning of March, leaving an estimated 460,000 families forced to make other arrangements, analysts concluded.

“Access to affordable child care has been shown time and again to boost labor force participation among mothers,” the report said.

A Census Bureau data poll in January found that 6% of parents with children 5-11 years old were not working because a child was not in school or day care. Data analyzed by Pew Research Center found that in the last quarter of 2021, 6% fewer jobs were held by parents of children age 5 to 12.

Erica Gonzalez of San Antonio secured after-school spots for her second grade and sixth grade daughters after going into the school year on waiting lists. That allowed her to maintain her schedule at the nonprofit where she works and her husband, a teacher, to also coach.

Anticipating a crush for spots, Gonzalez had made sure to enroll her children for Learning Tree as quickly as possible and she kept in touch with their schools as each child inched up waiting lists.

“We were really just kind of hoping and praying that spots would open up for them and fortunately they did,” Gonzalez said.

Without the program, Gonzalez said she and her husband would have had to figure out how to get their daughters from their schools to her husband to wait for him to finish work.

“I would have had to probably change my schedule to go pick them up, drop them off and come all the way back to work,” she said. “We would have figured something out but it definitely would have been a challenge.”

Rico X said the school-based before- and after-school programs he oversees at the YMCA of Middle Tennessee have had to cap enrollment because of staff shortages, leaving capacity at about 70% of what it was before the pandemic. One of its 105 sites used to have as many as 85 students; now it’s fewer than 60.

“In some of our waitlist sites we have some parents that are just in desperation,” he said, “and there’s not a whole lot we can really do unless there’s a spot that opens up.”

The YMCA, which sends staff into the schools to run the programs, is considering another pay raise in hopes of attracting more applicants, he said. The provider already raised the minimum pay for site directors from $13 to $16 an hour, and gave other employees a $2 an hour raise, to $13.

“For a good portion of our families, this is a lifeline for them, and it gives them the ability to be able to work but also have the peace of mind that their kids are in a safe and engaging environment. It’s 100% a lifeline,” X said.

The Afterschool Alliance survey found that 71% of programs had taken action to attract and retain staff. The most common was raising salaries, in some cases using federal pandemic relief money in the form of child care stabilization grants. Some also have offered free child care for employees as well as signing bonuses or paid time off.

“We came into the pandemic with tremendous unmet demand for after-school and summer programs and of course, like almost every other challenge out there, the pandemic only made that challenge worse,” Rinehart said.

Kasey Blackburn-Jiron, expanded learning coordinator for the West Contra Costa Unified School District in California, said providers the district relies on describe applicants skipping scheduled job interviews or even going through the hiring process only to vanish after landing the job, presumably to work at some place that pays more and demands less.

“My best guess is we don’t pay them enough money. We don’t offer them enough hours,” said Blackburn-Jiron, who said the program now serves far fewer than the 5,000 students enrolled before the pandemic.

“We’re asking asking these 17-, 18-, 19-dollar an hour people to work miracles,” she said. “Most of them don’t have bachelor’s degrees and yet we’re saying we want you to be an amazing youth development practitioner. You need to be able to teach and model social and emotional skills. You need to be able to teach 21st century skills, you need to be able to deal with young people who come from generations of trauma.”

She said state lawmakers recently increased funding for the program, which could lead to better pay, but the money will not get to programs until near the end of the school year.

“Working families need school-based afterschool programs, and we just haven’t been able to meet the need,” Blackburn-Jiron said, “and it’s heartbreaking.”