Minnesota angler catches fresh water jellyfish on camera

Matt Mikus

August 26, 2022  MPR

A freshwater jellyfish caught on camera from Leech Lake, near Walker, Minn.

Courtesy of James 'JimmyO' Hofmann

A St. Cloud resident caught freshwater jellyfish on camera during a recent fishing trip Monday on Leech Lake near Walker, Minn.

To pass the time waiting for his friend to arrive, James Hofmann decided he’d cast a line out and see if he could spot anything.

“It was early morning, flat water, the sun was out, and I was shallow fishing,” Hofmann said. “I had polarized glasses and seeing if I could spot any fish, and I just noticed them, thinking ‘What am I looking at right now?’”

Hofmann, who runs JimmyOgraphy, a video production company in St. Cloud, decided he’d flip his iPhone upside down and catch some footage of whatever it was in the water.

Turns out, he spotted jellyfish.

Freshwater jellyfish swim by, caught on camera from Leech Lake, near Walker, Minn.

Courtesy of James Hofmann, JimmyOgraphy

The freshwater jellyfish is not native to Minnesota, in fact most researchers believe the species hail from the Yangtze River valley in China. But Minnesota DNR fisheries researcher John Hoxmeier told MPR News that “they don’t appear to have a negative impact on our lakes.”

“They’ve been in [Minnesota] for decades, but people typically don’t see them because they are only around for a few weeks and the lake has to be calm in order for you to see them,” Hoximeier said.

Gary Montz, a research scientist with the DNR’s ecological and water resources division, said they’re difficult to spot because they spend most of their lifecycle in a polyp stage, attached to things at the bottom of the lake.

“It's a really unremarkable non-descript stalk, maybe 4 to 5 mm long,” Montz said. “It just sits there. Throughout the season it might make new polyps, but it’s mostly just stuck to the bottom and feeds on tinier animals.”

Then when the conditions are right — Montz said it’s not clear what conditions, but most researchers think it might have to do with water temperature or food availability — they move to the “medusa stage” what we might spot in the lake.

A freshwater jellyfish caught on camera from Leech Lake, near Walker, Minn.

Courtesy of James 'JimmyO' Hofmann

In this medusa stage, they range from 5 to 25 mm in diameter or the equivalent of a quarter or smaller. While they have stingers on their tentacles, it’s only useful for catching zooplankton to eat, the stingers aren’t large enough to hurt people.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, freshwater jellyfish can be found as far south as Florida and as far west as California.

Montz said that the DNR is aware of a couple dozen lakes in Minnesota where these jellyfish have been spotted, but’s very likely they’re more widespread than we currently know.

“You may see them one summer, and then you won’t see them again the next summer. Their appearance can be quite irregular,” Montz said. “If people aren’t there to spot the medusa stage, no one is going to notice the polyp stage at all.”

While they aren’t uncommon, Hofmann said he’s visited Leech Lake hundreds of times and has never spotted them before.

“Whenever I mention it, [other people] are just like ‘What are you talking about?’” he said, “until I pull up the video.”

Galloping Crocodile Charges At Man In Florida Wildlife Park [Video]

By Shreyashi Chakraborty @ShreyashiChak19
08/26/22 


KEY POINTS

The alligator is seen charging energetically

The crocodile further chases the man as he tries to get out of its way

The clip was posted by Gatorland on its Facebook page

Of all the scary surprises people expect while coming in contact with animals, a charging crocodile is perhaps one of the worst.

Crocodiles are mostly visualized as lazy creatures living in water bodies, only peeking out from time to time to catch a prey. However, it looks like things may go out of hand when they are energized, a viral video confirmed.

The short clip, posted by Gatorland, an alligator park in Orlando, Florida, on Facebook on Aug. 18, shows a ferocious crocodile at the nature reserve chasing a man inside an enclosure. The man can be seen trying to turn a curve in order to save his life from the scary creature. Meanwhile, the visitors at the park watched the man with bated breath.

"CHAINSAW IN ACTION. Our Amazing Cuban Crocodile" read the description.

The spine-chilling spectacle has shocked social media users. Many Facebook users took to the comments section to point out it was the first time they saw a crocodile running.
"I've never seen croc or alligator run like that. WTH!" one user wrote in the comment
"I've never seen a croc jump and run at the same time! That's gonna be a no for me bro lol," wrote another.

"I didn't think they ran like that, thought it was more of a 'waddle' than a run. Slow motion really shows it well," wrote a third person. "Did not realize they hopped like frogs!! I thought they ran alternating legs!"

It was not clear why the crocodile was chasing the man or how he got into the enclosure.

HE WAS IN THE CROCS SPACE OF COURSE HE WAS CHASED

Gatorland Orlando, which spans 110 acres, is home to thousands of gators. Open to visitors, it also has an aviary, a breeding marsh, and a petting zoo, according to the Facebook page of the theme park.

In another video that went viral in February 2021, a massive crocodile was seen emerging from the water and devouring a small shark at a Far North Queensland beach, Australia. The video showed the beast sneakily swimming underwater at the beach and then slowly leaping out. All of a sudden, the reptile appears in whole, grabs the shark in its jaws, and vanishes into the sea with it.

Wolves on Brink of Extinction Make Major Comeback on Michigan's Isle Royale

BY JESS THOMSON ON 8/26/22 

Wolf Cam Gives Day In The Life Of A Wild Wolf

Wolves that had nearly completely disappeared from Michigan's Isle Royale have doubled in population since 2020.

According to researchers studying the natural populations on the island, there are now an estimated 28 wolves living on Isle Royale.

This comes after efforts to increase the wolf populations in the area via trapping and relocating wolves to the Isle Royale from Minnesota, Canada and Michigan's mainland Upper Peninsula. In 2018, there were only two wolves left alive on the island.

"Each time we carried out aerial surveys this winter, we saw wolf tracks across many parts of the island and we also regularly saw groups of wolves traveling or resting together," Sarah Hoy, a Michigan Technological University researcher who was one of the leads in the 63rd annual Winter Study, told MLive.

"It is such a pleasant change from five years ago when there were only two wolves on the island and the future of the wolf population looked pretty bleak. It just goes to show how quickly wolf populations are able to thrive in places where they are free from persecution."

The population of wolves on Michigan's Isle Royale has doubled to 28 individuals in recent years.

ISTOCK / GETTY IMAGES PLUS

Gray wolves, which can grow to lengths of up to 6 feet and weights of up to 110 lbs, were once the apex predator on Isle Royale, a large island in Lake Superior close to the Michigan state border with Canada. Wolves arrived on Isle Royale from the Canadian mainland via an ice bridge during the winter of 1948, reaching a top population of around 50 individuals in 1980.

The reasons that the wolves populations have declined so significantly in recent years is likely due to lack of availability of their main food source: older moose and calves. It is also thought that the wolves have been affected by the spread of canine diseases to the island.

Due to the small populations, the wolves are genetically inbred, which has led to further disadvantages, including spinal and rib deformities.

The reason for the population restoration efforts is that as apex predators in the island food chain, the wolves are crucial for controlling prey populations. If left unchecked, the wolves on the island may have gone completely extinct, which would have caused an explosion in their prey species, including moose and beavers. This would have unbalanced the island ecosystem, potentially leading to more species extinctions in the region, especially in native plant species consumed by the moose.

Between 20-30 wolves were planned to be reintroduced onto the island in 2018. However, according to MLive, tracking the wolves has faced difficulties, as their GPS tracking collars break over time, or are somehow removed. This has meant that not all the wolves thought to be on the island are now accounted for.

Of the wolves that were trapped and relocated to Isle Royale between October 2018 and September 2019, one is known to have left via an ice bridge, nine have died, and only three are confirmed alive as of March 2022. The statuses of the remaining seven are unknown, however, the population of moose continues to decrease, declining by 28 percent since 2020.

Opinion: Cesar Chavez’s grandson working to push labor leader’s causes forward

‘Every one of my Tata’s causes are current-day issues. Vegetarianism. LGBT equality. Environmentalism. Police brutality.’

Andres Chavez, the grandson of Cesar Chavez and the executive director of the National Chavez Center in Keene, speaks with schoolchildren on a field trip to the Cesar E. Chavez National Monument in Keene. He is in charge of shaping his grandfather’s legacy. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times/TNS)
By GUSTAVO ARELLANO |

PUBLISHED: August 26, 2022 at 4:45 a.m. | UPDATED: August 26, 2022 at 5:28 a.m.

When I visited the National Chavez Center earlier this summer, the solemnity of the site hit me the moment I parked.

It sits on 187 gorgeous acres in the foothills of the Tehachapi Mountains, at the end of a winding forest road. All around are old buildings — houses, barns, trailers — that are what’s left of La Paz, the kibbutz-like community Cesar Chavez established in the 1970s and where his final resting place is.

Waiting to greet me at the entrance was Andres Chavez, the center’s executive director.

Andres is also Cesar’s grandson.

“See these steps right here?” he said as we began our tour. He gestured to the path up to the gravesite of his grandparents, surrounded by rose bushes in front of a fountain with five spouts to remember the people killed while protesting at United Farm Workers actions. “I used to skateboard here before school.”

What many consider sacred grounds Andres also knows as his childhood home.

The two-story house where Cesar and Helen lived? Andres remembered “stacked” Christmas Eve parties where Helen gave out socks to her grandchildren as presents. A playground behind a chain-link fence? Andres and his friends used to ride their mountain bikes down the slides. The soup kitchen that Andres plans to reopen to host visitors? He cleaned dishes and swept floors there as a kid during community meals and got paid in cheeseburgers.

We passed by the refurbished headquarters of the United Farm Workers and the Cesar Chavez Foundation, the two organizations through which the labor leader launched his people-power revolution. We went into the visitor center, which offers a short documentary about the history of the place, photos from el movimiento, a replica farmworker shack, and Chavez’s office the way he left it at the time of his death in 1993, down to brimming bookcases and a notepad with a to-do list.

He’s been in charge of the National Chavez Center since April, but had already made a name for himself in the Central Valley beyond his pedigree. He helped start one of the few political radio shows in California hosted by Latinos and helped with COVID-19 vaccine rollouts throughout Kern County. Right now, he’s coordinating logistics for the final stretch of the United Farm Workers’ march from Delano to Sacramento, scheduled to end this Friday.

Friends and family see in Andres the spiritual and spitting image of Cesar, down to the same warm smile and eyes, empathetic countenance and healthy head of hair.

“He’s a very strategic and brilliant thinker,” said Cal State Bakersfield President Lynnette Zelezny, who appointed Andres to her Latina/Latino Advisory Committee. She credits him with helping his alma mater open the campus for COVID testing and vaccines, and for working with Dolores Huerta to convince the academic senate to offer ethnic studies. “Andres has that ability to bring people together. He’s a magnet.”

“He doesn’t give thundering speeches that give you chills. He just talks to people, just like my dad,” said Paul Chavez, who heads the Cesar Chavez Foundation and is Andres’ father. “He’s conscious of the message that he has. But it’s a romantic notion that the two are similar. Each is their own man.”

The 28-year-old downplayed any comparisons, or any ambitions on his part to burnish his own image. His job right now is to elevate his grandfather at a time where he said interest in Cesar is bigger than ever.

“Every one of my Tata’s causes are current-day issues,” Andres said. “His ideas were radical for his time. Vegetarianism. LGBT equality. Environmentalism. Police brutality. He even did yoga before it got mainstream. A lot of what he’s known for is pretty glossy now, but there’s so much more.”

Gustavo Arellano is a Los Angeles Times columnist. ©2022 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

Six Flags' Safety Record After Multiple People Injured on Ride

BY JAMES BICKERTON 

ON 8/26/22

Five people were taken to the hospital on Thursday after riding the 19-story El Toro roller coaster at the Six Flags Great Adventure amusement park in Jackson Township, New Jersey.

While their injuries were minor, the incident is likely to once again direct attention to theme park safety in the United States, especially as the ride was previously closed by a partial derailment in 2021.

The vast majority of visitors to the 27 Six Flag parks across North America leave with nothing more than happy memories and souvenirs—or at worst, some nausea.

As Jason Freeman, Six Flag's vice president of security, safety, health & environmental, told CNBC, "You're more likely to be injured on your way to a theme park in your car than you are at a theme park."

A sign at the entrance of the theme park Six Flags Magic Mountain welcomes the public back on the day of the park's re-opening in Valencia, California, on April 1, 2021. Five people were taken to the hospital on August 25, 2022, after being injured on a roller coaster at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson Township, New Jersey.

VALERIE MACON / AFP/GETTY

He added: "When you look at the 157 million rides that we deliver in a year, and when you look at us versus other industries, you'll see that we are a very safe industry."

However, over the years Six Flag amusement parks have recorded a number of serious incidents, some with tragic consequences.

The deadliest single incident in Six Flags history took place on May 11, 1984, at the Six Flags Great Adventure Park in New Jersey, the same site as Thursday's accident.

Eight teenagers were killed when a fire ripped through a haunted castle at the park that had no sprinklers or smoke alarms. After the tragedy, Dan P. Howell, president of Six Flags Corporation, said that no rules had been broken at the park.

"We believe we were in compliance with all the codes. We believe we took the necessary steps to protect the public. But the tragedy happened anyway," he said at a news conference.

Six Flags Great Adventure amusement park and Six Flags were both acquitted of manslaughter and aggravated manslaughter during a subsequent two-month trial, but later paid $2.5 million to the families of those killed.

A double amputee Iraq war veteran was killed at Six Flags Darien Lake in Corfu, New York on July 8, 2012, after falling from the 'Ride of Steel' rollercoaster. An investigation by the Department of Labor concluded the accident was the result of "operator error," rather than a technical error.

Christopher Thorpe, then Darien Lake General Manager, said in a statement at the time that the park was "devastated" by the accident, and had "enhanced training programs, increased audits of safety procedures and enforcement, and made disability ridership information more accessible" in response.

READ MORE

Video Shows Six Flags Crowd Flood Exit After Shooting

Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, California has recorded multiple tragedies since opening in 1971.

In April 2004, Bantita Rackchamroon, a 21-year-old park employee, was struck and killed by the Scream roller coaster while operating a test run before the park opened in the morning. It is unclear why Rackchamroon was on the tracks.

An investigation by LA County Sheriff's department concluded it was a tragic accident, and the park released a statement saying: "The safety and security of our guests and employees is our number one priority."

In 1978, 20-year-old Carol Flores was killed after falling out of the Colossus rollercoaster at Magic Mountain. Following the accident, Colossus was closed for a year while improvements were made, including the replacement of all the old carriages.

In May, a bear had to be rescued by firefighters at Magic Mountain after it snuck onto the park's backlot and got stuck between two vehicles. The bear was sedated before being relocated by a team from California Fish and Game, a government agency.

And earlier this month, three people were injured during a shooting in the parking lot of Six Flags Great America in Gurnee, Illinois.

According to the Global Association for the Attractions Industry, the probability of suffering a serious injury while riding on a fixed-site attraction at a U.S. theme park is 1 in every 15.5 million rides taken.

The industry association said that more than 1.7 billion theme park rides take place across the 400 sites it monitors during a typical year.

Newsweek reached out to Six Flags for comment.

The Centre for Modernist Cultures recognises Stuart N. Clarke for decades of work on Virginia Woolf

The Centre for Modernist Cultures is a hub for world-leading research on literary and artistic modernism and welcomes an exceptional scholar as Honorary Fellow.

Published today

We are very glad to announce that Stuart N. Clarke has been made an Honorary Fellow of the Centre for Modernist Cultures in recognition of his exceptional contribution to the study of Virginia Woolf. Clarke co-founded the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain in 1998 and served as editor of the Virginia Woolf Bulletin for 23 years before stepping down in 2022. His work as a distinguished textual editor includes volumes 5 and 6 of The Essays of Virginia Woolf (Hogarth Press, 2009 and 2011), A Room of One’s Own with David Bradshaw (Shakespeare Head Press, 2015), and Jacob’s Room for The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

CMC member Alexandra Harris comments:

The Virginia Woolf Bulletin is a remarkable phenomenon, closer to a full-scale journal than its title modestly implies, though it’s a rare journal that brings previously unpublished primary sources into print with each and every issue. No fewer than seventy Bulletins (cause for alternative platinum jubilee celebrations) have opened with a group of uncollected Woolf letters or other writings, meticulously researched and edited by either Stuart or his long-term collaborator Stephen Barkway. Bulletin 65, for example, arrived in September 2020 despite the lockdowns, containing the texts of 102 letters and cards from Woolf to Mary Hutchinson, familiar only to the few scholars who had read them at the Harry Ransom Centre. With his encyclopaedic knowledge and well-honed methods of literary detection, Clarke had managed to date and contextualize even the most elusive scraps.

The Bulletin was established as a ‘forum for all varieties of common readers’ and has proceeded on the understanding that such readers are likely not only to be passionate but exacting and widely-informed. The tone is set by Clarke’s style and critical approach: no gush, no first-name-terms with Virginia, precise and closely-evidenced writing with the occasional dash of irony, and always an emphasis on primary material.

Clarke himself has remained determinedly an independent scholar, sharing Woolf’s confidence in the vitality of serious reading outside the particular frameworks of university English studies, and reminding us all that professional academia is only one of the many contexts in which ground-breaking literary scholarship is pursued. At the same time, Clarke has worked in collaboration with many academics, and in particular with the late, much-missed David Bradshaw. Clarke and Bradshaw were united in their conviction that the dense weave of allusion, association, and historical reference in Woolf’s writing repays the kind of attention that had previously been accorded to the work of Joyce, Eliot, and Shakespeare but not Woolf.

Clarke’s assiduous tracing of references has been especially significant in establishing the extent and complex character of Woolf’s political engagement. In far-reaching work on Jacob’s Room he probed Woolf’s depiction of the ‘dominant culture’, its figures of authority, and the fate of individual bids for freedom. Delivering the Annual Virginia Woolf Birthday Lecture in 2019, Clarke concentrated on Woolf’s letters to the press (a full catalogue of which he compiled), particularly those concerned with the most effective forms of resistance to fascism.

As editor of the final two volumes of the six-volumes Essays, Clarke gave to readers the inestimable gift of the essays and reviews written by Woolf between 1929 and 1941, judiciously footnoted and chronologically ordered, in a format to be held in the hand and read from cover to cover, as well as to be repeatedly consulted. Many essays had not been in print since their first appearance in 1930s newspapers; some had not been published at all, and some existed in widely varying drafts (Clarke presented the different texts for comparison). Here is the long and challenging 'Phases of Fiction', the drafts of Woolf’s late history of literature, a fantasised letter to ‘A Lady in Paraguay’, and Peter the Porpoise pursuing his own untold quest around the aquarium at Brighton.

Clarke’s ample and scrupulous annotations have helped to set the standard for contemporary editions of Modernist texts. His method has long been to set out information that might be significant and let readers make up their own minds. Students, scholars, and common readers will indeed be making up their own minds for decades to come. The Modernist Studies community is much in Clarke’s debt.

Competition Won’t Fix Canada’s Telecom Woes

Photo via Troy Squillaci on Pexels, modified with logo by Kian Malekanian.

We need the government to end the competition fallacy and use the tools at its disposal to ensure our telecom networks serve the public.

Paris Marx
AUGUST 11, 2022

TECH WON’T SAVE CANADA

LONG READ

On July 8, Rogers experienced an unprecedented network outage that left their customers without access to telecommunications services for most of the day, and in some cases even longer. But it also hit every single Canadian by taking out the Interac debit network across the country, some emergency numbers and other services that people depend on.

After years of anger over high telecom prices and bad connectivity in parts of the country, the outage put telecom back on Canadians radars — but it also helped force experts to reconsider whether the solutions they’d been championing for the past decade will actually solve the problem.

For years, I’ve been arguing that network infrastructure is a natural monopoly and that we should be considering public ownership of telecom companies, but the dominant narrative was that we lacked competition and needed to turn to the market to solve our telecom problems. After a decade of that assertion, Canadians have seen little real benefit.

The Rogers outage has made it clear how there’s a big difference between infrastructure and service delivery, and that there will never be effective competition on infrastructure. That means we need the government to end the competition fallacy and use the tools at its disposal to ensure our telecom networks serve the public, not the shareholders of Rogers, Bell, and Telus.

For this edition of Tech Won’t Save Canada, I spoke to Concordia University professor Fenwick McKelvey about the telecom industry, how it’s evolved over the course of the past century and how we ensure it’s treated as an essential service instead of a capitalist enterprise. It’s a real corrective to the assertion that all we need is more competition.

Below you’ll find an edited transcript of our conversation, but you can listen to the full thing on my podcast.

 

Paris Marx: Can you explain what the telecom industry is like in Canada right now, including who the major players are and why they hold such a dominant position in the market?

Fenwick McKelvey: Canada has had many different phases of telecommunication policy. It really started out as a bit of a free for all with many different competing networks, and that gradually consolidated into an era of natural monopolies or a concentration in a few state-owned companies. These were spread across Canada and part of a national network called the Stentor Alliance, which allowed for long distance communications.

Beginning in the ’70s, with a turn towards what we now refer to as regulatory liberalism and neoliberalism, there’s a privatization of these companies. The Canadian telecommunication system is still going through that process of privatization where we’ve seen, beginning in the ’80s, these public utilities being sold off and then gradually reacquired into a few large national monopolies.

In Canada, these are fairly protected companies, so there’s conditions around their ownership. The split is usually between two players per province, often the large telephone legacy companies and the large cable legacy companies. In Montreal, we have Bell, which is the telephone company, competing with Videotron, which is our cable company, and there’s some smaller players. In Ontario, where the big Rogers outage took place, you have a real divide between Bell and Rogers.

I want to emphasize the legacy and history of these networks, and part of these histories being caught up in Canada as a settler colonial state. The possibility of these networks to be built isn’t something that’s accidental or easy to do. For Bell’s relationship, it goes back to the railroad, and this is a railroad that, in my learning and knowing, was built largely as John A. Macdonald knew of the starvation that was taking place among the people of the plains and used that as leverage to expropriate territory, in part to build the railroad. Those same rights of way that the railway run on are now being used for fibre backbone.

When we talk about telecommunications infrastructure, we’re not talking about stuff that springs up overnight. This stuff has history and it has dependencies and legacies, and when we’re talking about telecommunications in Canada, we’re talking about the settler colonial project of Canada, which systematically dispossessed certain people from their land, and also from being connected. A lot of the digital divides that exist are in part because of where the railroad didn’t go.

PM: That’s such an essential point, and I’m so happy that you made it. I want to move to the Rogers outage on July 8. The Rogers network went down for virtually the whole day, and that had huge impacts across Canadian society. What was the effect of that outage? And what did it reveal about the industry?

FM: What Rogers says is that three distribution routers in its core network failed or started to misbehave, a filter was removed that propagated the wrong addresses to its core network, and it crashed. That core network was essential for many, many different services. What went down was Rogers wireless, Rogers home internet, Rogers home phone system, Rogers banking systems, in part, its radio stations, parts of its omnichannel distribution systems, its provisions of services it provides to the government, and the Interac banking system that we use every day to make payments. This also affected certain 911 services, as well as critical infrastructure providers.

Here you are talking about this entirety of different companies that are being affected, so one critical question is how is it that Rogers network was designed and built such that everything, including both critical infrastructure and everyday home services, could all be unilaterally affected by this one crash? That raises interesting questions about their network design, what decisions are being made, and corporate governance.

As someone who studied telecommunications for a long time, this outage, this crisis, has really caused reactions. I was in line the other day, and people were joking about maybe having to use a credit card. It’s remarkable how this has turned an issue that’s been long standing for those studying telecommunications into something that everybody now can relate to.

PM: Since at least the days that Stephen Harper’s Conservative government tried to bring Verizon to Canada, the focus of telecom policy has been on competition and the lack thereof in the Canadian market. Do you think that the Rogers outage will finally reset that policy debate, and allow us to look more at regulatory issues rather than simply whether there’s enough competition?

FM: This is precisely the contradiction that belies a lot of interest in telecommunications, and more broadly platform governance, where these companies are profitable and seem to be profitable because of the natural monopoly and the buy-in and lock-in powers that they have.

And yet, at the same time, there’s this perception that the solution is to allow for competition, which is going to bring about something that’s entirely contradictory to why these companies are profitable in the first place. They do have network effects and the idea that you’re going to create competing networks that are going to be able to create or foster this competition hasn’t proven true. In many ways, you could describe the past 20 or 30 years of Canadian telecom policy as a decades-long effort to maintain the fallacy of market competition in the telecommunications sector.

What’s important to remember is that Canada is different. Canada still has common carriage rules, which treat telecommunications companies as critical infrastructure subject to greater regulation. We can talk about whether that regulation is effective or not, but this principle that these companies have a certain power that needs to be taken seriously is an important part of the regulatory tradition in Canada. I would hope this points to an opportunity for renewal.

One of the parts that has been surprising for me is the conversation widening immediately after the Rogers outage. Seeing what has been a fairly narrow conversation of thinking only about competition and the idea that you’re going to have a fourth carrier come in that’s going to fix these problems, and widening it out to have a conversation about a public utility or better public access to these networks is something that’s frankly exciting.

I’ve been frustrated by how the scope of our policy conversations has narrowed and narrowed, particularly focused on this kind of one point of competition as a cure all. Verizon never came, and I think the evidence suggests that Verizon never would have come because it was too costly. It wasn’t something to do with regulatory impediments. It was the fact that if you looked at the market and the cost to get into it, it just wasn’t worth the time and the investment to become a carrier. That’s an important lesson to this possibility of competition.

The long history of public utilities and community-owned networking suggests that there’s different ways of approaching this. There’s a spectrum of options that could be out there from what you were talking about [mobile virtual network operators] or more service-based competition, where you have a public wholesaler and service-based competitors, to something more like public access networks or community access networks. That’s something to acknowledge that we do have in Canada, but it’s one I don’t think we emphasize enough and certainly emphasize a potential solution. And that’s a hopeful change.

PM: In the days after the Rogers outage, industry minister François-Philippe Champagne met with the telecom executives and gave them 60 days to make an agreement on emergency roaming, mutual assistance during outages and a better emergency communications plan. The telecom regulator, the CRTC, also said it was going to investigate and would have recommendations of its own. What do you make of the government’s response to the outage? And do you think it goes far enough?

FM: What’s happened over the Liberal mandate is a real deference to these larger telecommunications companies. A lot of our response to the pandemic and how we rolled out bridging this digital divide has been through incentivizing and funding these companies to build or improve their networks through the new broadband access program. In that sense, I’m slightly pessimistic. The outage emphasizes that the paradigm of “we’re going to have competitors and they’re going to have different networks and it’s going to create resilience in the network” didn’t work; it didn’t happen.

Frankly, it’s as much a government thing as the companies, and the companies are ultimately accountable to their shareholders. The lack of political will when you’re talking about how we’re treating these companies, like being pulled to testify before Parliament, are a largely symbolic gesture. Rogers could file most of its description of what happens in confidence, and we’ll see how effective the CRTC is at demanding accountability on this.

There’s as much pressure on Rogers as there is on government actually showcasing they can have a meaningful interaction. If we’re looking for solutions, we see that there’s more of a fit between a market-based approach to telecommunications and the companies providing them, and so there’s a kind of symmetry between government and these companies, which will lead to what we’ve had for decades: ineffectiveness and a continued fantasy about the possibility of competition.

PM: You talked about how, through the ’80s and even into the ’90s, there was this process of deregulation of telecommunications in Canada to take down some of the restrictions that existed around mergers, acquisitions, other aspects of the telecom industry, as well as the privatization of public players that existed and their eventual integration into this telecom oligopoly. Do you think that the deregulation of telecoms was a mistake?

FM: It hasn’t proven what it claimed to do, which is foster competition and see a competitive marketplace. From more of a cultural vantage point, it’s been interesting just how every subsequent new communication technology has been increasingly private, individually private, in the sense of everybody has their own phone and their own plan, and everybody has their own home internet account.

There’s always been the possibility of the community networks. Canada had the community access program where the internet was in libraries and schools, and there was a more fulsome discussion of what being connected meant and how the information superhighway — let’s use a throwback term — would roll out. When we talk about our public communication infrastructure, the fate of that is decided by a few companies, domestic and international. That winnows our imagination for these critical infrastructures.

We’re at an inflection point where our mobile phones are equivalent to the telephone, and the telephone was treated as universal service. Frankly, right now, should you be paying tax on your mobile phone? Because it’s an essential service? What are the ways of increasing affordability immediately?

There’s been this shift that’s obvious after the experience of the pandemic where we all depend on the internet. It’s critical infrastructure. And yet, the way of imagining what this infrastructure is going to be is largely Rogers’ new Super Ignite internet connection? That, to me, is ultimately one of the ways we really see the possibility of innovation, particularly innovation in connectivity, being defined in narrow terms.

PM: Telephone and television and even cable emerged in these moments where there was a greater recognition that the government had a role to play in ensuring that telecommunication services served a public purpose. But the internet emerges in this neoliberal moment where the government needs to have a hands-off approach and let private companies define what the internet is going to be. Do you think that that shapes how we think about the internet and the role of telecommunications in society today in a negative way?

FM: This is something I say with some reluctance to my past naïveté, but it’s important to emphasize this link between the design of the internet and a neoliberal approach. The success of Silicon Valley was largely through decades prior subsidization of this work, and America’s own hegemonic influence in shaping what became the international networking protocols.

It’s important then to emphasize that part of the way the internet evolved was fairly closely connected with this idea of creating markets and marketization, and I think that’s quite baked into core internet technologies.

In Canada, because the legacy of these infrastructures is not perfect, it’s not idealized competition. There’s this gap where we’re going to have competition and we’re going to have this open innovation, and then there’s just the structural nature of telecommunications companies. Many of the ideas of how the internet works and the idea of internet competition really are out of step with the way that networks are built and rolled out, and the way that in many smaller rural remote communities there’s no incentive to build up multiple networks.

An ultimate question for me is, as a final outcome, was this network failure — the fact that all core activities were running through the same infrastructure — the result of network efficiency, or was that actually good network design? That could be a very direct answer to how, as a result of neoliberalism, the network was being designed in such a way that resiliency and 100 per cent uptime were maybe a secondary concern to the fact that you could lower the network operation costs and try to automate workers that are running them — and shout out to them for getting the network back on so quickly.

PM: During the pandemic, it became undeniably clear that telecom services are essential, as if we didn’t know that before, and there are too many barriers to access from poor connections to high prices — some of the highest in the world for telecom services. Instead of greater competition, is it time to learn from the historical approach and treat it as a public utility, with the proper regulation in place, or even making the telecom companies (or at least their infrastructure) part of a Crown Corporation like we still have in Saskatchewan with SaskTel?

FM: It really pushes towards that being on the table. We do have community-owned networks and community approaches to internet in Canada already. I learned a lot about this from Cree communities in northern Ontario. K-Net was important for me to think about how the Internet could be built, and that was something that was largely community-owned, delivered in part through the collaborations with Bell, but you’re talking about a network that was meeting community needs and accountable to the council.

As much as we want to talk about a big national thing, in some of these communities, is it opportunities for more municipal wireless or more community or provincial options that could be on the table? There’s a whole stack — for lack of a better word — of places where we could start thinking about publicly owned, community-owned innovation, in what we call the internet. That’s something which we haven’t advanced very far, and often my worry is the organizations that we do have, particularly the CBC, aren’t that imaginative themselves to really allow for this.

The thing I’d stress is it’s not building another mesh network, which is something that I was totally suckered on for years, but it’s really about pushing for state or community action. You’re talking about infrastructure that requires institutions to create, and it’s like, how do you either leverage or lobby the existing institutions we have now to work better in the public interest, or trying to think more strategically about what it means to create the kind of organizations that would allow these networks to exist?

We’re not even getting into the internet itself: social media, in many ways, built on and leveraged these ideas and myths of public media, particularly ZeD TV, which Canada’s CBC was really behind, about thinking about being something of YouTube before YouTube. So when we talk about public utilities or public alternatives, the problem runs the whole spectrum, from the core of the internet to the services we use every day.

PM: On your point about community networks and public solutions, it’s always felt weird to me that when we talk about telecom, there’s this discussion that we should have all these options. But in my province, and across Canada, we have a history of public power delivery, where when you move into somewhere new, you don’t need to think about where it’s coming from or the different options that are available for power. Why shouldn’t telecom be that way? If it’s an essential service as well, why shouldn’t we just have a public provider that gives us our telecom services, instead of having all these supposed options that are still reliant on the same networks anyway?

FM: The pressure to sell a product, to sell a new high speed internet product, creates real inequities. One of the things I talk about in Internet Daemons is that there’s a classism that gets built into this between those who can afford high speed and those that are stuck with slow internet. If you’re thinking about your home internet — what your plan is, how much you’re paying for, what your access is — in many ways, the internet would be simpler were there one or two speeds and less complexity about what’s in those plans.

This very idea of internet speed is so closely tied up with the need to create privilege and luxury which you can sell, largely through creating those who are on the budget internet. That’s really something that is at the core of, but hard to explain about the consequences of how we’ve treated the internet and why when we talk about a public utility, there’s a lot being discussed there.

Part of that change is not just management, but it’s also cultural change and what we think about when we talk about coordinated infrastructure, because at the end of the day, no one’s complaining about how fast their internet is, they just want it to work.

PM: It’s fascinating to hear you describe the internet speeds that way. Thinking back to when I did work in telecom, very few people knew what the different speeds meant; they just wanted to know it was going to work well for them and they’d be able to do what they wanted to do.

Aside from the outage, Rogers is in the process of buying Shaw, which is the fourth largest telecom company. The Competition Bureau already seems to have concerns about the merger, not to mention industry observers and the general public. Do you think the outage kills the merger once and for all?

FM: It’s going to make it nigh impossible to go through. There’s been all kinds of terrible mergers, like the Torstar merger where they shuttered all the newspapers. We’ve had a very lax environment when talking critically about mergers, and the evidence is so strong, it’s hard to imagine this happening.

There are real governance questions at Rogers, too. This is a CEO that ousted members of the board. Members of the Rogers family were seen at Mar-a-Lago with pictures of the Trump family. After the ouster, his wife sent a Cameo video with Brian Cox from Succession. There are all kinds of bad public optics in here on top of clear evidence this is not in the interest of consumers.

When we’re talking about affordability or you’re really pushing for coordination issues, you’re seeing not only a shift of why this is a bad idea, but having evidence to point to it being a bad idea. It’s important to remember the stakes are high, but also low in some ways, because there’s so much more to be done. The merger being stopped is a first step to better telecommunications policy in Canada, and better broadcasting policy too.

PM: I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. It’s been insightful, but also kind of mind-expanding in terms of the possibilities for telecommunications as not just a debate about how much competition we want, but what role the government should play in addressing these problems and how we can make the telecommunications services that we all rely on better serve the public.

To close, are there particular regulations or developments that you’d like to see in the telecom sector that we haven’t discussed in this conversation yet?

FM: One of the things I’ve been intervening in in my recent work with my colleague and friend Reza Rajabiun is Bell Canada using an AI system to block fraudulent calls. A move towards artificial intelligence raises critical questions about democratic oversight of telecommunication systems, and whether we actually can know enough about how they work to have proper accountability. That’s something I would like to see, and a way of talking about cybersecurity and security issues in a way that could reckon with this tendency towards privacy and confidentiality, which really run against public participation and the function of an institution like the CRTC.

The future of the internet is often described as zero-touch networking, or lights-out operating centres, or AI chatbots for your assistants. For folks who are looking for these wider issues with artificial intelligence, there’s a key point of where that automation is taking place in networks and whether it’s coming at the expense of the workers.

The networking engineers and the gurus and all the Unix heads that kept these networks running, their jobs are becoming more precarious, and that really raises some questions. That’s to me, one of the outcomes I’d love to see or know about. Was this a network outage that was because there wasn’t enough technicians or the technicians were overworked? What were the working conditions of the people running the network and were they properly supported?

This interview has been edited by Paris Marx for clarity and length.

Paris Marx is a socialist writer and the host of Tech Won't Save Us who has previously written for NBC News, CBC News, Jacobin, Tribune, and Passage. Follow Paris on Twitter.

Home - Passage (readpassage.com)

Media Once Called Azov Neo-Nazis. Now They Hide That Fact

Photo via Goo3 on Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

News outlets have stopped labelling the Azov Regiment as neo-Nazis because it has become politically inconvenient.

Davide Mastracci and Alex Cosh
AUGUST 24, 2022

Earlier this month, The Globe and Mail published a story profiling the wife of an Azov Regiment colonel, who denied that the group is made up of neo-Nazis. Instead, she insisted it’s “the most motivated, most patriotic unit in Ukraine.” The story offered no real pushback against that claim, and effectively amounted to a piece of outright neo-Nazi propaganda, despite whatever intentions the reporter may have had.

Unfortunately, the piece wasn’t entirely unique, and is merely part of a broader trend in Canadian media that has seen major outlets downplay or openly deny the fascist group’s ideology. This wasn’t always the case — at least not to the same extent.

DIG DEEPER

The Globe And Mail Just Published Neo-Nazi Propaganda 

A profile in the newspaper focusing on a Ukrainian neo-Nazi group uncritically includes its subject’s description of them as ‘heroes.’

In order to get a better sense of how Canadian media’s approach to reporting on the Azov Regiment (formerly the Azov Battalion) has changed over the years, we searched for every mention of the group in the archives of the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, and National Post. We also searched through the CBC News website, as well as some of their broadcasts. All of the 90 unique mentions we found (as of August 10) were compiled, with the description of Azov provided in said article or broadcast being noted for comparison.

We found that these news outlets (and the wire services much of their coverage relied upon) went from directly acknowledging Azov’s neo-Nazi ideology to suggesting that the group is merely “controversial” or has a “checkered past.” Some reports included no qualifiers at all, and simply presented the group as just another Ukrainian military unit fighting against Russia.

Here’s a timeline of how the reporting shifted over the years, followed by an interview with an expert who claims this shift is not due to any change within Azov, but rather out of political convenience for Western forces.

The earliest mention of the Azov Battalion in the publications we searched that we found came in September 2014. From then until the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, nearly all mentions of the group were accompanied by descriptors that accurately captured what they are. These descriptors included: “Ukrainian fascist group”; “ultra-nationalist white supremacist paramilitary regiment”; “a pro-Ukrainian group with nakedly neo-Nazi sympathies and symbols”; “far-right Ukrainian group.”

In February, Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to justify the invasion of Ukraine in part by claiming it needed to be de-nazified. Understandably, some media reports took care not to uncritically repeat Russia’s narrative. However, even in the early stages of Russia’s invasion — when public and official outrage at Russia’s actions, and eagerness to avoid reporting information that complicated anything but unconditional support for arming Ukraine, were arguably at their peak — these news outlets still managed to acknowledge Azov’s neo-Nazism, with no suggestion that this was a feature consigned to the group’s past.

In March, The Globe and Mail published two opinion articles that referred to the group as a “neo-Nazi regiment” and an “overtly extreme-right faction,” respectively. Also that month, the National Post reported that Azov “has openly neo-Nazi sympathies, with members often seen posing with swastikas or photos of Adolf Hitler.” In April, news and opinion pieces from the Toronto Star variously called Azov “far-right-affiliated,” “ultranationalist” and “unabashedly fascist.” And podcast and video descriptions at the CBC referred to it as a “far-right” group.

But then, starting in early May, things changed.

That month, CBC News published an Associated Press (AP) story describing Azov Regiment as having “originated as a far-right paramilitary unit” (emphasis ours).

The National Post published a pair of opinion pieces by a columnist that noted the Azov Regiment “has previously described itself as pro-Nazi,” and called it “problematic” and “controversial,” while stressing the group’s relatively small size. A news article merely described Azov as “one of two units still resisting the Russians in Mariupol,” and cited an “anti-Kremlin” activist who claimed the unit has “moved beyond” its far-right politics.

During the same period, the Toronto Star relied almost exclusively on AP wire stories, which either included no qualifiers of the group at all, or described it as having “far-right origins.” One of the two original stories that the Star did publish said Azov has “been accused of holding white supremacist and neo-Nazi views.” The second Star story included no qualifiers.

Meanwhile, echoing language used in several wire stories, a Globe piece described Azov as having “far-right roots,” but claimed that it has been “increasing[ly] depoliticized in recent years.” Two other Globe articles, along with a dozen or so Reuters and AP reports, included no qualifying descriptions of the unit at all.

As a whole, these news outlets either offered no description of Azov, or claimed that it was far-right in the past but had since evolved. That trend has continued since May, for example with an August broadcast from CBC’s The National referring to the unit as having a “controversial past,” and the August article from The Globe and Mail mentioned in the introduction to this piece claiming it “has a history of far-right leanings but is now part of the Ukrainian army.”

So, what happened? Why did descriptions of the Azov Regiment go from almost unanimously consisting of some mention of neo-Nazi ideology to portraying the group as being just like any other unit fighting Russia?

Some argue that the group has changed and been deradicalized in recent years. As such, they claim that calling the Azov Regiment a neo-Nazi group is no longer accurate. But Ivan Katchanovski, a political science professor at the University of Ottawa specializing in Russia, Ukraine and armed conflicts, told Passage that these sorts of claims are inaccurate.

Katchanovski noted that despite formal changes to Azov’s structure when it became a part of Ukraine’s National Guard, it remains dominated by neo-Nazis. He noted that the armed group also has an affiliated civilian wing, called the National Corps, a neo-Nazi political organization led by Azov’s first commander, Andriy Biletsky. “Before the Russian invasion, they were very active in a variety of attacks, including attacks on Roma and attacks on the presidential administration of [Volodymyr] Zelensky,” Katchanovski explained. He added that Azov Regiment has also been involved in setting up other Nazi-led units.

So, again, why the change? Katchanovski is blunt in his assessment: “This is a political change. It’s not based on facts. Media coverage is often driven by political considerations, and not what actually happens on the ground.”

DIG DEEPER

Canadian Media Is Happy To Risk Arming Neo-Nazis In Ukraine

Editorial support for sending Canadian troops and arms to Ukraine didn’t waver when it became clear neo-Nazis would benefit.

The political consideration at play here for the war in general is that it’s damaging to Western interests to point out these countries are supporting neo-Nazi formations such as Azov, as well as other less well-known armed far-right groups. More specifically, in May, a major event in the war took place: the battle at the Azovstal steel plant. This battle, which lasted for weeks, saw the Russians fight against Ukrainian forces made up almost entirely of members of the Azov Regiment. This battle was dominating Western news coverage, and is also the period where news reports published in Canadian media began to soften descriptions of the fascist unit. This has resulted in misleading news coverage.

Katchanovski adds that, “This is also going to have a dangerous effect on Ukraine and potentially other countries because now, basically, Nazis in Ukraine are made into national heroes.” He also noted that Azov (as well as Western governments) has consistently pressured Zelensky — including with threats, and even before Russia invaded — not to seek a peace deal with Russia or withdraw forces from the Donbas region. In February, Azov branded Zelensky a “servant of the Russian people” after he suggested that he might negotiate with Moscow.

Katchanovski said that the valorization of the Azov Regiment is comparable to how the West initially supported the predecessors of the Taliban in their fight against the Soviet Union’s intervention in the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and also risks inspiring yet more far-right activists from other countries to join the conflict in Ukraine in order to gain military experience, potentially causing a blowback effect if they make it home.

While the Kremlin’s framing of Ukraine as a Nazi state is false, Katchanovski said, Western governments and media have gone in the opposite direction: “They’ve started to deny any presence of neo-Nazis.”

The shameless shift toward sympathetic coverage of the Azov Regiment is another useful reminder that Canadian media are perfectly happy to valorize anyone, including Nazis, so long as doing so serves the West’s interests. These media outlets should be continuously reminded of their coddling of fascists, including if and when the grim consequences of it play out over the coming years in blowback.

Davide Mastracci is the managing editor of Passage. Alex Cosh is the managing editor of The Maple.

https://readpassage.com/