Pardis Sabeti Dedicates Her TIME100 Impact Award to Mahsa Amini and the Protesters in Iran

Sun, October 2, 2022 at 8:54 AM·3 min



TIME100 Impact Awards: Singapore

Pardis Sabeti
Iranian-American biologist, Harvard University

Pardis Sabeti receives her award at the TIME100 Impact Awards on Oct. 2, 2022 in Singapore. Credit - Ore Huiying–Getty Images for TIME

When computational geneticist Dr. Pardis Sabeti took to the stage at Sunday night’s TIME100 Impact Awards in Singapore, she dedicated her achievement to Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian woman whose death in police custody last month sparked a wave of protests in the country against the Iranian regime.

“I want to dedicate this award to Mahsa Jina Amini and the young Iranians right now who are fighting for their freedom, whose impact should be seen, should be supported and should be fought for,” she said to the crowd at the National Gallery Singapore.

Amini was detained by Iranian morality police for not wearing a hijab properly and died on Sept. 16 after reportedly suffering blows to the head. Since her death, dozens of demonstrators have been killed and many more arrested in Iran’s largest protests in almost three years.

Sabeti, herself a refugee from Iran whose family fled the country shortly before the 1979 Iranian Revolution, said that her achievements in infectious disease research were only made possible by the “freedom” and “opportunities” she experienced growing up in the U.S. Amini, she said, was planning on studying microbiology and one day medicine. “Those are the fields of my own research and my own life,” Sabeti said. “But her dream was unjustly cut short.”

Sabeti said that support for vulnerable people and those struggling against oppressive regimes is crucial to growing the kind of global solidarity needed to mitigate the harms of any future pandemic. “You see, viruses, they expose and they exploit the cracks in our society: the lack of justice, transparency, and equity,” she said. “The way we weather those storms is most dependent on the ways we choose to see each other and to fight together…to uplift every individual and empower every human on this earth.”

She called on the officials, executives and activists in the crowd to help restore internet access in Iran—which has been cut off in some areas by the authorities in an attempt to crack down on protests. “Every moment in darkness is a mortal threat to another young woman,” Sabeti said. “And for each of us, please see and share their stories”

Sabeti ended her speech with a dedication to Amini and other Iranian women who have lost their lives under the regime. “To Mahsa Jina, Neda [Agha-Soltan, an Iranian woman shot dead by a government sniper amid demonstrations in 2009], and all of those that are gone too soon, beh omid-e didar, we hope to see you again, and beh omid eh rooz eh azadi, with the hope for one day a day in freedom.”

The TIME100 Leadership Forum, held at the National Gallery Singapore, brought together CEOs and other business leaders from across the globe to discuss how they are using their platforms to build a better world. Speaking at the event were: former Google CEO and co-founder of Schmidt Futures, Eric Schmidt; Sandhya Sriram, the co-founder and group CEO of Singapore-based cultivated seafood company Shiok Meats; Neo Gim Huay, managing director of the Center for Nature and Climate at the World Economic Forum; Ari Sarker, Mastercard’s president for Asia Pacific; and Neeraj Aggawal, BCG’s Chairman for Asia Pacific.

Immediately following the Leadership Forum was the TIME100 Impact Awards, which featured actor and producer Alia Bhatt; Sabeti; Gregory L. Robinson, the former Director of the James Webb Space Telescope Program; and singer and actor Lea Salonga.

The TIME100 Leadership Forum and TIME100 Impact Awards in Singapore were produced by TIME in partnership with the Singapore Economic Development Board, the Singapore Tourism Board, Mastercard, BCG, and Concha Y Toro.

'Woman, life, freedom': L.A. protest over Iran draws thousands


Laura J. Nelson
Sat, October 1, 2022

Thousands of Iranian Americans turn out in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday to protest the death of Mahsa Amini. (Laura J. Nelson / Los Angeles Times)

Thousands of Iranian Americans marched through the streets of downtown Los Angeles on Saturday in solidarity with the protests that have rocked Iran since the death of a young woman in police custody three weeks ago.

At Pershing Square on Saturday morning, protest leaders with megaphones led chants of "zan, zendegi, azadi," or "woman, life, freedom," the rallying cry of the demonstrations that began in Iran and have spread to cities across the world.

The protests that followed the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died in detention after being arrested by the country's morality police for not wearing her hijab correctly, have become Iran's biggest anti-government demonstrations in years.


"If they can be in the streets in Iran, we can be in the streets here — it's the least we can do," said Leila Amadi, 22, of West Los Angeles, who carried a sign that read, "Be her voice." In a nod to the tricolor Iranian flag, Amadi wore a white top, green shorts and bright red lipstick.

Maz Jobrani, the Iranian American comedian and actor, livestreamed part of the demonstration on Instagram, chanting along with the crowd, "Say her name: Mahsa Amini."

"Everyone in America should know about this," Jobrani said. "This is a fight for freedom across the world. It's for democracy. It's to get away from authoritarianism. The people in Iran are fighting for democracy."

Southern California has the largest number of Iranian residents outside Iran. Protests were also planned in Orange County and San Diego, and more than a dozen other U.S. cities, including Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Miami, Denver and Washington D.C.

Thousands of Iranian Americans march in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday in solidarity with protests in Iran. (Laura J. Nelson / Los Angeles Times)

As the crowd inched up Hill Street and across 1st Street toward City Hall, flanked by drummers and motorcyclists, people chanted, "Democracy for Iran, regime change for Iran!"

Many demonstrators wore masks, sunglasses and hats to avoid being identified in photos and drone footage. Others declined to give their full names, saying they were afraid to endanger loved ones who lived in Iran.

"This is not the first time we've had to protest like this, and unfortunately, it won't be the last," said Fereshteh, a Los Angeles resident in her 40s who asked to only use her first name for fear that the government would arrest her when she returned to Iran to visit her parents.

She held a sign that read, "How many protesters has the Iranian government killed today?" with red handprints in the background. The reverse side of the sign showed photos of 20 people who have been killed during the demonstrations.

Amnesty International has said that a crackdown on demonstrations by Iran's clerical government has led to the deaths of at least 52 people since Sept. 17.

"We want world leaders to do something," she said. "We need help. Iran needs help. We can't do this without the help of other governments, especially the United States."

Visible in the crowd were dozens of pre-revolutionary Iranian flags, which feature a lion and sun at the center instead of the stylized red symbol of the Islamic Republic. Flown during the government of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and banned after the 1979 revolution, the flag is frequently seen at anti-government protests.

A woman named Shohleh, who left Iran 44 years ago, wrapped the flag around her shoulders as she marched toward City Hall. She said she felt compelled to attend the protests to support the struggle of Iranian women, but worried that social media posts and protests would not be enough.

"I hope things will change," she said. "But in my head and in my heart, I'm afraid they won't."

The march ended at Los Angeles City Hall, where the Iranian singer Googoosh addressed the crowd.

Other protesters gathered around a black pickup loaded with portable speakers that blasted "Baraye," the ballad by Iranian singer Shervin Hajipour that has become the anthem of the protests.

The crowd sang along with the song's final lyrics: "For women, life, freedom; for freedom, for freedom."

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

Iranian woman pictured dining without a headscarf thrown in Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe's old jail

James Rothwell
Fri, September 30, 2022 

Donya Rad

Iran has arrested a young woman who defied morality police by eating in a restaurant without wearing a hijab, in an image that went viral on social media and inspired thousands of anti-regime protesters.

The photograph showed Donya Rad eating breakfast in a restaurant in Tehran, alongside a female friend who was also not wearing a headscarf.

The pair were silently protesting the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman killed in the custody of the Iranian morality police for improperly wearing a hijab. Her death has sparked mass protests across Iran which have led to more than 50 people being killed by riot police.



It came as another image emerged from Iran of a young woman, Minoo Majidi, standing next to the grave of her mother, who was also killed in the protests. Staring into the camera, Minoo is shown clutching her shorn long hair, which Iranian women are cutting off as a symbol of resistance against the regime.

In a post on Twitter, Donya Rad's sister, Dina, revealed that Iranian police had confronted them about the photograph before arresting Donya.

“Yesterday, after this photo was published, the security agencies contacted my sister Donya Rad and asked her to give some explanations,” the sister said.

“Today, after going where she was told, she was arrested. After a few hours of silence, Donya told me in a short call that she was transferred to ward 209 of Evin prison." That referred to an infamous jail in Tehran where British mother Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was also imprisoned before her release.

“Our family is very concerned about her wellbeing,” added Dina.

Minoo Majidi

The decision to arrest a woman for simply appearing in a photograph without a hijab reflects how the Iranian leadership has been spooked by the massive scale of the protests. Initially focused on the death of Ms Amini in police custody, they have quickly transformed into a campaign for the downfall of the Iranian regime.

Several other Iranian social media users have posted similar photographs of them venturing outside without headscarves, risking the wrath of riot police and Iranian security officers who seem to be sifting through high-profile internet posts to make arrests.

Campaigners and Iran affairs analysts have described the decision to arrest Donya as “brutal and sick”. Comparisons were also drawn with Rosa Parks, the black civil rights activist in the United States who, in 1955, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger.

Over the past week, extraordinary footage has shown Iranians engaged in running street battles with riot police, in some cases overpowering them. Many women are burning their hijabs on bonfires in the streets in protest as well as cutting off their hair.

In a letter on Friday, Iranian football fans asked Fifa to ban their national team from this year’s World Cup in Qatar over the crackdown.

“Why would Fifa give the Iranian state and its representatives a global stage, while it not only refuses to respect basic human rights and dignities but is currently torturing and killing its own people?” they wrote on behalf of the Open Stadiums campaign.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says at least 29 journalists have been arrested, including Nilufar Hamedi and Elahe Mohammadi, female reporters who helped expose Amini's case.

Watch: Protests in Iran continue against regime for 15th straight day

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Factories Making Towels and Bedsheets Are Shutting in Pakistan

Their hardships have become acute due to recent floods, which submerged a third of Pakistan, killed more than 1,600 people, and damaged about 35% of the cotton crop.

Ismail Dilawar
Sun, October 2, 2022 

(Bloomberg) -- Pakistan’s small textile mills, which make products ranging from bedsheets to towels mainly for consumers in the US and Europe, are starting to shut after devastating floods wiped out its cotton crop.

As many as 100 smaller mills have suspended operations due to a shortage of good quality cotton, high fuel costs, and poor recovery of payments from buyers in flood-hit areas, said Khurram Mukhtar, patron-in-chief of the Pakistan Textile Exporters Association. Larger firms, which supply to global companies like Nike Inc., Adidas AG, Puma SE, Target Corp., are less affected as they are well stocked, he said.

The mill closures underscore challenges for the sector that employs about 10 million people, accounts for 8% of the economy and adds more than half to the nation’s export earnings. 

Their hardships have become acute due to recent floods, which submerged a third of Pakistan, killed more than 1,600 people, and damaged about 35% of the cotton crop.

The latest blow comes at a difficult time for the South Asian nation that is already struggling with high inflation and falling currency reserves. The closure of firms, such as AN Textile Mills Ltd., Shams Textile Mills Ltd., J.A. Textile Mills Ltd. and Asim Textile Mills Ltd., could worsen the country’s employment situation and hit its export earnings. Larger companies are also facing rough weather, with demand for their products seen falling about 10% by December from now due to a slowdown in Europe and the US, Mukhtar said.

Due to an “unforeseen downturn in the market and unavailability of good quality cotton” following heavy rains and floods, the company’s mills have been temporarily closed, Faisalabad-based AN Textile said in an exchange filing earlier this month.

Cotton production in Pakistan could slump to 6.5 million bales (of 170 kilograms each) in the year that started in July, compared with a target of 11 million, Mukhtar said. That could force the nation to spend about $3 billion to import cotton from countries such as Brazil, Turkey, the US, East and West Africa and Afghanistan, said Gohar Ejaz, patron-in-chief of All Pakistan Textile Mills Association. About 30% of Pakistan’s textile production capacity for exports has been hampered because of cotton and energy shortages, Ejaz said.

Pakistan’s textile sector, which exports about 60% of its production, is also facing poor demand in the domestic market due to fragile economic conditions. Gross domestic product is estimated to halve from 5% in the fiscal year ending June following the floods that led to damages of around $30 billion. Pakistan secured a $1.1 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund in August to avert an imminent default.

Once Known for Vaccine Skeptics, Marin Now Tells Them 'You're Not Welcome'

Soumya Karlamangla
Sun, October 2, 2022 

Mount Tamalpais dominates the skyline in Marin County, in Belvedere, Calif., Aug. 28, 2022. (Jim Wilson/The New York Times)

SAN RAFAEL, Calif. — For more than a decade, few places in the nation were associated with anti-vaccine movements as much as Marin County, the bluff-lined peninsula of coastal redwoods and stunning views just north of San Francisco.

This corner of the Bay Area had become a prime example of a highly educated, affluent community with low childhood vaccination rates, driven by a contingent of liberal parents skeptical of traditional medicine. Marin was something of a paradox to mainstream Democrats, and often a punching bag. In 2015, during a measles outbreak in California, comedian Jon Stewart blamed Marin parents for being guilty of a “mindful stupidity.”

But Marin is the anti-vaccine capital no more.

In the pandemic age, getting a COVID-19 shot has become the defining “vax” or “anti-vax” litmus test, and on that account, Marin County has embraced vaccines at rates that surpass the vast majority of communities in the nation. It comes after public health efforts to change parents’ opinions, as well as a strict state mandate that students get vaccinated for childhood diseases.

And as the nation has grown more polarized, Marin residents are less comfortable wearing the “anti-vax” label increasingly associated with conservatives. Americans who identify as Democrats are more than twice as likely to be vaccinated and boosted against COVID-19 — and Marin County is one of the bluest enclaves in the United States.

“It kind of became the cool thing to do to get vaccinated,” said Naveen Kumar, physician-in-chief for Kaiser Permanente San Rafael Medical Center.

Kumar said some Marin parents who were hesitant about the vaccines have been persuaded by their children’s enthusiasm, which he has witnessed among his teenage son and his friends. “I could hear him talking about, ‘Can you believe there’s this kid in my class and he’s not vaccinated?’” he said. “You almost become a little bit of an outcast if you’re not vaccinated.”

Among children 5 to 11, 80% in Marin County have both of their COVID-19 shots, more than double the statewide or national rates. The rate among those younger than 5 is more than five times the nation’s.

Given that one-fifth of elementary-school-age children here still have not gotten the vaccines, it is not clear that Marin holdouts have changed their minds. But anti-vaccine parents no longer feel as empowered to voice their opinions. The mood shift was pointedly captured by a local columnist, who declared in January, “Unvaccinated? You’re not welcome in Marin.”

Julie Schiffman, 50, doesn’t have her COVID-19 shots; she said she believes vaccines would aggravate her many autoimmune conditions. Because she is unvaccinated, she has been excluded from Marin home-schooling gatherings that she had attended for years, even though parents were previously unconcerned with whether anyone had their shots. For the first time, she said, she feels as if people here despise her on principle.

Schiffman said that when her sons were young, she decided not to have them vaccinated because of similar concerns about vaccine side effects. Their vaccination status was never an issue for student enrollment because she home-schools them.

But because of the social pressure to be vaccinated against COVID-19, the boys got their COVID-19 shots last year. Her 13-year-old “wanted to be first in line,” Schiffman said. “I’m the only one in my family who did not.”

Across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, Marin County has strikingly beautiful landscapes and lush, wooded neighborhoods. The region was once largely made up of farms and small communities, with locals dedicated to living off the land.

The county became more bohemian in the 1960s and 1970s as the counterculture diaspora arrived seeking to get away from the chaos of San Francisco. The Grateful Dead lived in a commune here in 1966, and Otis Redding wrote “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” while staying on a houseboat off Sausalito.

Marin is also a bastion of wealth, with California’s highest median joint income in 2019 at $178,755. On weekends, luxury cars sneak past cyclists atop high-end bikes on roads heading toward the great Pacific. Before he became the Democratic governor of California, Gavin Newsom lived with his family on a hillside in Marin — with three Tesla vehicles in his driveway, The New Yorker once wrote.

In 2011, the percentage of kindergartners in Marin County who had all of their required shots — 78% — had fallen to fifth lowest among California’s 58 counties. Whooping cough outbreaks fueled by low vaccination rates were sending young children to the hospital.

Around that time, Matt Willis was working as a public health researcher for a branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that responds to global disease outbreaks. In 2010, he had been sent to Haiti after a massive earthquake there severely limited access to vaccines.

The following year, he was dispatched to his hometown in Marin County, where he was perplexed by what he found. “In other places I’d been working on vaccines, it was purely just logistical and operational, and here it was a matter of belief, which was a much harder nut to crack.”

Willis left the CDC and in 2013 took over as Marin County’s health officer, and he was intent on figuring out why relatively few parents were vaccinating their children.

He surveyed the parents of thousands of kindergartners to understand what their vaccine concerns were. On the list were autism, ingredients in vaccines and the speed at which babies are administered dozens of shots. A 1998 study that purported to connect the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine with autism was debunked and retracted — but only after propelling the anti-vaccine movement, particularly among parents skeptical of traditional medicine and pharmaceutical companies.

Willis began public health campaigns to specifically address those fears and primed local pediatricians to have those conversations too. His efforts got a boost when, in late 2014, a measles outbreak erupted at Disneyland, drawing greater attention to unvaccinated children. When cases spread to Marin County, its low vaccination rates became a glaring example in California.

At the same time, Rhett Krawitt, then a 6-year-old living in Corte Madera, was battling leukemia and was too medically fragile to be immunized against measles. An infection could kill him. Sitting in their backyard this summer, home to a thriving vegetable garden and pickleball court, his father, Carl Krawitt, recalled how Rhett’s oncologist urged them to ask the parents of classmates to get their children vaccinated.

When they did, it seemed as if parents who had avoided vaccines hadn’t fully grasped that there could be real consequences for other people, Krawitt said. “Once they understood it, they went out and got vaccinated,” Krawitt said.

Rhett, then a towheaded boy with a round face, spoke at the State Capitol to urge lawmakers to pass a stricter vaccination requirement that was sparked by the measles outbreak. The law, which requires that all California children receive vaccines to attend school, passed in the summer of 2015. Vaccination rates subsequently increased in Marin County and statewide.

“A lot of different building blocks led up to a big change,” said Rhett, now a lanky 14-year-old who has since gotten all of his vaccines for childhood diseases and COVID-19. He spends far more time thinking about sailing, his favorite hobby, these days.

By the 2019-20 school year, Marin County’s childhood vaccination rate was up to nearly 95%, in the middle of the pack statewide instead of near the bottom.

And then the pandemic hit.

The county was one of the first areas in the nation to implement a stay-at-home order in March 2020. Adherence to masking and social distancing here was high in the early days of the pandemic. And, locals say, the benefits of a vaccine quickly became obvious.

Willis also capitalized on his years of combating vaccine hesitancy. Anticipating that Marin parents might resist vaccinating their children, he decided to administer COVID-19 vaccines for ages 5 to 11 largely at schools.

He hoped that campus-based events — where staff played music, decorated with balloons and even brought comfort dogs — were less intimidating than going to a doctor’s office. Within the first two weeks of the vaccine rollout for children ages 5 to 11, 40% of Marin County kids in that age group had gotten their first COVID-19 vaccine dose, half at the school events.

Now, Marin County’s COVID-19 vaccination rate among all residents is 91%, compared with 68% nationwide.

The county has also shed its reputation as an anti-vaccine haven in part because of how much vocal resistance has taken root elsewhere. Marin County was once faulted for having a childhood vaccination rate of 78%. Now, almost every county in America has a lower COVID-19 vaccination rate among children.

The anti-vaccine movement used to be a place where the left met the right, but increased polarization during the pandemic has made such a combination difficult to sustain, said Jennifer Reich, sociology professor at the University of Colorado Denver and the author of “Calling the Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines.”

“When we start to see such vastly different sources of information about what the risks of infection of COVID are, you start to see people making wildly different decisions in their life,” Reich said. “The vaccine and scientific expertise has become politicized.”

Schiffman said her children got the COVID-19 vaccine because they wanted to be able to go to camp, concerts and the climbing gym with their friends. Without her shots, she frequently can’t get into restaurants and other places because they require that patrons show vaccine cards. She said she might think about moving if life became even tougher to navigate without proof of vaccination.

“I will never ever put a vaccination in my body ever again,” Schiffman said. “Would that mean splitting up my family? It could.”

The culture change in Marin has been so dramatic that many new parents struggle to understand how the county earned its infamous reputation.

Dana McRay, a Corte Madera resident who recently took her 3- and 5-year-old daughters to get their COVID-19 vaccines, said she has “never met anyone who was anti-vax, or at least who talks about it.”

In a local parenting Facebook group McRay is in, a mother recently asked if anyone would have a play date with her unvaccinated kids. “All of the other parents told her there was a separate Facebook group for anti-vax parents, and she should take her request there.”

© 2022 The New York Times Company

GEMOLOGY

The World Got Gems. A Mining Town Paid the Price.

John Eligon and Lynsey Chutel
September 24, 2022·

Muck from a diamond mine As wastewater coats a property in

 Jagersfontein, South Africa, Sept. 14, 2022.

 (Ilan Godfrey/The New York Times)

JAGERSFONTEIN, South Africa — The dirt wall holding in mucky waste from diamond mining grew over the years to resemble a wide, towering plateau. Suspended like a frozen tsunami over neat tracts of Monopoly-like homes in the rural South African mining town of Jagersfontein, the dam alarmed residents who feared it might collapse.

“We saw it long time, that one day this thing will burst,” said Memane Paulus, a machine operator at the dam for the past decade.

The worst fears of residents came true this month when a section of the dam crumbled, sending a thunderous rush of gray sludge through the community that killed at least one person, destroyed 164 houses, and turned a six-mile stretch of neighborhoods and grassy fields into an ashen wasteland.


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The Jagersfontein disaster has caused alarm in a nation where heaping dams of mining waste, known as tailings, are part of the landscape. Experts estimate that South Africa has hundreds of tailings dams, which mining watchdogs say is the legacy of an exploitative industry that extracts lucrative gems for jewelry stores abroad, while poor communities are saddled with toxic waste at home.

The townspeople in Jagersfontein, home to one of the world’s oldest diamond mines, had watched the wall of waste mount, looming over their homes and streets. But there was little they could do to stop it because it was big business.

A consortium that bought the mining waste from the mine’s former owner, De Beers, was sifting through the tailings to extract any diamonds left behind — an increasingly popular offshoot of mining. In doing so, the operation was piling up even more waste, and government oversight was lax. Some mine workers were scared when their colleagues reported finding leaks in the dam.

“It was definitely avoidable,” said Mariette Liefferink, chief executive of the Federation for a Sustainable Environment, an environmental organization focused on mining. “The damage to the ecosystem, to human lives, to future generations — the risks are significant.”

The international mining industry had promised to do better after a similar dam collapse in Brazil three years ago killed more than 250 people. Some of the leading mine operators collaborated to develop standards for tailings dams. But many smaller operators, like the one in Jagersfontein, don’t follow the standards and lack the resources and expertise to manage tailings dams, Liefferink said.

Marius de Villiers, the legal compliance officer for the mine’s operating company, Jagersfontein Development, said it complied with all requirements set by South African regulators. The dam was regularly inspected, he said, and an engineering report from July declared it was structurally sound.

“We were not even contemplating that something like this would happen,” de Villiers said. He said that while the company was still investigating the dam break, it “must accept liability that comes with the operations and with the break.”

‘That Thing Is Going to Blast’

About 2 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 11, a truck driver at the dam spotted a crack in the facade, several workers there that day said in interviews. The driver reported it to a foreman, who checked it out but did not do anything, the workers said.

Joe Makalajane, a pan operator at the mine, did not see the crack himself but spoke to the driver as they were ending their shift, he said.

“He said, ‘I’ll tell you, that thing is going to blast,’” said Makalajane, 45, recalling his conversation. Of management, he added, “They didn’t take it seriously.”

De Villiers and Johan Combrink, the plant manager, denied that there was any report of a crack early that morning.

The dam wall collapsed between 6 and 7 a.m. Some residents are furious at the prospect that they could have been alerted earlier.

Rio-Rita Breytenbach, whose home is near the dam, stood on a chair in the kitchen as the barrage of slime barreled toward her. She was swept off the chair and out of the house. Caught in the raging current, Breytenbach, 39, said she floated on her back and paddled in the muck to keep her head above water.

“I was praying that I would survive,” she said.

She finally came to rest on a farm, where the police found her — more than 6 miles from her house.

The sludge wiped out much of two residential neighborhoods to the south and the east. Fields, stretching for miles, looked like frozen cement lakes, some dotted with mangled cars and sunken utility poles.

Jack Sephaka was visiting his mother across town when the dam broke. He stared from a distance in horror — his three-bedroom house was being washed away with, as far as he knew, his wife and one of his sons inside.

“I thought they were dead,” he said.

To his relief, his wife eventually called his mother to say they had made it to a shelter.

He has to rebuild a home that he bought 20 years ago for 40,000 rand ($2,300), now missing its entire front facade.

Sephaka had worked at the mine shortly after it reopened in 2010, but quit after four years because conditions were bad, he said.

“I was not happy,” he said, with “the stress of the mine.”

But the mine’s problems still caught up to him.

A Colonial Past

With its first diamonds extracted in 1870 by colonial settlers, the Jagersfontein mine is a relic of a diamond rush that often exploited Black South Africans while enriching white owners. It yielded a 650-carat diamond, among the world’s largest, that was acquired by British merchants and from which was cut the jubilee diamond, named in honor of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee.

De Beers, the global mining titan, operated the mine from 1932 to 1971. It then sat idle, but in the early 2000s, De Beers sought to capitalize on improving technology to extract minerals from tailings. It sued for the right to mine tailings without a mining license and won a judgment in 2007.

De Beers then sold the tailings at Jagersfontein in 2010 to a consortium that eventually came under the control of Johann Rupert, a South African billionaire whose companies own luxury brands like Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels. In April, just six months before the collapse, Rupert’s holding company, Reinet Investments SCA, sold all of its shares in Jagersfontein Development to Stargems, a Dubai-based diamond manufacturer and retailer, according to a Stargems announcement.

Reinet did not respond to requests for comment.

The companies could be prosecuted for violating South Africa’s environmental and water laws, or could be forced to pay compensation, said Tracy-Lynn Field, a law professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg who specializes in environmental and mining law. Government officials may also have to answer, she said.

The ruling in 2007 in De Beers’ lawsuit removed responsibility for tailings dams from the government’s minerals department. Instead, because tailings are processed in dams, the Department of Water and Sanitation was left to oversee them, despite limited expertise in mining, Field said.

Warning Signs

Residents said they were excited when the mine roared back to life in 2010, believing it would create jobs.

But soon they were coughing from all the dust in the air, and watching with angst as the dam’s dirt facade nearly doubled in height.

“We kept saying, ‘What if something happens here? What if it breaks?’” said Itumeleng Monageng, 28, who unfortunately found out the answer: This month he was knee-high in muck, salvaging whatever he could from his home.

Fears heightened in recent years when residents said they periodically saw water seeping through the dam wall. The mayor of Jagersfontein, Xolani Tseletsele, said community members aired their concerns with officials from the water department.

But Combrink, the plant manager, denied that the dam ever had a leakage problem, or that employees had reported holes in the facade. He attributed any moisture to stormwater runoff.

According to a copy of a water department directive, inspectors visited the dam, and in January 2021, ordered the operation to stop, citing several violations. Chief among them was that the facility disposed more than 2 1/2 as much waste in the dam as it was allowed to in 2020 — and had continued disposing waste even after department officials told it to stop.

Five months later, the department cleared the facility to reopen, noting in a memorandum that Jagersfontein Development had agreed to be inspected more closely and installed new equipment to reduce the wastewater disposed in the dam. Although the water department said in its memo that Jagersfontein Development still needed to address issues of dam safety raised in an independent engineering report, it gave no directive or deadline for the company to do so.

Richard Spoor, an attorney with decades of experience litigating mining cases, said it was extraordinary that water department officials, “having found that that high-level report showed a serious risk,” allowed it to reopen.

Sputnik Ratau, a spokesman for the water department, said that the dam had been allowed to reopen while safety issues were being addressed because dam officials had already satisfied other conditions.

In 2018, Jagersfontein Development built a new section of the dam that would increase its capacity by 30% and increase profitability, according to a 2019 annual report filed by Reinet Investments.

Even with that expansion, the dam was still having capacity issues — it has applied for a permit to dump waste in the original mining pit, which is a national heritage site.

An analysis of satellite images conducted after the collapse by a data and analytics company shows that from Aug. 1 to 13, the corner of the dam that broke had become slightly deformed, indicating weakness, said Dave Petley, a geologist at the University of Hull in England. The new section is the one that collapsed, he said.

Mining companies and regulators with proper expertise should have caught those warning signs, he said.

For Sephaka, the former mine worker whose house was ruined, this was the latest sour chapter in the long life of a mine that he felt had brought little benefit to the community.

“It’s painful,” he said, surveying the wreckage.

© 2022 The New York Times Company

SEE GEMOLOGY ACTIVISM

 https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2022/10/gemology-yianni-melas-greek-modern-day.html

WAR IS RAPE

Inside the Grueling Mission to Help Russia’s Rape Victims


Anna Conkling
Fri, September 30, 2022 

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty

A network of two dozen organizations has been tasked with the critical role of helping Ukrainians who claim to have been sexually assaulted by Russian soldiers since the start of Vladimir Putin’s devastating war in Ukraine.

The network operates throughout the country, often in some of the war’s most dangerous hotspots, and offers anonymous support to anyone who requests help, ranging from sending rape kits to Russian-occupied villages to providing trauma support to survivors of sexual violence.

“We obtain information about alleged human rights violations including conflict-related sexual violence through a variety of sources,” a spokesperson for the UN’s Human Rights Mission in Ukraine told The Daily Beast. Once the sources are verified, they gather all of the information they have received and use a “reasonable grounds to believe” standard of proof which, if it meets all of the elements of sexual violence, will be recorded.

Despite the intricate system created by these organization, the number of “verified cases” of sexual violence in the Ukraine war stands at just 43 assaults, 20 of which were reportedly against women or girls, with 23 against men. The number is staggeringly low, and inside Ukraine, the network believes that the true number of rape survivors is likely to be much higher, given that in conflict zones only one in every 10 to 20 rapes are reported.

‘They’ll Give Me a Medal’: The Dark Reality of Russian Troops’ Alleged War-Crime Rapes

Each member of the network plays a different role, and in the early days of the war, one those networks, La Strada Ukraine, established two national hotlines for people to call with reports of possible human trafficking. Since then, the NGO has received calls relating to women, men, and children who have been sexually assaulted by civilians and members of the Russian military. The exact number of people La Strada has helped is unknown, but it receives reports of sexual assault every day.

“[It’s] not limited to rape. It also can take many other forms. Sexual exploitation also takes place because of heightened vulnerability of these women,” Yuilia Ansova, a lawyer for La Strada, told The Daily Beast in an interview.

Recently, La Strada received a call about a 17-year-old girl in foster care who went missing while crossing from Ukraine to Poland alone. The girl had been in touch with her foster family before leaving Ukraine and was supposed to meet a volunteer from Poland to ensure her safe arrival. She has not been heard from since. Ansova said that there is no way to know what happened to her, but there is a possibility that she was a victim of sex trafficking. Since La Strada works anonymously, there is no way to follow up to try to find any new information about the girl.

When speaking with survivors of sexual abuse is possible, another network, Sylini Ukraine, works to cover their medical expenses. Sylini works with victims who remain anonymous and, since the beginning of the war, has funded the cost of recovery for eight women, including dental surgery, STD tests, psychological support, and in some cases, abortions.

Volunteers examine the remnants of a shell explosion in the town of Staryy Saltiv, Kharkiv region.
Anadolu Agency/Getty

The number of requests from survivors has grown in recent months. From May to June, 18 survivors of rape reached out to Sylini for help. Some wanted help covering medical costs, while others just wanted to ask questions, often disappearing once their questions are answered. Sylini might not hear from them again, but if the organization is needed, it is ready to help.

“It’s extremely important to give people information and to remind them that it’s OK if you’re not ready to get help,” Anastasia Krasnoplakhtych, a representative of Sylini Ukraine, told The Daily Beast over Zoom. “People want to forget about this crime, and they want to rebuild their lives. A lot of people who write to us ask, ‘Can you help me with some issue?’ and then they disappear.”

While there is no specific demographic of people Sylini helps, they often receive an influx of requests from territories liberated from Russian occupation. Younger survivors are more likely to choose psychological help over medical, whereas older survivors are more focused on getting rid of all physical evidence of their assault than on speaking with a psychologist.

“People [who] have experienced sexual violence shouldn’t be expected to behave in a way that is typical, or the same for everyone. So someone can be very aggressive, other people can freeze and not be ready to contact at all, and others can cry,” Krasnoplakhtych said.

“But the responses of people who have experienced sexual violence depend on a person’s mental state before sexual abuse, on their age, or past experience of sexual violence in their life,” she added.

Along with financial support and resources set up to support survivors, some NGO workers drive to the homes of survivors in Russian-occupied territories, where communication is scarce. That includes members of SEMA Ukraine, a group made up of survivors of sexual violence, some of whom were assaulted by Russian troops in Crimea in 2014.

SEMA could not be reached directly for comment, but its partner, The International Council of Polish Women+, has worked closely with SEMA, documenting each instance where rape could have been used as a war crime. When SEMA is able to visit small villages on the outskirts of Kyiv, it will often count at least three cases of rape. In the war’s hotspots, such as Bucha and Mariupol, the number is usually much higher.

“They [SEMA] are traveling to small towns themselves, using their own money to meet victims in person and counsel them,” Agnieszka Rutkowska, a member of The International Council of Polish Women+, told The Daily Beast. While women are a primary target of sexual violence in Ukraine, Rutkowska said that the network is aware of instances where men and children are victims as well, though they are often less reported.

Local residents evacuate and cross the bridge over the Oskil River in Kupiansk, in the recently retaken area near Kharkiv.
Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty

The network also offers help and advice to survivors of rape who are now pregnant, including the option of abortion. In the midst of having their homes destroyed, losing loved ones, and being sexually assaulted, survivors must not only process the trauma of the assault but also deal with the physical aftermath. Many of those survivors have fled to Poland for safety, but when they arrive, they are met with some of the strictest abortion laws in the European Union.

In January 2021, Poland’s Constitutional Tribune banned access to abortions in almost all circumstances, except when someone has been raped or their life is at risk. But establishing that a rape has taken place takes time, and abortions are only allowed in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. As a result, only 1,000 legal abortions take place in Poland each year. “Imagine the level of stress that the woman is going through during those few weeks of uncertainty, and she might change her mind several times,” said Rutkowska.

“I think the problem is that Ukrainian women hadn’t expected what they saw when they came to Poland—that they couldn’t have had abortion as they could have in Ukraine,” she added.

In an attempt to get a legal abortion, some Ukrainian refugees have been forced to travel to other European Union countries to terminate a pregnancy. The journey has made some pro-choice activists draw comparisons between abortion access in Europe and the “Post Roe” era in the U.S., where the Supreme Court recently overturned the constitutional right to abortion.

It’s Official: The Supreme Court Has Overturned Roe v. Wade

At the beginning of the war, a Ukrainian woman emailed Cocia Basia, an abortion access group in Berlin made up of Polish-speaking volunteers. The woman said she had just lost her husband and her home in Russia’s invasion. She was pregnant and needed an abortion. “I don’t have a house, I cannot keep this pregnancy,” she wrote, according to Ciocia Basia member Zuzanna Dziuban, who had been reduced to tears after reading the email.

Abortions are technically illegal in Germany, but they can be administered under certain circumstances in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy at doctors’ clinics. Dziuban estimates that Ciocia Basia and its partners have helped at least 500 pregnant people coming from Ukraine get an abortion since March.

“It’s incredibly infuriating because abortion bans are closely associated with stigma, with people doing it in secrecy not being very often not being aware of the fact that they cannot be criminalized for having their own abortions,” Dziuban told The Daily Beast. “They’re often alone when doing this… We didn’t think that [this] still exists in 2022. We have to stay alert. The U.S. shows how easy it is to take things from us that we fought for such a long time, and Poland also shows us how easily those rights can be taken away from us.”

PDF

https://www.academia.edu/5832605/Against_our_will_men_women_and_rape_blackatk_

There Are No ‘Jewish-Free’ Zones on the UC-Berkeley Campus


Erwin Chemerinsky

The Daily Beast
Sat, October 1, 2023

Photo Illustration by Erin O'Flynn/The Daily Beast/Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The widespread media attention to recent events at Berkeley Law are stunningly misleading and inaccurate.

An opinion column in the Jewish Journal, which is titled, “Berkeley Develops Jewish-Free Zones,” paints a grossly misleading picture of what happened at Berkeley Law.

To state it plainly: There is no “Jewish-Free Zone” at Berkeley Law or on the UC-Berkeley campus. The Law School’s rules are clear that no speaker can be excluded for being Jewish or for holding particular views. I know of no instance where this has been violated.

Allow me to explain the controversy that sparked this misguided furor.

U.K.’s Crackdown on Anti-Royal Protests Makes U.S. Free Speech Look Good

At the beginning of the school year in late August, a student group at Berkeley Law, Law Students for Justice in Palestine (LSJP), asked other student groups to adopt a by-law condemning Israel. LSJP called for the student groups to pledge not to invite speakers who supported Israel’s “apartheid” policies, to support the Boycott, Divest, Sanction movement, and to participate in training about the plight of Palestinians.

As the dean, I quickly responded with a letter to all student organizations strongly objecting to this.

My letter said, “It is troubling to broadly exclude a particular viewpoint from being expressed. Indeed, taken literally, this would mean that I could not be invited to speak because I support the existence of Israel, though I condemn many of its policies. Chancellor Carol Christ has also spoken about how the boycott, divest, and sanction movement ‘poses a direct and serious threat to the academic freedom of our students and faculty, as well as the unfettered exchange of ideas and perspectives on our campus, including debate and discourse regarding conflicts in the Middle East.’”

I followed this up with a message to the entire Law School community: “The First Amendment does not allow us to exclude any viewpoints and I believe that it is crucial that universities be places where all ideas can be voiced and discussed. In addition, the Law School has an ‘all-comers’ policy, which means that every student group must allow any student to join and all student group organized events must be open to all students.”

The issue quickly faded at the Law School.

A handful of student organizations—fewer than 10 out of over 100—initially adopted the by-law. But the rest rejected it or ignored it. Some that quickly accepted it are now reconsidering that. Most importantly, no group has violated the Law School’s policy and excluded a speaker on account of being Jewish or holding particular views about Israel. Such conduct, of course, would be subject to sanctions.

At this stage, all some student groups have done is express their strong disagreement with Israel’s policies. That is their First Amendment right. I find their statement offensive, but they have the right to say it. To punish these student groups, or students, for their speech would clearly violate the Constitution.

Ironically, most students and faculty in the Law School were unaware of this controversy or paid little attention to it. After the first couple of weeks of the semester, it was virtually never mentioned. But some media outlets have brought it worldwide attention.

I am convinced it is because they have a narrative they want to tell about higher education generally—and Berkeley, in particular—being antisemitic. They wanted to use this incident to fit their narrative, even though the facts simply don’t support the story they want to tell.

There is no doubt that the on-going crisis in the Middle East understandably generates deep feelings on all sides. Some of our students and faculty are strongly critical of Israel’s policies and are concerned about the plight of the Palestinians. Some ardently defend Israel’s actions. And others hold a myriad of views. This is true at Berkeley Law, on the Berkeley campus, and at every university.

Georgetown’s Got a Serious Free-Speech Problem

What is the proper role of the university? To be a place where all ideas and views are discussed.

At my Law School, the Law Students for Justice in Palestine bring in speakers and hold programs to express their views. At the same time, the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies holds many programs. Just last week, Knesset Member Yossi Shain spent a week on the Berkeley campus and spoke of his recent book, as well as meeting with students and faculty.

But this is not the story the media wants to tell. It is frustrating and sad that their version has no relationship to reality.

Freedom of speech, dissent, and debate is alive and well at Berkeley. And there is no “Jewish-Free Zone” at Berkeley Law or on the Berkeley campus. Period.

Erwin Chemerinsky is the Dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley School of Law.

UN chief urges Yemen's warring sides to renew expiring truce

This is a locator map for Yemen with its capital, Sanaa. (AP Photo) 

Fri, September 30, 2022 

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. chief is strongly urging Yemen’s warring parties to not only renew but expand a truce that expires Sunday, saying it has brought the longest period of relative calm since the conflict began in 2014.

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Friday that the internationally recognized government and Houthi rebels should prioritize the national interests of the Yemeni people and “choose peace for good.”

His statement followed a stark warning Tuesday from the U.N. envoy for Yemen, Hans Grundberg, that the risk of a return to fighting “is real.”

Yemen’s brutal civil war began in 2014 when the Houthis seized the capital, Sanaa, and much of northern Yemen and forced the government into exile. A Saudi-led coalition entered the war in early 2015 to try to restore the internationally recognized government to power.

The conflict has created one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises and over the years turned into a regional proxy war between Saudi Arabia, which backs the government, and Iran, which supports the Houthis. More than 150,000 people have been killed, including over 14,500 civilians.

Both sides accepted the U.N.-brokered truce for two months at the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan on April 2. It has been extended twice, and Grundberg and the secretary-general have been pushing both sides for a longer extension to try to start negotiations toward ending the conflict.

“Over the past six months,” Guterres said, “the government of Yemen and the Houthis have taken important and bold steps towards peace by agreeing to, and twice renewing, a nationwide truce negotiated by the United Nations.”

With the Sunday deadline looming, Guterres strongly urged the parties to expand the duration and terms of the truce in line with a proposal presented by Grundberg that has not been made public.

Nabil Jamel, a government negotiator, said the U.N. proposal includes ways to pay civil servants in Houthi-held territories and reopen roads of blockaded cities, including Taiz.

16B U$D FOR WEAPONS,

COULD FUND POOR AMERICANS

Putin Just Seized One-Fifth of Ukraine But Biden’s Still Betting Sanctions Can Stop Him

DIPLOMATIC IMPOTENCY, SINCE CRIMEA

CLAUSWITZ CRINGES

Scott Bixby
Fri, September 30, 2022 

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty

Faced with mounting economic costs from sanctions on the Russian government and increasingly explicit nuclear threats from the Kremlin, the Biden administration still believes that a war of attrition is the only way to beat Vladimir Putin.

The newest tranche of sanctions punishing Russia for its illegal annexation of four Ukrainian provinces won’t turn the tide in the war, administration officials said on Friday, but are the safest way to continue backing the Ukrainian resistance without risking direct American involvement.

“The sanctions element of our strategy, the economic pressure that we are placing on Russia, and the denial of their ability to gather what they need to be able to regenerate their war machine, this has been a critical element to how we have prosecuted our strategy so far,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters in the White House briefing room. “The impacts of it will continue to be felt month on month as we go forward and put us in a stronger position, and Russia in a more disadvantaged position.”

Draft Dodgers Slam Putin’s War After Finally Escaping Russia

Sullivan’s remarks came hours after the Commerce, State and Treasury departments announced new economic, diplomatic and financial actions against Russia and its leadership in response to Putin’s announcement on Friday morning that four Ukrainian provinces are now Russian territory.

“People living in Luhansk and Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia are becoming our citizens. Forever,” Putin said in a speech from the Kremlin on Friday morning, naming the four Ukrainian provinces, which make up nearly one-fifth of Ukraine’s territory. The annexation—which is illegal under international law and was met with a range of sanctions, visa restrictions and other economic measures by allied governments around the world—was widely expected by U.S. officials in the months leading up to Putin’s announcement, though the debate over the Biden administration’s response was a matter of internal dispute.

“What is a proportionate response to the illegal seizure of one-fifth of an ally’s territory?” one senior U.S. official told The Daily Beast before a series of sham elections in the occupied provinces that were used to justify Putin’s annexation address. “Russia waited seven years after annexing Crimea to mount another pretext-less invasion of Ukraine—without a proportionate response, whatever that looks like, there is no disincentive to discourage them from another invasion seven years from now.”

In the first hours after the annexation, the administration’s counteroffensive was focused primarily on the economic front: sanctions against the head of Russia’s central bank, more than two hundred members of Russia’s Federal Assembly, and on companies that feed Russia’s military supply chains.

“These sanctions will impose costs on individuals and entities—inside and outside of Russia—that provide political or economic support to illegal attempts to change the status of Ukrainian territory,” President Joe Biden said in a statement. “We will rally the international community to both denounce these moves and to hold Russia accountable.”

Despite those measures, the debate over a proportionate response continues, with some senior State Department officials pushing for the U.S. to more aggressively back Ukraine’s bid to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a proposal Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky has called for and which Sullivan sidestepped.

“The best way for us to support Ukraine is through practical on-the-ground support in Ukraine,” Sullivan said, adding that the question of hastening Ukraine’s entry into NATO’s mutual-defense pact “should be taken up at a different time.”

“That’s a B.S. answer,” one senior U.S. diplomat told The Daily Beast when sent a transcript of Sullivan’s remarks. “There is no more apt time to support fast-tracking NATO membership than when half the country has been stolen.”

The U.S. support for Ukraine’s resistance is not entirely in the form of punitive measures taken against the Kremlin, of course. Earlier this week, the Pentagon announced an additional $1.1 billion in security assistance for the country, which includes artillery rocket systems, armored vehicles, drones and body armor, and Biden on Friday signed a stopgap spending bill that included nearly $12 billion in additional aid for Ukraine.

But while limited military assistance for Ukraine has helped Kyiv make major gains in Eastern Ukraine against Russian forces, one national security official said, the White House and National Security Council are constantly aware that backing Putin into too tight a corner risks provoking increasingly desperate counter-responses.

“There are two apex priorities: 1) support Ukraine’s attempts to expel Russian forces and reclaim its occupied territory; and 2) do not do so in a way that sparks World War III,” the official said. “Those two priorities are not in definitional conflict, but the margin is narrowing.”

Zelensky Says Ukraine Is Making ‘Accelerated’ Application to Join NATO

One need only look at the apparent sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea, the official said, as an indicator of how far Putin may go as the invasion falters and inexperienced Russian conscripts replace tens of thousands of dead soldiers on the front. The pipelines, which were discovered on Monday to have massive leaks of methane gas following underwater explosions, supplied nearly 20 percent of Europe’s natural gas before the invasion.

The threat of continued implausibly deniable sabotage is far from the topmost concern, however. That would be Putin’s increasingly explicit threats of nuclear war in the event that Russian territory—which now includes much of Eastern Ukraine, at least in the Kremlin’s eyes—is threatened.

Biden called the leaks a “deliberate act of sabotage,” although he later hedged on directly blaming the Russian government for an attack on the pipeline. “At the appropriate moment when things calm down, we’re gonna send the divers down to find out exactly what happened.”

HALCION DAYS ARE GONE
André Pratte: François Legault limps to victory in Quebec election POLLING SAYS

There was a time when Legault enjoyed stratospheric support, but those days are past

Author of the article: André Pratte
Publishing date: Oct 01, 2022 • 

Coalition Avenir du Quebec leader Francois Legault speaks to the Chamber of Commerce while campaigning Wednesday, September 28, 2022 in Montreal. Quebec votes in the provincial election Oct. 3, 2022. 

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz

At the beginning of the provincial election campaign in Quebec one month ago, pundits and pollsters agreed that unless “something extraordinary” happened, François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) would be re-elected with a huge majority of seats, perhaps more than 100 out of the National Assembly’s 125 seats. Well, what do you know, “something extraordinary” did happen: Legault ran one of the worst campaigns ever seen in the province’s modern history.

This coming Monday is election day. According to the latest Léger poll, the CAQ will receive around 37 per cent of the votes. This is exactly the percentage they got in 2018. It will be enough for a second majority mandate, but maybe not the landslide that appeared inevitable before the campaign.

For inexplicable reasons, from day one on the campaign trail, Legault accumulated missteps, notably controversial assertions on immigration that he had to backpedal from. More significant, most days, the premier appeared to be angry and impatient, as if he found the campaign a complete waste of time. The frustrated body language was in evidence during both televised debates, after which Legault’s frequent frowns became the stuff of newspaper cartoonists.

If the polls are correct, six voters out of 10 will side with one of the four major opposition parties. The fact that there are so many parties vying for non-CAQ votes ensures that Legault, even with less than 40 per cent of the vote, will govern from a comfortable position, facing a dispersed opposition.

The PQ survives

Commentators were also forecasting the disappearance of the separatist Parti Québécois (PQ), the party founded by René Lévesque. Few expected that the PQ’s young leader, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon (often called by his initials PSPP) would have the best performance of all leaders, especially during the debates. PSPP ran a competent, positive campaign; the contrast with Legault was striking. Thanks to that performance, he apparently has succeeded in repatriating some sovereignist voters who were thinking of voting CAQ. Credited with 15 per cent of voting intentions, the PQ will probably win a couple of seats, enough to ensure the party’s survival.

Having harvested 25 per cent of the votes and 31 seats in 2018, the Liberal Party of Quebec sat as the Official Opposition in the last parliament. Led by Dominique Anglade, a brilliant engineer and MBA graduate from a Haitian immigrant family, the party is now forecast to lose most of the few predominantly French ridings it currently holds. The Liberals may well keep their Official Opposition status, but with so little support amongst the francophone population, they will have a credibility problem.

Ms. Anglade is running an energetic, enthusiastic campaign, but this appears to be insufficient to repair the damage done by some of her decisions well before the campaign started, especially her wavering position regarding the CAQ’s infamous language bill, bill 96.

The leftist Quebec Solidaire is the only party that could take away the Official Opposition status from the Liberals. However, despite the formidable talents of its co-leader, former student activist Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, the party has failed to significantly increase its support, which rests at 16 per cent. A promise to tax buyers of SUVs, in the name of fighting climate change, did not go over well with many voters.

The Conservative Party of Québec, led by former talk radio host Eric Duhaime, appears to have topped at 15 per cent of voting intentions. It remains to be seen whether this is enough to award the Conservatives with one or two seats in the Assembly. In any case, Quebec politicians will have to find a way to channel the anger and frustration felt by Duhaime’s many supporters. As seen in other countries, ignoring such popular feelings leads to unfortunate scenarios.

The CAQ’s slogan is “Continuons” (Let’s continue). Many are asking, considering Legault’s obvious lack of enthusiasm, “Continue doing what?” The premier has been unable to provide a convincing answer to that question. Now that the government has dealt with the language (bill 96) and religious symbols (bill 21) issues, the CAQ appears to wonder what to do next besides running the government’s daily operations as competently as possible. This is one reason why, even if his party is chosen to form the government again, the question of Mr. Legault’s succession will soon be raised inside and outside the party.

Dominique Anglade is another leader who could face leadership challenges, depending on her party’s score on election night. Potential successors have already been preparing, and if the Liberals fare poorly, the ambitious ones will stand ready at the starting block. However, by running a strong campaign, Anglade probably saved her own seat and her chances of staying on as leader.

There was a time when Premier Legault enjoyed stratospheric support. This was due to the CAQ leader’s exceptional communication skills during the pandemic. It is ironic that that record level of support has dwindled to normal proportions due to Legault’s poor communications performance during the campaign.

In the end, despite that mediocre showing, a CAQ victory is by far the most likely scenario. The reason why was summarized by a Laval voter interviewed by Radio-Canada this week: “Mr. Legault managed the pandemic as best he could; he deserves a pick-me-up.”


André Pratte is a senior fellow at Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa.

AMERICANIZATION; STATES RIGHTS
Two more provinces join in opposition to gun buyback program that 'unnecessarily targets lawful gun owners'

THE GUNS ARE ILLEGAL REGARDLESS OF THE OWNERS STATUS

Ministers in Saskatchewan and Manitoba agree with Alberta's Tyler Shandro, who earlier this week called the program wasteful

Author of the article: Ryan Tumilty
Publishing date: Sep 30, 2022 •

Colt C8 rifles at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police at the Palais de Congres in Montreal, in this August 25, 2008 file photo. 

PHOTO BY PHIL CARPENTER/THE GAZETTE/

OTTAWA — Two more provinces are telling Ottawa they don’t want provincial police resources to be used for a proposed gun buyback program set to collect “assault style” firearms this fall.

Saskatchewan and Manitoba have followed Alberta’s lead and informed the federal government they won’t use local resources to enforce a federal initiative they don’t support.

Christine Tell, Saskatchewan’s Minister of Corrections, Policing and Public Safety, wrote a letter to the highest-ranking RCMP officer in the province telling them not to use provincial resources for the program.

“The Government of Saskatchewan does not support and will not authorize the use of provincially funded resources for any process that is connected to the federal government’s proposed ‘buyback’ of these firearms,” she said in the letter.

She said the government has heard often from the RCMP that they don’t have enough resources.

“It would seem to be counter intuitive to take our front-line resources from our provincial policing service to carry out a federally mandated administrative program.”

Manitoba’s attorney general Kelvin Goertzen posted on Facebook that he had also written to federal Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino to oppose the program.

“We feel many aspects of the federal approach to gun crimes unnecessarily target lawful gun owners while having little impact on criminals, who are unlikely to follow gun regulations in any event,” he said. “In Manitoba’s view, any buyback program cannot further erode precious provincial police resources, already suffering from large vacancy rates, from focusing on investigation of violent crime.”

Alberta was the first to oppose the federal buyback program earlier this week, with the province’s justice minister calling the program wasteful and unnecessary.

“It’s important to remember that Alberta taxpayers pay over $750 million per year for the RCMP and we will not tolerate taking officers off the streets in order to confiscate the property of law-abiding firearms owners,” said Tyler Shandro.

RECOMMENDED FROM EDITORIAL

Liberal minister accuses Alberta of 'abdication' for resisting gun buybacks

The Trudeau Liberals banned approximately 1,500 weapons they described as “assault style,” using a cabinet order in 2020. The list of weapons to be banned include weapons used in some of the country’s deadliest shootings, such as the École Polytechnique massacre and the Nova Scotia mass shooting. Owners will be given between roughly $1,200 and $6,200 for their weapons depending on the make and model.

The Liberals have since followed up with more gun legislation including a proposed “handgun freeze” that would prevent future handgun sales.

Mendicino said earlier this week that Shandro’s statements were regrettable, and called them an “abdication of responsibility.”

He said the weapons in question need to come off the street.

“As we look to get these assault style rifles, which again have carried out extensive, massive casualties in our country, it is imperative that we work together collaboratively.”

He said Shandro’s stance was disappointing.

“To simply say that you’re not going to cooperate, you’re going to resist does not allow us to move forward to accomplish the objective of this program,” said Mendicino.

Mendicino also pointed out courts have consistently ruled that firearms regulation is in the hands of the federal government.

Jason Watson, a spokesperson for B.C’s public safety minister said they’re willing to work with the federal government.

“The government supports any measures that are proven to enhance public safety and we will continue to consult with our federal counterparts,” he said in an email.

But Watson said the program is not a top priority for the B.C. government.

“Ending illegal firearm violence related to organized crime remains our priority. It is a shared responsibility with the federal government and requires a multi-pronged approach and long-term strategies.”

While the RCMP is a federal police force it provides contract policing to eight provinces and three territories with only Quebec and Ontario having their own provincial forces.

In general, larger cities have their own police forces, but smaller communities in those eight provinces rely on the RCMP for policing, with the federal government covering 30 per cent of the costs and provinces covering the rest.

Wally Opal, a former attorney general of British Columbia who has studied policing extensively, said the political dispute puts the RCMP in the middle. He said policing should ideally be focused on local priorities as determined by people in the communities police serve, which is challenging under the RCMP’s current model.

“That type of policing cannot be achieved if you’re going to have a form of contract policing, wherein the governance or the policing is centralized and controlled from Ottawa.”

He said he understands provinces want police to focus on local priorities, as they determine them, but politicians shouldn’t be deciding what laws are enforced.

“I am sympathetic to the provinces, but the normal, general proposition is that the political people ought not to tell police forces what laws to enforce and what not to enforce.”

Mounties were unionized in 2019 and signed their first agreement with the government last year. The National Police federation who represent them declined any comment on the growing dispute with provinces.

Twitter: RyanTumilty
Email: rtumilty@postmedia.com