Imprisoned Palestinian leader's entry shakes up planned vote

RAMALLAH, Palestinian Territory — A popular Palestinian leader imprisoned by Israel has registered his own parliamentary list in May elections, his supporters said Wednesday, in a last-minute shakeup that could severely weaken President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party and help its militant Hamas rivals.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Marwan Barghouti’s wife, Fadwa, registered the list hours before the deadline set by the election commission. Polls indicate it would split the vote for Fatah, potentially paving the way for another major victory by Hamas. That increases the likelihood that Abbas will find a way to call off the first Palestinian elections in 15 years.

Barghouti, 61, a former Fatah militant commander, is serving five life sentences in Israel following a 2004 terrorism conviction. But he remains a popular and charismatic leader, and by breaking with Abbas he could reshape Palestinian politics and potentially replace him as president.

His entry reflects growing frustration with Abbas, who has presided over an increasingly authoritarian and unpopular Palestinian Authority that has failed to achieve national unity or advance Palestinian hopes for an independent state.

It's unclear how Barghouti's rise would affect relations with Israel. Both he and Abbas want a Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, but there have been no substantive peace talks in over a decade. Israel is unlikely to release Barghouti regardless of his political fortunes, and may refuse to engage with a leader it views as a terrorist.

Abbas has decreed parliamentary and presidential elections for May and July this year, the first since 2006, when the Islamic militant Hamas won a landslide victory in parliamentary elections. That precipitated a crisis that led to Hamas’ seizure of Gaza from Abbas’s forces the following year, leaving the West Bank and Gaza divided between rival governments.

Abbas decreed the election in January in a step meant to help heal the division. It now remains to be seen whether the elections will actually be held, given the long-running feud between Fatah and Hamas — and the widening divisions within Fatah.

An opinion poll carried out by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research earlier this month found that a separate list endorsed by Barghouti would split the Fatah vote and potentially garner more support than the official list.

“Barghouti running would dramatically change the outcome,” the centre's director Khalil Shikaki said last week when the results of the poll were published.

If Barghouti runs for president in elections planned for this summer, he would easily defeat both Abbas and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, according to the poll, which surveyed 1,200 Palestinians with a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

Barghouti, 61 has flirted with a run in the past but eventually ended up endorsing Abbas, who was elected to a four-year term in 2005 but has remained in power since then.

This time Barghouti will partner with Nasser al-Kidwa, the 67-year-old nephew of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for a list called “Freedom.” Al-Kidwa was kicked out of Fatah in early March after announcing he would run on his own 

“We hope that this list will lead to democracy," Fadwa Barghouti said. "We registered this list and we hope it will succeed.”

Earlier, senior Fatah official Jibril Rajoub submitted the party's official list.

He said the elections would be held in “all the Palestinian territories, including east Jerusalem,” which Israel annexed and considers part of its capital. He also predicted the elections would lead to a national unity government that would end the rift.

“We seek to win the elections in the spirit of democracy, and we will respect the results,” he added.

Another list, known as “Future,” has been registered by supporters of Mohammed Dahlan, a former senior Fatah official who had a falling-out with Abbas and is now based in the United Arab Emirates. He is also expected to drain support from Fatah.

The fracturing of Fatah severely weakens Abbas and could pave the way for the far more disciplined and unified Hamas — which is running on one list — to emerge as the largest Palestinian party. Abbas could postpone or cancel the elections, but that would risk censure from the United States and European nations, which provide vital aid to the Palestinian Authority and have long called for free and fair elections.

East Jerusalem could provide a pretext for cancelling or postponing the elections. Israel bars the PA from operating there and has not said whether it will allow voting in the city.

Tensions are already rising in the occupied West Bank. In the Qalandia refugee camp near Jerusalem, dozens of Fatah gunmen fired automatic weapons into the air Wednesday night to protest the expected makeup of the official party list, which they said did not represent them.

Barghouti led Fatah’s militant wing during the intifada, or uprising, that erupted in 2000 amid the breakdown of the peace process. He condemned attacks targeting civilians inside Israel, though Israel says he is responsible for civilian deaths.

The uprising saw Palestinians carry out suicide bombings and other attacks against Israeli civilians as the Israeli military launched deadly raids in the West Bank and Gaza. More than 6,000 Palestinians and over 1,000 Israelis were killed, with the unrest tapering off after 2005.

Israeli troops arrested Barghouti in 2002, at the height of the uprising, and two years later a military court convicted him of orchestrating attacks that killed five people, giving him an equivalent number of life sentences. Barghouti refused to recognize the Israeli military court or offer any defence.

Many Palestinians view Barghouti as a revolutionary leader in the mould of Nelson Mandela or Fidel Castro, unsullied by the corruption of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority or the long-running feud between Fatah and Hamas. As a long-jailed militant, he is seen as having sacrificed his freedom for the cause of Palestinian independence.

From behind bars, he has continued to call for a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, lands Israel seized in the 1967 war. Polls consistently show him to be the most popular Palestinian leader, with support from across the political spectrum.

In 2017, Barghouti led more than 1,500 prisoners in a 40-day hunger strike to demand better conditions inside Israeli jails. Most Palestinians view prisoners held by Israel as heroes to their cause, and the strike bolstered Barghouti’s image.

Israel considers Barghouti and other Palestinians jailed for security offences to be terrorists and has given no indication it would free him. He was not included in a group of more than 1,000 high-profile prisoners who were released in 2011 in a deal with Hamas in exchange for an Israeli soldier captured by militants and held in Gaza for more than five years.

Joseph Krauss, The Associated Press

NO FOOLING

US jobless claims rise to 719K as virus still forces layoffs


WASHINGTON — The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits rose by 61,000 last week to 719,000, signalling that many employers are still cutting jobs even as more businesses reopen, vaccines are increasingly administered and federal aid spreads through the economy.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The Labor Department said Thursday that the number of claims increased from 658,000 the week before. Though the pace of applications has dropped sharply since early this year, they remain high by historical standards: Before the pandemic flattened the economy a year ago, jobless claims typically ran below 220,000 a week.

Still, the four-week average of claims, which smooths out week-to-week gyrations, fell by 10,500 to 719,000 — the fewest since mid-March 2020, just before the pandemic began to cause widespread layoffs.

All told, 3.8 million people were collecting traditional state benefits during the week ending March 20. If you include federal programs that are meant to help the unemployed through the health crisis, 18.2 million people were receiving some type of jobless aid in the week that ended March 13. That's down from 19.7 million in the previous week.

Economists monitor weekly applications for unemployment aid for early signs of where the job market is headed. Applications generally reflect the rate of layoffs, which normally fall steadily as a job market strengthens. During the pandemic, though, the numbers have become less reliable as states have struggled with application backlogs and allegations of fraud have clouded the actual volume of job cuts.

Even so, measures of the overall economy show clear improvement from the collapse last spring, with the rising number of vaccinations encouraging people to return to airports, shopping centres, restaurants and bars. The number of new confirmed COVID-19 cases has dropped from an average of about 250,000 a day in early January to below 70,000, though it has begun to rise again in recent days.

Last month, consumer confidence reached a post-pandemic peak. And the $1,400 checks in President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic relief plan have sharply lifted consumer spending, according to Bank of America’s tracking of its debit and credit cards. Spending jumped 23% in the third week of March compared with pre-pandemic levels, the bank said.

And even with the pace of layoffs still relatively high, hiring has begun to accelerate. In February, employers added a robust 379,000 jobs across the country. Last month, they are believed to have added even more: According to the data firm FactSet, economists expect the March jobs report being released Friday to show that the economy added a sizable 614,000 jobs and that the unemployment rate fell from 6.2% to 6%. Less than a year ago, the jobless rate had hit 14.8%.

Some economists are even more optimistic: Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at the tax advisory firm RSM, is predicting 1 million added jobs for March.

The Federal Reserve’s policymakers have substantially boosted their forecast for the economy this year, anticipating growth of 6.5% for 2021, up from an estimate in December of just 4.2%. That would be the fastest rate of expansion in any year since 1984.

“With vaccination efforts increasing seemingly by the day, hope may finally be on the horizon," said AnnElizabeth Konkel, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab. “Getting the public health situation back to normal is the only way to stop coronavirus’ economic damage. A robust recovery will only be able to flourish once the virus is under control.”

Still, the economic impact of the pandemic lingers. The data firm Womply reports that 63% of movie theatres and other entertainment venues were closed last week, as were 39% of bars and 39% of hair salons and other beauty shops.

Paul Wiseman, The Associated Press

Proposed Canadian gun bill will create U.S.-style patchwork of firearms laws

Noah S. Schwartz, PhD Candidate, Political Science, Carleton University


Canadians have a lot to be proud of. A vast wilderness to protect and explore, universal health care, a historical record of peacekeeping and diplomacy, and most of all, according to many of us: not being American.

© (Logan Weaver/Unsplash)

 Canadian gun laws should not replicate the chaotic system in the United States.

That last point seems to form the bedrock of our national identity. Canadians go to great lengths to distinguish ourselves from our southern neighbour. That’s why it seems odd that the federal government is trying to bring American-style gun politics to Canada.

I am talking about Bill C-21, the government’s latest gun control foray. It’s managed to unite proponents of gun control and gun rights in their condemnation while even simultaneously politicizing the largely apolitical airsoft community, made up of those who enjoy participating in the paintball-like game and whose toy firearms will be banned by the bill.

The strangest thing about the bill, however, is its attempt to copy and paste failed American-style gun laws into the Canadian context.

If the phrase “American-style” gun laws seems like an oxymoron, I don’t blame anyone for thinking so, especially in the aftermath of two recent, horrifying mass shootings south of the border. The popular perception is that America has no gun laws. While that’s not true, federal gun laws in the United States are modest when compared to Canada.

Constitutional and political considerations have made it difficult for American legislators to institute national gun control measures, leaving states, counties and municipalities to create their own confusing patchwork of stop-gap measures. This results in a legal mess, makes gun control a polarizing issue at all levels of government and does little in the way of dissuading criminals from driving to the next state or county to acquire firearms.

So far, Canada has avoided this sort of legislative quagmire; most of our gun laws are housed in the Firearms Act. This means they are largely consistent across all Canadian provinces and territories.

Confusion to ensue

This will change if Bill C-21 passes and gives the municipalities the power to ban handguns. Assuming — and this is a big if — these laws survive a constitutional challenge, they could result in an American-style snafu, creating confusion not only for licensed gun owners but police forces, courts and lawyers.

Given that most guns involved in crime in Canada are already being smuggled across the U.S. border, it is highly questionable to think that the “Welcome to Toronto” sign would deter gang members who rely on unlicensed firearms to conduct illicit business.© THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette Police officers from different agencies arrive for a news conference on an investigation into trafficking of illegal firearms and illegal drugs in the Greater Toronto and Golden Horseshoe areas of Ontario in December 2018.

The law also puts in place American-style Red Flag Laws by expanding the conditions under which a licensed gun owner can be subject to an Emergency Prohibition Order. This might make sense in the American context, since the U.S. doesn’t have a national gun licensing system and it can be difficult to remove guns from the hands of those who pose a risk to public safety.

But Canada already has provisions in place that allow police to conduct searches of gun owners’ homes without a warrant to respond to public complaints, and remove guns from the hands of people in crisis.

Frivolous complaints

The provisions contained in Bill C-21 will make it easier for frivolous complaints to be brought against gun owners, dragging harmless people into the court system at a personal cost of thousands of dollars.

While Red Flag Laws implemented in some American states may be a necessary workaround in the absence of better gun laws, they have had mixed success in reducing gun crime and preventing mass killings. Worse still, these laws create an alarming number of false positives and have hauled people into the legal system for posting internet memes or making childish statements.

Canada already has strict gun laws. The gun problem in Canada stems from sharing the world’s longest undefended border with the country that has the largest number of guns in civilian hands. There is no need to replicate American stop-gap gun laws here.

Lawmakers should instead focus on tackling the social determinants of crime, invest money in chronically underfunded programs to trace guns used in crimes and increase funding for community-based organizations like the One by One Movement, an advocacy group founded by former gang members to fight gun and gang violence.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Noah S. Schwartz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

CLOSING BARN DOOR 

Taiwan chip maker TSMC to invest $100B

 to grow capacity



TAIPEI, Taiwan — Major Taiwan computer chip maker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. plans to invest $100 billion in the next three years in expanding its manufacturing capacity and supporting research and development, the company said Thursday

.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The world’s biggest contract producer of semiconductors, TSMC said it anticipates faster growth thanks to long-term trends like the introduction of next-generation telecommunications and high-performance computing. The coronavirus pandemic, meanwhile is revving up demand for electronic devices as the world relies increasingly on digitalization.

“TSMC is working closely with our customers to address their needs in a sustainable manner," the company said in an emailed statement. It did not give further details about planned investments.

TSMC makes processor chips for major brands like Apple Inc. and Qualcomm Inc. Surging demand pushed its revenue 18% higher in January-February from a year earlier, it reported earlier.

Intel, South Korea's Samsung Electronics and other chip makers also have been boosting investments to meet rising demand and joust for market share in advanced semiconductors.

Most semiconductors used in smartphones, medical equipment, computers and other products are made in Taiwan, South Korea and China.

Last week, Intel announced plans to pour $20 billion into expanding production, building two new factories in Arizona. The company is building up its foundry business but lags behind TSMC in developing a next-generation chip-making process.

TSMC operates a semiconductor wafer fabrication facility in Camas, Washington, and design centres in San Jose, California, and Austin, Texas.

It has announced plans to invest $3.5 billion in a second U.S. manufacturing site, in North Phoenix, Arizona, as concern grows over heavy American reliance on sources in Asia for high-tech components.

The Associated Pres

U.S. trade war pushing China to steal tech, talent, Taiwan says

TAIPEI (Reuters) - The China-U.S. trade war is pushing Beijing to step up its efforts to steal technology and poach talent from Taiwan to boost China's semiconductor industry's self-sufficiency, the government of the tech-powerhouse island said on Wednesday.

Washington has taken aim at China's tech industry during the bitter trade dispute, putting sanctions on firms including telecoms equipment giant Huawei Technologies Ltd, saying they are a threat to national security, angering Beijing.

Chinese-claimed Taiwan is home to a thriving and world-leading chip industry, and the government has long worried about China's efforts to copy that success, through fair means or foul.

Speaking at a parliamentary committee meeting on how to respond to the "red supply chain" - a reference to the colour of China's ruling Communist Party - Taiwan Economy Minister Wang Mei-hua said the trade war had created new risks.

"Affected by the U.S.-China technology war, the development of mainland China's semiconductor industry has been obstructed, but they are still committed to the industry's development," she said.

"In order to achieve self-sufficiency in the supply chain, poaching and infiltration are the quickest way for mainland China to do this," Wang added.

Taiwan's chip workers have deep experience and speak the same language, meaning they are a "natural target for poaching China has latched onto", she added.

China's Taiwan Affairs Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Hu Mu-yuan, deputy head of Taiwan's National Security Bureau, said China's efforts were a threat to not just Taiwan, but also Japan and South Korea, threatening global trade and fair competition.

"Moreover, the Chinese communists are stealing other countries intellectual property to boost their own power," he added.

Taiwan has strict laws to try and prevent this from happening, but officials have warned China tries to skirt them by setting up front companies on the island, using Taiwanese headhunters and other methods.

"Preventing Taiwan's key technology and high-tech personnel from being infiltrated by the 'red supply chain' has become an important task to protect our industry's competitiveness and ensure our economic security," Hu said.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Additional reporting by Beijing newsroom. Editing by Gerry Doyle)

MEET THE NEW BOSS SAME AS THE OLD BOSS, SERIOUSLY

From the bottom up: CP Rail's Keith Creel steps out from Hunter Harrison's shadow to cement his own legacy

AS YOU WILL READ HARDLY BOTTOM UP

Joe O'Connor

POSTMEDIA

APRIL 1,2021

Keith Creel was just a relatively raw kid from Alabama when Hunter Harrison summoned him to the 21st floor of the NBC Tower in Chicago for a meeting in 1996. It’s a day vividly imprinted on his memory 26 years later, because days like that were not supposed to happen to people like him

A GUY IN A REALLY BAD SUIT, 

BUT NOT DON CHERRY BAD

.

© Provided by Financial Post 

Keith Creel, chief executive of Canadian Pacific Railway.

Harrison, a brash southerner, with a rich baritone voice, a taste for Marlboro Red cigarettes and stiff drinks, and a reputation as a master storyteller, was chief executive of Illinois Central Railroad and already a legend in railroad circles.

Creel was a nobody. A new frontline hire, soon bound for Memphis, Tenn., and a job as trainmaster. He couldn’t really fathom why the boss would want to meet him. His nerves were hopping all over the place as he walked into an office anteroom with bookshelves and a couch, comfy chairs and a million-dollar view of Lake Michigan. He found himself thinking, “Somebody must live here.”

Around a corner sat Harrison. He told the kid to “sit down,” and he started telling stories of growing up in the South, of sports and railroading.

“I spent three hours with Hunter,” Creel, now 52 years old, said. “And I heard a lot and I learned a lot, and I realized then that this wasn’t just a CEO in a suit, and no disrespect to CEOs in suits, but this was a guy who understood the business from top to bottom.”

Harrison also recognized, for whatever reason, something in Creel, and would pull him along from railroad to railroad, dispatching him to towns along the way to sort out operational kinks and learn the business just as he had: from the bottom up.

© Chris Goodney/Bloomberg files

 Hunter Harrison in 2015. RAN BOTH CN & CP

Until, that is, the protege appeared at the top, and succeeded Harrison as chief executive at Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. in January 2017. Harrison died later that same year, but were he alive today, Creel could tell him a story of his own, about that kid from Alabama being the driving force behind CP’s US$25.2-billion deal to purchase Kansas City Southern.

The merger is a whopper in an industry where whoppers rarely happen, and it positions a Canadian railway, one started in 1881 that now connects the country from coast to coast, to drive a stake into an expansive network stretching from northern Alberta deep into the Mexican industrial heartland.

Regulators will have their say, no doubt, but most everybody else — the Alberta Wheat and Barley Commission, Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, Alberta’s premier, Kansas City Southern’s board, analysts and the stock market, where CP is trading at record highs — are cheering the purchase.

Should it ultimately go through, Creel’s name, as Harrison’s typically is, may never again appear without the word “legend” practically affixed to it.

“This has been a transaction that has been talked about for the last 15 years.” Steve Hansen, an analyst at Raymond James Ltd., said of the deal. “It is massive.”

Chances are, though, it never would have happened were it not for another guy named Steve, who worked at Food World in Atlanta in the early 1980s. That Steve, whose last name has been lost to time, worked alongside Creel, a high school sophomore, wrestler and impressionable teen with car payments to make.

Steve had been to U.S. Army boot camp. He had a brush cut. He could talk.

“What he told me inspired me,” Creel said.

No one in Creel’s family had a military background. (No one in his family worked for the railroad, either). But he heard enough to enrol in an officer’s training program while pursuing a marketing degree at Jacksonville State University in Alabama.

Midway through university, Creel was called up for active duty during the Persian Gulf War, and the wet-behind-the-ears 21-year-old lieutenant got his first taste of leading others while stationed in Saudi Arabia.

The army was about teamwork, order, logistics, troubleshooting problems, following rules and believing in a mission greater than oneself. It was also about motivating people to do their best.

“I learned that I had a huge love for leadership in the military,” Creel said. “When I came back, the military opportunity was what led to the railroad.”

NEO LIBERALISM, CONTIENTALISM, JUST IN TIME DELIVERY

And the railroad led to that first meeting with Hunter Harrison in Chicago. Before Harrison came along, railroads were notoriously unreliable. Major delays were the industry norm. Punctuality was but a rumour.

Harrison set out to fix things, evolving his philosophy of “precision scheduled railroading” along the way. In short: his trains were going to leave on time and they were going to arrive on time. Locomotives would pull more cars to maximize loads and boost profits. Reducing transit times between point A and point B was paramount. Providing fast and reliable service would attract more customers, and more customers would mean more profitable railroads. A culture of slow and inefficient would become a culture of quick.

© Peter J. Thompson/National Post files Keith Creel, left, 

and Hunter Harrison at a CP Rail annual meeting in 2016.

“PSR is basically doing what you say you are going to do for your customers,” Hansen said. “If you say you are going to leave at 2 p.m., then you leave at 2 p.m., where, historically, it was always, ‘Let’s just wait a little bit longer before we leave.’”

Canadian National Railway Co. bought Illinois Central in 1998, and brought in Harrison as its chief operating officer, later promoting him to CEO. Now running a Canadian railroad, he would send Creel to Winnipeg, in -40 C weather, among other stops, to implement his precision-guided philosophy.

“Keith and Hunter were a lot alike in that they were both extremely focused,” said Andy Reardon, former chair of CP’s board and a 40-year industry veteran. “They strove for perfection.”

Reardon first met Harrison in the 1970s. He describes Creel as having a softer touch, and an uncanny talent for soaking up the best parts of the best people he has ever worked for and applying them to his own leadership style. As another person phrased it: no one finds Keith Creel “intimidating.”

Creel likens Harrison to a coach, or a father figure, someone who could be tough but caring, someone you hated to disappoint.

“When you needed it, Hunter would knock you down in the dirt,” he said from his home in Florida. “But he would also stick out his hand and dust you off, and tell you to go get them again.”

The question for Creel always seemed to be: go where? In learning the business from the bottom up, he uprooted his family 13 times in 14 years to live in places such as Battle Creek, Mich., Wichita Falls, Texas, and Edmonton.

“I became a fix-it guy,” he said. “Hunter put me in some very challenging locations and terminals. I would parachute in, stay for a year, get things turned around and going the right way, and then he would have another project to send me to.”

Living out of a suitcase wasn’t easy. Harrison may have been the boss, but Creel’s most “trusted adviser” was his wife, Ginger. Somewhere along the way, the former high school wrestler also became that most Canadian of things: a hockey parent.

Creel’s son, Tanner, was a goaltender at the University of Connecticut, while their daughter, Caitlin, competed in equestrian at Auburn University in Alabama.

“Often, I was by myself,” Creel said of watching Tanner’s games from the stands. “I sort of internalize, because that was the only healthy way to do it, or maybe it wasn’t healthy. But the stress of (watching Tanner) was more than the stress of work.”

Harrison retired from CN at the end of 2009, but came out of retirement to run CP in 2012. A year later, he poached Creel from CN under cantankerous circumstances to sign on as president and chief operating officer.

As close as the two men were, they didn’t agree on everything. The CP beaver is a case in point.

© Courtesy Library and Archives Canada The Last Spike, 1895.

Canadians may recall a black-and-white photograph of a small man with a white beard driving home the last spike of CP’s railway in November 1885. For a young country just finding its way, post-Confederation, the railway proved transformational. Goods and people could get around, as could a budding narrative of a nation, from sea to shining sea, united by a feat of engineering know-how.

The small man with the beard in the “Last Spike” photograph was a financier, political arm twister and philanthropist named Donald Alexander Smith, a Scotsman. More than a century later, it was an Alabaman, Creel, who twigged onto the idea that there was an opportunity to rebrand the company by reconnecting it to its roots.

CP first adopted the industrious beaver as a logo when it began running transcontinental trains out of Montreal and Toronto in 1886. The critter was tossed onto the metaphorical tracks in 1968, revived for a spell in the late 1990s, and then sidelined again. Harrison had no use for the beaver. The past was the past.

But Creel brought it back almost immediately after taking over as CEO, incorporating it into a snazzy new company logo — albeit one with a retro feel — and painting it in gold on CP trains. He even helped sketch out the logo.

“I literally sat at my desk in Calgary with a colleague and started scratching out some thoughts,” he said. “And I said, ‘This is it, we will just combine the past and the present, and it will carry us into the future.’”

The logo overhaul was a small touch, a clever bit of marketing from a guy with a marketing degree. To customers and the world outside, it was a nod to the past, sure, but it also pointed directly at the future.

© Alex Ramadan/Bloomberg files A Canadian Pacific Railway locomotive painted with the company logo at a rail yard in Calgary.

Here was a fresh look for a new CP: a railway that leaves and arrives on time, gets goods to where they need to go, has a strong safety record and happy shareholders, and one that was still looking to grow.

But Creel hoped an internal shift in tone, even more than the external messaging, would resonate with employees. The Harrison era at CP, with Creel as chief lieutenant, was a painful exercise in righting a business that had a weak bottom line and was teetering toward potential bankruptcy and break-up.

Hundreds of locomotives were parked, railyards were closed and about 8,000 jobs were chopped from the payroll during Harrison’s five years at the helm.

“PSR is a cultural, financial and operational principle, and it can be wrenching for some people, particularly for those accustomed to doing things one way, and who don’t want to change,” former chair Reardon said.

Harrison may have invented PSR, but Creel, in his role as implementer-in-chief, perfected it. Travel times between Toronto and Calgary were reduced by 22.5 hours. Another 12 hours was cut from the Calgary-to-Vancouver leg. The culture of fast won out, though not without friction.

In February 2015, 3,000 conductors and engineers walked off the job, protesting poor working conditions such as extreme fatigue and unreliable schedules. Harrison’s response to the two-day strike was to keep the trains running by putting white-collar executives on the rails.

“I can tell you that when a train comes running by at 60 miles per hour, pulling 20,000 tonnes with the manager blowing the whistle at them, their eyes get awful big,” Harrison reportedly said of the striking workers.

© Crystal Schick/Calgary Herald files A CP Rail train passes as dozens of employees wear signs and walk the edge of the Ogden rail yard as they strike in Calgary, on February 15, 2015.

By the time Creel officially took over, the mandate was growth, not more cuts, and the logo refresh was, in part, his way of extending an “olive branch” to employees. He describes the company’s 13,000 employees as “family.” It probably doesn’t hurt that the family generates about $8 billion a year in revenue.

The kinder approach has mostly paid off. A source among the CP rank and file, who requested anonymity, said there are some guys who “come to work with a smile on their face,” while others are “constantly looking over their shoulders, and feel as though they are being watched.”

Things are not perfect, Creel allowed, but no family is. What is beyond dispute is CP’s and Creel’s reputation for getting the job done.

“CP are unmatched, they are the gold standard,” Hansen, the analyst, said.

Now, it is poised to get a whole lot bigger.

But the merger with KCS was another thing that Creel and Harrison could never quite agree upon. Harrison disliked the idea; Creel had long been intrigued by it.

The younger man visited his mentor several times as he lay dying in a Florida hospital. Harrison was on oxygen, vulnerable — human — and it was tough to see. But two days before he died, he was back to being Hunter Harrison: lucid, funny and eager to tell stories with his protégé.

They thanked one another for “doing right” by one another. Harrison held forth, just like in the old days, coaching Creel on whom he could trust and who he couldn’t. They talked for three hours.

Creel knows just what Harrison would say, if he could see him now.

“He would be proud,” he said. “He would be extremely proud. I know that he would.”

Financial Post

CP’s ‘historic and transformational’ merger could be the last of the big rail deals

CP deal could be easier sell in wake of continental trade deal and pandemic’s economic shifts

Some 136 years after the Last Spike, CP Rail aims to connect north and south

CP Rail to buy Kansas City Southern to create first rail network connecting Canada, the United States and Mexico

Coca-Cola CEO wants Congress to act after Georgia's voting law

By Jordan Valinsky, CNN Business 

Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey is escalating his criticism against recently passed voting laws in Georgia, saying he wants to be "crystal clear and state unambiguously that we are disappointed" in the legislation.

© Fabrice Coffini/AFP/Getty Images Coca-Cola President and CEO James Quincey attends a press conference with International Olympic Committee (IOC) president and China Mengniu Dairy CEO and Executive Director, as part of the 134th Session of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) at the SwissTech Convention Centre in Lausanne, on June 24, 2019.

In a new statement released Thursday, Quincey said that Coke, which is headquartered in Atlanta, has "long championed efforts to make it easier to vote" and has previously opposed legislation that "would diminish or deter access to voting."

"Our focus is now on supporting federal legislation that protects voting access and addresses voter suppression across the country," Quincey said. "We all have a duty to protect everyone's right to vote, and we will continue to stand up for what is right in Georgia and across the US." 

The federal legislation that Quincey appears to be alluding to is HR 1, a sweeping government ethics and election bill that, among other things, would counter state-level Republican efforts to restrict voting access. The Democratic-led House approved the legislation earlier this month.

Wells Fargo also issued a public statement Thursday echoing the need for Congress to "establish Federal Election Day as a national holiday, thereby establishing the importance of this right."

Business leaders have been under growing pressure to denounce Georgia's voting law and similar measures in other states. Quincey's new statement follows his prior criticism, calling the law "unacceptable" and "a step backwards."

"This legislation is wrong and needs to be remedied," Quincey said in an interview on CNBC Wednesday. "We will continue to advocate for [changes], both in private and now even more clearly in public."

Republicans who passed the law say the measure is needed to prevent fraud and stop illegal voting, playing on discredited claims of widespread fraud in last year's presidential election. Opponents say the legislation amounts to voter suppression efforts that will reduce minority voting.

Several leaders of Georgia-based companies have criticized the law, including Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian. After facing a backlash over his initial statement, Bastian issued a more forceful criticism Wednesday, saying the measure was based on "a lie" about voter fraud.

"I need to make it crystal clear that the final bill is unacceptable and does not match Delta's values," Bastian said in a statement to employees. "After having time to now fully understand all that is in the bill, coupled with discussions with leaders and employees in the Black community, it's evident that the bill includes provisions that will make it harder for many underrepresented voters, particularly Black voters, to exercise their constitutional right to elect their representatives. That is wrong."

That prompted a response from Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, accusing Bastian of spreading misinformation and not recognizing the upsides for voting security included in the bill.

The "statement by Delta CEO Ed Bastian stands in stark contrast to our conversations with the company, ignores the content of the new law, and unfortunately continues to spread the same false attacks being repeated by partisan activists," Kemp said in a statement.

--CNN Business' Chris Isidore contributed to this report.

‘You’ll become Hindu’: Yoga remains banned in Alabama schools after senate vote

Alabama’s senate has rejected a bill that would have reversed a 28-year ban on practising yoga in public schools.

© Provided by National Post Alabama state legislator Jeremy Gray's bill preserved the ban on the Hindu greeting 'namaste' and made the practise of yoga in public schools voluntary. It was still defeated

Alabama State Rep. Jeremy Gray’s bill was defeated in committee on Wednesday night, despite a provision that would have made bringing yoga back to Alabama public schools voluntary. Yoga was forbidden by the Alabama Board of Education in 1993 after opposition by conservative groups over its Hindu roots.

The committee vote in effect continues a ban believed unique in the United States: “School personnel shall be prohibited from using any techniques that involve the induction of hypnotic states, guided imagery, meditation or yoga” (in addition to banning “namaste,” which means “I bow to you”).

At issue is whether yoga promotes Hinduism.

Groups who argued against the Alabama bill believe it violates the separation of church and state. The act of meditation is spiritual, argues constitutional lawyer Eric Johnston, who works with Christian advocacy groups that have spoken out against the measure.
THEY WANT PRAYER IN SCHOOL

HENCE THEIR PERVERSION OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT

“If you pass a law that says you can do stretches and sit in positions and so forth, that’s fine,” Johnston said. “But to say you can teach yoga is an entirely different thing because yoga is an exercise of the Hindu religion.”

Johnston and others say they don’t object to adults participating in yoga but they feel children are impressionable.

“Children at that age are very tech-savvy and if they are taught yoga, all they have to do is Google it and they will immediately find information on the spiritual aspects of it and look at it,” he said. “And if they look at it, it might lead them to believe that’s something they should be involved in.”

Gray, who began practising yoga in college as a football player at the end of his workouts, said yoga is everywhere in the state — there’s even a yoga program available to the state’s prison inmates.

He didn’t realize it wasn’t permitted at schools until he visited a class to speak about politics and lawmaking and told students he meditated to help himself focus. The students and faculty in the room appeared uncomfortable at the mention, he said, and teachers later told him they became certified to teach a course but were not allowed to because a group of parents complained.

No other state has a similar ban, Gray said.

Gray’s proposal tried to mollify his critics: His bill stipulated that “chanting, mantras, mudras, use of mandalas, and 11 namaste greetings shall be expressly prohibited.”

The state legislator told reporters, “This whole notion that if you do yoga, you’ll become Hindu — I’ve been doing yoga for 10 years and I go to church and I’m very much a Christian.”

With additional reporting from The Washington Post

Bright lights, bug city: Study explains why 45 million grasshoppers swarmed Las Vegas

Las Vegas is all about excess and July 2019 was no different when some 45 million grasshoppers descended on its dazzling skyline, a horde of insects that appeared on weather radar like a thunderstorm.

© Provided by National Post 

Grasshoppers swarm a light a few blocks off the Strip on July 26, 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Now, new research published in Biology Letters sheds light on the insect invasion. Rather than a biblical plague visited upon the city of sin in the Nevada desert, scientists see a convergence of more common phenomena.

By mapping vegetation and weather surveillance data, researchers found the insects scattered to forage for vegetation at dusk and swarmed Vegas after dark.

The study counted more grasshoppers in a single day than the city gets visitors in an entire year.

“I think that’s one of the cool aspects of this paper — to be able to quantify the number of grasshoppers in those ‘hordes’, and show that their movement is correlated with bright lights and the landscape below,” the study’s lead scientist, Elske Tielens, wrote in an email.

Footage from 2019 show teeming masses of insects painting the Vegas sky and littered throughout roads and parking lots in a deluge that lasted from June until mid-August. The radar picked up more than 45 million grasshoppers when the swarm peaked on July 27, adding up to around 30 metric tons in weight.

Interestingly, the authors found the grasshoppers congregated more around the Vegas strip, flocking to the brightest lit regions of the night sky.

The scale of this influx depends on the coming together of two things: “large grasshopper populations because of favourable conditions, wet winter and spring [with] lots of green vegetation … and the proximity of a large urban ‘light trap,’” Tielens said.

The study newly examines the effect that artificial lights at night have on the behaviour of insects at this scale. Their interactions with man-made environments could help with conserving insect diversity and managing pest species, according to the authors.

Invertebrates that are drawn to light may be “trapped” in unsuitable areas, hindering their ability to forage and mate, they write, adding certain moths drawn to light-polluted areas are known to show greater population declines.

Outbreaks of the very same pallid-winged grasshoppers were found in Arizona in the fifties, sixties and 1998, Tielens points out, including in Phoenix, Casa Grande, Tucson, and surroundings.

“It is likely this kind of event could happen again.”

The day of the locust : West, Nathanael, 1903-1940 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

'Mystery and milieu:' Survey says Canadians have seen more UFOs during pandemic

WINNIPEG — It was a clear afternoon when a man driving down a rural road in Alberta with his son saw a pie-shaped object levitating in the sky just before the thing rotated, turned black and suddenly disappeared.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

"There were no windows, lights, lines or markings on the object's surface and the edges were all rounded," says a transcript of the man's report made to Winnipeg's Ufology Research.

"Within (one minute) of us seeing the object, we witnessed a military plane flying in the direction of our sighting."

The report of the unidentified flying object was one of hundreds counted during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, says a report released Tuesday.

Chris Rutkowski with Ufology Research said sightings of UFOs across Canada — levitating discs, erratic spaceships and floating triangular objects — increased by 46 per cent in 2020.

He said the total of 1,243 sightings last year is one of the highest recorded in a single year. Roughly 30 per cent of the sightings were in Ontario and 24 per cent came from Quebec.

The high number of reports suggests an average of three UFO sightings every day, he said.

"Anything that is seen in the sky that a person doesn't think is a star, planet or plane is (a) UFO," said Rutkowski, who has been collecting unusual sightings in the sky since 1989.

"That's strictly an unidentified flying object by the definition."

One person in Toronto reported seeing a UFO levitating 1 1/2 metres away from his balcony before it folded in on itself. A pilot flying from Thunder Bay, Ont., reported an object about a metre in diameter passing over the plane's right wing even though his radar reported zero traffic in the airway.

Some sightings turned out to be a satellite, a plane flying at an awkward angle or light playing tricks, Rutkowski said. But 13 per cent were classified as unexplained.

"There's a persistent phenomenon that won't go away," he said.

"It certainly is very, very impressive and causes (people) to report them to various agencies from police, RCMP, to national defence and other agencies."

The astronomer said he doubts UFOs are being operated by an extraterrestrial being.

"As an astronomer, my background suggests there probably is alien life out there, but travelling between stars is very, very difficult."

But, Rutkowski said, once in a while a police officer or a pilot, who are considered credible observers, report a UFO sighting and researchers have to take their sightings seriously.

"What do you do with those cases? Do you just chalk them up to one of those things? Or does that make you think there is something behind all the mystery and milieu?"

He suggested there could be two reasons why more Canadians saw objects that seemed out of this world.

Early in the pandemic, the U.S. government released videos of unidentified aerial phenomena recorded by the navy.

"That (drove) some people to look a little more carefully in the sky and believe that UFOs are a little more popular and frequent than one believes."

It's also possible the pandemic has caused people to think a bit more about their lives and to wonder if we're alone in the universe.

"People were spending more time with their families, in their own backyards, and were ... appreciating nature and what's surrounding them (and) UFOs are a part of human culture.

"This is probably a way of just imagining what life is like in the universe, beyond the borders of our little blue speck in space."

Rutkowski encourages Canadians to continue reporting UFOs.

"We really have no information about what aliens might be like."

He adds that any being intelligent enough to travel between stars should have figured out some of the problems that exist on Earth, such as wars, famine and climate change.

"So, if you've seen a UFO, you're in very good company."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 30, 2021

— By Fakiha Baig in Edmonton

___

This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Facebook and Canadian Press News Fellowship.

The Canadian Press

Bright lights in the sky: A look at some of the UFO sightings in Canada last year

WINNIPEG — A recent survey posted by Ufology Research in Winnipeg says there was a jump in UFO sightings in Canada last year. Here are some of the 1,243 sightings:

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Jan. 23, 2020 — Someone shovelling snow off their Toronto balcony reported seeing a two-metre long object silently levitating about 1.5 metres away. As the person continued staring at the black and silver object, one side folded and disappeared.

Jan. 23, 2020 — On the same day near Guelph, Ont., a person reported seeing two bright lights following a plane. As the plane went in another direction, the lights continued moving forward at a fast speed and a massive circular object appeared behind the lights. The observer said it appeared the lights were escorting the UFO.

Feb. 3, 2020 — It was a clear day when a man driving down a rural road in Alberta with his son saw a grey pie-shaped object levitating in the sky just before it rotated, turned black and suddenly disappeared. Within the next minute, they saw a military plane flying towards the mysterious object. They said the round UFO had no windows or markings.

Video: Rocket debris from satellite launch puts on light show over southern B.C. (cbc.ca)

July 24, 2020 — A pilot of a North Star Air Ltd. plane heading to Sachigo Lake, Ont., from Thunder Bay, Ont., saw an object pass over the plane's right wing. The pilot said the UFO was about one-metre in diameter. The plane's radar indicated there was no object in the vicinity.

Aug. 30, 2020 — A man in Ottawa pulled out his binoculars after observing an object with flashing lights hovering in the clear sky. He described the chevron-shaped UFO as black with green, blue and purple with flashing lights underneath. He also said his wife confirmed that the object levitated in the sky for about 20 minutes before it moved west.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 30, 2021.

The Canadian Press

Sierra Nevada Corp. unveils space station plans

Sierra Nevada Corporation held a news conference Wednesday to reveal its vision for an integrated, free-flying commercial space station, building on key elements of the "Life" habitat and "Dream Chaser" spaceplane design. (March 31)

Duration: 01:04 

CRYPTOZOOLOGY BABY CTHULHU DISCOVERED

FROM THE MEZOLITHIC PERIOD

CANADA

Residential School Survivors' stories and experiences must be remembered as class action settlement finishes

Cindy Hanson, Professor, Dept of Sociology and Social Studies, University of Regina, Curtis J Shuba, Research Associate, Sociology and Social Studies, University of Regina, and Sidey Deska-Gauthier, Research Associate, Political Science, University of Guelph

March 31 marks the conclusion of the largest class action settlement in Canada’s history. After 14 years, the Independent Assessment Process (IAP) — a compensation process established to resolve claims of serious physical, sexual or emotional abuse suffered at Indian residential schools — is officially over.

Students of the Metlakatla Indian Residential School, B.C.
© (William James Topley. Library and Archives Canada, C-015037) 

Despite the fact that it collected claims from more than 38,000 Indian residential school survivors, the IAP remains relatively unknown.

The court-ordered destruction of IAP testimonies and records, the biased and superficial mainstream news media reports and the continued emphasis on compensation and costs ensure that if it is remembered, it will be through a colonial gaze.

This gaze represents the perspective through which the process is framed, what is explicitly valued or absent, and whose story is remembered: the colonial narrative is privileged and the Indigenous voice limited.

Our national study seeks to understand perspectives and the framing of the IAP to create public knowledge, in the wake of the destruction of records. The study analyzes government documents (Hansard Index, the traditional name of the transcripts of Parliamentary debates), national and Indigenous media, along with transcripts produced through interviews and focus groups with survivors, health support workers, adjudicators, judges and lawyers. The results presented here are preliminary.

Read more: Residential school literature can teach the colonial present and imagine better futures

A bit of background

Of the 38,000 survivors who applied to the IAP, almost 27,000 attended adjudications — an out-of-court process. The adjudication gave survivors the opportunity to tell their story of abuse to an adjudicator and government representative, with optional supports including a lawyer, health support worker, elder, translator or family. The fate of the records and testimonies from these hearings — 800,000 documents — was decided by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2017.

The court upheld the position of the Indian Residential School Adjudication Secretariat, the body responsible for administering the IAP, that the testimonies would be destroyed unless individual survivors decided to claim or share their records. Currently only a handful of survivors have requested their transcripts or offered to make (sometimes redacted) versions publicly accessible through the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR). In 2027, any remaining survivor testimonies and records will be destroyed.

In January 2020 an Ontario Superior Court ruling blocked the creation of static reports. These included information the secretariat gathered during the IAP about variables like the child’s age and sex, particularities of residential schools, types of abuses and community impacts. The case was appealed by the NCTR and the Ontario Court of Appeal’s judgment is pending.

Coverage of the IAP: Colonial and wanting

Media coverage of the IAP is sparse. Preliminary results of our study reveal a focus on the trials and tribulations of a bureaucratic process that attempted to combine class action law with reconciliation-based gestures. Lost in this narrative is the survivors’ lived experiences within the IAP and a critical evaluation of the IAP’s overarching goals: healing and reconciliation.

Through our study, “Reconciling Perspectives and Building Public Memory: Learning from the Independent Assessment Process,” we established factors that played key roles in healing: giving testimony, and supporting, believing and validating the survivors. This perspective was largely forgotten by the media and instead reports often focused on the credibility of survivors’ claims of abuse, financial compensations and court cases. It was, however, acknowledged in the IAP’s final report.

© (Bud Glunz/Library and Archives Canada, PA-134110) 

Cree students sit in class at All Saints Indian Residential School 

in Lac La Ronge, Sask., in March 1945.

The dominant narrative conflated success of the IAP with compensation. For example, the secretariat reported success when the claimant garnered a cash settlement (89 per cent success rate with an average of $91,000 in compensation). And although compensation metrics are certainly one indicator of success, the experiences of survivors telling their stories are key to considering the IAP’s larger goals.

The defensive posture of the federal government recently surfaced. An independent review of claims (specifically those from St. Anne’s Indian Residential School) was recently announced following critiques by survivors and public officials like former senator Murray Sinclair and MP Charlie Angus.

Elected officials in the House of Commons had an opportunity to contribute to public memory based on meaningful reconciliation, but it was largely swept away in partisan politics. Looking at Hansard Index debates from 2004-19, we found the IAP was discussed only 28 times.

Read more: Indian day school survivors are seeking truth and justice

The significance of Indian residential school abuses, the damage the system did to families and communities, the litigation and compensation settlements that came after the IAP can only be fully comprehended within Canada’s long history of denial of Indigenous human and gender rights.

The move from explicit systems of violence to concealed structures of domination cannot be mistaken for reconciliation. We must examine the ways in which Indigenous rights are both explicitly and implicitly advanced or denied: this was highlighted in an earlier IAP study that found that although residential schools taught girls domestic tasks, unpaid work caring for children was not acknowledged or compensated in the IAP model.

Remembering for a common future

We fear additional tragedies are inevitable without abundant data regarding abuse factors, or intergenerational and community impacts. These data add a quantifiable dimension to the horrors of residential schools and remind us of the consequences of racist public policy. Such policy is not just about the individuals impacted; it affects the consciousness of collectives and communities.

Public records are valuable for understanding how public memory is created, and who is directing its narrative. Unless attention is paid to the ways in which the media and Canada continue to decentre Indigenous voices and experiences the colonial gaze will endure.

How residential schools and the IAP are remembered is not only relevant to Canada’s identity but for government-Indigenous and public-Indigenous relations, now and into the future.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Cindy Hanson received funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (Insight Grant) for the study this article is based on.

Curtis J Shuba is a paid research associate on this SSHRC Insight Grant (on which this article is based).

Sidey Deska-Gauthier is a paid research associate on this SSHRC Insight Grant (on which this article is based).

Scientists: Grizzlies expand turf but still need protection

The bears now occupy about 6% of their historical range in the contiguous U.S., up from 2% in 1975.

BILLINGS, Mont. — Grizzly bears are slowly expanding the turf where they roam in parts of the northern Rocky Mountains but need continued protections, according to government scientists who concluded that no other areas of the country would be suitable for reintroducing the fearsome predators.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The Fish and Wildlife Service on Wednesday released its first assessment in almost a decade about the status of grizzly bears in the contiguous U.S. The bruins are shielded from hunting as a threatened species except in Alaska.

BOTH PARKS BORDER ON CANADA BEARS KNOW NO BORDERS
Grizzly populations grew over the past 10 years in two areas — the Yellowstone region of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, with more than 700 bears; and around Glacier National Park in Montana, which is home to more than 1,000 of the animals.

Grizzly numbers remain low in other parts of the Northern Rockies, and scientists said their focus is on bolstering those populations rather than reintroducing them elsewhere in the country.

The bears now occupy about 6% of their historical range in the contiguous U.S., up from 2% in 1975.

Conservationists and some university scientists have pushed to return bears to areas including Colorado’s San Juan Mountains and California’s Sierra Nevada.

The 368-page assessmen t makes no recommendation on the topic, but scientists looked at the possibility of bears in more areas as part of an examination of their remaining habitat.

That analysis showed grizzlies would be unable to sustain themselves in the San Juans, the Sierra Nevada or two other areas -- Utah’s Uinta Mountains and New Mexico’s Mongollon Mountains.

“They were looking for areas that could sustain grizzly bears as opposed to areas that would continuously need for humans to drop bears in there,” said Hilary Cooley, the Fish and Wildlife Service's grizzly bear recovery co-ordinator.

In each case, officials said, bears would face the same challenge — not enough remote, protected public lands, high densities of humans and little chance of connecting with other bears populations to maintain healthy populations.

An estimated 50,000 grizzlies once inhabited western North America from the Pacific Ocean to the Great Plains. Hunting, commercial trapping and habitat loss wiped out most by the early 1900s. The bears were last seen in California in the 1920s and the last known grizzly in Colorado was killed by an elk hunter in 1979.

Grizzly bears have been protected as a threatened species in the contiguous U.S. since 1975, allowing a slow recovery in a handful of areas. An estimated 1,900 live in the Northern Rockies of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Washington state.

The Center for Biological Diversity sued the Fish and Wildlife Service in 2019 in a bid to force officials to consider restoring grizzlies to parts of seven more western states. A U.S. District judge ruled last year that the government was not compelled to draft recovery plans for the bears in new areas.

Protections for bears in the Yellowstone region were lifted under former President Donald Trump but later restored under a court order just as Idaho and Wyoming prepared to hold public hunts for grizzlies for the first time in decades. Five Republican U.S. senators from the region this week introduced legislation to strip protection from Yellowstone-area bears and put them under state jurisdiction.

Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso said in a statement that President Joe Biden's administration had missed an opportunity Wednesday to declare restoration efforts in the region a success and lift protections.

Biologists say Yellowstone grizzlies are “biologically-recovered." But an appeals court last year said the government had not done enough to make sure hunting and other pressures don’t reduce the population size in the future to where the bears’ genetic health could be harmed.

Centre for Biological Diversity attorney Andrea Zaccardi said state officials, hunting groups and the agriculture industry had too much influence on decisions about bears made under Trump. She urged officials under Biden to take a “less politically-motivated look at grizzly bear recovery.”

Wyoming ranchers who want grizzlies under state control sided with the government in the legal dispute over where bears should be restored. They would oppose any attempt by the new administration to reverse course, said Will Trachman with Mountain States Legal Foundation, which represents the ranchers.

“We hope they won't roll over on their own victory,” he said.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who oversees Fish and Wildlife Service, co-sponsored legislation while in Congress to increase protections for bears and reintroduce them on tribal lands. Haaland declined to say how she would approach the issue when questioned during her February confirmation hearings.

“I imagine at the time I was caring about the bears,” she said.

Matthew Brown, The Associated Press

A new survey suggests grizzly bear numbers in Alberta's central Rocky Mountains have doubled since 2005.   

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The survey says there are about 88 grizzlies in 7,300 square kilometres of summits and foothills between the Trans-Canada Highway and Highway 11 roughly 200 kilometres to the north. That's up from 42 bears in 2005.

"That population has doubled," said Gordon Stenhouse, the biologist who led the survey done between 2005 and 2018.

The results follow an earlier survey in another region that saw bear populations double. That work, also by Stenhouse, found that grizzly numbers in the northern Rockies had increased to 74 from 36 between 2004 and 2014.

Stenhouse also released a survey of bears in the Swan Hills region in northwestern Alberta. He estimated 62 bears live there — "more bears than we thought were there," Stenhouse said.

The new survey didn't include Banff National Park. Parks Canada says 62 bears live in the park at least some of the time.

Stenhouse's tally was done by setting up scent lures of rotting cattle blood mixed with canola oil and surrounding them with barbed wire. The bears climbed over or under the wire and left tufts of hair behind, which were then subjected to DNA analysis.

Stenhouse credits two main factors for the bruin boom: "Not as many bears being killed and food resources are plentiful."

Alberta ended its grizzly hunt in 2006, which removed a major cause of bear deaths.

Logging has also created a younger, more open forest favourable to bears, Stenhouse said.

"When you have more young forest, you have more young whitetail deer and moose and species that are associated with younger forest stands. Those are prey items for grizzly bears."

Stenhouse credits the industry with logging in ways that are easier on bears.

"Much more attention has gone into road planning and access management. (Foresters) have been using some of the research tools that we've generated."

The younger forest does create problems of its own.

Some species, including caribou and weasels, need old forests. Forestry also creates roads and more access for humans is generally bad news for wildlife.

"But as long as we can keep human-caused mortality down, it looks like bear foods and habitat are doing OK," Stenhouse said.

"This is great news for grizzly bears," said Aerin Jacob, a biologist with the Y2Y Initiative, which works to preserve wildlife corridors from Yellowstone in the United States to Yukon.

But prime bear habitat has to be balanced with other forest stands that support different species, she said.

"We need to maintain natural variability."

Forests are also coming under increased pressure from recreational and industrial users. Permitted roads for coal exploration, for example, already exceed limits in Alberta's grizzly bear recovery plan in some parts of the animal's range.

"Some of the ways we have to focus conservation efforts are about roads and about human-wildlife coexistence," said Jacob. "We know very clearly that more roads is bad news."

Provincial statistics from 2009-18 show that 129 of 208 human-caused grizzly deaths were accidental or as a result of illegal kills — both related to roads.

Jacob said it's also important to keep the big picture in mind.

"This might be good news in a couple of these bear management areas, but let's think about how grizzly bears are doing overall and how much of their habitat has been lost overall."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 31, 2021.

— Follow @row1960 on Twitter

Bob Weber, The Canadian Press

Reversing Trump, Pentagon to release new transgender policy


WASHINGTON — The Pentagon on Wednesday will sweep away Trump-era policies that largely banned transgender people from serving in the military, issuing new rules that offer them wider access to medical care and assistance with gender transition, defence officials told The Associated Press.

© Provided by The Canadian PressThe new department regulations allow transgender people who meet military standards to enlist and serve openly in their self-identified gender, and they will be able to get medically necessary transition-related care authorized by law, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal decisions not yet made public.

The changes come after a two-month Pentagon review aimed at developing guidelines for the new policy, which was announced by President Joe Biden just days after he took office in January.

Biden's executive order overturned the Trump policy and immediately prohibited any service member from being forced out of the military on the basis of gender identity. Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin then gave the Pentagon two months to finalize the more detailed regulations that the military services will follow.

The new rules also prohibit discrimination based on gender identity. Their expected release Wednesday coincides with International Transgender Day of Visibility.

Austin has also called for a reexamination of the records of service members who were discharged or denied reenlistment because of gender identity issues under the previous policy. Results of that review have not been released.

Until a few years ago, service members could be discharged from the military for being transgender, but that changed during the Obama administration. In 2016, the Pentagon announced that transgender people already serving in the military would be allowed to serve openly, and that by July 2017, they would be allowed to enlist.

After Donald Trump took office, however, his administration delayed the enlistment date and called for additional study. A few weeks later, Trump caught military leaders by surprise, tweeting that the government wouldn’t accept or allow transgender people to serve “in any capacity” in the military.

After a lengthy and complicated legal battle and additional reviews, the Defence Department in April 2019 approved a policy that fell short of an all-out ban but barred transgender troops and recruits from transitioning to another sex and required most individuals to serve in what the administration called their “birth gender.”

Under that policy, currently serving transgender troops and anyone who had signed an enlistment contract before the effective date could continue with plans for hormone treatments and gender transition if they had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria.

But after that date, no one with gender dysphoria who was taking hormones or had transitioned to another gender was allowed to enlist. Troops that were already serving and were diagnosed with gender dysphoria were required to serve in the gender assigned at birth and were barred from taking hormones or getting transition surgery.

The new policies being released Wednesday are similar to those developed in 2016.

As of 2019, an estimated 14,700 troops on active duty and in the reserves identify as transgender, but not all seek treatment. There are more than 1.3 million active-duty troops and close to 800,000 in the National Guard and Reserves.

Since July 2016, more than 1,500 service members were diagnosed with gender dysphoria; as of Feb. 1, 2019, there were 1,071 currently serving. According to the Pentagon, the department spent about $8 million on transgender care from 2016 to 2019. The military’s annual health care budget tops $50 billion.

All four service chiefs told Congress in 2018 that they had seen no discipline, morale or unit readiness problems with transgender troops serving openly in the military. But they also acknowledged that some commanders were spending a lot of time with transgender people who were working through medical requirements and other transition issues.

Lolita C. Baldor, The Associated Press