Father, son accused of killing Metis hunters ask Alberta court again for bail

NO BAIL FOR RACIST KILLERS

#NATIVELIVESMATTER 

…  

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Jake Sansom, 39, and his nephew Maurice Cardinal, 57, 

EDMONTON — An Alberta judge is to rule Friday on whether two men charged with killing two Metis hunters will be granted bail.

Roger Bilodeau, 57, and his son Anthony Bilodeau, 32, both face two counts of second-degree murder.

Jake Sansom, 39, and his nephew Maurice Cardinal, 57, were shot to death last March on a rural road near Glendon, northeast of Edmonton.

Family and friends have said they were out hunting to feed their families at the time.

RCMP said a verbal confrontation escalated into a fight between the occupants of two vehicles when the shooting happened.

The Crown decided to proceed with a direct indictment in the case, which eliminated the need for a preliminary hearing. A trial is to begin in St. Paul on May 25.

The accused men were denied bail last summer and applied for a bail review.

A second bail hearing was held Tuesday in Edmonton, but details cannot be revealed due to a publication ban.

During the hearing, about 40 people gathered outside the courthouse as two people sang and played drums. A man also held a sign that read: "Justice for Jake & Morris."

Court of Queen's Bench Justice Robert Graesser ordered the accused men to appear in person in court for his decision on Friday.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 16, 2021.

The Canadian Press

TEPCO; NEGLIGENT, INCOMPETANT, CRIMINAL

Tepco shares slump over safety breaches at Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear station

TOKYO (Reuters) - Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) shares fell about 7% after Japan's atomic regulator found safety breaches at the company's Kashiwazaki Kariwa station and the industry minister said it was not likely to be able to restart the plant anytime soon.

© Reuters/SAKURA MURAKAMI An employee of TEPCO looks up at a tank reserved for storing treated water at the tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma town

Tepco shares had surged in recent months on hopes it would be able to restart Kashiwazaki Kariwa, the world's biggest nuclear station, after years of trying to convince regulators and local residents it had learnt the lessons of the Fukushima disaster ten years ago.

(Reporting by Aaron Sheldrick; Editing by Shri Navaratnam)

Climate change and pollen season: Human environmental impacts making allergies worse

Allergies aren't just a sneezy seasonal annoyance

By Katie Hunt, CNN 

3/16/2021

© William Anderegg Climate change has lengthened and intensified pollen seasons in the US and Canada, a new study has found. Shown is a Colorado blue columbine with pollen visible.

Hay fever has major health and economic consequences. It exacerbates asthma and weakens defenses against respiratory viruses, resulting in more emergency room visits and disrupted schooling and work.

Climate change has already made pollen seasons in the United States and Canada worse, a new study of almost three decades' worth of data has revealed. The pollen seasons are getting longer and more intense.

The amount of time people in North America are exposed to pollen as well as the amount of pollen had "increased significantly" in recent decades, according to the authors.

The researchers looked at different pollen metrics between 1990 and 2018 from 60 monitoring stations across North America. Pollen seasons were starting up to 20 days earlier and lasting for up to eight days longer, the scientists found.

There was also an increase in the pollen count or concentration of pollen, with a rise of 20.9% between 1990 and 2018 -- and a 21.5% increase for the spring season alone.

"There's an enormous body of research on how climate change is already affecting our health. Our study fills in a key piece connecting climate change to pollen, which is one of the largest drivers of asthma, allergies, and respiratory health problems," said William Anderegg, an assistant professor of biology at The University of Utah and lead author of the study that published in the journal PNAS on Monday.

"It's a clear example that climate change is here and now."


Regional differences

The largest and most consistent increases were in Texas and the midwestern United States, the study found -- something that surprised Anderegg. He had expected to see larger pollen increase in more northern states.

He said the reason for this wasn't "entirely clear and is going to take more research to unravel. One hypothesis might be that the plant species that are found there are particularly sensitive to warming and producing more pollen."

The study looked at different drivers for this change, including temperatures changes, rainfall, frost days and carbon dioxide concentrations, and it found that an increase in mean annual temperatures was the strongest driver.

Using computer models of the Earth's climate, the researchers also calculated to what extent human-caused climate change had increased pollen concentrations and made pollen seasons longer.

"These computer models simulate a world without human-caused climate change and a world with human-caused climate change (i.e. the real world)," Anderegg said via email.

"By combining the observed connection between pollen and temperature with these two different scenarios, we can estimate how much human-caused climate change is influencing pollen trends."


Longer pollen seasons

The researchers concluded that it was a "strong driver" in terms of the earlier starts to the pollen season and longer season lengths. However, it was a more modest driver when it came to higher pollen concentrations.

The contribution of human-made climate change was starker during the period 2003 to 2018 compared to the longer period of 1990 to 2018, the scientists said, which likely reflects both the cumulative effect of climate change and a larger number of pollen monitoring stations during the shorter period.

The researchers also noted that the human environmental impact was more modest when looking at figures for an entire year versus the spring season, with some decreases in summer pollen counts indicating that the life cycles of some plant species had shifted.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some 19.2 million adults have been diagnosed with hay fever -- an allergic reaction to pollen, a fine powder from plants that can come into contact with your eyes, nose, mouth and throat.

'A blessing from God': Iraqi truffle hunters unearth desert harvest

By Ahmed Saeed and Alaa al-Marjani 

3/16/2021

© Reuters/ALAA AL-MARJANI The Wider Image: 

'Here it is, the truffle, a blessing from God!'

SAMAWA DESERT, Iraq (Reuters) - "Here it is, the truffle, a blessing from God!" Zahra Buheir carefully digs out a desert truffle from the sandy earth and shows it off between her calloused fingers.


"Rain came, and then thunder, bringing truffles up to the surface," the 72-year-old said.

Braving the harsh weather of Iraq's southern desert, as well as left-behind land mines, Buheir and her family of seven have spent weeks hunting for the seasonal truffles that have provided them with an income for generations.

Fetching its hunters up to $7 a kilo this year, Iraq's desert truffle is cheaper than its rarer European cousins that can cost hundreds of dollars or more a kilo.

But with Iraq's economy in crisis, the local variety are a big help to Buheir and her family.

This year the rain came late and Buheir could only find about a kilo of truffles a day, one tenth of what she would dig up in a good year.

Turning over stones and poking the earth with her bare hands, Buheir's granddaughter, 5-year-old Riyam, accompanied her parents to learn a trade and the desert lifestyle.

"When there is no work, truffles are a source of income. And we are happy here," said Riyam's father Mohsen Farhan, who cherishes the weeks he spends with his family in their tent in the desert.

Learning to hunt for truffles these days also involves understanding the desert's dangers.

"We are afraid of wolves, there are a lot here. And there are mines. A while ago, someone died," Farhan said.

Remnants from the Gulf war in 1991, unexploded devices beneath the earth could be mistaken for truffles by the inexperienced eye.

Every few days, Hussein Abu Ali, drives into the desert from the city of Samawa to take the truffles to market.

There, Ali Tajj al-Din sells them at auction, each with a different name according to size.

"These are walnuts, eggs, oranges, and here is the pomegranate, the biggest one," he said.

This year, scarcity has pushed up prices and truffles that don't sell locally are exported to wealthier Gulf countries.

But customers at Samawa's "Beit al-Hatab" restaurant relish its weekly truffle speciality.

"We fry or grill them, but the favourite dish is truffles on rice," said restaurant owner Fawwaz Hatab.

(Writing by Charlotte Bruneau; Editing by Giles Elgood)

JESUITS; THE POPE'S ORDER

Catholic order pledges $100m in reparations to descendants of enslaved people

An order of Catholic priests has pledged $100m in reparations to descendants of Black people it enslaved and sold, in the largest initiative of its kind by the church.

© Provided by The Guardian Photograph: Ali Haider/EPA

Miranda Bryant 3/16/2021 THE GUARDIAN 

Leaders of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States have promised to raise the sum, which will be paid to a foundation set up with a group of descendants, and to “begin a very serious process of truth and reconciliation”.

“Our shameful history of Jesuit slaveholding in the United States has been taken off the dusty shelf and it can never be put back,” said the Rev Timothy P Kesicki, president of the Jesuit Conference.

“Racism will endure in America if we continue to turn our heads away from the truth of the past and how it affects us all today. The lasting effects of slavery call each of us to do the work of truth and reconciliation. Without this joining of hearts and hands in true unity, the cycle of hatred and inequality in America will never end.”

© Photograph: Ali Haider/EPA The move is thought to be one of the largest attempts to atone for slavery by an institution and the most substantial by the Catholic church.

Jesuits used enslaved labour and sold enslaved people for more than a century, to support clergy, churches and schools, including what is now known as Georgetown University in Washington DC.

The announcement on Monday is thought to be one of the largest attempts to atone for slavery by an institution and the most substantial by the Catholic church. It comes amid growing calls for reparations across US institutions including churches, colleges and Congress.

Descendants of enslaved people called on the order to raise $1bn, after discovering that their ancestors were among 272 enslaved men, women and children sold in 1838 to plantation owners in Louisiana, by the Jesuit owners of Georgetown.

While the order has committed to $100m over three to five years, with $15m deposited in a trust so far, Father Kensicki and Joseph M Stewart, acting president of the Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation, said $1bn was the long-term goal.

“We now have a pathway forward that has not been travelled before,” Stewart told the New York Times. “They [the order] did not come running to us, but because we went to them with open arms and open hearts, they responded. They have embraced our vision.”

Each year about half the foundation’s funds will take the form of grants to organisations working on racial reconciliation, around a quarter will fund scholarships and educational grants to descendants, and some will be allocated for the emergency needs of descendants who are old or sick.

About 5,000 living descendants of people enslaved by the Jesuits have reportedly been identified by a non-profit, the Georgetown Memory Project.

Shannen Dee Williams, assistant professor of history at Villanova University, said the move was an “important step forward” and “continued efforts to seek atonement for these egregious sin histories should be applauded”.

But she added: “Hopefully, this most recent announcement will not be the end for a religious community that for well over 400 years actively participated in and financially benefitted from the slave trade, colonisation, slavery and segregation.”

As the first and largest corporate slaveholder in the Americas and the largest Christian supporter of segregation in the US, the Catholic church will “never be able to repay fully what is owed for the millions of Black lives stolen and destroyed by its own practices of slavery and segregation”, Williams said.

The historian said she hoped other religious orders, US bishops and the Vatican would follow the Jesuits’ lead and called on them to formally acknowledge and apologise for the church’s history of slavery, segregation and racial exclusion; to institutionalise teaching of Black and Black Catholic history; and to “work in complete conjunction with the descendants of its victims to realise true racial justice and reconciliation”.

Rashawn Ray, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, said the move “sends a message” to other religious institutions but added that it “doesn’t come close” to bridging the racial wealth gap.

“While the $100m is laudable and important,” he said, “that $1bn that they discussed raising should still be on the table because we know that when it comes to the racial wealth gap, when it comes to the legacy of slavery in the United States and what selling slaves has meant for building wealth, particularly white wealth and institutional wealth in higher education, even with the $100m it still doesn’t even remotely come close to making that racial gap.”

 

Spooky footage appears to show UFO floating above desert

Duration: 00:52 6 hrs ago

The Brazilian economic canary in the coal mine
Desmond Lachman, Opinion Contributor 1 day ago



Troubles come to the Brazilian economy not as single spies but in battalions. Especially at a time of rising U.S. interest rates, this hardly bodes well for the international economy. Brazil is Latin America's largest economy, so a full-blown Brazilian economic crisis could have a domino effect on the rest of Latin America's troubled economy. It could do so in much the same way as economic troubles in Thailand triggered the 1998 Asian economic crisis.

© getty: Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro The Brazilian 

economic canary in the coal mine

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic delivered Brazil the severest of public health and economic blows, the country had a troubled economy. The pandemic found a Brazil still struggling to kickstart its economy after the unusually deep 2015-2016 economic recession. It also found Brazil with an uncomfortably large budget deficit and a record-high public debt level.

In no small measure due to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's incompetence and apparent indifference, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacted a high human toll on Brazil. To date, some 277,000 Brazilians have lost their lives due to COVID. With Brazil's vaccination program still in first gear and infections still surging, there seems to be little sign of light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel for Brazil.

Thanks to a very generous public spending program, including very popular handouts to the poorest segments of the Brazilian population, Bolsonaro has succeeded in limiting the depth of the country's COVID-induced economic recession. However, he has done so at a considerable cost to the country's public finances. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in 2020 Brazil's budget deficit ballooned to almost 15 percent of the country's Gross Domestic Product, while its public debt skyrocketed to a level approximately the size of its economy.

Adding to the country's economic and political woes has been a Brazilian Supreme Court judge's decision to overturn former far-left President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's criminal conviction. That opens the way for Lula to challenge Bolsonaro in next year's Brazilian presidential election. It also makes it all the more difficult for Bolsonaro to begin addressing the country's highly precarious public finances or to begin reforming its sclerotic economy.

In an environment of ample global liquidity, markets have been very forgiving of Brazil's public finance excesses. However, with the bold Biden budget stimulus now threatening to cause the U.S. economy to overheat by year-end, it is very unlikely that today's ultra-easy global liquidity conditions will last very long. As if to underline this point, since the start of the year, the key U.S. 10-year Treasury bond yield has moved up sharply from less than 1 percent to its present level of over 1.5 percent.

The gathering clouds over the Brazilian economy have not gone unnoticed by the markets. Since the start of the year, the Brazilian currency has been among the world's worst performing currencies and now stands at close to its all-time low. Meanwhile, the Brazilian government is running into increased difficulties in placing its debt as reflected in higher government bond yields and in the fact that almost 30 percent of the country's debt comes due over the next year.

In 1998, as global liquidity conditions tightened, Thailand's economic troubles triggered the Asian currency crisis. With Brazil being a much larger economy and having much worse public finances than Thailand in 1998, one has to wonder whether Brazil's troubles might not trigger a more widespread emerging market debt crisis if U.S. interest rates do indeed continue to rise out of fear of U.S. economic overheating.

All of this should be of particular concern to U.S. economic policymakers. With emerging market economies now constituting around half of the global economy, an emerging market debt crisis today would be much more serious than the 1998 Asian currency crisis. With U.S. interest rates likely to rise for the remainder of this year, it would not seem to be too early for the Biden administration to start thinking about how it would respond to an emerging market debt crisis.

BOURGEOIS ECONOMIST GLOBALIST
Desmond Lachman is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He was formerly a deputy director in the International Monetary Fund's Policy Development and Review Department and the chief emerging market economic strategist at Salomon Smith Barney.

Europe's droughts since 2015 'worst in 2,000 years'

AFP 3/15/2021

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Recent summer droughts in Europe were the most severe the region has seen in 2,110 years as climate change has stoked punishing heat waves, according to new research Monday that raises the alarm for ecosystems and agriculture.

© LOIC VENANCE Samples from 2015 to 2018 showed drought

 conditions that far exceeded anything in two thousand years

Using data from tree rings in living and dead European oaks going back to the time of the Romans, scientists identified a long-term drying trend that suddenly intensified in 2015 beyond anything seen in two millennia.

The researchers said that this cluster of abnormally dry summers was likely caused by human-driven climate warming and changes to the circulation of the jet stream.

"Climate change does not mean that it will get drier everywhere: some places may get wetter or colder, but extreme conditions will become more frequent, which could be devastating for agriculture, ecosystems and societies as a whole," said lead author Ulf Buntgen, of Cambridge University.

Buntgen, a professor of environmental systems analysis, said the research showed that consecutive summers of intense heat and drought experienced since 2015 is "extraordinary for central Europe", in a statement by the university.

- Intensifying heat -

To study the timing and severity of historical droughts, researchers analysed 147 oak trees -- including logs pulled from old buildings and archaeological sites and living trees from what is now the Czech Republic and parts of Bavaria -- covering a period of 2,110 years.

They then measured the oxygen and carbon isotope composition of 27,080 growth rings, as opposed to the usual tree-ring measurements of width and density, to plot changes as trees respond to water and heat stress.

The data, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, revealed a trend of Europe gradually getting drier, punctuated by very wet summers in the years 200, 720 and 1,100 and very dry summers in the years 40, 590, 950 and 1,510.

But samples from the summers of 2003, 2015 and 2018 showed drought conditions that far exceeded anything in the 2,110-year period.

Co-author Mirek Trnka, a professor at the CzechGlobe Research Centre in Brno, said the results are "particularly alarming for agriculture and forestry".

"Unprecedented forest dieback across much of central Europe corroborates our results," he said.

With one degree of warming since pre-industrial times so far, extreme weather of this kind has already become more intense, with a single heatwave in 2003 leading to 70,000 excess deaths in Europe alone.

Since the 2015 Paris climate deal, the world has experienced its five hottest years on record.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization has warned that food production is "extremely sensitive" to climate change.

In 2019, a report in Nature Climate Change warned that changes in the jet stream sharply increased the risk of heatwaves in regions responsible for up to a quarter of global food production -- Western North America, Western Europe, Western Russia and Ukraine.

klm/mh/mjs

Asian Americans reported being targeted at least 500 times in the last two months
By Nicole Chavez, 

CNN 5 hrs ago

A coalition tracking reports of racism and discrimination against Asian Americans says it has received at least 3,795 firsthand complaints since last year.

© RINGO CHIU/AFP via Getty Images

 Advocates say Asian Americans have faced bigotry and discrimination.

Stop AAPI Hate began tracking violence and harassment against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders on March 19 last year.

From then through the end of 2020, Stop AAPI Hate received a total of 3,292 complaints from all 50 states and Washington, DC, according to a Stop AAPI Hate news release. The coalition, which had previously reported a lower number of complaints for 2020, said some incidents that took place in 2020 were not reported until earlier this year.

There were at least 503 anti-Asian hate incidents reported between January 1 and February 28 according to the group's latest report, released Tuesday.

While the incidents reported through their website likely only represent a portion of the number of hate incidents in the United States, the coalition says those numbers show that anti-Asian sentiment is still prevalent.

"Hate incidents are not abating. We cannot let anti-Asian American hate be a legacy of COVID-19 or the last presidential administration, but that's exactly what will happen unless we demand concrete action," Russell Jeung, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate and professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, said in a statement.

The majority of the incidents -- about 68% -- were cases of verbal harassment, while shunning or avoidance made up about 20.5%. About 11% of the incidents involved physical assaults, according to Stop AAPI Hate.

Video: 'It must stop': Biden condemns hate crimes against Asian-Americans (CNN)

More than a third of the incidents -- 35.4% -- took place in businesses, 25.3% were in public streets and 9.8% in public parks. Nearly 11% of the reports involved online incidents, according to the organization.

Among those saying they've experience hate, 42.2% identify as Chinese, followed by 14.8% who said are Korean. Vietnamese and Filipinos make 8.5% and 7.9% of those reporting the incidents, respectively.

Stop AAPI Hate said it doesn't independently verify any of the reports it receives, but that its total number of incidents only includes those reports that came with a description.

"We just report what we receive. We do tend to believe the impacted person, especially as so many are willing to go on record and to speak publicly about what happened to them," Stop AAPI Hate said in a statement.

In recent months, advocates, actors and officials have come together to denounce violence following a string of attacks in California and New York that left several people severely injured and some dead.

Last week, President Joe Biden addressed the nation on the one-year anniversary of the Covid-19 shutdown. During his speech, he condemned the hate and discrimination that Asian Americans have faced.

"Too often, we have turned against one another," Biden said. "A mask, the easiest thing to do to save lives, sometimes, it divides us, states pitted against one another, instead of working with each other, vicious hate crimes against Asian Americans, who have been attacked, harassed, blamed and scapegoated."

"At this very moment, so many of them, our fellow Americans, they're on the front lines of this pandemic trying to save lives, and still, still they're forced to live in fear for their lives just walking down streets in America. It's wrong. It's un-American. And it must stop," he added.

Hours before Biden's speech, two Democratic lawmakers reintroduced legislation in the House and the Senate calling for the expedited review of hate crimes related to the pandemic.

Rep. Grace Meng of New York, who sponsored the bill in the House, said she hopes the legislation tackles the "disgusting pattern of hate" that Asian Americans are facing since the start of the pandemic.

AFL-CIO urges U.S. to block imports of solar products from China's Xinjiang

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The leader of the AFL-CIO, the largest U.S. labor federation, is calling on the Biden administration and Congress to stop imports of solar products from China's Xinjiang region over human rights concerns

.

© Reuters/CHINA STRINGER NETWORK Worker operates a machinery to clean solar panels at a photovoltaic industrial park in Hami

In letters to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said there is "convincing evidence of systematic forced labor" in solar production in Xinjiang and he demanded "immediate focused action."

"The Biden administration and Congress must act to block imports of solar products that contain polysilicon made with forced labor," Trumka said in the letters, dated March 12.

The State Department and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The AFL-CIO was an important supporter of President Joe Biden in his victory over former President Donald Trump in the November election.

The Biden administration has endorsed a last-minute determination by the Trump administration that China has committed genocide against Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang and has said the United States must be prepared to impose costs on China.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Writing by Eric Beech; Editing by Michael Perry)