NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg: Donetsk, Luhansk are part of Ukraine; Russia undermines Ukraine's territorial integrity

 22.02.2022

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg issued a statement on Russia's recognition of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk "People's Republics" condemning this decision, which undermines the territorial integrity of Ukraine and violates the Minsk agreements.

"I condemn Russia's decision to extend recognition to the self-proclaimed 'Donetsk People's Republic' and 'Luhansk People's Republic.' This further undermines Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, erodes efforts towards a resolution of the conflict, and violates the Minsk Agreements, to which Russia is a party," Stoltenberg said.

He said that in 2015 the UN Security Council, which includes Russia, confirmed its full respect for the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine.

"Donetsk and Luhansk are part of Ukraine. Moscow continues to fuel the conflict in eastern Ukraine by providing financial and military support to the separatists. It is also trying to stage a pretext to invade Ukraine once again," the NATO Secretary General said.

At the same time, Stoltenberg said the alliance supports the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders. "Allies urge Russia, in the strongest possible terms, to choose the path of diplomacy, and to immediately reverse its massive military build-up in and around Ukraine, and withdraw its forces from Ukraine in accordance with its international obligations and commitments.

Minsk agreements cease to exist — Putin

The Russian president recalled that Kiev authorities have publicly said they were not going to implement this document

MOSCOW, February 22. /TASS/. The Minsk agreements are non-existent after the recognition of the Donetsk and Lugansk Peoples Republics (DPR and LPR), Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday.

"In this sense, no, the Minsk agreements are non-existent now. Why should they be implemented if we recognize the independence of these republics?" he told a news conference.

The Russian president recalled that Kiev authorities have publicly said they were not going to implement the Minsk agreements and in those conditions Russia could not tolerate genocide of the Donbass people any longer. That was why Russia had to recognize the Donbass republics.

"They are not going to implement - what else can be said? And the top officials have already said it in public. What is to be expected then? Shall we wait for the continuation of sufferings of these people, this genocide of nearly four million people who are living on these territories? It is simply impossible to look at it. <…> It could not be tolerated any longer," he said.

Russia, in his words, has always been interested in the implementation of the Minsk agreements as they were a result of a compromise. "I would like to stress once again that we have been interested in the implementation of this Package of Measures because it was a result of a compromise," he said, adding that he was among the authors of this document on the part of Russia.

But, since the signing of the Minsk accords, Ukraine has been seeking to reduce all the efforts toward their implementation to zero. "The Minsk agreements were killed long before yesterday’s recognition of the Donbass republics. And not by us, not by these republics, but by Kiev’s current authorities," Putin stressed.

On February 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree recognizing the sovereignty of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR). Treaties of friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance were signed with their leaders. Putin instructed the foreign ministry to establish diplomatic relations with the Donbass republics and the defense ministry to ensure peace on their territories.

Egypt: Protests outside Giza factory after worker commits suicide

Asem Afifi reported to have been unable to pay debts after his wages were not paid for months

The factory, which is owned by Egypt's Universal Group, is located in 6th of October city in the Giza Governorate, about 30km from Cairo (Screengrab)

By MEE staff
Published date: 22 February 2022 

Fellow Egyptian workers held protests outside their factory in Giza on Tuesday after a colleague Asem Afifi committed suicide. The worker was reported to have been unable to pay his debts because his salary had not been paid for months.

The factory, which is owned by Egypt's Universal Group, is located in 6th of October city in the Giza Governorate, about 30km from Cairo.

The Egyptian Network for Human Rights told Middle East Eye that security workers fired tear gas at protesters outside the factory who were demonstrating over Afifi's death.

Workers said Afifi had killed himself by throwing himself in front of a car on Tuesday.

More than 2,500 workers at the factory originally held a strike in September after their wages had not been paid for three months.

The strikers also complained about poor working conditions, including the ending of payments for workers injured during their work.

Living conditions for workers and the poor have fallen significantly in recent times, in part due to "structural adjustment" policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund.

The Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services, an Egyptian non-governmental organisation, said it had monitored 8,041 violations of workers' rights over the past year.

It said delayed salary payment represented the highest number of violations of workers’ rights in 2021, amounting to 36 percent of the total.

Palestinian Authority asks US Congress to probe 'Israeli apartheid'

Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh says 'real enemy of peace is settlements'

Shtayyeh called on US lawmakers to form a special committee to probe "practices of persecution and apartheid" committed by Israel (AFP/File photo)

By MEE staff
Published date: 22 February 2022

Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh has warned US members of Congress that the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories could explode if Israel is not pressured to return to the peace process.

During a meeting with a delegation of 30 US lawmakers in Ramallah on Monday, Shtayyeh called on the legislators to form a special committee "to investigate the practices of persecution and apartheid carried out by Israel against the Palestinian people".

"Israel does not want the two-state solution or the one-state solution," Shtayyeh told the congressional delegation, according to the Palestinian state-run news agency Wafa.

Pelosi calls Israel's creation the 20th century's 'greatest political achievement'

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"All it wants is the continuation of the fait accompli, which is a deteriorating reality that will lead to an explosion of the situation," he said.

A growing number of human rights organisations are reporting that Israel's treatment of Palestinians amounts to crimes of apartheid.

Shtayyeh added that the "real enemy of peace is settlements", referring to Israel's building of illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Another congressional delegation of Republican lawmakers also met with Shtayyeh on Monday.

The meeting followed an earlier meeting last week between US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas - the first high-ranking meeting between US and Palestinian officials since the Biden administration took office.

Pelosi, who led a delegation of Democratic House members to Israel last week, also met with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.

Her visit, where she called Israel's creation the "greatest political achievement of the 20th century", was criticised by Palestinian activists and progressive groups who noted that it came after days of unrest in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where supporters gathered outside the home of the Salem family, who are facing imminent expulsion.
Unfulfilled promises

Palestinian-US relations soured under the Trump administration, which cut all funding to the Palestinian Authority and moved the US embassy to Jerusalem in a departure from years of US policy that avoided recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.


Since entering office last year, US President Biden has sought to reverse some of the damage done by the Trump administration by restoring hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Palestinians while also pledging to reopen the Palestinian Liberation Organisation's diplomatic mission in Washington and the American consulate in Jerusalem.

The US consulate, which served Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip, had been open for almost 175 years until it was shut down in March 2019 when former US President Donald Trump signalled support for Israel's claim on Jerusalem as its capital.

US Congress forms caucus to promote more normalisation with Israel

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In May, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the US was planning to reopen the consulate, reiterating US President Joe Biden's position during his election campaign in 2020.

The plan, however, has hit a snag, as Israeli officials and Biden administration officials have been at odds over the issue, which Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid previously said could break up the fragile coalition government currently heading up the country's parliament.

Shtayyeh pointed out that many promises, including the reopening of the US consulate, have remained unfulfilled - while also bringing up the issue of Israel's retention of tax revenues.

Last year, Israel announced it would withhold $180m in tax revenue it collected last year on behalf of the PA, which amounts to roughly seven percent of its total revenue.

Earlier in February, Abbas held a phone conversation with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The US State Department said that during the call, Blinken had discussed with Abbas the necessity for reforms within the PA, while the PA said that Abbas stressed the importance of ending the Israeli occupation.

Credit Suisse leaks: Muffled Jordanian anger emerges after King Abdullah revelations

Local media is studiously quiet, while Jordanians struggling in the kingdom's stuttering economy find outlets for their frustrations online

Jordan's King Abdullah II arrives to meet Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Downing Street, in London (Reuters)

By Mohammad Ersan in Amman
Published date: 22 February 2022 

If Jordanians heard about their king and queen being implicated in this week's Credit Suisse leaks, they didn't hear about it from local media.

Internationally, King Abdullah II and Queen Rania were named by several outlets as beneficial owners of a number of secret accounts at the Swiss bank, two of several figures from around the world who were revealed to have held millions with Credit Suisse.

Yet the response in Jordan from major local media outlets and official sources was largely muted on Monday.

No Jordanian outlet published the details of the investigative report about the royal couple's accounts, thought to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Credit Suisse leaks: From King Abdullah to Mubarak's sons, the Middle Eastern figures involved

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At 6pm on Monday the Royal Court issued a detailed reply to the investigations. Most media outlets published the response without giving details of the investigation itself.

"Any allegations that link the funds in these accounts to public funds or foreign assistance are defamatory, baseless, and deliberate attempts to distort facts and systematically target Jordan’s reputation as well as His Majesty’s credibility, especially coming after similar reports published last year that were based on leaks from previous years," said the Royal Court.

The statement said the majority of the money reported on had related to the replacement of planes the monarch had inherited from his father King Hussein, including the sale of a $212m Airbus 340 plane that was replaced with a less costly Gulfstream jet currently used by Abdullah.

Prime Minister Bisher al-Khasawneh also weighed in on Monday claiming “Jordan and its leadership are being targeted".

“Jordan and Egypt are targeted from sources of ideological black evil on the basis of its steadfast positions regarding national issues," he said.

This scene was a repeat of what happened when the Pandora Papers were published last year showing that King Abdullah owned properties worth $100m in the US and UK. At that time, media silence forced many activists and politicians to turn to social media, particularly Clubhouse and Twitter, to discuss internal issues.

'Do I practice my right and ask the king what the source is of your millions in those accounts here and there while we are deep in debt and we are almost dying of hunger?'

- Nuha Faouri, activist

Then, as now, many Jordanians have been less than willing to accept claims from the government that all those involved have clean hands.

Activist Nuha Faouri told Middle East Eye that Jordanians had the right to ask where the money had come from.

"Why don’t you ask oh cowards? What are you afraid of? I am a citizen of Jordan named Nuha Faouri," she said.

"Do I practice my right and ask the king what the source is of your millions in those accounts here and there while we are deep in debt and we are almost dying of hunger?”

'Please respect us?'

A number of discussion rooms opened on Clubhouse following the Credit Suisse revelations. One had 70 participants using the title "Is Jordan being targeted?" The room is moderated by opposition figure Alaa Fazaa who has been living as a political refugee in Sweden since 2013.

Participants in the Clubhouse room criticised the king and demanded that the money stored in the accounts - one of which was revealed at one point to have been worth 230m Swiss francs ($250m) - be returned to Jordanians.

"If the sources of the money are known, why was the money stashed in a secret Swiss account and not in local banks?” asked one group participant.

On Twitter, using the hashtag "Jordan is not in good shape", a participant named Maya Raham asked: "Please respect our minds a little bit. Are we naive people to this degree that we believe in these lies!!!"

'Regardless of the leaks and their reasons, there is a high level of mistrust between citizens and the leadership because of this absence of transparency'

- Lamis Andoni, analyst

Ahmad Milhem tweeted in response to the Royal Court statement: “Are we to believe that money to help Jordanian and Islamic holy places are paid for from secret Swiss accounts? Please respect us?"

Much of the anger has stemmed from the fact that Jordan is currently struggling with serious economic problems which have been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Protests have broken out across the country against financial hardship and high youth unemployment.

Abdullah has been accused of doing too little to tackled the entrenched corruption and nepotism that has flourished through the Jordanian state.

"The importance of these Swiss accounts is that they were kept secret to protect from leaks. This is a lesson that there should be transparency from the royal court in such cases and what the money is being used for," said political analyst Lamis Andoni.

She added that the tightly controlled response from the mainstream media in Jordan to the revelations would only serve to heighten suspicions.

"They received clear instructions from the Royal Court not to publish anything related to this investigation," she told MEE.

"Regardless of the leaks and their reasons, there is a high level of mistrust between citizens and the leadership because of this absence of transparency."
Is Jordan being targeted?

A well-known former member of the Jordanian parliament, Hind al-Fayez, criticised the Royal Court's response to the revelations.

Pegasus: Jordanian officials and journalists demand probe into hacking of their phones

Read More »

“Their statement proved that the king owns millions instead of spending it on his people and in developing the country," he said.

“According to the statement of the Royal Court, the money is inherited from his father and as cost of the airplanes. But the king has five brothers and six sisters, should not they be dividing the money between them?"

Oraib Rantawi, director of the Al Quds Center for Political Studies, gave an interview to the local Radio al Balad, asking sarcastically that the government reveal the identity of those who it claims are targeting Jordan.

“I find it hard to accept the repeated words that Jordan is targeted by foreign forces. Why doesn’t the government do its own leaks to local journalists about who these foreign bodies are?" he said.

"Jordanian media is unable to check into this issue due to the restrictive nature of the media laws that are handicapping journalists’ freedom. If the government wants us to believe in their official position, they should tell us who is targeting Jordan?"

ZIONIST MURDER STATE

Israeli soldiers kill 14-year-old Palestinian boy in occupied West Bank

Mohammed Shehadeh's killing comes a week after Israeli forces shot and killed multiple Palestinians

Mohammed Shehadeh was accused by Israel of throwing a Molotov cocktail before being shot by soldiers in the occupied West Bank town of al-Khader (Twitter)

By MEE staff
Published date: 22 February 2022 

Israeli forces fatally shot a 14-year-old Palestinian teenager on Tuesday near the city of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry said.

The teen, identified as Mohammed Shehadeh, was accused by the Israeli military of throwing a Molotov cocktail before being shot by soldiers in the West Bank town of al-Khader.

The Israeli forces "identified three suspects who arrived at a location where Molotov cocktails were repeatedly thrown at Israeli vehicles recently," the military said.

Israel's military said soldiers gave Shehadeh medical aid at the scene where he was later pronounced dead; while Palestinian news outlets reported that a medical crew from the Red Crescent was prevented from reaching him.

The Palestinian news outlet Wafa reported that confrontations between Israeli forces and Palestinians in al-Khader continued late on Tuesday.

The killing of Shehadeh comes a week after Israeli forces shot and killed multiple Palestinians.

Nihad al-Bargouthi, 20, succumbed to bullet wounds in the abdomen after being shot by Israeli soldiers on 15 February at the entrance of the village of Nabi Saleh, northwest of Ramallah.

Several days prior to this, Mohammad Akram Abu Salah, 17, was shot in the head by Israeli troops as they stormed Silat al-Harithiya village late on Sunday to demolish the home of a man accused of killing an Israeli settler.

The rights group Defence for Children International - Palestine (DCI) said earlier on Tuesday that Israel is continuing to withhold the bodies of nine Palestinian children its forces killed.

The nine Palestinian children were all under 18 at the time of their deaths, which occurred between 2016 and December 2021, with the youngest being two 15-year-olds: Yousef Mohammad Odeh from Jenin and Mohammad Nidal Musa from Nablus.

DCI said in December that 2021 was the deadliest year for Palestinian children since 2014, as Israeli forces killed 76 Palestinians under 18, 15 of them in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and 61 in the besieged Gaza Strip.

AI Journalism Lessons from a 150-Year-Old Argentinian Newspaper

By Laura Oliver | 

A solar farm in Cauchari, Jujuy province. Image: Screenshot (La Nación)

This article was originally published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and is republished here with permission. It is part of an ongoing series of cross-posts GIJN is running on AI and investigative journalism.

Media companies are looking at artificial intelligence (AI) in 2022, according to Nic Newman’s Trends and Predictions 2022 Report, based on a survey of hundreds of media leaders around the world. For newsrooms looking to deepen their understanding of how AI could be used for newsgathering, storytelling, and business purposes, La Nación is blazing a trail. The 150-year-old Argentinian newspaper has produced a diverse range of stories assisted by AI technologies and has created an AI lab.La Nación needed an infrastructure and skills that it didn’t yet have in its newsroom to produce this reporting.

La Nación’s experiments with AI began with an investigation into private renewable energy in Argentina. In 2016, Mauricio Macri, the Argentinian President at the time, launched a program to open up the country’s clean energy resources to private and international investment. Inspired by an initiative mapping every solar panel in the US she had encountered as a JSK Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, Florencia Coelho, new media researcher at La Nación, pitched a project to map the government program’s progress four years after it was launched.

La Nación data team started the project in collaboration with Mathias Felipe, a visiting fellow from the University of Navarra in Spain. The team used machine learning and computer vision, and worked with a third-party lab specializing in geospatial analysis and AI. La Nación’s algorithm was trained to identify the shape of solar farms in Argentina. Computer vision is a process that trains computers to analyze and understand visuals. So 10,999 images were used to train the algorithm before a total of 7 million images were processed and 2,780,400 square kilometers (1,074,000 square miles) of land analyzed. The data suggested the government program had not met its

 targets.

A map from La Nación’s investigation into the Argentinian government’s pledge to build solar farms. Image: Screenshot (La Nación).

The project threw up some challenges. Accessing satellite imagery is costly. Solar farms look like agricultural farms depending on what image-recognition system you use. They didn’t have enough images of solar farms in Argentina in 2019 to train the model so images from Chile had to be sourced. “We couldn’t map every solar panel in Argentina because it needed very high-definition imaging, so we focused on solar farms because machine learning looks at shapes and this was an easier pattern for them to identify,” Coelho says.

Ultimately, La Nación needed an infrastructure and skills that it didn’t yet have in its newsroom to produce this reporting. “We didn’t have all the hardware and computing power needed for this project, so that’s why we collaborated. It was data for good,” says Coelho.
Analyzing Trap Song Lyrics

From this early example, the La Nación data team learned the benefits of collaboration. They also learned that until their own tech-savvy in terms of AI grew they they might not be able to ask the right questions, such as testing how accurate a model is. Setting up an AI lab involving journalists, data analysts, and developers to work on AI projects within La Nación’s newsroom has helped expedite this learning process. None of the seven staff members work in the lab full-time, though, as they have other commitments in the newsroom.

The lab’s first project was an analysis of the lyrics of trap music that took seven months to complete. Gabriela Bouret and Delfina Arambillet were the leaders of the project, in which Coelho didn’t participate. The team used machine learning, natural language processing, Spotify’s API, and lyrics from genius.com to process 692 songs and dig into the topics, trends, and messages of this increasingly popular music genre in Argentina. The AI that journalists used had to deal with some linguistic problems, including invented words used in trap songs. An interactive feature, including an extensive trap dictionary, an “egometer” measuring how many times an artist mentions him or herself, and other analysis of hallmarks of the genre allowed readers to explore the results.

A gif showing La Nacíon’s trap music project. Courtesy of La Nación

Much of what they learned, Coelho says, can be applied to other types of music or even to different texts. “Today the topic was trap, but tomorrow we may use this for political discourse or for a different topic,” says data analyst Gabriela Bouret.

Bringing new technologies, reporting processes, and topics into play has pushed the newsroom too. “It was such a different thing to publish in La Nación,” Bouret notes. “It’s a very traditional newspaper and trap is especially for very young people. It’s totally different from what our audience expects from us and gets us out of the box.”

La Nación’s experiments are also exposing that AI has been built or trained for the English language and for audiences in the Global North. “Every [natural language processing] model has been prepared for the English language,” says Bouret. “It was very difficult for us to find the libraries and the processes to help us deal with the problem of the Spanish language [for the trap project].”
AI for Electoral Coverage

In 2021, the newsroom again used computer vision to detect errors in the telegrams returned from polling stations during parliamentary elections in Argentina.

Working with a third-party company to build and train an algorithm to identify inconsistencies in the telegrams, which record details including the number of votes won by each party and how many election monitors were present, human volunteers were then asked to sift through flagged records. La Nación used its existing VozData platform, where readers have collaborated on data investigations and worked with transparency initiatives and universities. Human helpers refined the algorithm: it had to be adjusted to deal with telegrams that were wonky or that had been uploaded upside-down. The results suggested that 95% of telegrams returned were filled out correctly, but 5% had some information missing.

Collaborating with a third party brought another use of computer vision into the newsroom and showed what it could do in a different context. Coelho hopes this model could be used to monitor future elections and to encourage returning officers to fill out telegrams properly. “I think it’s good that the government knows you are using AI to find nuances in documentation,” she says.“We are being investigative journalists of technology… We are taking these projects and learning by doing with this lab.” — La Nacíon’s Florencia Coelho

Finding Time for AI Projects

One of the biggest challenges for newsrooms looking to implement more AI projects is understanding the time it can take and protecting that time. There is no target for how many projects the lab produces in a year, it depends on the work involved and what other demands are placed on the team members’ time.

“These projects can take five to seven months — it’s long-term. It’s difficult for newsrooms to understand because they are always in a rush. You have to be patient. Once a week we have a meeting to work on this because if not, all of the other things will cover you,” says Bouret.

“Investigative journalists can spend a year looking into corruption or an event. We are being investigative journalists of technology,” adds Coelho. “We are taking these projects and learning by doing with this lab. Once we have enough information, we will be able to react in a faster way.”

Collaboration, whether with third-party AI specialists, university departments, or academic experts, can help newsrooms expedite the process and reduce the costs of introducing new technologies, says Coelho. Working with a newsroom may provide a real-life case study for a class or academic research, while start-ups may be interested in testing their tools and AI models to help news organizations solve a problem.

La Nación has also secured third-party funding for some of its AI work, including a Google News Initiative grant for a forthcoming machine learning project. Based on the idea of password strength checkers, the tool will make recommendations for journalists to improve wording related to diversity and inclusion.
A Focus on Gender and the Business SideA collaborative approach runs through all of La Nación’s AI projects and is exemplified by its team approach in the newsroom.

In La Nación’s experience, internal collaboration can also foster support for AI development within the organization and uncover more resources. The team is working on a Spanish-language version of the gender gap tracker, a tool originally devised to measure the ratio of female-to-male sources quoted in online news articles in Canadian media. Coelho and her colleague Delfina Arambillet began working on the project through the JournalismAI Collab project organized by the London School of Economics and has brought the work into La Nación’s newsroom to better understand gender biases in reporting, including whether a source’s gender affects the topics on which they are likely to be quoted. The resulting tool will be useful for the newspaper’s business insights team to assess how article performance is affected by the gender or topics featured.

In an extension of the gender tracker project, La Nación was also involved in an open source AI model developed to detect gender in faces to help analyze the ratio of male and female images used by news outlets. By sharing around 50 Argentinian and Latinx portraits with the team training the AI model, which was originally trained on Asian faces, the AI’s ability to detect a more diverse range of faces in terms of skin tone and ethnicity will improve, making it more useful to a wider range of newsrooms.

Whether with technology companies, commercial departments, other newsrooms, or audience volunteers, a collaborative approach runs through all of La Nación’s AI projects and is exemplified by its team approach in the newsroom. “The skills are so tough to learn that it’s better to learn them together even with competitors. Learn the skill together and then compete for the stories,” Coelho says. “We are already competing with Google and Facebook for the attention of our readers. It’s not good that we take five to 10 years to learn these things. We need to speed up the process of learning and radical sharing, and work with other countries. You will have to study too, but it’s too much for one person.”

Additional Reading

Journalists’ Guide to Using AI and Satellite Imagery for Storytelling

Deepfake Geography: How AI Can Now Falsify Satellite Images

AI in Journalism: With Power Come Responsibilities

Laura Oliver is a freelance journalist based in the UK. She has written for the Guardian, BBC, The Week, among others. She is a visiting lecturer in online journalism at City, University of London, and works as an audience strategy consultant for newsrooms.

Nestle to double investments in Brazil in 2022 as it expands output capacity


Logo of Nestle is seen in Konolfingen

Tue, February 22, 2022
By Roberto Samora

SAO PAULO (Reuters) -Nestle SA said on Tuesday it will almost double its investments in Brazil in 2022 from a year earlier as it builds a new pet food factory and looks to expand its overall industrial capacity in the country.

The annual investments are expected to reach more than 1.8 billion reais ($355.59 million), up from 939 million reais in 2021, Nestle told Reuters, adding that its new Purina plant in the southern state of Santa Catarina - which is already under construction - will get about 40% of the total amount.

Some 1.1 billion reais will be invested in Nestle's industrial operations in the South American country, including new technologies, logistics and sustainability initiatives.

Of that, 90% is set to go to new lines as it aims to boost output capacity, Nestle said, while also planning to invest in energy to shift part of its power generation in Brazil to biomass from gas.

Nestle's coffee plants - seen as a priority for the company in Brazil, the world's largest producer and exporter of the commodity - will get 160 million reais this year. Such an amount does not include investments in sales and distribution channels, it said.

"It is going to be a year of a lot of investments in innovation, increased efficiency and productivity in our lines," Nestle's chief executive in Brazil, Marcelo Melchior, said in a statement.

"We are accelerating investments and... that will allow us to expand capacity while also supporting the business strategies we planned for the period," Melchior said.

($1 = 5.0620 reais)

(Reporting by Roberto Samora; Writing by Gabriel Araujo; Editing by Sandra Maler)

WORKING FOR FARMER PRIDDY
Wildlife officials mark rare Florida panther for death



FOR DOING WHAT PREDATORS DO


Ben Montgomery
Tue, February 22, 2022

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency formed to protect wildlife, has taken an unprecedented step and marked for death a rare Florida panther known as FP 260.

FP 260 is still alive, but has been targeted for capture and euthanasia, Craig Pittman reports for the Florida Phoenix.

Driving the news: Because of an Immokalee rancher's persistent complaints that FP 260 was killing her calves, the federal agency decided the endangered panther should die, despite protests from biologists.

"FP 260 is the renegade panther with a taste for veal, unfortunately," one state biologist wrote, per Pittman, who reviewed some 400 agency emails about the panther.

The big picture: The endangered Florida panther has been in decline in the last half century or so, from hunting before it was illegal, then from development and cars.

There are around 200 Florida panthers left on the southern tip of the peninsula, a rebound from fewer than 30 in the 1990s.

How it happened: FP 260 first caught biologists' attention after it was struck by a car in 2020 and crawled off the road and onto the Immokalee ranch of Liesa Priddy.

FP 260 was treated by veterinarians, fitted with a tracking collar, then turned loose a few weeks later in the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge.

Yes, but: Priddy, a former state wildlife commissioner, has complained about panthers killing her cows for a decade. She said FP 260 killed 10 of her calves in a matter of months. Annual losses to panthers topped $25,000, she reported.

Her complaints reached the top levels of wildlife bureaucracy.

Wildlife officials tried everything, from hazing the animal to firing "shell crackers" to scare it off. They eventually relocated the panther 18 miles south, but it returned to the ranch.

In late December, federal panther coordinator David Shindle wrote that his agency had determined FP 260 should be "permanently" removed from the wild after Priddy said she feared the panther would attack a human.

Shindle wrote that the law "provides for removing animals that constitute a demonstrable but non-immediate threat to human safety."

The latest: Calving season has ended at Priddy's ranch and the panther has gone back to the wild.

A USFWS spokesperson told Pittman they're not actively looking for the panther.

The full story is worthy of your time

Archaeologists find 9,000-year-old shrine in Jordan desert

Tourists visit the Amman Citadel in Jordan in 2021. Jordanian and French archaeologists said Tuesday they had found a roughly 9,000-year-old shrine at a remote Neolithic site in Jordan’s eastern desert. (AFP/File )

https://arab.news/rkzkq
AP
February 22, 202223:06

The ritual complex was found in a Neolithic campsite near large structures known as “desert kites"

Jordanian archaeologist Wael Abu-Azziza, co-director of the project said: “It's 9,000 years old and everything was almost intact”

AMMAN, Jordan: A team of Jordanian and French archaeologists said Tuesday that it had found a roughly 9,000-year-old shrine at a remote Neolithic site in Jordan’s eastern desert.

The ritual complex was found in a Neolithic campsite near large structures known as “desert kites,” or mass traps that are believed to have been used to corral wild gazelles for slaughter.

Such traps consist of two or more long stone walls converging toward an enclosure and are found scattered across the deserts of the Middle East.

“The site is unique, first because of its preservation state,” said Jordanian archaeologist Wael Abu-Azziza, co-director of the project. “It’s 9,000 years old and everything was almost intact.”

Within the shrine were two carved standing stones bearing anthropomorphic figures, one accompanied by a representation of the “desert kite,” as well as an altar, hearth, marine shells and miniature model of the gazelle trap.

The researchers said in a statement that the shrine “sheds an entire new light on the symbolism, artistic expression as well as spiritual culture of these hitherto unknown Neolithic populations.”

The proximity of the site to the traps suggests the inhabitants were specialized hunters and that the traps were “the center of their cultural, economic and even symbolic life in this marginal zone,” the statement said.

The team included archaeologists from Jordan’s Al Hussein Bin Talal University and the French Institute of the Near East. The site was excavated during the most recent digging season in 2021.

Dakota Access pipeline suffers U.S. Supreme Court setback

Tue, February 22, 2022
By Lawrence Hurley

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a bid led by Dakota Access oil pipeline operator Energy Transfer LP to avoid additional environmental review of a section that runs under an artificial lake and is opposed by nearby Native American tribes, leaving the pipeline vulnerable to being shut down.

The justices left in place a lower court's decision that ordered the federal government to undertake a more intensive environmental study of the pipeline's route underneath Lake Oahe, which straddles the border of North Dakota and South Dakota. The pipeline, known as DAPL and open since 2017, will continue to operate as the review is carried out.

"We call on the administration to close the pipeline until a full safety and environmental review is complete. DAPL never should have been authorized in the first place, and this administration is failing to address the persistent illegality of this pipeline," said Jan Hasselman, a lawyer for the environmental group Earthjustice who represents the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

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BLACKSNAKE

The Dakota Access pipeline has been the subject of a lengthy court battle between tribes seeking its closure and Dallas-based Energy Transfer.

Whether the project should be shut down was not at issue in Energy Transfer's Supreme Court appeal. But Energy Transfer said in court papers that the pipeline remains "vulnerable to a shutdown" with the new environmental review pending. The company did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, along with the Yankton Sioux Tribe, the Oglala Sioux Tribe and the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, have opposed the biggest pipeline out of the Bakken shale basin. The pipeline runs about 1,170 miles (1,885 km) from North Dakota to Illinois. The disputed section on federal property under Lake Oahe, an artificial reservoir on the Missouri River, is 1.7 miles (2.7 km) long.

The tribes draw water from the lake for various purposes, including drinking, and also consider the waters of the Missouri River to be sacred. Their lawyers have said the tribes are worried about a potential oil spill.

The tribes lobbied hard to prevent the easement under the lake from being approved and initially appeared to have succeeded when in 2016 the administration of Democratic former President Barack Obama said it would review its original action to allow construction. But after Republican Donald Trump became president in 2017, the government endorsed the original decision to grant an easement.

Democratic President Joe Biden's administration urged the Supreme Court not to hear the appeal, saying the pipeline operator concerns about a shutdown were overstated.

Washington-based U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg in 2020 found that the government had violated a law called the National Environmental Policy Act and threw out the approval.

Boasberg ordered a more detailed "environmental impact statement," which was the decision the pipeline operator was challenging. Boasberg subsequently ruled that the pipeline be shut down but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit blocked that decision while allowing the additional environmental review.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency overseeing the permit approval process, has said it expects to complete the review later this year.

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham)