Alberta NDP choose Nathan IP to run in Edmonton-South West

Hamdi Issawi - 

Edmonton Journal

Alberta's NDP nominated Edmonton Public School Board trustee Nathan Ip Saturday to run in the Edmonton-South West riding, currently held by UCP Labour and Immigration Minister Kaycee Madu.

Alberta’s Opposition nominated Edmonton Public School Board trustee Nathan Ip to run in the capital’s only riding held by the United Conservative Party.

In a Saturday news release, the province’s New Democratic Party announced Ip as their candidate for Edmonton-South West in Alberta’s 2023 election. Labour and Immigration Minister Kaycee Madu currently represents the riding, and is the only UCP MLA with a seat in the city.

Ip, a three-term trustee for Ward H in southwest Edmonton, said he’s “deeply worried” about the province’s direction, and listed the UCP’s draft kindergarten to Grade 6 curriculum among his complaints.

“I’m excited for the chance to be a voice for my community, and to build a future for Alberta where no one is left behind,” he said, adding that the riding is home to a young and fast-growing community that deserves a representative who will stand up for it.


Ip announced he was joining the race for the Edmonton-South West nomination on March 29, and has said he’s running to protect publicly funded education, help build new schools, and provide leadership that serves community needs.

“We are in dire need for new schools in the growing areas of Edmonton-South West,” he said Saturday.

— With files from Lisa Johnson

A horse seized in a tax fraud case was sold back to its owner after authorities realized how much it cost to look after: report


Ryan Hogg
Sat, June 18, 2022

Getty Images

US authorities seized Lex, a $750,000 showjumping horse, as part of a $1.3 billion fraud case.


Federal agents realized it would cost up to $55,000 a year to care for, Bloomberg reported.


Christine Fisher, daughter of the man indicted, paid $25,000 to get the horse back, per Bloomberg.

The US Government sold a $750,000 showjumping horse back to its owner for just $25,000 after realizing it would cost too much to look after, Bloomberg reported.

Authorities initially seized the horse, called Lex, after its owner, the Atlanta accountant Jack Fisher, was indicted by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in connection with tax fraud worth $1.3 billion along with four other individuals.

Fisher had bought the horse, a 15-year-old Holsteiner, for his daughter Christina. She pleaded with authorities to leave Lex, saying: "Take whatever you want that's monetary, but you can't treat a living animal like this."

"I feel violated and helpless," Christina told Bloomberg. "I'm not a part of the case. I'm not a part of the business. I was completely caught off guard, and they took an innocent animal."

Bloomberg reported that federal agents soon realized it would cost between $45,000 to $50,000 a year to feed and care for Lex, excluding medical costs.

The horse's value had dropped sharply, with an examination determining it to be worth $145,000, according to the report.

The US Attorney's Office in Atlanta then agreed to return the horse to Christina for $25,000, on the understanding that they could collect more if her father was convicted. She planned to ride the horse down the aisle on her wedding day.

Documents released by the Justice Department in February show Jack Fisher used proceeds of the tax fraud to buy the horse, as well as properties worth millions of dollars, and $225,000 tickets for a Super Bowl "Hall of Fame Experience."

US authorities use the proceeds from selling seized assets to compensate the victims of fraud and deter crime, in a process known as federal forfeiture.

The seizure of horses has some precedent. In 2012, authorities raised $4.8 million by selling more than 150 horses belonging to then-comptroller of Dixon, Illinois, Rita Crundwell after she was indicted on misappropriating city funds to fund a "lavish lifestyle."

But Fisher's case highlights the running costs associated with maintaining assets before they can be sold.

The US is facing huge costs to maintain assets such as superyachts seized from Russian oligarchs, according to US national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

The Justice Department and the IRS didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Read the original article on Business Insider

A Chinese Telescope Did Not Find an Alien Signal. The Search Continues.

Dennis Overbye
Sat, June 18, 2022

It was a project that launched a thousand interstellar dreams.

Fifty years ago, NASA published a fat, 253-page book titled, “Project Cyclops.” It summarized the results of a NASA workshop on how to detect alien civilizations. What was needed, the assembled group of astronomers, engineers and biologists concluded, was Cyclops, a vast array of radio telescopes with as many as 1,000 100-meter-diameter antennas. At the time, the project would have cost $10 billion. It could, the astronomers said, detect alien signals from as far away as 1,000 light-years.

The report kicked off with a quotation from astronomer Frank Drake, now an emeritus professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz:

“At this very minute, with almost absolute certainty, radio waves sent forth by other intelligent civilizations are falling on the earth. A telescope can be built that, pointed in the right place and tuned to the right frequency, could discover these waves. Someday, from somewhere out among the stars, will come the answers to many of the oldest, most important and most exciting questions mankind has asked.”

The Cyclops report, long out of print but available online, would become a bible for a generation of astronomers drawn to the dream that science could answer existential questions.

“For the very first time, we had technology where we could do an experiment instead of asking priests and philosophers,” Jill Tarter, who read the report when she was a graduate student and who has devoted her life to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, said a decade ago.

A book published 50 years ago titled

I was reminded of Cyclops and the work it inspired this week when word flashed around the world that Chinese astronomers had detected a radio signal that had the characteristics of being from an extraterrestrial civilization — namely, it had a very narrow bandwidth at a frequency of 140.604 MHz, a precision nature doesn’t usually achieve on its own.

They made the detection using a giant new telescope called the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope, or FAST. The telescope was pointed in the direction of an exoplanet named Kepler 438 b, a rocky planet about 1 1/2 times the size of Earth that orbits in the so-called habitable zone of Kepler 438, a red dwarf star hundreds of light years from here, in the constellation Lyra. It has an estimated surface temperature of 37 degrees Fahrenheit, making it a candidate to harbor life.

Just as quickly, however, an article in the state-run newspaper Science and Technology Daily reporting the discovery vanished. And Chinese astronomers were pouring cold water on the result.

Zhang Tong-Jie, the chief scientist of China ET Civilization Research Group, was quoted by Andrew Jones, a journalist who tracks Chinese space and astronomy developments, as saying, “The possibility that the suspicious signal is some kind of radio interference is also very high, and it needs to be further confirmed or ruled out. This may be a long process.”

Dan Werthimer, of the University of California, Berkeley, who is among the authors of a scientific paper on the signal, was more blunt.

“These signals are from radio interference; they are due to radio pollution from earthlings, not from E.T.,” he wrote in an email.

This has become a familiar story. For half a century, SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, has been a game of whack-a-mole, finding promising signals before tracking them down to orbiting satellites, microwave ovens and other earthly sources. Drake himself pointed a radio telescope at a pair of stars in 1960 and soon thought he had struck gold, only to find out the signal was a stray radar.

More recently, a signal that appeared to be coming from the direction of the sun’s closest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri, was tracked down to radio interference in Australia.

Just as NASA’s announcement last week that it would make a modest investment in the scientific study of unidentified flying objects was intended to bring rigor and practicality to what many criticized as wishful thinking, so, too, was the agency’s Cyclops workshop held at Stanford University over three months in 1971. The conference was organized by John Billingham, an astrobiologist, and Bernard Oliver, who was the head of research for Hewlett-Packard. The men also edited the conference’s report.

In the introduction, Oliver wrote that if anything came of Cyclops he would consider this the most important year of his life.

“Cyclops was, indeed, a milestone, largely in pulling together a coherent SETI strategy, and the clear calculations and engineering design that followed,” said Paul Horowitz, an emeritus professor of physics at Harvard University who went on to design and start his own listening campaign called Project Meta, funded by the Planetary Society. Movie director Steven Spielberg (“E.T.” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”) attended the official opening in 1985 at the Harvard-Smithsonian Agassiz Station in Harvard, Massachusetts.

“SETI was for real!” Horowitz added.

But what Oliver initially received was only a “Golden Fleece” award from Sen. William Proxmire, D-Wis., who crusaded against what he considered government waste.

“In my view, this project should be postponed for a few million light years,” he said.

On Columbus Day in 1992, NASA did initiate a limited search; a year later, Congress canceled it at the behest of Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev. Denied federal support ever since, the SETI endeavor has limped along, supported by donations to a nonprofit organization, the SETI Institute, in Mountain View, California. Recently, through a $100 million grant, Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner set up a new effort called Breakthrough Listen. Horowitz and others have expanded the search to what they call “Optical SETI,” monitoring the sky for laser flashes from distant civilizations.

Cyclops was never built, which is just as well, Horowitz said, “because, by today’s standards, it would have been an expensive hulking monster.” Technological developments like radio receivers that can listen to billions of radio frequencies at once have changed the game.

China’s big new FAST telescope, also nicknamed “Sky Eye,” was built in 2016 partly with SETI in mind. Its antenna occupies a sinkhole in Guizhou in Southwest China. The size of the antenna eclipses what was the iconic Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, which collapsed ignominiously in December 2020.

Now FAST and its observers have experienced their own trial by false alarm. There will be many more, SETI astronomers say.

The generation of astronomers who were inspired by the Cyclops report is getting old. Billingham died in 2013. Oliver died in 1995. Tarter retired from the SETI Institute in 2012, proud that she had never sounded a false alarm.

Those who endure profess not to be discouraged by the Great Silence, as it is called, from out there. They’ve always been in the search for the long run, they say.

“The Great Silence is hardly unexpected,” said Horowitz, including because only a fraction of a percent of the 200 million stars in the Milky Way have been surveyed. Nobody ever said that detecting that rain of alien radio signals would be easy.

“It might not happen in my lifetime, but it will happen,” Werthimer said.

“All of the signals detected by SETI researchers so far are made by our own civilization, not another civilization,” Werthimer grumbled in a series of emails and telephone conversations. Earthlings, he said, might have to build a telescope on the backside of the moon to escape the growing radio pollution on Earth and the interference from constellations of satellites in orbit.

The present time, he said, might be a unique window in which to pursue SETI from Earth.

“One hundred years ago, the sky was clear, but we didn’t know what to do,” he said. “One hundred years from now, there will be no sky left.”

© 2022 The New York Times Company

• China Says It May Have Detected Signals From Alien Civilizations

Biden Proposes Changes to Help Rescue California Nuclear Plant


Mark Chediak
Fri, June 17, 2022

(Bloomberg) -- The US Department of Energy is proposing changes requested by California Governor Gavin Newsom that will allow the state’s last nuclear power plant to qualify for federal financial assistance.

The Energy Department proposed removing a requirement that would have prevented PG&E Corp.’s Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant from getting a portion of $6 billion in funds the Biden Administration is making available to rescue reactors at risk of closing early because they are losing money. The Energy Department posted the suggested amendment on its website and asked for public comments by June 27.

Newsom is reconsidering a state plan to retire Diablo Canyon in 2025 because of projected electricity shortages that could lead to blackouts in the state.

The effort to keep Diablo Canyon open would gain momentum if the plant can qualify for federal financial aid. California’s potential reversal of its anti-nuclear power stance underscores the crisis the state is facing as it seeks to decarbonize its grid.

Last month, Newsom asked the Energy Department to amend its nuclear funding criteria so Diablo Canyon would be eligible. The federal program was originally designed to help nuclear plants that were financially struggling in competitive wholesale power markets, which wasn’t the case with Diablo Canyon.

The Energy Department suggested that it would eliminate a requirement that a nuclear reactor applying for funds not recover more than 50% of its costs from regulated rates or contracts. The costs of PG&E’s Diablo Canyon plant are recovered through bill charges to its customers.

NO NEED FOR A MASK

In a pinch, you might be able to breathe through your butt

Cassidy Ward
Sat, June 18, 2022

We generally don’t like to think about the fact that there is a large worm-like organ inside of our abdomens. That’s the sort of thing which you usually only have to make peace with when watching horror comedies like Slither, but it doesn’t stop it from being true. Your intestines stretch for roughly 15 feet inside your body, winding a path between your stomach and rectum.

Despite being among the creepiest of your internal organs, your intestines play a crucial role in your everyday life, taking up nutrients from the food you eat and ridding your body of waste, but their job ends at your end. They can’t, for instance, help you breathe right?

Getting the oxygen needed for survival is achieved through various processes in the animal kingdom. Insects gather oxygen through holes in in their bodies known as spiracles, and some vertebrate animals can breathe through their butts. Sort of.

In the winter, turtles slow their metabolism and get most of their oxygen through their cloaca in a process known as cloacal respiration. Other reptiles and amphibians use similar respiration techniques to breathe without using lungs. If you happen to be a mammal, however, it’s long been believed that if your lungs are out of commission than you are out of luck. At least until recently.

We’ve long known that the intestines could take up chemical components and deliver them to the rest of the body. That’s one of the ways your gut microbiome communicates with your brain, but it was unclear if the same or similar processes could be used to get oxygen into the blood stream.

To test the hypothesis, scientists created a scenario in which pigs and mice in a laboratory were deprived of normal respiration and ventilated via the intestines. To improve the likelihood of oxygen uptake, some animals had their intestines scrubbed in order to thin the mucosal lining and reduce the barrier to the blood stream. Their findings were published in the journal Clinical and Translational Resource and Technology Insights.

Unsurprisingly, control animals who were deprived of respiration and received no intestinal ventilation, died after about 11 minutes. Animals who received intestinal ventilation without the intestinal scrubbing survived almost twice as long, about 18 minutes, indicating that there was some oxygen uptake. Lastly, 75% of those animals who had been scrubbed and received pressurized oxygen into the rectum, survived for an hour, the total length of the experiment.

This seemed to prove that mice and pigs are capable of intestinal respiration under the right conditions, giving researchers reason to believe that other mammals — like humans — might have the same capability.

However, the process of scrubbing the intestines is potentially dangerous and researchers wanted to uncover if there was an alternative solution which could achieve similar results. Their answer turned out to be oxygen-rich liquids known as perfluorocarbons. They repeated a similar experiment, again using mice and pigs, but this time they flooded the intestines which perfluorocarbons instead of gaseous oxygen. They found that the animals experienced increased blood oxygen levels which measured at normal levels.

While the effect has not yet been tested on humans, scientists suggest it might serve as an effective alternative respiration technique when conventional methods like mechanical ventilation don’t work. It’s also possible that introducing high levels of oxygen into the digestive tract will have a negative impact on the microbiome, but that’s generally a secondary concern if you can’t breathe. Further testing is needed to determine if intestinal ventilation might be an effective lifesaving tool in people.

With any luck, most of us won’t ever been in a situation where we’ll need intestinal ventilation. However, if a respiratory disease knocks us on our butts and our lungs are bottoming out, we might be willing to consider a little derri-air.

ANOTHER USE FOR MASKS
Pollution from California's 2020 wildfires likely offset decades of air quality gains

Tony Briscoe
Fri, June 17, 2022

Wildfire smoke drifts through Los Angeles in September 2020.

 (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

It was a nightmare fire season that California won't soon forget.

As more than 9,000 wildfires raged across the landscape, a canopy of smoke shrouded much of the state and drifted as far away as Boston.

All told, more than 4.3 million acres would be incinerated and more than 30 people killed. Economic losses would total more than $19 billion.

But the damage caused by California's 2020 wildfire season is still coming into focus in some respects, particularly when it comes to the air pollution it generated.

In an analysis published this week in the annual Air Quality Life Index, researchers found that wildfire smoke probably offset decades of state and federal antipollution efforts, at least temporarily.

Even as the COVID-19 pandemic took cars off the road and temporarily halted some industries, particulate pollution — widely considered one of the greatest threats to life expectancy — soared to some of the highest levels in decades in parts of California in 2020, according to the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, which produces the report estimating how air pollution may reduce life expectancy.

Nationally, 29 of the top 30 counties with the highest level of particulate pollution that year were in California, researchers found.

The report is the latest to highlight the dangerous health effects of wildfire smoke at a time when drought and climate change are fueling extreme wildfire behavior. Now, as the state enters what is expected to be another serious wildfire season, researchers say the toll these natural disasters can take on human health is striking.

“Places that are experiencing frequent or more frequent wildfires are going to experience higher air pollution levels, not just for a couple of days or weeks, but it could impact the annual level of exposure,” said Christa Hasenkopf, director of air quality programs at the University of Chicago institute. “It can bump up that average to unsafe and unhealthy levels that really do have an impact on people’s health. When we think of wildfires, we think of short-term events — and hopefully they are — but they can have long-term consequences [considering] your overall air pollution exposure.”

Mariposa County, a sparsely populated county seated in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada, typically enjoys cleaner air than much of the state. But in 2020 it led the nation in annual average concentrations of fine particulate at 22.6 micrograms per cubic meter — more than four times the World Health Organization recommended guidelines. Likewise, more than half of all counties in California experienced their worst air pollution since satellite measurements began collecting data in 1998.

If the particulate concentrations Mariposa County experienced in 2020 were sustained, the average resident’s life would be shortened by 1.7 years, according to the report. That’s compared to if residents were permanently breathing air in line with widely accepted international health guidelines.

In Tulare County, levels of fine particulate were twice the national average in 2020.

Donelda Moberg, a longtime resident of Lindsay who has emphysema, has grown accustomed to enduring air pollution that drifts to her corner of the San Joaquin Valley from nearby Bakersfield and Fresno. However, in 2020, with many people housebound due to the pandemic, she remembers the skies were much clearer than normal.

By autumn, conditions had taken a dramatic turn with the wildfires.

Moberg, 67, recalls the haze being so thick she couldn’t see the hill six blocks from her home. The pall of smoke above the valley obscured the stars at night and made the sun appear blood-orange during the day. And the abundance of ash falling from the sky regularly coated cars along the street.

For weeks, she didn’t leave the house except to go grocery shopping, or for church services and doctor appointments.

“The sky was a clay color and it made the sun a funny color — it didn’t look normal,” Moberg said. “You could always tell whether it was safe to go out or not by just looking at the way the sun shined.”

Between 1970 and 2020, five decades since the Clean Air Act was passed, the United States has witnessed tremendous progress in curtailing air pollution, including a 66.9% reduction in fine particulate — the pollutant that increases chances of lung disease, heart attack and stroke, the report said.

These reductions have prolonged the lives of most Americans, including those in Los Angeles County, where levels of particle pollution has been halved, extending the average Angeleno’s lifespan by 1.3 years, according to a University of Chicago analysis.

In recent years however, wildfire smoke has accounted for up to half of all fine-particle pollution in the Western United States.

Fine particulate matter has been viewed as one of the preeminent threats to public health. When inhaled, these microscopic particles — 30 times smaller than a human hair — can venture deep into the lungs and into the bloodstream, increasing the chance of lung disease and potentially triggering a heart attack or stroke.

Recent research suggests the fine particulate generated by wildfires to be much more dangerous than other sources of combustion, such as vehicle exhaust or gas-fired power plants.

“When you have a wildfire, they burn everything,” said Francesca Dominici, professor of biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health. “They burn cars, they burn buildings, they burn plastic. So it’s not only the level of [particulate pollution] that gets really high, but the type of [this pollution] that you’re breathing.”

The pollution emanating from the 2020 wildfires likely resulted in 1,200 to 3,000 premature deaths for seniors, according to estimates from Stanford University.

In September 2021, the World Health Organization lowered its recommended guideline from 10 micrograms of particulate matter per cubic meter to 5, a revision scientists say signals that lower levels are detrimental to human health. According to the updated guidelines, nearly 93% of people in the United States lived in counties with unhealthful levels of pollution in 2020, including the entire population of California.

In addition to wildfires, fine particulate is also produced by car tailpipe emissions and smokestacks of fossil fuel power plants. Issues with this pollution are compounded by California’s mountainous terrain, which traps air pollution and allows it to linger, especially within inland valleys that are beyond the reach of ocean breezes.

But the rising threat of wildfires remains on the minds of many.

Amid a third year of drought, much of the San Joaquin Valley is primed for wildfires. All it takes is a bolt of lightning, a spark from a transmission line or a negligently discarded cigarette.

Moberg, who lives in the shadow of hills covered in dry brush, is aware of the delicate balance. But there’s not much she can do besides pray fires and smoke don’t return.

“We’re always like, ‘Please, don’t catch fire, hills.’”



This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

Pakistan to stay on terror financing watchdog's 'gray list'



A Pakistan watches news channel flashing news regarding FATF decision, at a market in Karachi, Pakistan, Friday, June 17, 2022. An international watchdog said Friday it will keep Pakistan on a so-called "gray list" of countries that do not take full measures to combat money-laundering and terror financing but raised hopes that its removal would follow an upcoming visit to the country to determine its progress. (AP Photo/Fareed Khan)More

MUNIR AHMED
Fri, June 17, 2022

ISLAMABAD (AP) — An international watchdog said Friday it will keep Pakistan on a so-called “gray list” of countries that do not take full measures to combat money laundering and terror financing but raised hopes that its removal would follow an upcoming visit to Islamabad to determine its progress.

The announcement by Marcus Pleyer, the president of the Financial Action Task Force, was a blow to Pakistan's newly elected government, which believes that it has mostly complied with the organization's tasks.

Expectations were high in Pakistan that FATF would announce its removal from the list at Friday's meeting in Berlin.

Instead, Pleyer said an onsite inspection by FATF in Pakistan would take place before October, and that a formal announcement on Pakistan's removal would follow. He said FATF is praising Islamabad for implementing the organization's action plans — a clear indication that Pakistan is moving closer to getting off the “gray list."

“Pakistan’s continued political commitment to combating both terrorist financing and money laundering has led to significant progress," FATF said in a statement. The country's efforts were sustained, it said and added that Pakistan’s “necessary political commitment remains in place to sustain implementation and improvement in the future."

Pakistan's foreign ministry said FATF reviewed Pakistan’s progress in countering terror financing during a four-day meeting this week and “acknowledged the completion of Pakistan’s" action plans. It said a visit to Pakistan was authorized as a final step toward exiting from the FATF’s “gray list."

Also Friday, FATF removed Malta from its “gray list" but added Gibraltar. Pleyer urged Gibraltar to take steps in the right direction, including focusing on the gatekeepers to the financial system.

The Paris-based group added Pakistan to the list in 2018. The “gray list” is composed of countries with a high risk of money laundering and terrorism financing but which have formally committed to working with the task force to make changes.

At the time, the south Asian country avoided being put on the organization's “black list” of countries that do not take adequate measures to halt money laundering and terror financing but also have not committed to working with the FATF. The designation severely restricts a country’s international borrowing capabilities.

Still, being on the Paris-based international watchdog's “gray list” can scare away investors and creditors, hurting exports, output and consumption. It also can make global banks wary of doing business with a country.

Pakistan has said it continues to detain suspects involved in terror financing to comply with tasks set by the watchdog. A Pakistani-based independent think tank, Tabadlab, has estimated that it has cost the country’s economy $38 billion since it was put on the gray list in 2018.

The FATF is made up of 37 member countries, including the United States, and two regional groups, the Gulf Cooperation Council and the European Commission. Currently, only Iran and North Korea are blacklisted.

Canada's national police force cost lives in the country's worst mass shooting: report


Isabella Zavarise
Sat, June 18, 2022

A memorial for the 22 people that died in a mass shooting in Portapique, Nova Scotia

Tim Krochak/Getty Images

In April 2020, 22 people were killed in Portapique, Nova Scotia.

The Mass Casualty Commission determined police made crucial errors that cost numerous lives.

The commission was created after criticism from victims' family members about how police handled the event.

A public inquiry into Canada's worst mass shooting has revealed fatal mistakes by police.

In April 2020, amidst the COVID-19 lockdowns, 22 people were killed in Portapique, Nova Scotia, by 51-year-old denturist Gabriel Wortman. An investigation led by an independent public inquiry, also known as the Mass Casualty Commission determined Canada's national police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, made errors that cost people's lives.

The shootings took place in the rural community of Portapique, and the communities of Wentworth, Debert, and Enfield, Nova Scotia.

Mistakes ranged from officers accidentally shooting at a fire station in their attempts to stop Wortman, to the RCMP notifying the public on Twitter and Facebook that there was a mass shooting instead of issuing a province-wide alert.

According to Vice News, police initially thought Wortman had died or was hiding in the immediate area after he killed multiple people. During this time he drove hundreds of miles to an area an hour outside the province's capital.

The only reason Wortman was eventually shot and killed was due to a chance encounter with police while filling up the gas tank of a stolen car.

Saltwire reported that at one of the commission testimonies, Dave MacNeil, chief of the Truro Police Service said "there had to be a lot of catastrophic failures for this guy to be on the loose for 13 hours, driving through Nova Scotia."

The commission was created in response to public criticism from victims' family members about the RCMP's response. It is expected to continue its investigation in the coming months and have a final report ready by November.

Apple employees at Maryland store vote to unionize, a first for the tech giant in U.S.

The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers' president called the vote a "historic victory" for labor.

An Apple store in Maryland

June 18, 2022
By Dennis Romero

Employees of an Apple store in Towson, Maryland, have voted in favor of union representation, a first for the tech giant in the United States.

A majority of store employees voted to join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, or IAM, according to the union.

The vote tally, which was announced Saturday, was 65-33 according to IAM.

The mall-based store outside of Baltimore is the first Apple location in the U.S. to unionize.

The IAM on Saturday described the vote as one for history as workers seek representation, often unsuccessfully, in the tech field.

“I applaud the courage displayed by CORE members at the Apple store in Towson for achieving this historic victory,” IAM International President Robert Martinez Jr. said in a statement.

“I ask Apple CEO Tim Cook to respect the election results and fast-track a first contract for the dedicated IAM CORE Apple employees in Towson,” he said.

The Towson Town Center store employees recently paired up with the Coalition of Organized Retail Employees to send a letter to Cook “informing him of the decision to organize,” according to the union’s statement.

The letter implores Cook not to use the resources of one of the world's most valuable companies to "engage in an anti-union campaign to dissuade us."

Apple has so far opposed unionization of its stores. The company had no comment about the vote.

Apple will be required to bargain with the union after the National Labor Relations Board certifies the votes.

WHITE POWER
Building anger in rural New Mexico erupts in election crisis

Otero County, New Mexico Commissioner Couy Griffin speaks to reporters at federal court in Washington, Friday, June. 17, 2022. Griffin, who is a central figure in a New Mexico county’s refusal to certify recent election results based on debunked conspiracy theories about voting machines, has avoided more jail time for joining the mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol. He was sentenced to 14 days behind bars, which he has already served. (AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe)Less

MORGAN LEE
Sat, June 18, 2022

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — Behind the raw public frustration and anger over election security that has played out this week in New Mexico was a hint of something deeper -- a growing divide between the state’s Democratic power structure and conservative rural residents who feel their way of life is under attack.

In Otero County, where the crisis over certifying the state’s June 7 primary election began, County Commissioner Vickie Marquardt struck a defiant tone as she relented under pressure from the state’s Democratic attorney general, Democratic secretary of state and a state Supreme Court dominated by Democratic appointees.

One of the main explanations she gave for reversing course had nothing to do with questions over the security of voting machines — the reason the all-Republican, three-member commission had originally refused to certify its election.

“If we get removed from office, nobody is going to be here fighting for the ranchers, and that’s where our fight should be right now,” said Marquardt, the commission chairwoman in a county where former President Donald Trump won nearly 62% of the vote in 2020.

Otero County is similar to the handful of other New Mexico counties where residents have questioned the accuracy of election results and given voice to unfounded conspiracy theories about voting systems that have rippled across the country since former President Donald Trump lost re-election in 2020.

In the state’s vast, rural stretches, frustration over voting and political representation has been building for years. Residents have felt marginalized and overrun by government decisions that have placed limits on livelihoods — curtailing access to water for livestock, shrinking the amount of forest land available for grazing, or halting timber operations and energy developments due to endangered species concerns.

Tensions have mounted as Democrats in New Mexico consolidate control over every statewide office and the Supreme Court. Democrats have dominated the Legislature for generations.

Even as they voted to certify their elections, sometimes reluctantly, commissioners from several New Mexico counties said they were bound by the law to take that step — thanks to legislation passed by Democrats. They urged their residents to take the fight to the statehouse.

Some bemoaned what they felt was an encroachment by the state on the powers of local government. Marquardt, from Otero County, complained of her commission’s meager “rubber stamping” authority under laws enacted by Democrats and an election certification “railroaded” through by larger forces.

Otero County is among more than a dozen self-proclaimed 2nd Amendment “sanctuary” counties in rural New Mexico to approve defiant resolutions against recent state gun control laws. The county also has embraced resistance to President Joe Biden’s goals for conservation of more private land and waterways for natural habitat, arguing it will cordon off already limited private land.

Amid alienation, skepticism about the security of elections has taken flight.

On Friday, Otero County Commissioner Couy Griffin was the lone dissenting vote in the election certification, though he acknowledged that he had no evidence of problems or factual basis for questioning the results of the election. His vote came after the county elections clerk said the primary went off without a hitch and that the results were confirmed afterward.

The former rodeo rider and co-founder of Cowboys for Trump dialed into the meeting because he was in Washington, D.C., where hours before he had been sentenced for entering restricted U.S. Capitol grounds during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

Applause rang out when Griffin declared, “I think we need to hold our ground.”

The developments in New Mexico can be traced to far-right conspiracy theories over voting machines that have spread across the country over the past two years. Various Trump allies have claimed that Dominion voting systems had somehow been manipulated as part of an elaborate scheme to steal the election, which Biden won.

There has been no evidence of widespread fraud that would have changed the results of the 2020 presidential election, and testimony before the congressional committee investigating the insurrection has made clear that many in Trump’s inner circle told him the same as he schemed to retain power.

The election clash that erupted this past week worries Dian Burwell, a registered independent and coffee shop manager in the Otero County seat of Alamogordo.

“We want people to vote and when they see all this, they’ll just say, ‘Why bother?’” Burwell said.

Despite New Mexico counties’ eventual votes to certify their primary results, election officials and experts fear the mini-rebellion is just the start of efforts nationwide to sow chaos around voting and vote-counting, building toward the 2024 presidential election. The New Mexico secretary of state’s office said it had been inundated with calls from officials around the country concerned that certification controversies will become a new front in the attacks on democratic norms.

In another New Mexico county where residents angrily denounced the certification, commissioners were denounced as “cowards and traitors” by a hostile crowd before voting. Torrance County Commissioner LeRoy Candelaria, a Republican and Vietnam veteran, voted to certify the results without apologies, despite the personal insults.

The semi-retired rancher and highway maintenance foreman said he has taken time outside commission meetings to explain his position that New Mexico’s vote-counting machines are well-tested and monitored.

“Our county clerk did an excellent job. I don’t think there’s a vote that went wrong in any way,” Candelaria said later in a telephone interview. “My personal opinion is there are people who are still mad about the last presidential election. ... Let’s worry about the next election and not take things personally.”

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Associated Press writers Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Anita Snow and Terry Tang in Phoenix contributed to this report.

DOMINION VOTING MACHINES ARE A CANADIAN COMPANY USED FOR FEDERAL, PROVINCIAL AND MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS FOR DECADES, SECURELY