Costco mistreats the birds used for rotisserie chickens, new lawsuit alleges


Paul Sakuma/AP

Vandana Ravikumar
Fri, June 17, 2022

Two Costco shareholders sued the company, saying that it mistreats and neglects the chickens used for its low-priced rotisserie chickens.

The complaint, filed by the organization Legal Impact for Chickens on behalf of shareholders Krystil Smith and Tyler Lobdell, accuses Costco of violating animal welfare laws in order to “supply itself with a large quantity of cheap chicken meat.”

Costco did not immediately respond to a request for comment from McClatchy News.

Costco sells its cooked rotisserie chickens for $4.99 each, a “widely-known and prominent feature” of its business model to lure customers into stores, according to the lawsuit. In order to maintain a constant supply of chickens and not raise prices, the company “knowingly propagates chickens that are bred to grow so fast that many of them cannot stand under their own weight,” the complaint says.

The lawsuit accuses Costco of then sending those chickens “to dirty, crowded factory farms, run by inexperienced contract growers who Costco recruited and trained.”

“There, disabled birds slowly die from hunger, thirst, injury, and illness,” the complaint said, adding that company directors and officers “cause and are aware of these illegal practices.”

The lawsuit also says that the company’s practices violate animal welfare laws in Iowa and Nebraska, two states where Costco raises its chickens. By extension, the shareholders bringing to complaint accuse the company of violating its commitment to shareholders to act lawfully, thus breaching its fiduciary duties.

The company openeda $450 million chicken processing facility in Nebraska in 2019 to keep costs low, Insider reported. The plant processes about 2 million chickens a week, supplying about half its total rotisserie chickens and a third of its raw chicken products, Insider and Civil Eats reported .

Costco previously responded to a 2021 report by the group Mercy for Animals by telling Insider that the company’s committed to maintaining “the highest standards of animal welfare, humane processes, and ethical conduct throughout the supply chain.”

After Mercy for Animals released their report, a fan page dedicated to Costco’s rotisserie chicken pivoted to advocating for chickens’ welfare. The page, “Costco Rotisserie Chicken,” has over 18,000 fans on Facebook.

“Once lauded as an innovative warehouse club, Costco today represents a grim existence for animals who are warehoused in inescapable misery,” Legal Impact for Chickens president Alene Anello said in a statement. “Costco’s executives must agree to follow both the law and general decency in order for Costco to resume being seen as an industry leader.”

Costco sells millions of rotisserie chickens every year, topping 106 million in 2021, Eat This Not That reported. The price of the chicken has remained at $4.99 since 2009, according to the outlet.

Do Costco's $4.99 Chickens Come With Too Heavy a Price?

People love the warehouse club's low-cost chickens, but should the chain make a change?

VERONIKA BONDARENKO
JUN 16, 2022 

One of Costco Wholesale's (COST) - Get Costco Wholesale Corporation Report most popular products is turning into a headache for the warehouse retailer, and it's one the company doesn't even make any money on.

The company has kept the price of its popular Kirkland Rotisserie Chicken at $4.99 since 2009. Costco willingly loses money on the chickens to maintain customer loyalty and draw visits that result in sales of other profitable products.

Now, however, with inflation surging, the company is facing additional cost pressures.

But that's not the only problem.

Concerned with the animal welfare costs of producing such cheap poultry, two shareholders in Washington state recently filed a lawsuit accusing Costco of "illegal neglect and abandonment" when it comes to how it raises poultry at its new Nebraska facility.

The lawsuit focuses on the local 400,000-square-foot Fremont, Neb. poultry processing facility that churns out over one million ready-to-eat chickens every week, the Nebraska Examiner reported.

Costco's Chickens Are a Big Deal

The plant, which opened in 2020, cost $450 million to build and will eventually be able to process half the 106 million rotisserie chickens sold every year at Costco stores across the country.

The lawsuit claims that mistreating chickens is "an integral part of the company's poultry production strategy and its business model."

It accuses Costco of using barns that hold up to 45,000 chickens in a single enclosure and growing them so "unnaturally" fast that they develop muscle conditions known in the industry as "white striping."

While it was "once lauded as an innovative warehouse club, Costco today represents a grim existence for animals in Nebraska who are warehoused in inescapable misery," Alene Anello, the attorney representing the shareholders said in a statement to the Nebraska Examiner.

The shareholders who filed the suit are Krystil Smith and Tyler Lobdell.

Will This Lawsuit Lead Anywhere?

Shareholder and class actions lawsuits often fizzle out for a variety of reasons — from not having sufficient evidence to support the claims to the disproportionate resources required to go up against a global chain in court.

But sometimes, the public outcry can set off a ripple effect that causes the chain negative publicity and forces it to take action.

After PETA started posting videos of monkeys being used "like coconut-picking machines" to make the Chaokoh chain of coconut milk, Costco, Walmart (WMT) - Get Walmart Inc. Report, Target Target (TGT) - Get Target Corporation Report and Kroger (KR) - Get Kroger Company (The) Report all pulled the Thai product from their shelves.

This is not the first time that Costco's rotisserie chickens in particular have come under scrutiny. As Insider reported, staff from the Mercy for Animals nonprofit visited the Nebraska chicken-processing facility in 2021 and reported seeing "chickens struggling to walk under their own unnatural weight" and "bodies burned bare from ammonia-laden litter."

Costco did not immediately respond to TheStreet's request for comment on the lawsuit.

After the Mercy for Animals Report came out, Costco said that it was "committed to maintaining the highest standards of animal welfare, humane processes and ethical conduct throughout the supply chain."

Bayer wins fourth Roundup weedkiller case in U.S


Logo of Bayer AG is pictured at the annual results news conference of the German drugmaker in Leverkusen

Sat, June 18, 2022,

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - A U.S. jury found Bayer's Roundup weedkiller did not cause an Oregon man's cancer, the German agriculture and pharmaceuticals company said on Saturday, handing the firm its fourth consecutive trial victory over such claims.

The verdict, reached on Friday by the Circuit Court of Jackson County, Oregon, is "consistent with the assessments of expert regulators worldwide as well as the overwhelming evidence from four decades of scientific studies concluding that Roundup can be used safely and is not carcinogenic", Bayer said.

"We continue to stand behind the safety of Roundup and will confidently defend the safety of our product as well as our good faith actions in any future litigation."

Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Bayer brands such as Roundup and RangerPro. It has been at the centre of mass litigation in the United States brought mostly by residential gardeners claiming the weedkiller caused their cancer.

The company has spent billions of dollars to settle close to 100,000 Roundup cases.

(Reporting by Christoph Steitz; Editing by Mark Potter)

Decades of research document the detrimental health effects of BPA – an expert on environmental pollution and maternal health explains what it all means


Tracey Woodruff, Professor of Environmental Health, University of California, San Francisco

THE CONVERSATION
Fri, June 17, 2022

The chemical BPA has been shown to leach from food packaging products into our bodies. 

Jacobs Stock Photography Ltd/DigitalVision via Getty Images

Whether or not you’ve heard of the chemical bisphenol A, better known as BPA, studies show that it’s almost certainly in your body. BPA is used in the manufacturing of products like plastic water bottles, baby bottles, toys and food packaging, including in the lining of cans.

BPA is one of many harmful chemicals in everyday products and a poster child for chemicals in plastics. It is probably best known for its presence in baby bottles due to campaigns by organizations such as Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families and Breast Cancer Prevention Partners.

An extensive body of research has linked BPA to reproductive health problems, including endometriosis, infertility, diabetes, asthma, obesity and harming fetal neurodevelopment.

After years of pressure from environmental and public health advocates, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration agreed in June 2022 to reevaluate the health risks of BPA. This is significant because a vast body of research has documented that BPA is leaching from products and packaging into our food and drink and ultimately our bodies.

What is BPA?

BPA is not only used in plastics and food and drink containers but also in pizza boxes, shopping receipts, liners of aluminum cans and much more. Scientists have found that BPA is an endocrine disruptor, which means it disrupts hormonal systems that support the body’s functioning and health.

Hormonal disruption is a particular problem during pregnancy and fetal development, when even minor changes can alter the trajectory of developmental processes, including brain and metabolic development.

Over the last two decades, public awareness about the risks led many companies to remove BPA from their products. As a result, studies have shown that BPA levels in people’s bodies appear to be declining in the U.S. However, a nationwide research team that I helped lead as part of a national NIH consortium showed in a recent study of pregnant women that the decline in BPA could in part be explained by the fact that BPA replacement chemicals have been on the rise over the last 12 years. And other studies have found that many BPA substitutes are typically just as harmful as the original.

As an environmental health scientist and professor and director of the University of California, San Francisco Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment who specializes in how toxic chemicals affect pregnancy and child development, I am part of a scientific panel that decides if chemicals are reproductive or developmental toxicants for the State of California. In 2015, this committee declared BPA a reproductive toxicant because it has been shown to be toxic to ovaries.

BPA and the FDA

BPA was first approved for use in food packaging by the FDA in the 1960s. In 2008, the agency released a draft report concluding that “BPA remains safe in food contact materials.” This assessment was met with pushback from many health advocates and environmental health organizations. The FDA claimed BPA to be “safe in food contact materials” as recently as 2018.

Meanwhile, since 2011, Canada and Europe have taken steps to ban or limit BPA in children’s products. In 2021, the European Union proposed “dramatic” decreases in BPA exposure limits due to a growing body of evidence linking BPA to health harms.

One of the major challenges to limiting harmful chemicals is that regulatory agencies like the FDA try to figure out the levels of exposure that they consider harmful. In the U.S., both the FDA and the Environmental Protection Agency have a long history of underestimating exposures – in some cases because they do not adequately capture “real-world exposures,” or because they fail to fully consider how even small exposures can affect vulnerable populations such as pregnant women and children.

Latest research

A large body of research has explored BPA’s effects on reproductive health. These studies have also revealed that many BPA substitutes are potentially even worse than BPA and have looked at how these chemicals act in combination with other chemical exposures that can also come from a variety of sources.

And while much attention has been paid to BPA’s effects on pregnancy and child development, there is also significant research on its effects on male reproductive health. It has been linked to prostate cancer and drops in sperm count.

In a study our research team conducted that measured BPA in pregnant women, we asked study participants if they knew about BPA or tried to avoid BPA. Many of our study participants said they knew about it or tried to avoid it, but we found their actions appeared to have no effect on exposure levels. We believe this is, in part, because of BPA’s presence in so many products, some of them known and some unknown that are difficult to control.

Study shows BPA substitutes may cause same health issues as the original

What you can do

One of the most common questions our staff and clinicians that work with patients are asked is how to avoid harmful chemicals like BPA and BPA substitutes. A good rule of thumb is to avoid drinking and eating from plastics, microwaving food in plastic and using plastic take-out containers – admittedly easier said than done. Even some paper take-out containers can be lined with BPA or BPA substitutes.

Our recent review of the research found that avoiding plastic containers and packaging, fast and processed foods and canned food and beverages, and instead using alternatives like glass containers and consuming fresh food, can reduce exposures to BPA and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals.

Research has shown that when heat comes into contact with plastic – whether water bottles, Tupperware, take-out containers or cans – BPA and other chemicals are more likely to leach into the food inside. One should also avoid putting hot food into a food processor or putting plastic containers into the dishwasher. Heat breaks down the plastic, and while the product might appear fine, the chemicals are more likely to migrate into the food or drink – and ultimately, into you.

We also know that when acidic foods like tomatoes are packaged in cans, they have higher levels of BPA in them. And the amount of time food is stored in plastic or BPA-lined cans can also be a factor in how much the chemicals migrate into the food.

No matter how much people do as individuals, policy change is essential to reducing harmful chemical exposures. A large part of our work at UCSF’s Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment is to hold regulatory agencies accountable for assessing chemical risks and protecting public health. What we have learned is that it is essential for agencies like the EPA and FDA to use the most up-to-date science and scientific methods to determine risk.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Tracey Woodruff, University of California, San Francisco.

Read more:

We’re all ingesting microplastics at home, and these might be toxic for our health. Here are some tips to reduce your risk

Tracey Woodruff received funding for BPA research from NIEHS. She receives and has received funding for research on chemical exposures from NIH/NIEHS, USEPA and California EPA.

An Election Fraud Conspiracy Theorist Has Been Elected to the Australian Senate

June 20, 2022


Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party has delivered precisely one representative to government, after Ralph “Deej” Babet—a real estate agent and election fraud conspiracy theorist—snagged the final spot in the Australian Senate for the state of Victoria on Monday.

The win emerges as the one and only victory for Palmer, who spent close to $100 million in the lead up to the 2022 federal election to bombard voters around Australia with populist boosterisms in a bid to whet the constituency’s appetite for his candidates

It was a tough sell: a number of them had faced charges for everything from stalking and intimidation, to burglary, domestic violence and even trafficking. For Babet, the party’s number one Senate pick in Victoria, there was no exception.

In 2014, he pleaded not guilty to a charge of criminal damage, before it was withdrawn in 2015. Then, a criminal damage charge was later recorded in 2017, but wasn’t convicted because Babet accepted responsibility without pleading guilty. Babet was then lashed again in 2018, when he pleaded guilty to unlawful assault, but a magistrate dismissed the charge when he complied with an undertaking.

Beyond his brushes with the courts, Babet, like his party running mates, neatly ticked off all of the prerequisite requirements of a modern-day UAP candidate, even if his ascendancy could be considered a tepid return on investment.

Before he was elected to the Senate, Babet ran a real estate agency called “@realty” head-quartered out of Surfer’s Paradise in Queensland, with his brother, Matt (who also stood as a UAP candidate at the federal election for the Melbourne seat of Bruce and recorded 9 percent of the vote). And like those in his political orbit, the COVID-19 pandemic was a boon for his politics.

He has stood in firm opposition to lockdowns—and pretty much all COVID-19 risk mitigation measures—misrepresenting news reports so as to suggest lockdowns were the cause of death for countless Australians through the pandemic, and that COVID-19 vaccines could somehow be linked to Sudden Adult Death Syndrome.

But Babet has long thrown his support behind a number of debunked conspiracy theories. As soon as it appeared likely he would secure a Senate seat, Crikey compiled a selection of his greatest hits.

Among them were his promotion of the Davos conspiracy, which falsely claims the World Economic Forum is impeding on Australian sovereignty by thrusting blanket COVID-19 mandates on Australian governments.

In one post on May 22, the day after the election, he wrote: “I would like to congratulate the new prime minister of Australia on an excellent campaign. Well done Klauss Schwab,” the executive chairman of the World World Economic Forum.

On his Facebook page, between posts that might see him spruik “The Great Reset” conspiracy theory, or pose in random hotel lobbies telling his followers “life’s good”, Babet has also moved to sow doubt over the outcome of the federal election.

In one post on June 2, he doubled down on false claims made by proponents of the “freedom” movement that suggested the Australian Electoral Commission had intentionally been providing voters with misleading information as part of an effort to rig the election.

He joined a chorus of fringe supporters who claimed the same, professing that the amount of people personally known to supporters who voted for fringe candidates should’ve seen parties like Clive Palmer’s UAP and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation perform better.

Babet has since made an effort to tidy his social media accounts. He deleted his Instagram and Twitter accounts shortly after the election. On Monday, attempting to restart his Twitter presence, Babet shared that Twitter had proactively suspended him and placed his account in “read-only mode”, meaning he would not be able to post, retweet, or like content.

The legions of questionable Facebook posts he leaves in his wake will no doubt soon disappear, too.

Follow John on Twitter.

Read more from VICE Australia.

The post An Election Fraud Conspiracy Theorist Has Been Elected to the Australian Senate appeared first on VICE.

Ecuador police requisition cultural center under state of emergency

June 20, 2022


“The national police notified (us of) the requisition of the place, under the state of emergency,” the House of Ecuadorian Culture said.

President Guillermo Lasso declared a state of emergency on Friday in three provinces, including the capital Quito, in a bid to end the sometimes violent demonstrations.

The state of emergency empowers Lasso to mobilize the armed forces to maintain order, suspend civil rights and declare curfews.

The powerful Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (Conaie), which has been credited with helping topple three presidents between 1997 and 2005, called the protests to demand cheaper fuel and food price controls.

The Indigenous community represents more than one million of Ecuador’s 17.7 million inhabitants, and their protest has been joined by students, workers and others.

The demonstrations have blocked roads across the country, including highways leading into Quito.

Oil producer Ecuador has been hit by rising inflation, unemployment and poverty exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.

Fuel prices have risen sharply since 2020, almost doubling for diesel from $1 to $1.90 per gallon and rising from $1.75 to $2.55 for petrol.

The requisition of the House of Ecuadorian Culture — home to theaters, cinemas, a museum and a library — came on the eve of the arrival of more Indigenous protesters in the capital, where a seven-hour nighttime curfew is in effect.

The center sheltered thousands of Indigenous people in October 2019 during violent demonstrations against rising fuel prices that left 11 dead and more than 1,000 injured.

“National police and soldiers entered” the building and “hundreds of armed elements besieged it,” the Ecuadorian House of Culture said in a statement.

“Joy has died tonight, the House of Culture has fallen into the hands of police terror, we live in a dictatorship,” Fernando Ceron, president of the cultural center, tweeted on Sunday.

Ceron also tweeted a copy of the police requsition order.

Talks with President Lasso have failed to end the demonstrations.

Clashes with security forces during the protests over the past week have left at least 83 people injured, and 40 have been arrested.

The post Ecuador police requisition cultural center under state of emergency appeared first on France 24.
Tags: Live news

The Perfect Storm In Oil Caught Markets Off Guard


Editor OilPrice.com
Sat, June 18, 2022

Two years ago, at the height of the pandemic, BP wrote in its annual Energy Outlook that global oil demand had peaked at around 100 million bpd in 2019, and it was only going to go down from then on because of the effects of the pandemic and the accelerated energy transition.

Just two years later, BP is admitting it may have underestimated the world’s thirst for oil, although it heroically stuck to its long-term forecast that the electrification of transport will eventually usher in the era of peak oil demand.

Investment banks, meanwhile, foresaw the rebound in demand because it was the natural thing to happen after the pandemic depression caused by all the lockdowns. What they did not foresee—because it is impossible to foresee—was the extent and speed of the rebound.

Goldman Sachs’ Jeffrey Currie recently acknowledged this gap between expectations and reality in an interview with Bloomberg, saying, “The markets moved faster and the fundamental tightness is deeper than what we would have thought three or six months ago.

“This is where we should be, but it is a lot deeper than we would have initially thought. Energy and food right now, as we go into the summer months, are severely skewed to the upside,” Currie added.

It may be interesting to note that even three to six months ago, long before Russian supply became a factor in the upward potential of oil prices, there were few but authoritative voices that argued the oil market is, in fact, in balance.

Citi’s Ed Morse was one of these voices. In February, he told Bloomberg’s Javier Blas he expected the oil market to move into surplus territory thanks to increased oil production from the United States—the Permian, specifically—Brazil, and Canada.

Indeed, the Energy Information Administration recently forecast oil production in the Permian would hit a record high this month, but that does not appear enough to offset the global oil imbalance, with many U.S. producers signaling they are unwilling—or are unable because of shortages and delays—to boost production.

In Canada, production is rising, and according to Alberta’s Premier, Jason Kenney, the country’s total could rise by close to 1 million bpd, but this has yet to happen. In Brazil, production is also on the rise but has so far failed to make a difference in the price department.

Of course, the reasons for this price situation are first, the sanctions against Russia, which happens to be the world’s largest oil and fuel exporter, and second, OPEC’s inability to produce as much as it agreed to because of chronic problems with some members of the cartel. Meanwhile, the two OPEC members that have enough spare capacity to offset the loss of Russian barrels, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are wary of tapping it.

Related: What Biden Is Getting Wrong About Big Oil’s Profits

Perhaps somewhere there is a genius oil analyst that foresaw this state of affairs. Perhaps it doesn’t take a genius to spot the patterns: those OPEC members that cannot hit their own production quotas have been finding it difficult to boost production for years; relations between the Middle Eastern oil states and the West have been deteriorating also for years. And the fact that Russia is the world’s biggest oil exporter is not exactly news.

Perhaps the biggest surprise, the thing that was extremely difficult to foresee, was the speed with which demand for oil rebounded and how resilient this demand has turned out to be despite much higher oil prices that the world has seen for years. In hindsight, it’s easy to attribute it to pent-up demand after the lockdowns, but hindsight is known to make it easier to explain events that have been near impossible to forecast.

The trouble with oil and any other analysis is, of course, that there are always assumptions that need to be made for lack of all the necessary information. Assumptions are often safe to make but sometimes, when a wild card enters the game, assumptions quickly become worthless. In this case, the wild card was Russia, but even the known cards refused to play into the assumptions of analysts.

U.S. production is not growing as much or as fast as some expected as WTI soared above $100 and stayed there. The electrification of transport is not undermining demand because the electrification of transport is happening a lot more slowly than expected. And, perhaps more importantly, OPEC+ may say it will boost production by 1 million additional barrels daily but whether words will translate into actions is very far from certain.

These seem to be all the necessary ingredients for a perfect oil storm, spiced up with the latest massive oil field outage in Libya. Things are, indeed, worse than pretty much everyone expected, and, what is perhaps more worrying, they will remain so for a while yet because there is no quick fix on the table.

The latest from the world’s biggest consumer is putting limits on exports. This would certainly lead to lower domestic prices but will push international prices further still and maybe hurt Washington’s friendship with Brussels. The latest from the world’s biggest importer is that it is stocking up on crude while refinery output declines. Stocking up does seem like the smart thing to do during this storm.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

Biden’s plan for addressing high shipping prices is bogus

June 17, 2022

US president Joe Biden has signed into law a bipartisan bill designed to lower ocean shipping costs and reduce inflation.

The new law seeks to bring down shipping costs by forcing ships that drop off cargo at US ports to fill their remaining cargo space with US exports, instead of racing back to Asia or Europe with empty containers onboard. It also directs the Federal Maritime Commission to investigate the late fees shipping lines charge their customers when cargo gets stuck in gridlocked ports.

Both Biden and Congress seek to blame an anti-competitive oligopoly of foreign shipping lines for colluding to artificially raise prices on American consumers. “They raked in the profits and the costs got passed on, as you might guess, directly to consumers,” Biden said at a June 16 signing ceremony for the law. “Sticking it to American families and businesses because they could.”

But the law—and the narrative the Biden administration is crafting around it—offer a simplistic and inaccurate narrative about what caused shipping rates to rise during the pandemic and what might cause them to come back down.

US infrastructure and US consumers created a shipping shortage

US companies are paying sky-high shipping prices because US ports can’t bring in cargo fast enough to satisfy the demand of US consumers.

Americans, flush with an extra $957 billion in disposable income in 2020 thanks to US fiscal stimulus, spent 15% more on goods in 2021 than they did pre-pandemic. Many of those goods are manufactured in Asia, resulting in record-high demand for shipping from Asian ports to the US west coast in 2021.

But America’s west coast ports, built at the start of the 20th century, don’t have the capacity to handle such high volumes of cargo. By September 2021, ships were waiting weeks for a turn to dock at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, California, and containers were piling up in shipyards and the surrounding streets. There was, in other words, a shortage of shipping capacity.

That shortage allowed shipping lines to raise their prices. US retailers, desperate to stock their shelves ahead of the 2021 holiday season, were willing to outbid each other to buy space on cargo ships. As a result, shipping rates rose nearly 10-fold from pre-pandemic levels, and shipping lines made record profits totaling more than $110 billion in 2021.

The free market, not a foreign oligopoly, drove up shipping prices

Biden argued that shipping prices rose because of an anti-competitive scheme by monopolistic shipping lines. “One of the factors affecting prices is this: Nine major shipping companies consolidated into three alliances control the vast majority of ocean shipping in the world,” Biden said. “And each of these nine is foreign-owned. During the pandemic, these carriers increased their prices by as much as 1,000% while families and businesses struggled around the world.”

But that line of argument isn’t very convincing to US economists. “Consumers are paying higher prices this holiday season for a variety of reasons, but not because of some sinister plot from freight companies to exploit consumers,” as Eric Jessup, director of the Freight Policy Transportation Institute at Washington State University’s School of Economic Sciences, told Quartz in November 2021.

“Introductory economics argues that when demand exceeds some constrained supply, then the market has to ration,” Northwestern University economist Ian Savage explained at the time.”[W]hat we are seeing in freight and also warehousing is no different in principle from Superbowl tickets, surge pricing by ride-hailing companies when a concert lets out, [or] airline tickets on the day before Thanksgiving.”

“Whether we call it profiteering or just the free market system might be a matter of semantics,” Savage added.

As for the late fees on stuck cargo, the extra charges grievously annoy importers, but don’t make up the majority of increased shipping costs.

Infrastructure investment and lower consumer spending can ease shipping costs

Shipping rates won’t fall until US consumer demand for goods balances out with the US’s capacity to import goods. There are two ways that can happen.

First, the US could update its aging ports to increase the amount of cargo they can handle. The US infrastructure law passed in 2021 includes $17 billion to do exactly that, but infrastructure upgrades take years to complete.

Second, Americans can stop buying so much stuff. A weakening economy is already causing US consumers to spend less, which has helped bring Asia-US shipping rates down 20% to 30% from their peak.

The new US shipping law won’t address either of these root causes of high shipping costs. But it could prompt shipping lines to lower their prices a bit, if only to appease US lawmakers and avoid further regulatory scrutiny. At the very least, it will give lawmakers a chance to pass blame for inflation onto a foreign enemy and tell voters in an election year that they’re doing something about rising prices.

The post Biden’s plan for addressing high shipping prices is bogus appeared first on Quartz.

As Israel investigates the killing of a Palestinian journalist, many doubt there will be justice

Raf Sanchez
Sat, June 18, 2022

JERUSALEM — Israel’s military says it is still investigating the killing last month of Shireen Abu Akleh, a veteran Palestinian American correspondent for Al Jazeera.

But few Palestinians are holding their breath that they will see justice served.

In interviews across Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank, many Palestinians said they are skeptical that the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, would fully investigate the May 11 death or hold its own troops accountable if warranted.

“We have no confidence in their judiciary or in their military investigations. When it comes to the Palestinians, we are a people under occupation with no rights, fully dehumanized, fully unprotected, and Israel acts with impunity,” Hanan Ashrawi, a prominent former senior Palestinian official, told NBC News.

Israeli security forces confront Palestinian mourners 

(Ahmad Gharabli / AFP - Getty Images)

According to Al Jazeera, which cited eyewitness accounts of its staff, 51-year-old Abu Akleh was shot by an Israeli soldier while covering a military raid in the city of Jenin.

But Israel’s military says it hasn’t yet determined whether Abu Akleh was shot by an Israeli soldier or a Palestinian gunman. The IDF says its probe has been hampered by the Palestinians’ refusal to hand over the fatal bullet for ballistic testing and their refusal to mount a joint investigation.

The Palestinian Authority justified its denial by saying that information handed over would be used for “a new lie, a new narrative” by Israel.

Israeli military investigations into the deaths of Palestinians often drag on for months, or sometimes years, without reaching firm conclusions or leading to prosecutions.

Data compiled by Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, found that of 273 complaints filed in 2019 and 2020 against Israeli troops for violence against Palestinians or damage to their property, only four led to indictments of soldiers. One case, striking for its parallels to the killing of Abu Akleh, is held up as an example of why the distrust runs so deep.

Yasser Murtaja was a Palestinian journalist who was killed by an Israeli sniper in April 2018 during mass protests in the Gaza Strip, according to the Palestinian health ministry. Murtaja ran a small news agency known for its drone footage and had worked with Ai Wei Wei, the Chinese visual artist, on a documentary about refugees.

Like Abu Akleh, Murtaja, 31, was wearing a vest clearly labeled “Press.” And like with Abu Akleh, the Israeli military promised to investigate the killing after an international outcry.

But in the days after his death, senior Israeli officials, including the defense minister, accused Murtaja of being a senior Hamas operative, holding a rank equivalent to captain. Israel never provided evidence for the allegation, which Murtaja’s family strongly denied. Moreover, Murtaja’s company had been approved for a United States government grant — a process that includes extensive background vetting.

Israel’s claims immediately sparked confusion about whether Murtaja was killed deliberately for his alleged Hamas activities, or was shot by accident in the chaos of often violent protests at the fence separating Gaza from Israel.

Four years on, Israel’s military investigation offers few answers.

A picture of the martyr Yasser Murtaja 

The IDF said in a brief statement that Murtaja’s death was investigated by a military body known as the Fact-Finding Assessment Mechanism. The findings were then passed on to military prosecutors who determined “no suspicion was found of a crime having been committed” and closed the case. No indictments were brought.

“The IDF does not deliberately fire at civilians or journalists. Moreover, the use of live fire is done after all other options have been exhausted and in accordance with the standard operating procedures that comply with the rules of international law and the IDF values,” the IDF said.

The IDF did not respond to a series of questions by NBC News, including a request for details of the investigation’s findings and whether Israel still stands by the allegation that Murtaja was a Hamas operative.

Officials also did not respond to questions about Palestinian fears that an investigation into Abu Akleh’s death would not be fair and balanced.

Friends of Abu Akleh say they expect Israel’s military will provide similarly scant information when the investigation finishes.

“These Israeli investigations are methods of whitewashing,” said Dalia Hatuqa, a journalist close to Abu Abkleh. “It’s fair for any journalist and for any Palestinian to believe that there will be no investigation, there will be no justice, and there will be no accountability for Shireen.”

An IDF spokesman said: “All complaints received regarding offenses committed by IDF soldiers are examined in a professional manner. A criminal investigation is launched in a case where there is a reasonable suspicion of a criminal offense.”

One factor may help ensure that Abu Akleh’s case is dealt with differently: She was a U.S. citizen, and her death has attracted attention on Capitol Hill, including from Sens. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and Jon Ossof, D-Ga.

“We insist that the Administration ensure a full and transparent investigation is completed and that justice is served for Ms. Akleh’s death,” the senators wrote in a June 6 letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. They requested “a detailed update” within 30 days.

The Biden administration appeared to dismiss an investigation by the Palestinian Authority, which concluded on May 26 that Abu Akleh had been deliberately targeted by Israeli troops.

“We are looking for an independent, credible investigation. When that investigation happens, we will follow the facts, wherever they lead,” Blinken said at a conference on June 8.

 (Louisa Gouliamaki / AFP via Getty Images)

A State Department spokesperson would not say whether Blinken considers the Israeli military probe independent and credible.

“There has been no change in our approach. We continue to call for a thorough, credible investigation that culminates in accountability,” they said in a statement to NBC News.

Reporters Without Borders, a press freedom group, urged the U.S. and other countries to keep the pressure up until there was accountability for Abu Akleh’s death.

“We must not resign ourselves to seeing the investigation buried,” said Christophe Deloire, the group’s secretary-general. “Countries that called for an investigation must apply pressure and not be fobbed off with empty declarations that are only humiliating.”

SEE

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for Shireen Abu Akleh 

Once-Common California Bumble Bees Have Gone Missing

Fri, June 17, 2022

A Western bumble bee. Rich Hatfield / Xerxes Society

A census of California bumble bees failed to locate several once-common species, including the formerly abundant Western bumble bee, a key pollinator for many wild plants and crops.

“We didn’t find it even once,” said University of California Riverside entomologist Hollis Woodard, a co-author of the study. “If it was okay, we should have seen it.”

In the first statewide survey of bumble bees in nearly 40 years, scientists collected hundreds of bees at 17 sites in largely mountainous parts of Northern California. The team attempted to collect bees at four additional sites in Southern California, but they could not find more than 10 bees in those areas and so excluded them from the study.

In total, their search turned up just 17 of the 25 bumble bee species historically known to reside in the state. The findings were published in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

While scientists said they may have found additional species had they broadened their search, their study nonetheless attests to the growing threats facing California bees, with even the most commonly found species, the yellow-faced bumble bee, seeing its range shrink.

“Even the most dominant species has lost a lot of suitable habitat since the last large-scale survey,” Woodard said. “The winner is not doing great.”

Globally, bees are in decline, imperiled by habitat loss, widespread use of pesticides, and climate change. Their shrinking numbers pose a critical threat to agriculture. In the U.S. alone, bumble bees help pollinate $3 billion worth of crops each year, including tomatoes, peppers, and cranberries.

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Will Putting Honey Bees on Public Lands Threaten Native Bees?

Did climate change kill 2,000 Kansas cows? Farmers can’t afford to ignore science


Charlie Riedel/Associated Press file photo

The Kansas City Star Editorial Board
Fri, June 17, 2022,

Extreme weather conditions that caused thousands of cattle to perish in Kansas feedlots this past weekend may or may not have been caused by climate change. Either way, it seems farmers in that region are beginning to believe the science alerting them to long-term climate trends. And that’s good news for all of us.

Kansas State University climatologist Xiaomao Lin spends a significant amount of time talking with Kansas farmers about climate change. The farmers “will challenge us, because that’s what they do,” said Lin, who is also the state’s official climatologist. But they are also adjusting the way they farm because of climate change, he said.

Maybe the farmers and cattle ranchers are realizing they can’t afford not to trust the science-supported warnings from Lin and other experts: Unless they make adjustments, climate change will greatly diminish their livelihood, Lin said.

“The way they deal with their crop in terms of water reserves is a major concern,” Lin said. “A drought situation is for certain. The science is there. It’s true. It just is what it is,” he said.

It’s been a tough row to hoe to get farmers to accept the science. But the work is showing results. Last year, an Iowa State University poll showed Midwest farmers overwhelmingly — 80% — believe climate change is real. Just eight years earlier, a 2013 survey found that only 8% of farmers in the Midwest believed that “climate change is occurring, and it is caused mostly by human activities.”

Some Kansas Republican lawmakers, however, continue to recklessly deny the science around climate change, views that threaten not only the survival of Kansas farms but food supplies for the nation.

Kansas state Sen. Mike Thompson, a Johnson County Republican and a retired television meteorologist, presented a seminar on the “weaponizing” of climate change. Speaking at the Kansas Independent Oil & Gas Association event in Wichita in August, he called climate change a natural-recurring cycle. Human behavior had little to do with it, he said, and called warnings from scientists about climate change “propaganda.”

Weather-related phenomena, like what killed an estimated 2,000 cows in Kansas, are studied over a long period of time before scientists link them to climate change, Lin said.

So is long-term global warming responsible for the cattle deaths? “It’s a good question, but we can’t answer that yet,” Lin told us, adding that scientists will be looking to see what happens in years to come before they make that call.

Does that sound like someone “weaponizing” science? Hardly.

Meanwhile, there’s no denying the scorching hot temperatures that hit triple digits in the region and barely cooled down in the evenings, which normally would happen, said Chip Redmond, a Kansas State University meteorologist.

Cattle are adaptable to heat, but they don’t sweat like humans. They absorb the heat of the day and expend it through panting. But since it never cooled off enough last weekend, the cattle never got a break and died of heat stress, said A.J. Tarpoff, a veterinarian at K-State.

Yes, it’s still early to determine whether the combined heat, humidity and breezeless conditions that killed the cattle were the result of long-term climate change.

Regardless, Kansas lawmakers need to stop denying, for political reasons, what their constituents have already come to know: Climate change is real. It’s time to get behind every legislative effort to help the farmers and ranchers in these changing climate conditions