WE ARE STILL IN A PANDEMIC
WHO: COVID-19 cases rising nearly everywhere in the world


Pediatrician Emy Jean-Marie, center, holds her nine-month-old son Adedeji Adebayo, Emiola Adebayo, 3, on her lap as Dr. Nizar Dowla, right, administers a vaccine while Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Health, Admiral Rachel Levine, left, looks on, Tuesday, June 28, 2022, at the Borinquen Health Care Center in Miami. Florida is the only state that didn't pre-order the under-5 vaccine, and state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo has recommended against vaccinating healthy children. 

(AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)

Thu, June 30, 2022

GENEVA (AP) — The number of new coronavirus cases rose by 18% in the last week, with more than 4.1 million cases reported globally, according to the World Health Organization.

The U.N. health agency said in its latest weekly report on the pandemic that the worldwide number of deaths remained relatively similar to the week before, at about 8,500. COVID-related deaths increased in three regions: the Middle East, Southeast Asia and the Americas.

The biggest weekly rise in new COVID-19 cases was seen in the Middle East, where they increased by 47%, according to the report released late Wednesday. Infections rose by about 32% in Europe and Southeast Asia, and by about 14% in the Americas, WHO said.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said cases were on the rise in 110 countries, mostly driven by the omicron variants BA.4 and BA.5.

“This pandemic is changing, but it's not over,” Tedros said this week during a press briefing. He said the ability to track COVID-19's genetic evolution was “under threat” as countries relaxed surveillance and genetic sequencing efforts, warning that would make it more difficult to catch emerging and potentially dangerous new variants.

He called for countries to immunize their most vulnerable populations, including health workers and people over 60, saying that hundreds of millions remain unvaccinated and at risk of severe disease and death.

Tedros said that while more than 1.2 billion COVID-19 vaccines have been administered globally, the average immunization rate in poor countries is about 13%.

“If rich countries are vaccinating children from as young as 6 months old and planning to do further rounds of vaccination, it is incomprehensible to suggest that lower-income countries should not vaccinate and boost their most at risk (people),” he said.

According to figures compiled by Oxfam and the People's Vaccine Alliance, fewer than half of the 2.1 billion vaccines promised to poorer countries by the Group of Seven large economies have been delivered.

Earlier this month, the United States authorized COVID-19 vaccines for infants and preschoolers, rolling out a national immunization plan targeting 18 million of the youngest children. American regulators also recommended that some adults get updated boosters in the fall that match the latest coronavirus variants.

'The worst version' of COVID is spreading.

Can we update our vaccines in time?

Andrew Romano

·West Coast Correspondent

Thu, June 30, 2022 

For the last 18 months, the original COVID-19 vaccines — first as a two-dose series, then as boosters — have done an extraordinary job shielding us from illness, hospitalization and death. Globally, they saved nearly 20 million lives in 2021 alone. Even today, unvaccinated Americans are twice as likely as vaccinated Americans to test positive for COVID — and six times as likely to die from the disease.

But viruses evolve, and vaccines should too.

That was the big-picture takeaway from a pivotal meeting this week of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s expert advisory panel. The question before them was simple: Ahead of an expected winter surge, should vaccine manufacturers tweak their forthcoming booster shots to target Omicron — the ultra-infectious variant that has spent the last seven months surging throughout the world in one form or another — or should they stick with the tried-and-true 2020 recipe?

The panel voted 19-2 on Tuesday in favor of Omicron boosters. The question now, however, is which version of Omicron the next round of shots should target.

A health worker administers a dose of a Moderna COVID-19 vaccine in Norristown, Pa., in 2021. (Matt Rourke/AP)

For anyone who hasn’t been paying attention, the Omicron strain that triggered last winter’s massive COVID wave (BA.1) is now extinct. In March, it was supplanted by the even more transmissible BA.2 … which was supplanted in May by the even more transmissible BA.2.12.1 … which is now being supplanted by the (you guessed it) even more transmissible BA.4 and BA.5.

Experts say BA.5 is the one to worry about: “The worst version of the virus that we’ve seen,” as Dr. Eric Topol, the founder of Scripps Research Translational Institute, recently put it. Together, the closely related BA.4 and BA.5 now account for the majority of new U.S. COVID cases, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — but BA.5 (36.6%) is spreading a lot faster than BA.4 (15.7%). By early July, it will be the dominant strain in the U.S.

That’s troublesome for several reasons. To our immune system, the distance from BA.1 to heavily mutated BA.4 and BA.5 is “far greater,” Topol writes, than the distance from the original BA.1 virus to previous blockbuster variants such as Alpha and Delta — which makes them harder to recognize and respond to. According to the latest research, that could mean:

• More breakthrough infections, especially among people who previously had BA.1. Compared to BA.2, BA.2.12.1 is only modestly (1.8-fold) more resistant to antibodies from vaccinated and boosted individuals. But BA.4 and BA.5 are substantially (4.2-fold) more resistant.

• More symptoms. BA.4 and BA.5 are also better at replicating in lung cells than BA.2 — a shift that could mean, according to one experimental model, that they’re more “pathogenic” as well (i.e., more likely to make you sick).

• More resistance to treatments. At the same time, BA.4 and BA.5 appear to be 20-fold more resistant than BA.2 to Evusheld — an important monoclonal antibody treatment that has been providing preemptive protection for immunocompromised people.

None of this will set the U.S. back to square one. Despite elevated case levels, there are now fewer U.S. COVID patients in intensive care units than there were during previous phases of the pandemic, and the national death rate (about 300-400 per day) is near the all-time low. Acquired immunity, multiple rounds of vaccination and improved treatment options are helping — a lot.

But combined with waning vaccine protection and disappointing booster uptake among the elderly, the virus’s accelerating evolution and aggressive new trajectory — toward greater transmissibility, evasiveness and possibly pathogenicity — could cause significant reinfections and disruptions if not addressed.

It could also endanger vulnerable Americans in the months ahead.

A sign seen in March in New York City outlining the CDC’s guidelines to control the spread of COVID. (John Minchillo/AP)

In late April, BA.5 hit Portugal; by June, more Portuguese people were dying of COVID each day than during the country’s winter Omicron peak. To be sure, Portugal has a larger senior population (23%) than the U.S. (16%), but not by much. And the vaccination rate there is 87%, compared to just 67% in America. Portugal’s booster rate, meanwhile, is nearly twice as high as ours. Infection and hospitalization rates are now rising across much of the rest of Europe as well.

At Tuesday’s FDA advisory meeting, Justin Lessler, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presented a series of projections about how the virus could affect the U.S. in the months ahead. The most optimistic scenario? About 95,000 new deaths between March 2022 and March 2023. The most pessimistic? More than 200,000.

So given that BA.5 — which, again, is outcompeting its cousin BA.4 — will soon be everywhere, it seems logical that the next version of the vaccine should be tailored to fight it.

Yet that hasn’t necessarily been the plan. Both Pfizer and Moderna have already launched clinical trials for redesigned fall boosters … but those boosters are optimized to counter the now-nonexistent BA.1 rather than the soon-to-be-dominant BA.5. According to data presented Tuesday by Pfizer, their existing BA.1 booster generated a significantly lower level of neutralizing antibodies against BA.4 and BA.5 than against BA.1.

Vials of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine are prepared for packaging in 2021. (Pfizer via AP)

Yet in mice, at least, a booster containing BA.4 and BA.5 produced a higher neutralizing response to all Omicron variants (including BA.4 and BA.5) than the original vaccine.

Despite concerns about “scant” data about whether bivalent boosters (equal parts original strain and Omicron) work better than monovalent boosters (100% Omicron), and about whether it’s worth waiting for Novavax’s promising non-mRNA vaccine to hit the market, the panel mostly agreed that BA.4/BA.5 boosters make sense. The FDA is leaning that way as well. Pfizer said it was “prepared” to deliver the new boosters by the first week of October; Moderna, by the last week of October or early November — “assuming no clinical data requirements.”

That means no human trials — just animal trials and laboratory tests. That might sound scary to some, but regulators already use the same accelerated process to update the flu vaccine each year — and there is no mechanism by which minor mRNA tweaks will make revised Pfizer and Moderna shots any less safe than the billions of doses administered so far worldwide. Otherwise, the U.S. will miss its fall-winter deadline, and the fast-evolving virus will continue to outrun the vaccines.

The FDA itself will decide “very rapidly” what to recommend; manufacturers will follow their lead.

A syringe is prepared with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in Chester, Pa., in 2021. (Matt Rourke/AP)

In the future, chasing variants may not prove to be the most effective or efficient approach to COVID vaccination. As Topol put it, “by the time a BA.5 vaccine booster is potentially available, who knows what … the predominant strain” will be? That’s why it was welcome news Wednesday when Pfizer and BioNTech announced that they plan to “start tests on humans of next-generation shots that protect against a wide variety of coronaviruses in the second half of the year,” according to a Reuters report.

These include “T-cell-enhancing shots, designed to primarily protect against severe disease if the virus becomes more dangerous,” and “pan-coronavirus shots that protect against the broader family of viruses and its mutations.” Nasal vaccines meant to stop infection before it starts are promising as well.

But those are all longer-term propositions. This year, at least, a BA.5 booster is probably our best bet to minimize infection, illness and death during another likely winter surge.

“I fully expect further evolution to occur in the coming months, but that this evolution will most likely be on top of BA.4/BA.5 — and so [it] shouldn’t dissuade vaccine updates,” virologist Trevor Bedford of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle wrote earlier this week. “I believe that the decision making process can be boiled down to: of vaccine compositions that can be manufactured in time for fall distribution, which do we expect to generate the highest [protection] against BA.4/BA.5?”

WE ARE STILL IN A PANDEMIC

Covid air war being lost, experts warn, urging mass ventilation

Author: AFP|Update: 02.07.2022 

Office space: Experts say nowhere near enough is being done to ventilate public and private spaces across the world / © AFP/File

The world is still not using one of its most effective weapons against Covid -- properly ventilating public spaces -- more than two years into the pandemic, experts warn.

At the moment there is a "fragile, armed peace" with Covid-19, said Antoine Flahault, director of the Institute of Global Health at the University of Geneva.

"In the hopes of stemming the tide of the pandemic and reducing mortality, we need to reduce the level of contamination, which the vaccine cannot do alone," he told AFP.

"We need a new phase -- improving the quality of indoor air."

Covid-19 is primarily transmitted through the air. It is carried in large droplets or fine aerosols when an infected person breathes -- and even more so when they talk, sing or shout.

In a closed off or poorly ventilated room, these aerosols can remain in the air for some time, moving around the space and greatly increasing the risk of infection.

While it is generally accepted that Covid can be transmitted within two metres (6.5 feet) via both droplets and aerosols, there is still no consensus on the importance of long-distance airborne transmission indoors.

A team of researchers from the UK Health Security Agency and the University of Bristol reviewed 18 studies in several countries on airborne transmission.

In research published in the BMJ this week, they found that people can infect each other when they are more than two metres apart.

- Open that window -

We know one thing for sure: if you open a window, or well-ventilate a space, the virus-carrying aerosols dissipate like smoke.

But experts say that nowhere near enough is being done to ventilate public and private spaces across the world.

Schools are among the places that need governmental action to properly ventilate / © AFP/File

"On the whole, this is an issue that governments have not yet taken up," Flahault said.

He called for massively increased funding to ventilate many public spaces, starting with schools, hospitals, public transport, offices, bars and restaurants.

"Just as we knew to filter and treat drinking water" in homes at the beginning of the 1900s, "one can imagine some households will equip themselves with air purifiers and consider opening their windows," Flahault said.

Only a few countries have announced ventilation plans since the start of the pandemic.

In March the US government called on all building owners and operators, as well as schools and universities, to "adopt key strategies to improve indoor air quality".

The plan, dubbed the Clean Air in Buildings Challenge, is covered by previously announced Covid funding and also includes a review of existing ventilation, heating and air conditioning systems.

The European Union has not issued any binding statements on improving air quality in light of Covid.

However Belgium has announced a plan to have a carbon dioxide meter situated in all places open to the public. Having such a meter is voluntary until the end of 2024, when it becomes mandatory.

Stephen Griffin of the School of Medicine at Britain's University of Leeds lamented that the UK had not acted more on ventilation.

"Sadly, the UK has not embraced the opportunity to safeguard its citizens in public spaces, its children in schools, or the longevity of the vaccination programme in this way," he told the Science Media Centre.

He said that setting minimum safety standards for ventilation in public buildings would also "greatly mitigate the impact of other diseases".

"Better ventilation also improves cognition by reducing carbon dioxide levels and, along with filtration, can reduce the impact of pollen and other allergies."

GM subsidiary workers at Michigan

plants prepare to strike

Jamie L. LaReau, Detroit Free Press

Thu, June 30, 2022

General Motors subsidiary employees at four Michigan plants have set a strike deadline for 10 a.m. Thursday if the automaker and the United Auto Workers cannot reach an agreement.

If the subsystem employees do walk off the job, the impact on production could be felt within hours, said a union leader who was not authorized to speak for the union so they spoke to the Detroit Free Press on the condition of anonymity.

"If they walk off it's going to affect the GM workers within hours," this person said. "I don't know if GM will have their supervisors run parts to the line. The subsystems people sequence the parts for the orders and when the line runs out those workers take them to the line."

Dean Franks, center, stands on an overpass above U.S. 31 in Spring Hill picketing on the second day of a national strike of General Motors by the United Auto Workers on Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2019.

According to the person, the subsystem workers who could strike are at the following plants:

• Flint Assembly, represented by UAW Local 598. GM builds its top-selling and profitable heavy-duty pickups there.

• Lansing Grand River Assembly, represented by Local 652 where GM builds Cadillac CT4, Cadillac CT4-V, Cadillac CT5, Cadillac CT5-V and Chevrolet Camaro.

• Factory ZERO in Detroit and Hamtramck, represented by Local 22. GM makes the 2022 GMC Hummer EV pickup there and will start on the Hummer SUV.

• Orion Assembly plant in Orion Township, represented by Local 5960, which makes the Chevrolet Bolt EV and Bolt EUV.

"It could shut down production in a matter of hours depending on what GM's plan is," the person said. "That means it could idle the 500 workers at Lear and 300  to 400 at Flint Metal and ... 5,500 at Flint Assembly."

The subsystem workers have been working on a contract that expired more than a year ago and, "GM won't come to terms with a contract for them," the person said.

In a statement, GM spokesman Dan Flores said, "We are continuing to negotiate in good faith and we are hopeful we can reach an agreement that positions our team members and our business for success."

The UAW did not comment immediately.

Subsystem employees work for GM but are represented by a different contract that represents assembly line workers and skilled trades employees.

"This is GM, but they're (parts-expediting) people who fill the lines at the plants. It's like how we have outside sanitation," the person said.

That means the thousands of regular GM hourly workers represented by the UAW will have to keep workers in the event the subsystem people walk out.

In a letter dated Wednesday, UAW Vice President Terry Dittes wrote: "As a General Motors employee covered by Paragraph 117 of 2019 UAW-GM National Agreement, you must continue to report to work in the event of a strike by the Subsystems unit. In addition, you may not take part in the picketing that will accompany a strike."

The union person said crossing a picket line would be tough for many UAW members, but it is required.

"Our GM people will still be required to work; they have to cross the picket line," the person said. "The national agreement covers the workers who work for GM and what they would be striking for is the GM LLC, which is a different variant and the national agreement doesn't cover these people."

Update: A previous version of this story misidentified the local that was representing workers at Lansing Grand River assembly. That UAW Local is 652. 

More: UAW accuses GM joint-venture of rejecting process to organize union at Ohio battery plant

More: GM announces where its next Cadillac EV will be built and it's unexpected

Contact Jamie L. LaReau: 313-222-2149 or jlareau@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan. Read more on General Motors and sign up for our autos newsletter. Become a subscriber.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: GM subsidiary workers at Michigan plants prepare to strike

REPARATIONS DUE
Tax Liens Cost Generations of Black Americans Their Land

LONG READ


To the east of the Gay Fish Co. dock on South Carolinas St. Helena Island, a new bridge soars above the water, high enough for the shrimp boats to clear as they head to sea. It hits ground near the gatehouse for the private Harbor Island, where some of the colorful triple-decker beach homes have backyard tennis courts and putting greens. Across the water to the south, a guard turns the uninvited away from Fripp Island, a playground studded with luxury homes and three golf courses. The gate to a third private island is down Sea Island Parkway toward the mainland. Hilton Head is a short boat ride away.

In the middle of them all sits St. Helena, the largest of the sea islands that stretch out from the antebellum city of Beaufort. St. Helena has no golf courses, no gated guardhouses. Mobile homes are its primary housing stock.

Bordered by tidal estuaries, sounds, and bays, the island holds a special place in Black history. Freed slaves flocked here after the Civil War. They held political power and produced one of the highest concentrations of Black landowners in the US. Gullah culture, the richest expression of African traditions and language in the country, is centered here. But St. Helena is also a case study in how Black-owned land is lost.
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Just west of the Gay dock, across an inlet filled with seagrass, sits one of St. Helenas few residential subdivisionsHorse Island, a loop of two-story homes, many with long docks reaching into the tide. John and Hilda Gay, founders of the fish company, developed the subdivision in the 1960s on 40 acres of land that a Black woman named Evelina Jenkins thought she owned.

For the final 35 years of her life, Jenkins lived across the street from the entrance to Horse Island, watching land that had been in her family for three generations become a middle-class subdivision, with lots snapped up by transplants from the inland South and the Midwest. She and her children made a living as farmhands and as nannies, cooks, house cleaners, dockworkers, and caregivers, including for the Gays and their company, while the land they once owned generated money for White families. One piece of it, an islet in the tidal river, eventually sold for $1.5 million as a private island.

Jenkins and her family were among thousands and thousands of Black families who lost their land, or a better description is that they had it taken or stolen in the first half of the 20th century, says US Representative Jim Clyburn, whose district includes coastal South Carolina. I distinguish taken from stolen because these were things that were done in plain sight and with the help of government.

The loss has repercussions for family wealth to this day. Those are the things that people dont think about, Clyburn says. They think about how somebody can now sit at a lunch counter and ride anywhere on a bus. But that is not the real legacy of Jim Crow. The real legacy is this kind of stuff. Thats the wealth taken from Black families. And White families got wealthy unfairly. And it was legal, all legal.

Families, they hand things down to their people. We didn't have that kind of start

On the day Jenkins found out her familys land was gone, shed planned to pay her annual property taxes the way she always did, giving the money to a White man whod get it where it needed to be. It was sometime in the 1960s. She caught a ride across the Richard V. Woods Memorial Bridge into Beaufort and went to the office of a lawyer named William Levin, to whom shed been passing her tax money. This time, Levin told her that the land wasnt hershed bought it decades earlier at a sheriffs sale for back taxes. The cost was $26. The money shed been paying had been rent, he said. He was telling her because hed sold the land in 1961 to the Gays, and now they intended to subdivide it. She and her family would have to move.

She came back just distraught, so upset, says Delphine Gillard, Jenkinss granddaughter. 

It crushed her.

Many details are lost to history, including how Jenkinss land ended up in a tax sale in the first place and why the family wasnt aware of it. Some family members blame Levin. Others suspect a relative helped divert the tax money. No one has any proof. County records show that the land was sold in 1932, and census records partly back up Jenkinss claim that she had no idea it was gone. The family told census takers in 1940 that they owned the land free and clear. They may have said the same in the 1950 census, but its impossible to know. The US Census Bureau neglected to microfilm that years housing forms for much of the country, according to the National Archives, and theyre now lost.

The ripple effects of the wealth transfer are less elusive. The White families who ended up with the Jenkins family land would have been prosperous anyway; the land made them more so. For Jenkinss family, the land was a lost opportunity to build wealth. I grew up thinking we were the poorest people in the world, but apparently we werent at one time, says Rosalyn Small, a great granddaughter of Jenkins who lives in Huntsville, Ala. Families, they hand down things to their people. We didnt have that kind of start. Everything we did, we had to do it on our own.

The Jenkinses land was lost in an early version of a tax collection mechanism still in place today, the tax lien sale. Levin gained ownership of the land by paying the familys back taxes, plus some fees. The family then had a year to pay him back, plus interestbut, not knowing theyd lost the land, they made no effort to get it back.

Andrew Kahrl, a professor of African-American history at the University of Virginia, is an expert in the role tax policies have played in shaping the racial wealth gap in the US. Hes paid particular attention to tax sales such as the one that cost the Jenkins family their land.

Tax sales have been around for at least a century, Kahrl says, and took wing in the Great Depression, around the time the Jenkins land was lost. Interstate Bond Co. in Atlanta developed the first large-scale business based on tax sales, paying delinquent taxes on farmland in the South. Typically the company didn't want the land; it made its money from the interest farmers had to pay to get it back. The idea spread. In cities across the US, a new breed of lawyers turned tax-buying speculators sprang up in response, often targeting poor minority neighborhoods, Kahrl wrote in a study of a predatory tax lien operation in Chicago in the 1970s. (In that instance, a lawyer known as Chicagos tax lien king got a key deadline for repayment moved to right after Christmas, in a successful bet that many homeowners would be distracted and short on cash.)

The tax lien industry took off particularly in the states that allowed the highest interest rates and offered taxpayers the least protection. Some states allow usurious interest. In Texas, taxpayers pay 25% if they redeem their land within a year, 50% if they take longer. In Indiana, Maryland, and South Carolina, investors collect interest not only on the owed taxes and fees, but also on whatever premium they paid over that amount, which encourages investors to bid more at auction and makes it harder for taxpayers to buy back their property.

Black families in the US bear a heavier tax burden than White ones. A 1973 study by the Department of Housing and Urban Development found higher tax rates in Black neighborhoods in 10 cities across the country. More than four decades later, a 2020 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis found Black and Hispanic homeowners paid 10% to 13% more in property taxes than Whites for homes with the same market value.

Today 30 states sell tax liens, and investors buy $3 billion to $5 billion in tax liens a year, says Brad Westover, executive director of the National Tax Lien Association, a trade group. Tax sales help local governments pay for services and generally dont cost families their homes, Westover says. Less than half of 1% of liens result in a taxpayer actually losing their property, and 70% of the land lost that way is vacant, according to the organization.

Most of the hedge funds and people who are in this space recognize that this is simply an arbitrage business, Westover says. Investors do not know anything about the demographics of the delinquent taxpayer.

Regardless of what investors know, a number of studies agree: Black families are disproportionately represented both in the ranks of those whose property is sold at tax lien sales and those who later lose their land because of it.

St. Helena Island - ArcGIS StoryMaps

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/a73616da14944289ae1c832d5fe3bd1a

2021-10-07 · St. Helena Island is located in present-day South Carolina, situated between the cities of Charleston, SC and Savannah, GA. St. Helena Island is surrounded by marsh strewn …

St. Helena Islands place in Black history was forged by two events related to the US Civil War. The first was the Great Skedaddle of 1861, in which the entire White population of Beaufortthen the summer home of the sea island planters and one of the wealthiest cities of its size in the USfled overnight in advance of the Union Army. They abandoned mansions, plantations, and an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 Black slaves. Local legend holds that soldiers from the North found only one White man in Beaufort, and he was drunk. The army paid the left-behind Black population to farm, making them de facto if not yet legally free. Northerners rushed to St. Helena to help,creating schools and training programs. Word spread. By the summer of 1862, almost 3,000 refugee slaves had found their way there.

The second event was the Union Armys Special Field Order No.15 in January 1865. It confiscated 400,000 acres along the Atlantic Coast from North Florida to Charleston, S.C., including St. Helena, and ordered the land given in 40-acre plots to freedmen. The orderthe storied promise of 40 acres and a mulewas rescinded after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, as Andrew Johnson invited White planters to reclaim their land. Many did so, but not on St. Helena, now heavily populated by Black farmers with four years of freedom under their belts.

Black land ownership on the island was exceptionally high in the post-Civil War years.

The freedmen bought the abandoned land, often from Union soldiers whod acquired it for taxes. By the late 1880s, the areas population was more than 90% Black, with really, really high rates of land ownership, says

Caroline Grego, an historian of the period. Farmers supplemented their income working in the phosphate mine and harvesting oysters to sell in town. They built a middle class and political clout, including a Black sheriff and port master. They sustained this society for almost two decades after the White South began stripping Black citizens of their rights in the Jim Crow era, which lasted until the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Land ownership led to the sustenance of this community that was able to bolster itself against Jim Crow for a very, very long time, Grego says.

Jenkinss grandfather Caesar Scott bought 40 acres of St. Helenas Pine Grove Plantation in 1884, paying a former Union Army soldier from Massachusetts $400. Scotts holding included the land that would later be called Horse Island and a smaller island called Little Horse. Scott and his family, including daughter Olivia Scott Jenkins and granddaughter Evelina, worked the land, growing vegetables and rice.

Part of the 66 acres bought by Caesar Scott and lost in tax sales.

Evelina was tall and slim. She had some Native American blood, and you could see it, says Gillard, whom Jenkins raised while her mother cared for a child of the Gay family. Her mother was Blackfoot. She had a tiny nose, and her eyes looked like they always had eyeliner. Jenkins wore work clothes and was always working. She had a longtime boyfriend and two children who lived to adulthood. She was known in the family as a wizard with numbers.

Her wooden house had porches front and back and was full of children, including Gillard, her six siblings, and her cousins. All of them called Jenkins Mama. She grew okra, tomatoes, corn, and famously large sweet potatoes, sold most of her harvest, and gave some away to the community. She fished in the tidal waters, casting nets she made herself. She basically lived off the land, Gillard says.

By the 1930s, when Jenkins was in her 20s, the islands prosperity had been battered by two hurricanes and the loss of the phosphate industry, along with Jim Crow and the Depression. People were desperate, says Stephen Schein, a White Beaumont native whose family ran grocery stores that served the local Black population. They had nothing. They had houses you could see through. There were unscrupulous people who would tell you, You owe so much in taxes that you are going to go to jail. All you need to do is sign over your deed to me.

The use of White middlemen to pay property taxes was common. So were tales of predation, especially with property taxes. People were doing stuff who had access to the Black population, because the Black population trusted them, says Joe McDomick Jr., a retired Black judge who worked for years to save St. Helenas Black-owned land from tax sales. There were some Black folks back in the day who didnt feel safe going to the courthouse to pay their taxes. They thought it was not necessary if they could have a White person do it for them. It could be anybody. It could be an insurance person. We had White people going door to door collecting insurance, and people would give them their tax money. It could be a neighbor.

For almost 40 years, tax sales on St. Helena and in the rest of Beaufort County went through the countys sheriff, J.E. McTeer. Appointed in 1926 at the age of 22 to fill his dead fathers seat, McTeer, a White man, remained the top law officer in the majority-Black county until he was voted out in 1962. He prided himself on using his own version of African witchcraft or voodoo to control the islands Black population, brazenly making up hexes and spells in competition with St. Helenas Black witch doctors. In part because of that, he never had to carry a gun. He would later get into real estate development on St. Helena and write a book on his magic trade:

Fifty Years as a Low Country Witch Doctor.

Records about the Scott land are a mess. They show that by the end of his life, Caesar Scott had 66 acres on St. Helena. McTeer sold it all from Scotts estate in 1932 at a sheriffs sale for $26. He sold the same property again in 1936, for $40. The double sale is a mystery. The buyer both times was Levin, who for a time shared a downtown Beaufort office building with McTeer.

Levin was one of five children of shopkeepers Morris and Alice Levin, whod immigrated from Russia and were part of a small but vibrant and progressive Jewish community in Beaufort. A great nephew, Ken Goldman of Minneapolis, says his great-uncles and -aunts were on the right side of civil rights history in a South that was not easy on Jews. He remembers the veranda of their Beaufort home full of friends from the North.

William Willie Levin was one of the most respected lawyers in Beaufort. He bought roughly 60 properties over the years, including an historic house on Beauforts downtown Craven Street and 19 properties purchased for taxes at sheriffs sales, many on St. Helena. The Gays paid him $5,000 for their piece of the Scott property and subdivided it into dozens of lots, which they began selling for a few thousand dollars apiece.

John and Hilda Gay moved to St. Helena to start their fish company in 1948, leaving a nice home on neighboring Ladys Island for a house so rickety you could look through the floor boards and see the chickens, says their son Charles Gay, who was then a toddler. Almost everybody else on the island was Black.

Gay remembers his father buying Horse Island: Daddy bought it from the lawyer, Levin, he says. It was an easy transaction compared with a second purchase of land next door to Horse Islandnow also a subdivisionfrom a relative of the Jenkinses named Ernest Middleton. It ended up in court nine years later, after other heirs came in from New York in a limousine and sued, Gay says. We had to buy it back on the courthouse steps after nine years, for a lot more money.

He says it was a good thing they did, though. Property values have gone way up. Property on this island has gone crazy, he says.

Gay doesnt remember anyone living on Horse Island. He says he and his family knew the Jenkins family, though, both before and after they bought the land. Yes, of course, he says. They worked for us. So did Ernest Middleton. He worked for us until he died. Jenkins family members worked on the docks and on the boats. Gay remembers one who worked as a caretaker for his parents as they aged: She was known for ferociously protecting his fathers post-lunch nap.

Over time, the land benefited both of the White families who acquired it. Hilda Gay transferred several lots to her six children, who also inherited Little Horse Island after her death, according to county records. The children sold Little Horse for $200,000 in 1998, though Charles Gay argued then and insists now that they should have held on to it.

For Levin, the benefits of his real estate ventures went largely to his niece, Helen Levin Goldman, now a retired college professor living in Minneapolis. Levin gave Goldman and her late husband, Larry, one piece of St. Helena land in 1972, for $10. Ten years later, Levin died and she inherited the Beaufort house. In 1998, Goldman sold the house to an historic Black church and gave 8 acres from the former Jenkins land to her three sons, including Ken Goldman, a marketing and retail entrepreneur, who spoke for the family.

The loss split the Jenkins family. Some relatives refused to speak to Evelina for the rest of her life, convinced shed secretly sold the land

Ken Goldman says he is fascinated by Jenkinss story and its implications for intergenerational wealth, but he is skeptical that his great-uncle did anything unethical. The family remains politically liberal. Goldman says he was stunned by what the George Floyd murder in 2020 laid bare about his citys racial relations and policing. In response, he began reaching out to released felons to offer them employment at his newest startup, an online dog accessory business that took off during the pandemic.

Back in South Carolina, the loss of the land split the Jenkins family. Some relatives refused to speak to Evelina for the rest of her life, convinced shed secretly sold the land and pocketed the proceeds. They painted her to be a bad person, like she purposely sold it and then we got all this money, says Tawana Promprakai, a great-granddaughter who lives near the entrance to the Horse Island subdivision. That wasnt right. She was displaced. She was kicked out of her home.

After losing her land, Jenkins enlisted the help of neighbors to dig out her wooden house and move it to a small plot across the road from the entrance to Horse Island. A cousin had given her the land to keep her from homelessness. Over time, the house deteriorated, and Jenkins moved into a double-wide trailer on the property. Eventually the fire department burned down the house for a training exercise.

Jenkins never got over losing the land and the rift it caused in her family. When she suffered a stroke in 1990, she talked about it all the way to the hospital in Charleston, Gillard says. She kept saying, They took my land, they took my land, as the ambulance took her away.

A housing development on St. Helena.

Activists have worked to rein in tax sales on St. Helena. They show up at sales and urge investors not to bid on so-called heirs property, which has been passed down without wills, until heirs can clear up the title. They make sure families such as the Jenkinses know when the rights to their land are about to be auctioned off.

Families rich in land and poor in capital continue to struggle to pay the rising taxes on the increasing value of their land, the same dynamic that plays out in gentrifying neighborhoods in cities across the US. Beaufort County has tried to protect St. Helenas Black farming culture with zoning that forbids golf courses and gated communities, but the value of the land keeps rising.

The threat of tax sales only got worse when the pandemic dried up the tourism jobs at neighboring island resorts. The tax sale market has been flooded, says Theresa White, whose nonprofit

Pan-African Family Empowerment & Land Preservation Network Inc. raises money to help Black families pay back taxes on their land. White wrote to South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster in 2020, asking him to delay the October tax sales in the state and give families more time to buy back property lost in the 2019 sale.

Families are on the ropes from Covid-19, she wrote. Clear evidence of that can be seen just driving through communities here in Beaufort County, where a sea of neon green signs have been posted on houses, gates, fences, and trees announcing that the property theyre on has been seized. White called the looming 2020 tax sale a scandalous state-sanctioned land grab of poor, unemployed, and Black peoples land by rich investors and developers from across the United States.

South Carolina law gives families a year to buy back their property for whatever an investor paid for it, plus as much as 12% interest. The interest rate is on the low end nationally, but the cost can add up in coastal areas where competitive bidding often takes prices far beyond the required minimum of twice the taxes owed.

The state didnt delay the 2020 tax sale. It did pass a law giving families another year to redeem land lost in 2019, as long as they paid another years interest. That displeased tax sale investors including Mercury Funding LLC of Memphis, which sued. According to county records, the company had paid almost $3.5 million in the 2019 tax sale in Beaufort County for property with only $95,521 in delinquent taxes. The delay meant it had to wait another year to sell, if the land wasnt redeemed. Lawyers for Mercury didnt return several calls and emails for comment.

The state Supreme Court threw out the extension on a technicality in July 2021, but not before the longer payment timeline had helped many families redeem their land, says Maria Walls, Beaufort Countys treasurer and one of the few local officials who supported the delay. In 2019 and 2020, 136 properties on St. Helena sold at a tax sale. Thanks in part to the extension and donors, owners bought back 113 of them. In the most recent tax sale, which happened in October, 36 propertiesout of 258 total in Beaufort Countywere sold. A total of $32,366 was owed on them. They sold for $486,796. The delinquent taxpayers have until this October to redeem the properties.

Evelina Jenkins died in 1997. Her descendants forged their own way. Some still live on St. Helena. Many have moved away. Theres no way of knowing how their fortunes would have been different if the land were still theirs. Gillard says that its the principle that matters most and that the people who got the familys land shouldnt have been able to benefit from it unfairly.

To Small, the great-granddaughter from Huntsville, the property might have helped her provide a home for her mother, who spent her life cleaning houses and now lives in a subsidized senior apartment off-island. It also might have helped pay for the education that she and other descendants were able to get only by enlisting in the military or taking on debt.

Some of Jenkinss heirs worked or work at low-wage jobs, cooking and cleaning at nearby resorts or homes. Many, though, pulled themselves into the middle class. Forty of Jenkinss grandchildren and great-grandchildren graduated from college. Two have masters degrees. Gillard has a doctorate and is a school administrator and educator. Promprakai, now raising her family at home, was a special-education teacher. One great-grandson is in the Navy. A great-granddaughter is an economic analyst at a bank.

Those successes dont erase the pain thats part of Evelina Jenkinss legacy. Its said in the family that some of the children whod moved from Horse Island with her had no idea what had happened until later. They would wander down to the water to catch crabs and wave at the White children moving in.

The land meant something to us, Promprakai says. This was a personal attack on what we had accumulated as a family.

Having the homestead is what is missed, Small says. Compared to everybody else, they have some place and we dont.

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Black land loss in the United States - Wikipedia

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2020-07-30 · The proportion of the United States under black ownership has actually shrunk over the last 100 years or so. At their peak in 1910, African American farmers made up around 14% …

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2019-08-19 · Black agriculture was a powerhouse; per capita there were more black farmers than white farmers. But by the turn of the 21st century, 90 percent 

GM calls off plan to sell India car plant to China's Great Wall

FILE PHOTO: Logo of GM atop the company headquarters

Thu, June 30, 2022 

By Aditi Shah

NEW DELHI/SHANGHAI (Reuters) -General Motors (GM) said on Friday it had called off the sale of a shuttered Indian plant to China's Great Wall Motor after they failed to obtain regulatory approvals, amid a tougher stance by New Delhi towards investments from Beijing.

GM struck a deal in January 2020 to sell the plant to Great Wall, with the Chinese SUV-maker expected to pay up to $300 million as part of a broader plan to invest $1 billion to establish a presence in India's growing car market.

The agreement, which was extended twice, expired on June 30.

"We have been unable to obtain the required approvals within the time frame of the deal," George Svigos, executive director of communications at GM International, told Reuters.

"Our strategy in India remains unchanged and we will now explore further options for the sale of the site," he said, adding the company "hopes to achieve a price that reflects the value of the asset".

"Great Wall Motor will keep its attention to the Indian market in the future and continue looking for new opportunities," the Chinese automaker said in a statement on Friday, while confirming the termination of the plant deal.

The Indian government did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment.

GM's deal with Great Wall was agreed just months before India toughened its stance in April 2020 on investment from neighbouring countries including China, making them the first major casualty of the move that has held up billions of dollars of capital inflow in sectors such as automobiles and technology.

This was part of a broader crackdown by India on businesses with Chinese links amid worsening diplomatic relations. Separately, New Delhi also banned more than 300 Chinese mobile apps, including TikTok, over security concerns.

"It is hoped that the relevant countries will properly honor their commitment to openness and cooperation and provide a fair, just and non-discriminatory business environment for foreign investors,” China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs told Reuters when asked to comment on the matter.

The move draws a line under a more than two-year effort by GM and Great Wall, forcing the U.S. firm to restart its hunt for a buyer while it continues to spend money on maintaining some machinery and tooling in the factory.

Asked if the plant could be used to make electric vehicles, Svigos said it was suitable for a number of industrial uses, including by non-automotive companies, and GM would explore all options.

GM, which stopped selling cars in India at the end of 2017, has already sold its other plant to SAIC Motor Corp, where the Chinese automaker builds cars under its British brand, MG Motor.

This will also send Great Wall back to the drawing board on its plans to enter India, which it considered an important part of its global strategy to break into new markets like Latin America, Thailand and Brazil.

Last year, Great Wall re-allocated to Brazil a portion of its $1-billion investment earmarked for India and reassigned some of its staff after delays in winning government approvals.

(Reporting by Aditi Shah, Zhang Yan, Martin PollardEditing by Mark Potter and Kim Coghill)

UPDATE 1-China's Great Wall Motor shelves $1 bln India plan -sources

Fri, July 1, 2022 
By Aditi Shah

NEW DELHI, July 1 (Reuters) - China's Great Wall Motor has shelved plans to invest $1 billion in India and laid off all employees at its operations there after failing to obtain regulatory approvals, three sources with direct knowledge of the matter said on Friday.

The Chinese automaker has been planning to enter the Indian market since 2020 but now becomes one of the biggest casualties of New Delhi's increased scrutiny of investments from Beijing.

Without directly commenting on the exit, a Great Wall statement said the company "would like to thank all the members of Indian team for their contribution", adding that it would continue to study the Indian market and look for opportunities in the future.

Great Wall's India entry plan was announced with great fanfare during the country's biennial auto show in January 2020. India was a key market for the Chinese SUV manufacturer's global expansion plans and the company had envisioned a plant that would be its biggest outside China.

Months later, after Great Motor began hiring staff in India, New Delhi increased scrutiny of investments from countries with which it shares a land border to deter opportunistic takeovers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The crackdown deepened after a border clash between India and China later that year, which has since held up billions of dollars of capital inflow in the auto and technology sectors among others.

The sources, who declined to be named, said that Great Wall laid off about a dozen employees at its Indian business on Friday after telling them it had failed to obtain foreign direct investment approval from the government to buy a former General Motors (GM) plant in the country.

Earlier on Friday Great Wall and GM called off the plant deal, drawing a line under a two-year initiative.

An Indian government spokesperson could not immediately be reached for comment outside regular business hours.

The axed employees were working on the company's planned India entry in departments including finance, strategy and marketing, two of the sources said, adding that they are to be given three months' severance pay.

Great Wall's patience had been waning since last year. In August it allocated to Brazil a portion of its planned $1 billion India investment and reassigned some of its staff.

The company's research and development centre in the southern Indian city of Bengaluru is operating as normal, it told Reuters earlier on Friday. (Reporting by Aditi Shah Editing by Mark Potter and David Goodman)

Pope appoints first cardinal from Amazon rainforest




- Pope Francis waves from a golf cart as he is driven inside a coliseum during a meeting with indigenous groups from the Peruvian Amazon, in Puerto Maldonado, Madre de Dios province, Peru, Jan. 19, 2018. When the Archbishop of the Brazilian city of Manaus Leonardo Steiner kneels before Pope Francis on Aug. 27, the Brazilian clergyman will make history as the first Cardinal who comes from the Amazon. 

(AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd, File)


by FABIANO MAISONNAVE and NICOLE WINFIELD
Fri, July 1, 2022 

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — When the Archbishop of the Brazilian city of Manaus Leonardo Steiner kneels before Pope Francis on August 27, the Brazilian clergyman will make history as the first cardinal to come from the Amazon region.

“The communities feel that the distance between Rome and the Amazon is now smaller,” Steiner told The Associated Press in a written interview. “Perhaps this is the reason for the Amazonian people’s joy with Pope Francis’ move.”

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Steiner attributed his selection to four priorities of the pope: the desire to do more missionary work in the Amazon and to be attentive to the poor; to care for the Amazon “as our common home” and to be a Church that "knows how to contribute to the autonomy of Indigenous people.”

Sprawling across nine countries, the Amazon region is larger than the European Union. It is home to 34 million people, of whom more than three million are Indigenous, belonging to around 400 ethnic groups, according to the Catholic Church.

There is a religious lens through which to see the acute environmental struggles playing out in the region as well: The Catholic Church’s socio-environmental agenda is a contentious issue with numerous Brazilian Pentecostal churches. These have a powerful caucus in Brazil's parliament and have embraced the pro-agrobusiness beef caucus in Congress. Both Pentecostals and cattle industry advocates belong to far-right President Jair Bolsonaro’s political base.

Cardinals are the most senior clergy below the pope. Often called “red hats” because of the color of their skullcaps, they serve as papal advisors. More important, together they select each pope, the leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics.

For observers of the church, it will come as no surprise that Francis has finally named an Amazonian cardinal, given the importance the region has had for his papacy and the attention he has shown it.

POPE FRANCIS' ENVIRONMENTAL AWAKENING

Francis was first moved by the plight of the vast Amazon basin in 2007, during the Episcopal Council of Latin American Bishops Conference, according to the Brazilian priest and historian José Oscar Beozzo. Francis was at that time the archbishop of Buenos Aires, and helped write the official account of the conference. The final text advocates for the preservation of both the Amazon and Antarctica.

Francis then dedicated an entire synod, or meeting, of bishops from the region in 2019. In his environmental awakening, crystallized in his 2015 encyclical “Praised Be,” he advocates for the preservation of the region's biodiversity and portrays Indigenous peoples as forest guardians. In 2018, he also visited Madre de Dios, a region in the Peruvian Amazon devastated by illegal mining and logging.

The pope made Steiner archbishop of Manaus just after the Amazon synod ended, tapping a Franciscan who clearly shares the same ethos and ideology as the pope’s namesake, St. Francis. The pope may have noticed Steiner because he had a prominent position in the Brazilian bishops’ conference and was acting as its secretary-general from 2011-2019. He also has serious Roman credentials, having served as the secretary general of the Franciscans’ Pontifical Antonianum University in Rome, one of the major pontifical universities.

CATHOLIC BISHOPS FROM AMAZON REGION MEET IN ROME

The Amazon synod was also notable for the theft of three Indigenous statues featuring a naked pregnant woman, that were part of a procession in the Vatican at the start of the meeting. Conservative critics had blasted the synod’s “pagan” prayers and idolatry, and early one morning, thieves entered a Vatican-area church where the statues were displayed and tossed them into the Tiber River.

Francis publicly apologized to the Indigenous leaders present for the theft, and the statues were dredged from the river in time for the end of the meeting. One was placed prominently on display in the synod hall as the synod fathers voted on the final recommendations.

The main thief, an Austrian far-right activist Alexander Tschugguel, went on to become something of a celebrity within the traditionalist opposition to Francis because of the stunt. In the years since, the stunt itself has come to crystalize the loathing that conservatives and traditionalists have for this pope, where even crimes are justified to save the faithful from his “heresy.”

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE AMAZON RAINFOREST

The Catholic Church’s relationship with the Amazon began in 1617 when Franciscan missionaries arrived in the coastal region of Belem. Their opposition to the enslavement of Indigenous peoples strained the relationship with Portuguese authorities, who expelled Catholic missionaries from the region on three occasions, last in 1759.

In the beginning, Catholic denominations required missionaries to learn Indigenous languages to work in the Amazon and spread Christianity. Jesuit priests went as far as creating Nheengatu, a language based on the Tupi Indigenous language adapted with Portuguese words and grammar. For a time it became the most common language in the Amazon and remains spoken in some regions.

For Beozzo, the historian, Pope Francis is promoting a kind of “patriarchy” in the Amazon, similar to the five patriarchies in places such as Jerusalem and Constantinople during the early Middle Ages, an effort to elevate the status of the Amazon within the Catholic structure.

The synod, the creation in 2020 of the Ecclesial Conference of the Amazon Region and now Steiner’s elevation are all part of Francis' goal of placing the world's largest rainforest center stage, Beozzo said.

“His choice begins a very important moment of considering the Amazon as a region with its own church dynamics, one which welcomes the prominence of the region’s Indigenous peoples.”

Steiner, 71, is one of 21 new Cardinals announced by Pope Francis in late May. They include Giorgio Marengo, who has been the apostolic prefect of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, Robert McElroy, bishop of San Diego and Peter Okpaleke, bishop of Ekwulobia, Nigeria.

Winfield reported from Rome.

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

AI WARFARE KILLER BOT

India conducts flight of autonomous flying wing technology demonstrator

Vivek Raghuvanshi
Fri, July 1, 2022 

NEW DELHI — India on Friday successfully carried out the first flight of an autonomous technology demonstrator.

The aircraft, launched by Bangalore-based Aeronautical Development Establishment under the purview of the state-run Defence Research and Development Organisation, is a scaled-down version of the upcoming Ghatak combat drone. The flight took place at the aeronautical test range based at Chitradurga in the southern Indian state of Karnataka.

The airframe, undercarriage, and entire flight control and avionics systems used for the aircraft were domestically developed, the Defence Ministry said in a statement. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh called the flight a major achievement toward autonomous aircraft that will pave the way for Aatmanirbhar Bharat — an economic initiative meant to make India less dependent on foreign technology — in terms of critical military systems.

A scientist with the Aeronautical Development Establishment told Defense News that the flight test of the aircraft — also referred to as the Stealth Wing Flying Testbed, or SWiFT — took place to demonstrate its of ability to take off, climb in altitude, cruise midair, navigate to waypoints, descend and land autonomously.

He noted that the next step is to develop a proven autonomous combat surveillance platform. The scientist spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

The 1-ton SWiFT platform is powered by a Russian NPO Saturn 36MT turbofan engine. The platform had completed taxi trials in September 2021.

The Aeronautical Development Establishment will now evaluate the flight data in relation to the aircraft’s configuration, and autonomous takeoff and landing technology, retractable landing gear system, and low radar signature. This effort is meant to inform future modifications to the platform.

A scientist with the Defence Research and Development Organisation noted that at least 10 more flight tests are needed to prove the capability of the SWiFT platform, and only then will the government grant funding for the full-fledged development of the Ghatak UAV.