UK
Strike misery looms as Border Force, postal and rail staff walk out before Christmas - live updates

Chris Price
Fri, December 23, 2022 

Royal Mail postal workers go back on strike today, as they did earlier this month - Katharine Hay/PA Wire

Planes, trains, driving lessons and postal deliveries are set to be disrupted by walkouts in the days before Christmas.

National Highways, Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) and Royal Mail employees are due to take industrial action today.

As they continue their strike into Saturday, they will be joined by rail workers represented by the RMT, Abellio London bus workers, and Environment Agency employees, who will launch separate waves of action.

This follows two days of strikes by NHS staff, as thousands of nurses walked out on Tuesday, and ambulance workers joined picket lines on Wednesday.


Passengers landing in Britain today face the prospect of long queues as thousands of Border Force begin strike action.

More than 250,000 passengers arriving at UK airports have been warned to expect delays amid walkouts from the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union.

The walkout will affect travellers at Heathrow, Birmingham, Cardiff, Gatwick, Glasgow and Manchester airports, and the port of Newhaven in East Sussex.

Read the latest updates below.
08:04 AM
Markets open down

Markets in London opened down, following the direction of US markets overnight, even as many traders headed off for the Christmas break.

US markets plummeted following stronger than expected economic figures, which could mean the US Federal Reserve keeps pushing up interest rates.

The FTSE 100 opened down 0.3pc to 7,472.35 while the FTSE 250 dropped 0.6pc to 18,751.40.
07:42 AM

Musk vows not to sell Tesla stock for two years

Elon Musk has pledged not to sell any more Tesla shares for two years, having offloaded $40bn (£33.2bn) of stock in the electric vehicle maker over the last 12 months.

Tesla's share price has plummeted 69pc this year and this week it was forced to slash prices.

Mr Musk's sale of stock came as he needed to fund his $4bn (£35bn) takeover of Twitter.

During a Twitter spaces session, he said: "I won't sell stock until - I don't know - probably two years from now, definitely not next year under any circumstances, and probably not the year thereafter."

Car production rises in November

Car production increased in the UK last month, according to the latest figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.

More than 80,000 vehicles were made in November, a 5.7pc increase on the previous year.

However, exports fell by 5pc as the gloomier outlook for the global economy and a stronger pound impacted sales.

In all, 723,846 cars have been produced so far this year, which is down 9.2pc.
07:15 AM

Border Force strike set to bring misery to 500,000 travellers

Border Force workers check the passports of passengers arriving at Gatwick - Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Strikes by Border Force staff are set to cause misery for up to half a million travellers arriving in the UK ahead of Christmas.

Senior news reporter Neil Johnston has the details:

Families with young children could face the worst of the disruption today as a week-long strike by 1,000 passport staff at six airports, including Heathrow, begins.

The walk-out will coincide with a strike by thousands of rail workers on Christmas Eve, which will see trains to and from major airports halt from mid-afternoon.

Airports say most adults will be able to use electronic gates rather than waiting for manual checks by military personnel and volunteers standing in for striking workers. However, children under 12 are not able to use the scanners.

View our strike action calendar here.

For many of you it will be the last working day before the Christmas break.

It could also be a working day disrupted by strike action.

Thousands of union members are on strike today and tomorrow.

As if that was not enough to bring you some festive gloom, chaos on the markets should leave you feeling postively Grinch-like, as detailed below.
5 things to start your day

1) Bank of England backs Sunak’s crypto dreams despite market meltdown | The Bank of England has thrown its weight behind Rishi Sunak's plan to make Britain a digital currency superpower, despite a market meltdown that has wiped more than £1 trillion off the value of crypto.

2) Japan’s Christmas bombshell risks setting off another European credit crunch | Japan is the world’s top creditor with $3.6 trillion (£3 trillion) of net assets overseas. It is the marginal buyer of British, eurozone, and American debt, and a central pillar of the international bond market.

3) Britain faces spike in divorces and unhappiness next year as wages fall below those of France | Divorce rates will climb at the fastest pace since 1971 and unhappiness will reach the highest levels since record began next year, as British workers get poorer than the French.

4) Asda sounds alarm over Ulez expansion as MPs call for Sadiq Khan to ditch it | Sadiq Khan is facing a growing parliamentary backlash over plans to expand the ultra low emission zone in London, as it emerged that Asda had raised concerns about the impact on its staff.

5) Diesel generators ready to power NHS and military as blackouts loom | As the frost chills the ground, Britain’s data centre operators are preparing for a long, testing winter to keep millions connected through the dark and cold.
What happened overnight

Shares declined in Asia on Friday after a retreat on Wall Street driven by fears that strong economic data will lead the Federal Reserve to double down on its interest rate hikes to tame inflation.

Shanghai was flat while other major indexes declined. Trading was winding down with the approach of Christmas and New Year holidays.

Japan reported its core inflation rate, excluding volatile fresh foods, rose to 3.7pc in November, the highest level since 1981, as surging costs for oil and other commodities added to upward price pressures in the world's third-largest economy.

Tokyo's Nikkei 225 index lost 1pc to 26,242.58 and the Hang Seng in Hong Kong shed 0.5pc to 19,578.44. The Shanghai Composite index was unchanged, at 3,054.52 and Australia's S&P/ASX 200 declined 0.7pc to 7,099.70.

In Seoul, the Kospi dropped 1.4pc to 2,323.09. Shares also fell in Bangkok, Mumbai and Taiwan.

Wall Street stocks tumbled on Thursday, closing in a sea of red after data that indicated a strong labour market and better-than-expected economic growth.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed 1.1pc down at 33,027.49, while the broad-based S&P 500 Index lost 1.5pc to 3,822.39. The tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index also plunged 2.2pc to 10,476.12.

U.S. faces shortage of EMTs after nearly one-third of them quit in 2021

Simon Bouie

Thu, December 22, 2022 

Nearly every industry has dealt with staffing shortages since the start of the pandemic, but few occupations can mean the difference between life and death like that of an EMT. But for many, low wages are forcing EMTs out of their jobs.

Deniece Farnsworth told CBS News that after seven years she's not sure how much longer she can afford to keep doing her job as an EMT. Her current pay is $18 an hour.

"To pay the bills, we have to work as much as we can," she said.

Farnsworth actually makes slightly more than the national median average for EMTs which is $17.05 per hour. That translates into $35,470 per year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics lists it as one of the lowest-paying jobs in health care. Low pay was the primary reason roughly one-third of all EMTs quit in 2021.

The industry is having a hard time replacing them.

A 2022 American Ambulance Association study of employee turnover found that 39% of part-time EMT and 55% of part-time paramedic positions went unfilled because of a lack of qualified candidates.

"It's an absolute crisis. We have continual paramedics hitting the exit doors and leaving the field," said American Ambulance Association president Shawn Baird.

He added that Medicaid's reimbursement for non-emergency transports, like moving a patient between hospitals or taking someone to dialysis, keeps wages low.

"It can mean the difference of having an ambulance or not having an ambulance," Baird said.

AMR, the nation's largest private ambulance provider, announced it's ending non-emergency transport in Los Angeles County. The company cites low Medicaid reimbursement as a major reason for a $3.5 million budget deficit in that market alone.

Amwest Ambulance Director of Operations Brian Napoli said that to keep from losing EMTs like Farnsworth, the company is moving to give employees a raise. But they can't afford it long-term, he told CBS News, that if Medicaid reimbursements don't increase, Amwest may also have to stop non-emergency services.

Napoli said it costs the company more than $250 for an average non-emergency transport call. However, their Medicaid reimbursement is just $107.

California recently passed a law that could require a $22-an-hour minimum wage for fast food workers. However, there is no mandated pay for EMTs.

Questions linger over Facebook, Twitter, TikTok's commitment to uphold election integrity in Africa, as countries head to polls




Annie Njanja
Fri, December 23, 2022 

A dozen countries in Africa including Nigeria, the continent’s biggest economy and democracy, are expected to hold their presidential elections next year, and questions linger on how well social media platforms are prepared to curb mis and dis-information after claims of botched content moderation during Kenya’s polls last August.

Concerns are mounting as it emerges that Twitter has scaled back content moderation after Elon Musk took over and later laid-off more than half the employees, and nearly cleaning out the entire Africa team, a decision that left outsourced moderators out of jobs too. With very limited support to filter or stop spread of propaganda, Africa will likely be a casualty of Twitter’s oft-erratic or slow response to falsehoods -- which catalyze violence in times of political polarization.

But this is not unique to Twitter; widely used platforms like Facebook, TikTok, WhatsApp, and YouTube have also been fingered for doing little to stop mis- and dis-information in Africa.

Meta sued by Ethiopians and Kenyan rights group for fueling Tigray War

In Nigeria, for instance, sitting president Muhammadu Buhari, has voiced concerns over how dis- and mis-information on social media is fanning conflict, insecurity, and distrust in the government in the lead up to the February elections – even as the country’s economy continues to struggle causing a sense of instability. Yet, as momentum picks up for what is one of the most hotly contested elections, activists, researchers, and a section of civilians are apprehensive about the mounting spread of negative campaigning.

Researchers anticipate that hateful content and falsehoods, meant to stir confusion or sway voters in Nigeria, will continue to be shared online. They are insistently calling on tech companies to hire and train local experts with the knowledge of local languages and context to intercept misleading, violent or intimidating posts that could undermine election integrity.

“Social-media platforms especially – Twitter, Meta (Facebook), YouTube, WhatsApp and Telegram – should step up efforts to identify and deal with election-related misinformation, disinformation and conspiracies as well as intercepting violent or intimidating messages,” said Audu Bulama Bukarti, a senior fellow, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, said in a report published a fortnight ago about security risks in Nigeria.

Nigeria's youthful and tech-savvy population is Africa’s most active on social media. The calls for the platforms to step-up content moderation, while not new, follow the increased use of social sites owing to smartphone and internet penetration.

“The reach and influence of social media have grown ever larger in the years since the 2019 election. It will play a pivotal role in the 2023 election, in terms of positive political communication and in terms of its ability to spread misinformation and disinformation,” said Bukarti.

In Nigeria, Meta claims to have invested in people including content moderators and technology to stem the misuse of its platforms ahead of the elections. The social media giant is also taking the same measures as before and during Kenya’s elections, which included verifying the identities of persons posting political ads. But Mozilla tech and society fellow Odanga Madung is not convinced Facebook and other social sites are prepared well enough.

"Social media platforms are still not completely ready to deal with election environments especially because they've had massive layoffs that have greatly affected how the work within several of the areas these elections will be held,” said Madung.

“And quite frankly, they have consistently failed to address the key aspects that make an election environment a dangerous information environment in the first place, where things are neither true or false and information tends to get weaponized quite a bit. Election environments are incredibly low trust environments. I do not think they're going to actually succeed on this.”

Away from Nigeria, a pivotal moment is also approaching for social media platforms and fragile nations such as Sudan, South Sudan, DR Congo, Libya, and Mali -- most of which have blocked social media access in the recent past to quell protests against their governments -- as they head to polls next year.

Facebook, TikTok, Twitter failed election integrity test in Kenya’s elections

Bungled labeling and moderation

Social sites like Facebook, Twitter and TikTok recently came under heavy scrutiny over their role in undermining election integrity in Kenya. A Mozilla Foundation report claims that content labeling failed to stop misinformation, while platforms such as Facebook profiteered from political advertising that served to amplify propaganda.

Twitter and TikTok’s spotty labeling of posts calling the elections ahead of the official announcement made the platforms seem partisan, and failed to stop the spread of falsehoods, despite partnering with fact-checking organizations.

Facebook, the leading social media platform in Africa, failed majorly on this front by not having “any visible labels” during the elections, allowing the spread of propaganda — like claims of the kidnapping and arrest of a prominent politician, which had been debunked by local media houses. Months later, Facebook put a label on the original post claiming the kidnapping and arrest of the prominent politician.

Sluggish responses to falsehoods by Facebook, are now at the center of a lawsuit filed last week claiming that Meta is fueling violence and hate in eastern and southern Africa.

Abrham Meareg, one of the petitioners and whose father, Professor Meareg Amare, was killed during the Tigray War after Facebook posts doxed and called for violence against him, says that Facebook failed, on multiple requests, to bring down posts that put his father’s life in danger. He said that one post was recently taken down, a year after his father’s murder -- more than 600,000 Ethiopians were killed during the two-year war that started in 2020.

Meta sued in Kenya over claims of exploitation and union busting

The case claims that Facebook’s algorithm fuels viral hate and violence while that content moderation in Africa is bungled as moderators lack local knowledge to moderate content posted in local languages.

"Many of them (platforms) lack context and they are always going to fall short in terms of the of the promises they make to their users because, again, a lie is able to move very fast across platforms before they able to get ahold of it," said Odanga.

Whistleblower Frances Haugen previously accused Facebook of “literally fanning ethnic violence” in Ethiopia, and a recent Global Witness investigation also noted that the social site was “extremely poor at detecting hate speech in the main language of Ethiopia.”

“Something is wrong with the way Facebook moderates content, and … there is a lack of investment in content moderation, especially for African countries. When you compare to other regions, we are getting the second-rate treatment. And what's the effect? We are seeing a catalyst for civic unrest, civil war coming from normal interactions; viral posts that make fun of people and then escalate to insightful posts that my client is proof do end up causing violence in real life,” said Meareg’s lawyer, Mercy Mutemi.

Meanwhile, social media remains central to the permeation of political propaganda and the dilution of important investigations in matters around economic and social corruption. Last year, the former Kenyan president, Uhuru Kenyatta, was mentioned in the Pandora Papers - a leakage of files detailing the hidden wealth of a number of global leaders, celebrities and billionaires in offshore havens. However, researchers noticed the soaring of two hashtags, #offshoreaccountfacts and #phonyleaks, which topped trending topics and shadowed organic discussions on Twitter in Kenya, undermining the findings of the documentary.

Foreign-sponsored campaigns with political objectives have also affected more than three-quarters of the countries in Africa as “disinformation campaigns become increasingly sophisticated in camouflaging their origins by outsourcing posting operations.”

According to a Africa Center for Strategic Studies report published in April this year, Russian-sponsored disinformation campaigns by the Wagner Group mercenary force, promoting the Kremlin’s interests in the continent, for instance, have so affected more than 16 countries in Africa.

On Twitter, political disinformation clouds Kenya’s trending topics

TikTok found to fuel disinformation, political tension in Kenya ahead of elections

Verdict on continuation of Meta’s prosecution in Kenya to be made early next year

Hundreds of 1,000-year-old statues unearthed at ruins of ancient Chinese market


Photo from Shaanxi Provincial Government via Xi'an news network.

Moira Ritter
Wed, December 21, 2022 at 4:01 PM MST·1 min read

Hundreds of sculptures spent the past 1,000 years buried beneath the ruins of an ancient Chinese market. That is until Chinese archaeologists recently discovered the fragments.

Archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences unearthed more than 680 fragments of Buddha and pagoda statues from the Tang dynasty, which existed from 618-907, according to a Dec. 20 news release from the Shaanxi Province.

The findings were discovered in the ruins of the East Market in Xi’an, about 700 miles southwest of Beijing.

The sculptures — made of clay, ceramic and stone — show elements unique to the Tang period, such as colored drawings and gold decorations, experts said. Since they were discovered, the fragments have been packaged and moved for further research.

The East Market was once “a flourishing business center,” according to the Global Times. The latest discovery further indicates that the market was an international trade center, and experts said it will help with a better understanding of the ancient city.

“This archaeological discovery is of great significance to the restoration of Chang’an avenue and the enhancement of our cultural confidence. It can reproduce the prosperity of the Tang Dynasty,” Yu Jinlong, a cultural expert in Beijing, told the Global Times.

PRIVATIZED WATER COMPANIES

UK

Mersea Island oyster farmer joins legal bid over sewage spills

Wed, December 21, 2022 

Tom Haward's family oyster business has operated for 253 years

An eighth generation oyster farmer has joined a legal bid to toughen government policy on water companies discharging sewage into the sea.

Family business Richard Haward Oysters, based on Mersea Island, Essex, has operated for 253 years.

Operations manager Tom Haward said the "industry could be destroyed if water companies aren't held to account".

Anglian Water said it was investing more than £200m to reduce spillages across the East of England.

Mr Haward said he wanted to "stand up" for the fishing industry

Untreated sewage is discharged into costal waters by storm overflows, which are designed to prevent sewers becoming overloaded in an emergency.

However, their use has increased in recent years as climate change has led to more rainfall and water infrastructure has not kept pace with population growth, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said.

The government has given water firms until 2050 to invest in and improve sewers to prevent them from overflowing into English waterways and coastlines.

Water firm fined £560k for sewage leak into brook


'I ended up in hospital after going wild swimming'


'Spend water profits to stop sewage outflow'

A claim for a judicial review has been made by Mr Haward, the Marine Conservation Society, activist Hugo Tagholm and the Good Law Project.

The group hopes to compel the government to impose tighter deadlines on water companies to significantly reduce the use of storm overflows and expand protection for coastal waters.

Mr Haward said water companies were not taking action quickly enough

While Mr Haward's business has not been adversely affected by sewage, he said it was important to "stand up and shout about things like this".

"Our oysters are safe to eat and the waters are beautiful and clean," he said.

"But it's about pre-empting it before it becomes a problem, as opposed to it happening and overwhelming us and then becoming too late to do anything about it."

Mr Haward said he wanted to not only safeguard his family's business but the industry as a whole.

"The industry has a legacy," he said.

"The UK's famous for it, Mersea is very famous for it and I'm proud to be part of that."

Mr Haward said work and investment by water firms should be happening "immediately" and not in years to come

Mr Haward said there had been "a renaissance of oyster eaters in the UK" and so the industry could have "an amazing future".

"So it's really important we safeguard it and protect it for its future," he said.

Defra has declined to comment on the legal bid.

A spokeswoman for Anglian Water said: "We completely accept Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) are history, particularly as our climate changes and extreme weather is more commonplace.

"But until they can be eradicated, they act as a necessary safety valve in old sewerage systems, to protect homes and businesses from flooding during heavy rainfall."

Find BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk

Spending bill leaves out most of the climate change funding Biden sought

After the Senate passed the $1.7 billion omnibus spending bill Thursday, climate change activists bemoaned a key promise of President Biden’s that won’t be met: $11.4 billion in climate aid per year to developing countries.



Ben Adler
·Senior Editor
Thu, December 22, 2022

President Biden at the White House on Thursday.

 (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

The Senate passed the $1.7 billion omnibus spending bill Thursday, averting a government shutdown, but climate change activists are upset that a key promise of President Biden’s won’t be included in the package: $11.4 billion in climate aid per year to developing countries.

In a September 2021 speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Biden pledged to increase U.S. assistance to low-income nations for combating climate change through building their clean energy economies and adapting to the dangerous effects of climate change, such as sea level rise, to $11.4 billion. Biden later moved his request to Congress up to 2023 — the fiscal year currently under consideration — including $2 billion the U.S. already owes the Green Climate Fund, a U.N. initiative that distributes climate financing.

But, despite Biden’s fellow Democrats holding slim majorities in both houses of Congress, the spending package includes just $1.057 billion for international climate change aid. That is “only $900,000 more than the previous year’s already woefully short amount,” climate policy experts at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) lamented in a blog post on Wednesday.

A pledging conference of the Green Climate Fund in Paris, Oct. 25, 2019. 

Pascal Rossignol/Reuters

Congressional Democrats had sought $3.4 billion for global climate programs this year, but Republicans blocked what Republicans on the Senate Appropriations Committee called “radical environmental and climate policies.”

“Congress just bankrolled an $857 billion defense bill but failed to provide a single penny to meet our commitments to the Green Climate Fund — a step that would truly help us defend our country and our planet from chaos and instability,” Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said on Twitter.

As Bloomberg News observed, “with Republicans taking control of the House in January, the fiscal 2023 budget was seen as the last best chance for Biden to fulfill his commitment.”

“This will damage the ability of the U.S. to spur greater climate action outside its borders and continue to put the most vulnerable on the front lines of climate damage,” Jake Schmidt, NRDC’s senior strategic director for international climate policy, told Bloomberg.

Yannick Glemarec, center, currently executive director of the Green Climate Fund, speaking at the Atlantic Council in 2018.

 (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

Earlier this year, Green Climate Fund executive director Yannick Glemarec told the fund’s board that if donors such as the U.S. do not live up to their commitments, the organization will have to reject applications for funding for otherwise qualified projects.

Biden’s previous commitment to significantly increase U.S. international climate aid was intended to boost the ambition of plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from developing nations in the run-up to the 2021 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland. Developed countries have fallen short of their pledge to mobilize $100 billion per year for climate finance by 2020. In that year, only $83 billion in climate assistance went to developing countries. That funding gap has impeded efforts to get more ambitious commitments from developing nations such as India and Indonesia, which say they need capital to build wind and solar power generating capacity.

Developed countries have also been particularly parsimonious when it comes to money for climate adaptation. While $50 billion of the promised $100 billion was supposed to be for adaptation, only $29 billion for adaptation was produced in 2020. The U.N. has warned that this “adaptation gap” leaves the poorest countries dangerously unprepared for extreme weather events such as floods that are becoming more common because of climate change.

The U.S. is one of the lowest contributors to climate finance relative to the size of its economy and its historic greenhouse gas emissions, both of which are the largest in the world. The Overseas Development Institute, a London-based think tank, calculated that, based on “gross national income, cumulative carbon dioxide emissions and population,” the United States’ fair share of financing for the developing world would be $43.4 billion annually. But the U.S. contributes less than Spain, which has an economy 16 times smaller than that of the U.S.

People wade past stranded trucks on a flooded street in

 Sunamganj, Bangladesh, on June 21.

(Mamun Hossain/AFP via Getty Images)

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson told the New York Times that “members of the administration worked to secure funding in [fiscal year 2023] that puts us on a path to achieving [the $11.4 billion] goal. We will continue to work with Congress to make achieving this goal in [fiscal year 2023] a reality.”

Although no one in Congress issued any statements explaining or defending the decision to limit climate finance specifically, one might assume that they fear larger expenditures would be unpopular, as past polling has shown that a strong plurality of Americans think economic aid to other nations should be cut.

But polling on climate finance itself suggests that it may be more popular than one might assume. Between Dec. 1 and Dec. 5, Yahoo News and YouGov conducted a poll of 1,635 U.S. adults in which it asked a series of questions about whether the U.S. should fund climate change mitigation, adaptation and recovery in developing countries.

When asked whether “the U.S. should help poor countries develop clean energy and also adapt to and recover from effects of climate change like stronger hurricanes, sea level rise, drought and famine,” 49% said yes, 33% said no, and 18% said they were unsure. Support was strongest among Democrats, at 68%, with 47% of independents and 29% of Republicans agreeing.

Environmental activists rally at the Capitol, March 25.

 (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Broken out specifically by each category of climate change aid, the results were similar. When asked “do you think the U.S. should give poor countries financial aid to help them switch from fossil fuels like coal to cleaner energy sources like wind and solar power?” 41% said yes, 36% said no, and 23% were unsure. When asked “do you think the U.S. should give poor countries financial aid to help them adapt to the effects of climate change like rising sea levels and stronger storms?” 41% said yes, 35% said no, and 23% were unsure.

The most popular form of climate aid was for recovery from extreme weather events. When asked “do you think the U.S. should give poor countries financial aid to help them recover from climate change-related disasters like droughts and floods?” 47% said yes, 29% said no and 24% were not sure.

That finding is slightly counterintuitive, as rich countries have generally been most enthusiastic to fund clean energy development in poorer countries, since reducing emissions benefits the residents of rich countries as well, by slowing climate change. And funding recovery efforts from climate-change-related extreme weather events, also known as “loss and damage,” or climate compensation, has been long opposed by the U.S. and the European Union, although the U.S. and the EU agreed for the first time ever to create a funding mechanism for it at the most recent round of climate change negotiations in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

A ravaged Quebec coast fights climate change by retreating


1 / 17
APTOPIX Climate Change Coastal ErosionJoel Berthelot pilots his boat along the coast of Perce, Quebec, Canada, just after sunrise, Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2022. Against the ravaging seas, Quebec's coastal communities have learned through experience that the way to advance against climate change is to retreat. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

CALVIN WOODWARD, LYNN BERRY, CHRISTINA LARSON and CAROLYN KASTER
Tue, December 20, 2022

PERCE, Quebec (AP) — Against the ravaging seas, Quebec's coastal communities have learned through bitter experience that the way to advance against climate change is to retreat.

Over the past decade, civilization has been pulled back from the water’s edge where possible along the eastern stretch of the Gaspe Peninsula where coastline is particularly vulnerable to erosion. Defenses erected against the sea ages ago have been dismantled, rock by rock, concrete chunk by chunk.

Forillon National Park, nearly 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Perce, removed a road that the ocean turned into heaving chunks year after year as winters warmed and the shore's protective sea ice vanished.

In Perce, a town of several thousand that swells in summer, a manmade beach was “nourished” with pebbles and given to nature to sculpt. After storms wrecked the old seaside boardwalk, a new one was built farther from the water, without the concrete wall that had only added to storm wave fury.

When you try to wall off the sea, communities here learned, the sea prevails. Less destruction happens when waves have less to destroy.

The idea is to “move with the sea, not against it,” said Marie-Dominique Nadeau-Girard, services manager at the Quebec park that encompasses the world renowned seabird sanctuary of Bonaventure Island and the enormous Perce Rock, a natural marvel and cultural touchstone that dominates the panorama.

“We have to work with the elements,” she said from offices of Parc national de l’lle-Bonaventure-et-du-Rocher-Perce. To fight nature is to realize “we’re not going to win.”

So, too, at Forillon, where park ecologist Daniel Sigouin says: "We decided to retreat, and let nature evolve naturally.”

Not every location in the world where climate change accelerates coastal erosion can roll with the punches like this. Condos crowding U.S. beachfronts aren't going anywhere unless or until such seaside living becomes unsustainable.

But the Gaspe Peninsula's approach is a test case for far-flung places where strategic capitulation to nature is possible, even with historic human settlements in the mix.

Along the peninsula’s shores, once-dependable buffers of coastal ice in deep winter have been largely absent for a quarter century.

In Perce, the ritual of trekking across ice floes to Bonaventure, 3 kilometers (almost 2 miles) from the town, hasn’t been possible for several decades. It is probable, said meteorologist George Karaganis of the Canadian Ice Service, that “20 or 30 years on, those people who walked to Bonaventure Island will all be gone — people will never remember walking to Bonaventure.”

The story of modern Canadian winters, indeed all seasons, is one of disruption attributed to warming temperatures and rising seas.

“Historical warming has led to changes in rain and snow, rivers and lakes, ice, and coastal zones,” said the Canadian government’s 2019 climate report, “and these changes are challenging our sense of what a ‘normal’ climate is.”

At Forillon, Sigouin is author of a recent report on a seven-year project to adapt the park to climate change. “In winter, there was always ice cover from December to late March," he said. "That ice cover was protecting the coast from coastal erosion.

"But as temperatures are getting higher and higher, in that area, there’s almost no ice anymore. As ice is less and less present, we have seen more and more the effect of coastal erosion.”

In the project at Forillon to yield to the coast's natural rhythms, officials also were mindful of preserving — and honoring — the human imprint.

The peninsula is lightly populated and has much less wealth than the maritime playgrounds of the U.S. Atlantic coast. But it’s central in the founding of New France — French explorer Jacques Cartier made landfall in the early 1500s and colonists settled coastal hamlets in the late 1700s.

The park is where the Irish Monument stands — recently relocated farther inIand — in memory of the 120 to 150 lives lost when the Carricks, an Irish ship bound for the St. Lawrence River, ran aground off the coast of Cap-des-Rosiers on April 28, 1847.

For all of that history, the Forillon climate project still was able to eliminate infrastructure along 80% of the coastline. In addition to removing a road, relocating the monument and rehabilitating natural habitats, the park took away stacks of large rocks known as riprap — a common defense for seaside roads and facilities that has come to be seen as part of the problem.

Then there is the Perce Rock, immortalized by explorers back to the 1500s and artists and poets ever since. It stands as testament to the natural processes of erosion even without climate change.

The massive formation sheds hundreds of tons each year. Where once there were at least three arches, now there is only one, and some distant day “the pierced rock” itself will disappear.

The picturesque town, though, is grappling with more immediate consequences of global warming.

In Perce, violent weather in 2016 convinced officials that the old ways of holding back the sea would not do. By then it had become apparent rigid structures such as the town’s damaged seawall often made the risks of destruction worse.

Rather than absorbing wave energy, seawalls and riprap can create backwash that collides with incoming waves, engineers realized, setting off supercharged turbulence that chews away at shoreline protection.

In Perce’s areas where rigid protections had been built over generations, the width of beaches decreased by about 70%.

In 2017, with such obstacles largely gone, 7,500 truckloads of coarse pebbles, like ones found naturally on the region’s beaches, were deposited at the town’s South Cove and left for the sea to arrange in a gentle slope.

Officials project that the cove’s rehabilitation will last 40 to 50 years. But who really knows?

“Beyond the next few decades, the largest uncertainty about the magnitude of future climate change is rooted in uncertainty about human behaviour,” says the 2019 Canadian study — namely “whether the world will follow a pathway of low, medium or high emissions.

“Until climate is stabilized,” it says, “there will not be a new ‘normal’ climate.”

___

Larson reported from Washington.

An employee laid off by Meta says he got a strange package from the company marked 'leaver' with two emojis inside and no note

Story by jhart@insider.com (Jordan Hart) • Yesterday 

Matt Motyl/Twitter

One former Meta employee received a 'peculiar' gift in the mail just in time for the holidays.

Matt Motyl says he was one of the 11,000 staff members laid off by Meta in November.
Motyl says other ex-employees DM'ed him saying they'd received odd packages from the company too.

A former Meta employee said he received a bizarre package from his old company labeled "leaver" one month after being laid off from the tech giant.

Researcher Matt Motyl was laid off from Meta in November despite exceeding expectations in performance reviews, he said. In December, the company sent him a box without a note containing two rubber cards displaying emojis — one "wow" face and one "sad" face — with cords attached.

Although Motyl assumed they were Christmas tree ornaments, commenters said the rubber faces could be luggage tags. But their true purpose is unclear since the only context for the package was the word "leaver" written on the box, Motyl said.

"Either way, it's still a confusing thing to receive from a company after they lay you off during the holiday season," Motyl tweeted.

Some questioned the validity of the package and suggested pranksters could be responsible, but Motyl confirmed that it came from Meta's office with his employee ID number written on the box.

A week later, Motyl said he received four large boxes from Meta so that he could return the Quest 1 virtual reality headset and controller he'd received from the company.

In November, Meta announced that the company would be laying off more than 11,000 employees followed by an apology from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Insider previously reported.

In the thread of tweets related to the box, which Motyl called "peculiar," he said he'd heard from other former Meta employees about strange things delivered to them from the company.

"Some folks have DMed me saying that they also received random things. 1 person said he received a box of several open bourbon bottles that he recalled seeing near his desk before the layoffs," Motyl wrote.

Meta shed more light on the matter in a statement to Insider.

"On background, we packed and shipped items left on impacted employees' desks. These items were shipped to him on the assumption that they were his personal items," it read.

Using additive manufacturing to detect counterfeit parts

Texas A&M Researchers are applying metal additive manufacturing techniques to embed a hidden cache of information within products to help combat counterfeited goods.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY

Ensuring manufactured goods and components have not been copied and replaced illegally by counterfeited goods is a high-priority concern of the manufacturing and defense industries in the U.S. and around the world.

A potential solution would hold wide-reaching impacts and implications in various areas ranging from enhancing biomedical implants to protecting national defense assets.

Texas A&M University researchers have developed a method of imprinting a hidden magnetic tag, encoded with authentication information, within manufactured hardware during the part fabrication process. The revolutionary process holds the potential to expose counterfeit goods more easily by replacing physical tags — such as barcodes or quick response (QR) codes — with these hidden magnetic tags, which serve as permanent and unique identifiers.

The project, titled “Embedded Information in Additively Manufactured Metals via Composition Gradients for Anti-Counterfeiting and Supply Chain Traceability,” is a faculty partner project supported by the SecureAmerica Institute. It includes researchers from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M. The team recently published its research in the journal Additive Manufacturing.

The faculty investigators on the project include Ibrahim Karaman, Chevron Professor I and department head of the materials science and engineering department; Raymundo Arroyave, professor of materials science and engineering and Segers Family Dean’s Excellence Professor; and Richard Malak, associate professor of mechanical engineering and Gulf Oil/Thomas A. Dietz Career Development Professor. In addition to the faculty, Daniel Salas Mula, a researcher with the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, and doctoral student Deniz Ebeperi — both members of Karaman’s research group — have worked on the project. The team has also collaborated with Jitesh Panchal, professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University.

Ensuring security and reliable authentication in manufacturing is a critical national concern, with the U.S. investing billions of dollars in manufacturing. Without such a method readily available, it can be nearly impossible to differentiate an authentic part or component from its counterfeit copy.“The issue is that when I come up with an idea, device or part, it is very easy for others to copy and even fabricate it much more cheaply — though maybe at a lower quality,” Karaman said. “Sometimes they even put the same brand name, so how do you make sure that item isn’t yours? (The embedded magnetic tag) gives us an opportunity and a new tool to make sure that we can protect our defense and manufacturing industries.”

The team is implementing metal additive manufacturing techniques to accomplish its goal of successfully embedding readable magnetic tags into metal parts without compromising on performance or longevity. Researchers used 3D printing to embed these magnetic tags below the surface into nonmagnetic steel hardware.

Other applications for this method include traceability, quality control and more, largely depending on the industry in which it is used.

Once embedded into a nonmagnetic item, the magnetic tag is readable using a magnetic sensor device — such as a smartphone — by scanning near the correct location on the product, allowing the designated information to be accessed by the user.

While other methods exist for imprinting information, they primarily require sophisticated and costly equipment that introduces a barrier to real-world implementation.

“Different approaches have been used to try to locally change the properties of the metals during the manufacturing process to be able to codify information within the part,” said Salas Mula. “This is the first time that magnetic properties of the material are being used in this way to introduce information within a nonmagnetic part, specifically for the 3D printing of metals.”

Ebeperi said that to map the magnetic reading of the part, the team created a custom three-axis magnetic sensor capable of mapping the surface and revealing the regions where the embedded magnetic tag was accessible.

While the system is more secure than a physical tag or code located on the exterior of an item, the team is still working to improve the complexity of the method’s security.

As the project continues, Karaman said the next steps include developing a more secure method of reading the information, possibly through the implementation of a physical “dual-authentication” requiring the user to apply a specific treatment or stimulus to unlock access to the magnetic tag.

---

JOURNAL

Additive Manufacturing

DOI

10.1016/j.addma.2022.103261 

ARTICLE TITLE

Embedding hidden information in additively manufactured metals via magnetic property grading for traceability

Lie detectors to target "corrupted" officials amid wildlife poaching

Story by CBSNews •

South Africa plans to carry out lie detector tests on staff working at its game reserves in a bid to fight rampant wildlife poaching, a national parks management agency said Thursday.

Shamwari Private Game Reserve Marks 30 Years Of Conservation Tourism© / Getty Images

Poachers, sometimes operating in cahoots with crooked park employees, have decimated the country's population of endangered rhinos in recent years.

To tackle the problem, South African National Parks authority, SANParks, has adopted a new polygraph testing policy for its employees, it said Thursday.

Testing will be on a voluntary basis in the interim, but the "intention is ultimately to make polygraph testing compulsory to certain job categories," SANParks said in a statement.

The policy approved in November is expected to come into force early next year, Environment affairs minister Barbara Creecy said in a written answer to the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) party, which published the response on Wednesday.

Rhino poaching surges across Africa amid virus pandemic

Duration 2:26 View on Watch

"There are suspicions that some SANParks officials may have been corrupted," Dave Bryant, the DA's shadow environment minister told AFP.

"It is high time that we take active measures and active steps towards addressing this".

SANParks' General Manager Rey Thakhuli said the polygraph policy was developed after consulting with experts on labor law.

"It is accordingly important to appreciate that polygraph testing is not the answer to prevent or manage staff involvement in criminality but it is a tool that needs to be used as part of the toolkit and with a full understanding of its benefits, but also its limitations," Thakhuli said in a statement.

South Africa is home to nearly 80 percent of the world's rhinoceroses.

But it is also a hotspot for rhino poaching, driven by demand from Asia, where horns are used in traditional medicine for their supposed therapeutic effect.

Almost 470 rhinos were poached across the country between April 2021 and March 2022, according to government figures -- up 16 percent on the previous twelve months.

The world-famous Kruger National Park, a tourist magnet bordering Mozambique, has seen its rhino population decrease dramatically over the past decade-and-a-half due to poaching.

The park's estimated tally in 2021 was 2,800 rhinos, around 70 percent down compared to 10,000 in 2008, according to official SANParks statistics.

Last year, a suspected poacher was trampled and killed by a herd of elephants at the park. In 2019, a suspected rhino poacher at the same park was killed by an elephant before his body was apparently eaten by lions.

Details of the new lie-detector policy are still being finalized.

Polygraph tests for SANParks staff were first introduced in 2016 as part of a pilot project. Last year the environment ministry said 71 park officials had taken the test.

SANParks employs about 4,000 people, according to official figures.

Wildlife poaching has been a persistent problem across Africa — and has even turned deadly for conservationists. Earlier this month, a high court in Tanzania sentenced 11 people to death for the 2017 murder of anti-poaching activist Wayne Lotter.

Krissie Clark, who worked with Lotter, told CBS News in 2019 that her colleague had received multiple death threats over his work.

"If we really want to defeat this illegal wildlife trafficking, we have to go for the blood supply; we have to stop the money at the heart of this crime," Clark told CBS News.