CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Theft and Corruption Hinder Venezuela's Oil Industry

The key to reducing these criminal threats is ending the sanctions on Venezuela

VENEZUELA

/26 JUN 2023

BY VENEZUELA INVESTIGATIVE UNITE

Oil production in Venezuela has recently picked up after years of decline. But increasing criminal activity around the industry hinders the market’s potential recovery.

A series of attempted thefts from pipelines over the past several months has raised concerns at the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), which distributes gasoline and diesel throughout the country via these pipelines.

In May, PDVSA's vice president of trade and national supply, Juan Carlos Díaz, said that five of the country's 17 fuel distribution plants have been paralyzed because "gangs open holes in the pipelines and connect hoses to steal the gasoline." Pipeline theft increased noticeably in May and April, said Díaz, though he did not say by how much.

The most recent reported incident was the perforation of an oil pipeline in the state of Anzoátegui, in eastern Venezuela, on June 1.

SEE ALSO: Inside the Evaporating Black Market for Gasoline in Zulia, Venezuela

A lack of state investment, falling oil prices, and international sanctions have devastated Venezuela’s oil industry, once one of the strongest in the world. As the main driver of Venezuela’s economy, experts consider the recovery of the industry essential to improving the country’s economic crisis.

Below, InSight Crime examines how organized crime could affect the revival of the country's oil industry.

Proliferation of Fuel Theft

Fuel theft has become a significant problem for PDVSA over the last two years.

A 1,444-kilometer network of pipes moves fuel from refining plants to filling centers around Venezuela. Oil sanctions and the lack of investment in refineries have created a gasoline shortage, especially in states far from the capital, Caracas. Now, increasing fuel theft has exacerbated those shortages.

“Why is there no volume at the service stations? Because organized crime violated us,” said the governor of the southern state of Bolívar, Ángel Marcano, in a press conference at the end of April. “The fuel mafias violated the pipeline."

Criminal networks steal as much as 30% of the fuel destined for this southern region of the country, according to official information.

Bolívar is just one of several states affected by fuel theft. Between January 2021 and June 2023, InSight Crime recorded nine cases of arrests or dismantling of networks dedicated to illegally extracting gasoline in the states of Yaracuy, Carabobo, Lara, Zulia, and Mérida.

While authorities have indicated that there are various gangs dedicated to tapping pipelines, they have not provided any further information about the groups.
The Cancer of Corruption

“The biggest blow to the oil industry," according to former PDVSA director José Toro Hardy, "centers around corruption."

Corruption began in earnest when then-President Hugo Chávez nationalized of country’s oil production in the early 2000s. A lack of transparency around the oil industry was one of the aspects that characterized Chávez’s economic management, according to Andrés Rojas Jiménez, a Venezuelan journalist and editor of the oil and energy-focused publication Petroguía. The practice, he said, was continued by Chávez’s successor, current President Nicolás Maduro.

SEE ALSO: Despite Vast Oil Reserves, Venezuela Smuggling Gasoline From Colombia, Brazil

Due to the absence of reports, embezzlement went undetected for years. One of the first scandals uncovered involved Rafael Ramírez, a close contact of Chávez who was accused by the Venezuelan National Assembly in 2016 of embezzling some $11 billion while he served as oil minister and president of PDVSA between 2004 and 2014.

Ramírez fled the country. His successors, the former Oil Minister Eulogio Del Pino and former PDVSA President Nelson Martínez, were both accused of corruption, among other charges, by the Venezuelan Attorney General in 2017. Martínez died in prison in 2018 while awaiting trial. Del Pino remains in pretrial detention.

In March 2023, another operation led to the arrest of civilians and soldiers who held management positions at PDVSA for participating in a corruption scheme. The event led to the resignation of Tareck El Aissami, former Oil Minister and one of the key political figures in the country.

According to the Venezuelan Attorney General's Office, these officials arranged shipments of oil to foreign businessmen who were then in charge of selling it. But upon payment, the PDVSA was shortchanged, with a significant portion diverted to the accounts of these officials.

While authorities have not specified the amount that PDVSA lost as a result of this scheme, unofficial estimates put the figure at around $21 billion.

Corrupt officials have allowed criminal gangs to dismantle PDVSA oil facilities and sell the stolen parts for scrap metal, further impeding the recovery of the industry, according to complaints from the Venezuelan Attorney General's Office.
Extortion Industry

Extortion is another issue. As a result of the pandemic and de facto dollarization, which has made the US dollar the desired currency, extortion has become one of the main criminal economies in Venezuela.

In February, a man was detained by officials from Venezuela's criminal investigative unit (Cuerpo de Investigaciones Científicas, Penales y Criminalísticas - CICPC) in the state of Anzoátegui for his alleged involvement in extorting companies subcontracted by PDVSA. A year earlier, the Attorney General's Office reported the dismantling of a gang that extorted oil companies in the same region.

These extortion cases hinder the recovery process for the Venezuelan oil industry if they scare off investments from international oil companies concerned about security.

The key to reducing these criminal threats, Jiménez told InSight Crime, is ending the sanctions on Venezuela, which would lead to an improvement in electricity infrastructure and staff remuneration, as well as greater security in the oil fields.

“Crime is a consequence of distortions in other areas,” Jiménez said. “As long as you have distortions in other areas, crime will inevitably have it too.”

Calgary is preparing for an even bigger flood than 2013

Connor O'Donovan

Video Journalist
Published on Jun. 26, 2023,


To help predict how such severe events might play out, the city of Calgary has developed a complex modelling system harnessing not only sophisticated weather forecasting but also urban geographic information and historic flood data.

There’s a lot motivating hydrologist Frank Frigo to help prepare Calgary for a 1,000-year flood.

If floodwaters were again to rise to dangerous levels on the Bow and Elbow rivers, perhaps 10 feet or more higher than they rose a decade ago, damage would likely exceed the estimated $6 billion cost of the 2013 floods.

More critical infrastructure, like water and communications lines, would be compromised, with river flows surging to rates never before recorded in modern times. In 2013, when floods reached "100-year" levels on the Bow and "200-year" levels on the Elbow, those rivers flowed as high as 12 times their regular rates. During a "1000-year event," (these terms are used both to describe the likelihood and intensity of a flood), the flow would be even greater.

More private and public property would certainly be lost, with the unimaginable power of water rushing as fast as six metres a second, reshaping the land and environment in more dramatic ways.

And, most significantly for Frigo and everyone who plans for emergencies in the city of Calgary, the danger to human safety would be even greater than the historic floods that took five lives in 2013.

"Average flows in the Bow and Elbow rivers are about two metres deep in the summer," Frigo says.

"When we have events of about one-in-20-year likelihood, that level goes up by about four metres. One-in-100 is about a metre, metre-and-a-half higher than that, so six could become 7.5 metres. A one-in-200 is another metre higher than that, then one-in-1000 gets up to another 2 metres higher above even that."

WATCH:

 Why Alberta's 2013 flooding was so intense

 Before Fort McMurray's wildfire, Alberta's costliest disaster was 2013 flooding

While a "1000-year" flood, with levels more than three metres higher than in 2013, may sound unlikely, there is a (very) small chance that it could happen every year. 

As mentioned, the hydrological term describes the likelihood of a flood of a certain level occurring in a certain place in any given year. A "100-year" flood, for example, has a one per cent chance of occurring in a given year.

So, while a "100-year," 500-year," or "1,000-year" event has an increasingly smaller likelihood of occurring, there is still a chance it could happen next year, the year after, or in any year during the coming decades.

That’s why Frigo and the city of Calgary are preparing for the worst now. 

"2013 is not the most severe flood on record. In both 1879 and 1897, there were large events on the Bow that we know from anecdotal evidence exceeded what we saw in 2013," says Frigo

"They were greater than that 100 to 200-year level. They clock in at between 350- and 500-year levels. Then, through paleohydrology work, we’ve been able to project all the way back to the 1500s, and we can see periods that were dryer and much wetter than anything we’ve seen recently."

In 2013, extreme rainfall totaled above 200 mm in areas around Calgary and as high as 325 mm in the hardest-hit areas in a matter of days. While a higher-than-average alpine snowpack and the region’s steeply descending, saturated watershed played a role, Frigo says the weather was the biggest culprit behind the devastating disaster.

That year, he says, a low-pressure system and a significant feed of moisture from the Pacific Ocean and Gulf of Mexico became trapped over the Rockies thanks to a high pressure ridge to the north. The skies opened, and torrential rains hammered the large river basins west of Calgary for days.

Theoretically, a similar but more intense meteorological setup pouring rain over a larger part of the basins of the Bow and Elbow rivers, which are thousands of square kilometres in size, could result in an even bigger flood. 

To help predict how such severe events might play out, the city of Calgary has developed a complex modelling system harnessing not only sophisticated weather forecasting but also urban geographic information and historic flood data. It can be used to estimate the impacts of everything from a relatively common, or "one-in-two-year" flood, all the way up to a one-in-1000-year event.

Those models are being used to guide the city’s flood management strategy.

The downtown flood Barrier in Calgary. (Connor O'Donovan/The Weather Network)

For example, new flood barriers stretch along the rivers in many Calgary communities, including in areas hit hard in 2013, like downtown Calgary and the west Eau Claire neighbourhood.

Those barriers, Frigo says, were not only designed to ensure protection from a one-in-200-year flood event, but also included an extra half-metre of height. Further, he says, their foundations were built strong enough that they can be even further expanded if needed down the road.

To mitigate risk from the Elbow River, new gates have been installed at the Glenmore Dam in Calgary, which roughly doubles the Glenmore Resevoir’s storage capacity. Meanwhile, the Springbank Off-stream Reservoir is under construction and due to become operational in 2025 with a 70.2 million cubic metres capacity.

The new gates installed on the Glenmore Dam. (Connor O'Donovan/The Weather Network)

Working together, Frigo explains, those reservoirs should be able to manage an event as large as what was seen on the Elbow in 2013

But more capacity is needed, he says, especially along the Bow. That’s why Calgary and other communities are exploring creating new upstream reservoirs, or expanding existing ones to further mitigate risk.

"It’s quite clear that the amount of storage that exists upstream of Calgary on the Bow River isn’t adequate to address a very large flood," he says.

"Both for drought resilience and flood protection, the city of Calgary and many others are interested in working with the province to look at the construction of incremental storage, a new reservoir upstream on the Bow River."

Better river monitoring technology is in place as well, along with improved emergency response strategies. Riverbanks have been rehabilitated and protected against erosion. Stormwater and sanitary system improvements have been made.

According to city estimates, the overall damage potential that existed in 2013 has been reduced by 55 per cent. When the Springbank Off-stream Reservoir is completed west of the city in 2025, that protection level will increase to 70 per cent.

This marker along the Bow River shows flood levels reached in 2013. (Connor O'Donovan/The Weather Network

So, as Frigo has pointed out, there is more work to be done.

Theoretically, he says, the "probable maximum flood" for the region would result in river flows twice as high as they reached in 2013.

"That would be in excess of a 100,000-year flood in terms of the actual likelihood. And, while theoretical, there’s nothing stopping nature from creating those types of events. An event close to the probable maximum flood actually occurred in Vanguard, Saskatchewan, in 2003." (There, nearly 350 mm of rain fell in just over eight hours.)

And, while it is decreasing mountain snowpack levels, Frigo adds that climate change is still increasing flood risk, as well, with the potential for more severe floods in addition to droughts.

That, he says, is providing even more motivation for the city’s "Swiss cheese" model of flood defences.

"All of the climate change research suggests that both on the drought side and on the flood side, we will see more extreme events," he says. "What we are expecting is that over about the next 70 or 80 years, all of the flood likelihood estimates to increase by about 20 per cent."

(Learn more about the 2013 floods in This Day in Weather History, a podcast by The Weather Network)

Header image: View of Elbow River meander belt from Forgetmenot Ridge in Kananaskis Country showing the devastation caused by the June 2013 flooding in Southern Alberta. Credit: Joe Price/Submitted.

Dolphin moms use baby talk to call to their young, recordings show

You know instantly when someone is speaking to an infant or small child. It turns out that dolphin mothers also use a kind of high-pitched baby talk.

By Christina Larson 

The Associated Press
Monday, June 26, 2023

AP / Sarasota Dolphin Research Program
In this undated photo, bottlenose dolphins swim in open waters off Sarasota Bay, Florida. Photo taken under NMFS MMPA Permit No. 20455 issued to the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program. A new study has found that female bottlenose dolphins change how they vocalize when addressing their calves.


WASHINGTON (AP) — You know instantly when someone is speaking to an infant or small child. It turns out that dolphin mothers also use a kind of high-pitched baby talk.

A study published Monday found that female bottlenose dolphins change their tone when addressing their calves. Researchers recorded the signature whistles of 19 mother dolphins in Florida, when accompanied by their young offspring and when swimming alone or with other adults.

The dolphin signature whistle is a unique and important signal — akin to calling out their own name.

“They use these whistles to keep track of each other. They’re periodically saying, ‘I’m here, I’m here’,” said study co-author Laela Sayigh, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution marine biologist in Massachusetts.

When directing the signal to their calves, the mother’s whistle pitch is higher and her pitch range is greater than usual, according to the study published in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“That was true for every one of the moms in the study, all 19 of them,“ said biologist Peter Tyack, a study co-author from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Obtaining this data was no simple feat. Over more than three decades, scientists placed special microphones multiple times on the same wild dolphin mothers in Florida’s Sarasota Bay to record their signature whistles. That included years when they had calves and when they didn’t — dolphin calves stay with their mothers for an average of three years in Sarasota, and sometimes longer. Fathers don’t play a prolonged role in parenting.

“This is unprecedented, absolutely fantastic data,” said Mauricio Cantor, an Oregon State University marine biologist who was not involved in the study. “This study is the result of so much research effort.”

Why people, dolphins or other creatures use baby talk isn’t certain, but scientists believe it may help offspring learn to pronounce novel sounds. Research dating back to the 1980s suggests that human infants may pay more attention to speech with a greater pitch range. Female rhesus monkeys may alter their calls to attract and hold offspring’s attention. And Zebra finches elevate their pitch and slow down their songs to address chicks, perhaps making it easier to learn birdsong.

For the dolphin study, the researchers focused solely on the signature call, so they don’t know if dolphins also use baby talk for other exchanges — or whether it helps their offspring learn to “talk” as it seems to do with humans.

“It would make sense if there are similar adaptations in bottlenose dolphins — a long lived, highly acoustic species,” where calves must learn to vocalize many sounds to communicate, said Frants Jensen, a behavioral ecologist at Denmark’s Aarhus University and a study co-author.

Another possible reason for using specific pitches is to catch the kids’ attention.

“It’s really important for a calf to know ‘Oh, Mom is talking to me now’ __ versus just announcing her presence to someone else,” added Janet Mann, a marine biologist at Georgetown University, who was not involved in the study.

___


Follow Christina Larson on Twitter at: @larsonchristina


___


The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

From warriors to Vogue: 106-year-old tattoo artist preserving a endangered tradition

Monday 26 June 2023 

AT 106, Whang-Od is thought to be the oldest female tattoo artist in the world.

Credit: ITV News

Perched on a cliffside, high in the Cordillera mountains is Buscalan village. Only accessible by foot, it may have remained largely cut off from the rest of the world if not for one remarkable resident.

At 2016-years-old, Whang-Od is thought to be the oldest female tattoo artist in the world.

Taught by her father, she has been heralded as the last mambabatok - a traditional Kalinga tattooist - of her generation.

Using just a bamboo stick, a thorn from a pomelo tree, water and coal, her tattoos were earned for bravery by the Indigenous male Butbut warriors.

Whang-Od appeared on the cover of Vogue back in April, making her the oldest person to ever feature on the front cover of the magazine.

Credit: ITV News

In April, she became the oldest ever Vogue cover star, propelling her to international fame and prompting to people travelling from all over the world to get a tattoo from her.

While she is no longer able to complete the more intricate markings of her Kalinga tribe, people still come to her to receive the three dots, which represent Whang-Od and her two grandnieces, that have become her new signature.

An art that can only be passed down to blood relatives, Whang-Od has been training her grandnieces Elyang Wigan and Grace Palicas for years.

Whang-Od's grandnieces have been selected as the next generation of Kalinga tribe tattooists.

Credit: ITV News

The pair now take on the bigger, more intricate tattoos that Whang-Od's failing eyesight prevent her from doing.

All of the tattoos have traditional meanings, but these days they are mostly chosen for style preference and not significance.

Her own body could be described as a work of art, telling the story of her life, work and even some former romances

.

Whang-Od's own tattoos represents stories of her life, work, and even some former romances.

Credit: ITV News

This tattooing tradition was mostly lost as Filipinos were converted to Christianity during the Spanish colonial era but it survived in more remote areas of the Philippines.

Today, it is a highly endangered tradition. The hand-tapped tattoos were earned by indigenous warriors.

And for women, the tattoos were considered an aesthetic accessory and ritualistically important. These days, the performance of rituals is altogether left out of the tattoo session, although they can be done if requested, especially upon the completion of a large, multi-day tattoo.

Megalodon body temperature ‘was about 7C warmer than surrounding water’

Megalodons are believed to have grown to lengths of 50 feet 

(Alex Boersma/PNAS/PA)

MON, 26 JUN, 2023 - 20:12
NINA MASSEY, PA SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT

The megalodon could maintain a body temperature that was about 7C warmer than the surrounding water, new research suggests.

Based on analysis of tooth enamel from the ancient shark, the findings might help explain why it went extinct 3.6 million years ago.


The temperature difference is greater than those determined for other sharks that lived alongside the megalodon, and is large enough to categorise megalodons as warm-blooded, experts say.

According to the study, the amount of energy the megalodon used to stay warm contributed to its extinction.

Lead researcher Robert Eagle, a UCLA assistant professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, said: “Studying the driving factors behind the extinction of a highly successful predatory shark like megalodon can provide insight into the vulnerability of large marine predators in modern ocean ecosystems experiencing the effects of ongoing climate change.”Maintaining an energy level that would allow for megalodon’s elevated body temperature would require a voracious appetite that may not have been sustainable in a time of changing marine ecosystem balances

Megalodons, which are thought to have reached lengths up to 50 feet, belonged to a group of sharks called mackerel sharks.

Today members of that group include the great white and thresher shark.

While most fish are cold-blooded, with body temperatures that are the same as the surrounding water, mackerel sharks keep the temperature of all or parts of their bodies somewhat warmer than the water around them.

The heat generated by their muscles is stored by sharks, making them different from fully warm-blooded or endothermic animals like mammals.

In mammals, a region of the brain called the hypothalamus regulates body temperature.

In the new study, the scientists looked for answers in the megalodon’s most abundant fossil remains: its teeth.

A megalodon tooth (right) dwarfs one from a white shark (Harry Maisch/Florida Gulf Coast University/PA)

A main component of teeth is a mineral called apatite, which contains atoms of carbon and oxygen.

The composition of fossil teeth can reveal insights about where an animal lived and the types of food it ate, and — for marine vertebrates — information like the chemistry of the seawater where it lived and its body temperature.

Randy Flores, a UCLA doctoral student and fellow of the Centre for Diverse Leadership in Science, who worked on the study, said: “Because teeth form in the tissue of an animal when it’s alive, we can measure the isotopic composition of fossil teeth in order to estimate the temperature at which they formed and that tells us the approximate body temperature of the animal in life.”

The megalodon’s warmer body allowed it to move faster, tolerate colder water and spread out around the world.

However, this ability may also have been its downfall.

Mr Flores said: “Maintaining an energy level that would allow for megalodon’s elevated body temperature would require a voracious appetite that may not have been sustainable in a time of changing marine ecosystem balances when it may have even had to compete against newcomers such as the great white shark.”

The findings are published in the Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences journal.

YOUR EDITOR
IN MEGLADON MOUTH

Preserving the LGBTQ Legacy of One of America’s Most Historic Homes

Boston’s Longfellow House was a 19th-century refuge.

BY ANYA GRUBER

JUNE 26, 2023

Longfellow House is a stately manor on Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, owned by the literary family for nearly 130 years. It was also used as a headquarters by George Washington during the Revolutionary War.

 AP CORTIZASJR/GETTY IMAGES

In This Story
Longfellow House

THINK OF HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW—what comes to mind? High school English class? If you’re a fan, maybe “Paul Revere’s Ride” or “A Psalm of Life”? Beyond being one of America’s most famous poets, the twice-married Longfellow, who died in 1882, also holds an iconic and unlikely place in queer history.

Steps away from Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is Longfellow House, a stately Georgian home owned by his family (and eventually a trust they established) from 1843 to 1972. It was a home, but also a gathering place for artists and thinkers, and something more. Its archives contain a trove of documents about LGBTQ+ history. Several members of the Longfellow family, including the poet’s brother, daughter, and grandson, were, as park ranger Kate Potter puts it, “not straight.” Luckily for historians, they all left behind records of their lives in the form of letters, diaries, journals, articles, and photographs.

In more than 150 boxes of historical documents, modern scholars are uncovering the queer stories of 19th-century Boston’s intellectual and artistic high society.

The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his study. 

THE STORIES OF LGBTQ+ PEOPLE are not always easy to find. Modern historians usually learn about past lives through material they leave behind, such as letters and diaries. That’s only for people in certain places and times, of a certain education and social class, and within them, language about sexuality was often coded for safety. “We never know what conversations people had across the breakfast table or going for a stroll around the garden,” Potter says.

The butter-yellow Longfellow House, which also served as George Washington’s Boston headquarters during the American Revolution, is surrounded by formal plantings of roses and a neatly manicured lawn for those strolls. Inside, the house is filled with oil paintings, brocade and velvet textiles, dark wood bookshelves with piles of old books. A visit—in 1972 the house was donated by the Longfellow House Trust to the National Park Service, which offers a variety of tours—is a feast of sumptuous artifacts that immediately recall the upper-class history of the home.

Arguably some of the most valuable objects in the Longfellow House are decidedly less lavish: the hundreds of journals of meticulously preserved sheets of paper and journals in the archives. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s well-educated and politically active grandson, Henry “Harry” Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, served as his family’s de facto archivist (when he wasn’t busy being a socialist or losing his teaching job at Columbia due to his pacifist political views). Thanks to Dana’s work preserving his family’s letters and journals, archivist Kate Hanson Plass has uncovered glimpses into the LGBTQ+ culture of historic Boston.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, who went by Harry, in a sitting room in the house around 1904.

Take the poet’s youngest brother, Samuel, for example, a Unitarian pastor who died in 1892. “There are a few journals that contain pretty clear descriptions of same-gender attraction in Samuel Longfellow’s papers,” says Plass. “In his college-age journals, he writes very clearly about being attracted to and loving fellow students … of course, the all-male Harvard students.”

Alice Longfellow, the poet’s daughter, is known to have had a decades-long intimate relationship with a woman named Fanny Stone. An 1884 letter from Stone to Longfellow describes the emotional loss of a beloved piece of jewelry. “Fanny writes to Alice, ‘I have been wearing this bracelet that you gave me, and it never left my wrist. But I was on a bridge over the Potomac, and I took my glove off, and the bracelet went flying into the river,’” says Plass. Stone wrote that she felt like a widow when she lost the bracelet. “It’s really hard to argue that that is a platonic relationship,” Plass says.

In addition to his tireless work to preserve his family’s history, Dana’s own journals describe his attraction to other men. “In his lifetime, 1881 to 1950, [Dana] was relatively open about being gay,” says Plass. “There is clear evidence in the papers that he had intimate encounters with men.” Plass notes that there is active research on Dana’s papers, with a focus on his time in New York City. “The men that he’s interacting with in New York are not from this elite Boston Brahmin society,” says Plass. “He’s going to New York and he’s picking up mainly younger men, men with immigrant backgrounds.… We have an opportunity to dive into a little bit of that story and learn more about who they were as individuals.”

Fanny Stone and Alice Longfellow, who shared a long-term intimate relationship, at Squam Lake in Maine, about 1900.

IN THEIR TOURS, THE PARK rangers describe scenes of lively social gatherings in Longfellow’s living room, no doubt characterized by political and literary conversations. In addition to members of their own family, the Longfellows hosted and befriended prominent figures from Cambridge and beyond, including some known members of the LGBTQ+ community. For example, in January 1882, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had Oscar Wilde over for breakfast. According to Potter, the two men had their disagreements when it came to literature, but “from what I understand at that meeting, they both left it thinking, ‘Gosh, that was much more pleasant than I was expecting it to be.’”

Novelist and friend of Alice Longfellow Sarah Orne Jewett was another regular visitor to the home and lived in a “Boston Marriage” to poet Annie Fields. A Boston Marriage refers to two wealthy women cohabitating without men. Some, such as Jewett and Fields’s, are thought to have been romantic. Jewett’s South Berwick, Maine, home is a Historic New England property, maintained by historians dedicated to illuminating the love between the two women. “Annie is mentioned in every room in the house. They talk about Sarah and her sexuality quite a bit,” says Potter. “They talk about Sarah’s journal, and how from a very young age she did not write about any crushes on young men. She wrote a lot about her feelings for other young women.”

American author Sarah Orne Jewett, a friend of Alice Longfellow who was likely also in a long-term relationship with another woman, poet Anne Fields, in front of her home in South Berwick, Maine. 

SARAH ORNE JEWETT COMPOSITIONS AND OTHER PAPERS, 1847-1909 (MS AM 1743.26 (16), HOUGHTON LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

WHEN TALKING ABOUT THE LIVED experiences of historical figures, Plass and Potter note that it can be tricky to apply modern labels to people in the past. “We don’t know how these people would have labeled themselves,” says Potter. “It might have been, ‘I have these feelings, but I don’t know where they come from or what that means about me.’”

Potter points out, however, that modern language helps us better understand the past. “Language is always evolving. It’s very much about looking back, but it is also about looking forward and seeing where we are right now in 2023,” says Potter. “I mean, who knows what it’s going to be like doing this in 2024 or 2033?”
“We cannot tell the queer history of the 19th century.”

The ranger and archivist also recognize the uniqueness of these archives and are quick to point out that the experiences of individuals associated with the Longfellow family do not necessarily reflect the experience of queer people broadly in the 19th and 20th centuries. “We have this very specific story at our site,” says Potter. “All the people associated with our site are white, and so far as we can tell, cis, and very privileged.

“We cannot tell the queer history of the 19th century.”

Though the subjects are a privileged few, there is still power in the stories. “There have always been queer people and certainly there have always been activists and there have always been people just quietly living their lives and existing in social units with their special someone,” says Potter. “Whoever that someone was.

“Queer people, or non-straight people, have always existed. There are certainly painful stories of people feeling isolated, but there are also these moments of connection where people found common ground.”

PHOTO'S

COURTESY NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, LONGFELLOW HOUSE-WASHINGTON’S HEADQUARTERS NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE; ARCHIVES NUMBER 3008/002.009-#006

Shell oil pipeline spill fouls farms, river in Niger Delta

It is "one of the worst in the last 16 years in Ogoniland"


Associated Press In this grab taken from video, oil from a spill pollutes the Okuku river, in Ogoniland, Nigeria, June 16, 2023.

PUBLISHED: June 26, 2023 
By Taiwo Adebayo | Associated Press

ABUJA, Nigeria — A new oil spill at a Shell facility in Nigeria has contaminated farmland and a river, upending livelihoods in the fishing and farming communities in part of the Niger Delta, which has long endured environmental pollution caused by the oil industry.

The National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency, or NOSDRA, told The Associated Press that the spill came from the Trans-Niger Pipeline operated by Shell that crosses through communities in the Eleme area of Ogoniland, a region where the London-based energy giant has faced decadeslong local pushback to its oil exploration.

The volume of oil spilled has not been determined, but activists have published images of polluted farmland, water surfaces blighted by oil sheens and dead fish mired in sticky crude.

While spills are frequent in the region due to vandalism from oil thieves and a lack of maintenance to pipelines, according to the U.N. Environmental Program, activists call this a “major one.”

It is “one of the worst in the last 16 years in Ogoniland,” said Fyneface Dumnamene, an environmental activist whose nonproft monitors spills in the Delta region. It began June 11.

“It lasted for over a week, bursts into Okulu River — which adjoins other rivers and ultimately empties into the Atlantic Ocean — and affects several communities and displaces more than 300 fishers,” said Dumnamene of the Youths and Environmental Advocacy Centre.

He said tides have sent oil sheens about 10 kilometers (6 miles) further to creeks near the nation’s oil business capital, Port Harcourt.

Shell stopped production in Ogoniland more than 20 years ago amid deadly unrest from residents protesting environmental damage, but the Trans-Niger Pipeline still sends crude from oil fields in other areas through the region’s communities to export terminals.

The leak has been contained, but treating the fallout from the spill at farms and the Okulu River, which runs through communities, has stalled, NOSDRA Director General Idris Musa said.

“Response has been delayed,” Musa said, blaming protesting residents. “But engagement is going on.”

The apparent deadlock stems from mistrust and past grievances in the riverine and oil-abundant Niger Delta region, which is mostly home to minority ethnic groups who accuse the Nigerian government of marginalization.

Africa’s largest economy overwhelmingly depends on the Niger Delta’s oil resources for its earnings, but pollution from that production has denied residents access to clean water, hurt farming and fishing, and heightened the risk of violence, activists say.

The communities “are very angry because of the destruction of their livelihoods resulting from the obsoleteness of Shell’s equipment and are concerned the regulator and Shell will blame sabotage by the residents,” Dumnamene said.

Often oil companies blame pipeline vandalism by oil thieves or aggrieved young people in affected communities for spills, which could allow the companies to avoid liability.

London-based Shell said it is working with a joint investigatory team, consisting of regulators, Ogoniland residents and local authorities, to identify the cause and impact of the spill.

Shell’s response team “has been activated, subject to safety requirements, to mobilize to the site to take actions that may be necessary for the safety of environment, people and equipment,” a company statement said.

NOSDRA confirmed the joint investigation, but a cause of the spill — whether sabotage or equipment failure — has not yet been revealed.

Hundreds of farmers and fishermen who have been cut off from their livelihoods would insist on restoration of the environment and then compensation, Dumnamene said.

At the request of the Nigerian government, the U.N. Environment Program conducted an independent environmental assessment of Ogoniland, releasing a report in 2011 that criticized Shell and the Nigerian government for 50 years of pollution and recommended a comprehensive, billion-dollar cleanup.

While, the government announced the cleanup in 2016, there is little evidence of restoration on the ground. The government says community protests and lawsuits by local activists have hampered progress.

“A credible cleanup would have been a beacon of hope for the Niger Delta and other areas in Africa that have suffered oil pollution, but no credible cleanup is ongoing,” said Ledum Mitee, a veteran Ogoni environmental activist and former president of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People. “It is a cover-up, and we do not see the impact.”


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California's law aimed at fast food wages is on hold. Lawmakers may have found a way around it

By ADAM BEAM

 Associated Press
JUNE 26, 2023 

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A new California law aimed in part at boosting salaries for fast food workers has been delayed for nearly two years following industry resistance. Now the Democrats who control the state Legislature might have figured out how to raise worker pay anyway.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the law last year. It created a 10-member council with the authority, among other things, to increase the state's $15.50 minimum wage to a maximum of $22 per hour for some fast food workers. Some experts quickly hailed the law as one of the ''most significant pieces of employment legislation passed in a generation.''

But unlike in most states, California voters have the power to overturn some laws passed by the Legislature. Business groups who opposed the law gathered enough signatures to qualify a referendum in 2024. In the meantime, the law does not take effect.

Business groups were confident the law would ultimately be blocked at the ballot box. But tucked inside California's more than $300-billion operating budget is a provision to resurrect a long-dormant regulatory commission that would have powers similar to that of the fast food council.

The Industrial Welfare Commission regulates wages, hours and working conditions in California. It has been dormant for most of this century. The Democratic-controlled Legislature stripped its funding in 2004 when Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor, making it more difficult for the Republican to influence the state's wage regulations. The commission has not issued any orders since.

California's budget, scheduled to be voted on this week, includes $3 million to bring that commission back to life. The commission has the power to investigate wages paid across various employment sectors. If it finds wages are ''inadequate to supply the cost of proper living,'' it can convene industry-specific wage boards to gather findings and make recommendations. The commission can then issue orders specific to wages, hours and working conditions.

The funding would come with conditions. It would require the commission to prioritize industries in which more than 10% of workers are at or below the federal poverty level, a definition that includes California's fast food workers, according to the University of California-Berkeley Center for labor Research and Education.

It also ordered the commission to complete its work by the end of October 2024, days before voters are scheduled to vote on whether to uphold the fast food law. And because that funding is part of a budget bill, it could not be blocked by voters.

Matt Haller, president of the International Franchise Association, said he sees that as a clear attempt by the Legislature to bypass the industry's efforts to block the law creating the fast food council.

''We're concerned about any attempt to create some Frankenstein version'' of that law, Haller said, noting that more than a million California voters signed a petition to block it. ''It speaks to (labor unions') desire to create political control over our business model.''

State Sen. Maria Elena Durazo, a Democrat from Los Angeles and chair of the budget subcommittee responsible for labor issues, said lawmakers were not targeting the fast food industry by restoring the commission's funding. She said lawmakers were seeking to improve conditions for all California workers. More than a third of California's residents don't make enough money to meet their basic needs, according to a report from the United Ways of California.

''The fast food industry is one of the industries with the problem, but it's not the only industry,'' Durazo said, adding that the commission ''should always be looking at what the wages (are) of workers."

''There comes a time when they should step up and do something about it and we're just giving them the funding to address it because it's a much bigger problem,'' she said.

The Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, had sponsored the fast food law last year. David Huerta, president of SEIU California and SEIU-United Service Workers West, did not comment on whether the union has pursued the funding as a way to accomplish the goals of the fast food law. But he said the funding is part of ''workers in low-wage industries ... rising up to demand the wages they need to provide for their families.''

''SEIU members thank Governor Newsom and legislators for listening to workers and taking the bold action needed to make progress against a growing tide of inequality and poverty experienced by low-wage workers and people of color,'' Huerta said.

California's new fiscal year begins Saturday. Newsom and legislative leaders on Tuesday were still negotiating a new operating budget. But both sides had tentatively agreed on restoring funding for the Industrial Welfare Commission, language that was inserted into a budget bill over the weekend. Newsom's office declined to comment Monday on restoring funding for the commission.

The Industrial Welfare Commission has continued to exist despite not having any money to operate. It has 17 wage orders that are still in effect, including setting a minimum wage and other factors for the manufacturing, agricultural and housekeeping sectors, according to a legislative analysis.

If signed into law, the Industrial Welfare Commission could have impacts beyond the fast food industry. Several business groups have come out against it, including the California Chamber of Commerce, the California Retailers' Association, the California Manufacturers and Technology Association, the California Restaurant Association and the California Building Industry Association.

Those groups particularly don't like that the the Legislature would limit the Industrial Welfare Commission from issuing ''any standards that are less protective than existing state law.''

''This limitation will only create unnecessary confusion,'' the business groups said in a statement.

What lies ahead for OceanGate? Company closes headquarters indefinitely as officials determine if criminal probe needed

BySumanti Sen

Jun 27, 2023 

Officials investigating the Titan will reportedly examine voice recordings and 

other data from its mothership Polar Prince to determine what happened

An underwater robot is now combing the floor for debris from the catastrophic implosion of the submersible that resulted in the deaths of five passengers. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada is launching an investigation into the implosion. The National Transportation Safety Board has also said that the US Coast Guard will lead the investigation into the incident.This comes as the company that operated the Titan, OceanGate, has closed its headquarters in Everett, Washington State. The leasing agent said the company would be closing indefinitely, according to The Seattle Times. OceanGate’s CEO Stockton Rush was killed in the latest tragedy along with British billionaire Hamish Harding, French diver Paul Henry Nargeolet, and Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.

Meanwhile, it was revealed that officials investigating the Titan will reportedly examine voice recordings and other data from its mothership Polar Prince to determine what happened during the voyage. They will also try to determine if the incident occurred criminally.

The submersible began its journey on Sunday morning, June 18. About one hour and 45 minutes into its descent, the vessel lost contact with the Polar Prince, the support ship that transported it to the site.

Investigators with the Transportation Safety Board of Canada visited the Polar Prince on Saturday, June 24, “to collect information from the vessel’s voyage data recorder and other vessel systems that contain useful information,” TSB Chairwoman Kathy Fox told CNN. She stressed that the aim of the investigation was not to blame anyone but that voice recordings “could be useful in our investigation.”

Royal Canadian Mounted Police Superintendent Kent Osmond has announced that authorities are trying to determine if the case deserves a criminal investigation. “Such an investigation will proceed only if our examination of the circumstances indicate criminal, federal or provincial laws may possibly have been broken,” he said, according to New York Post.

White House condemns harassment of reporter who questioned Modi

• Axios

Wall Street Journal reporter Sabrina Siddiqui asks a question to during a joint press conference with President Biden and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the White House on June 22. Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Biden administration officials on Monday denounced online harassment against a Wall Street Journal reporter who asked Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi about his government's human rights record at the White House last week.

Driving the news: Sabrina Siddiqui has been subject to "intense online harassment from people inside India," some of them politicians associated with Modi's government, and is being targeted because of her Muslim faith, another reporter said during a White House press briefing Monday.

What they're saying: National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said in response that the White House is aware of the reports of harassment and called it "unacceptable."

• "We absolutely condemn any harassment of journalists anywhere under any circumstances," Kirby said. "It's antithetical to the very principles of democracy that ... were on display last week during the state visit."
• White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre added: "Here, at the White House, under this administration, we're committed to the freedom of the press, which is why we had the press conference last week."
• She added that White House officials "certainly condemn any efforts of intimidation or harassment of a journalist or any journalist that is just trying to do their job."

Context: Siddiqui said to Modi during a press conference on Thursday alongside President Biden that "there are many human rights groups who say your government has discriminated against religious minorities and sought to silence its critics."

• She then asked: "What steps are you and your government willing to take to improve the rights of Muslims and other minorities in your country and uphold free speech?"

• Modi responded through a translator, saying: "In India’s democratic values, there is absolutely no discrimination, neither on basis of caste, creed, or age or any kind of geographic location," per NBC News.
• "Indeed, India is a democracy. And as President Biden also mentioned, India and America both countries, democracy is in our DNA. The democracy is our spirit. Democracy runs in our veins. We live democracy,” he added," Modi added.

Go deeper: Modi touts democracy, denies discrimination in rare press conference