Saturday 4 July 2020

NESTLÉ WATERS LEAVING CANADA IS A COMMUNITY SUCCESS

Vi Bui, July 3, 2020
https://canadians.org/analysis/nestle-waters-leaving-canada-community-success

Bloomberg photo added by CiC

This afternoon, Nestlé Canada Inc. announced it will leave the Canadian bottled water market and sell its bottled water brand, Nestlé Pure Life, to Ice River Springs. This is a significant win for communities across Canada, and everyone who has been fighting the bottled water giant.

“Community groups, First Nations, residents across the country and Council of Canadian supporters have persistently challenged Nestlé’s water takings in Wellington County, Ontario and Hope, British Columbia. This is their victory against the multi-national giant,” says Vi Bui, water campaigner with the Council of Canadians.

Nestlé has been making profit by pumping groundwater all over the world. Over the years, Nestlé has taken billions of litres of pure, clean and vital water from underground aquifers in Canada and sold them for huge profit. Meanwhile, communities are struggling with severe droughts, dwindling water supply for community uses, and plastic bottles clogging up our landfills and waterways.

The Council of Canadians’ supporters and chapters joined with community groups on the ground to mobilize opposition and deny Nestlé’s many attempts to expand its operations, push for a moratorium on water taking permits, and boycott Nestlé products. Today’s announcement follows a decline in the volume of water Nestlé extracts and bottles, thanks to the groundswell of community opposition, public education and our national Boycott Nestlé campaign.

We know that Nestlé’s departure will not end water takings in Canada, and our work continues to oppose any commodification of water for profit, whether by a multi-national corporation or a Canadian-owned one.

Today, we want to say thank you to all our chapters, members, donors and supporters across the country. Your collective activism makes people-powered progress like this possible. Tomorrow, we will continue to build on that grassroots power to keep water protected as a shared commons for current and future generations.


Recommend this post and follow TCW

‘Day of Rage’ protesters in Boston chant anti-Israel, pro-Hamas slogans, call for intifada

“This wasn’t about changing American police policies, but about coarsening and brutalizing the discourse around Israel and Jews through the exploitation of black suffering,” said Dexter Van Zile, an analyst at CAMERA.

Sixty arrested in Seattle as protesters feud with police after demise of CHOP


















Universities Sowing the Seeds of Their Own Obsolescence













When mobs tore down a statue of Ulysses S. Grant and defaced a monument to African-American veterans of the Civil War, many people wondered whether the protesters had ever learned anything in high school or college.

Did any of these iconoclasts know the difference between Grant and Robert E. Lee? Could they recognize the name “Gettysburg”? Could they even identify the decade in which the Civil War was fought?

Universities are certainly teaching our youth to be confident, loud, and self-righteous. But the media blitz during these last several weeks of protests, riots, and looting also revealed a generation that is poorly educated and yet petulant and self-assured without justification.

Many of the young people on the televised front lines of the protests are in their 20s. But most appear juvenile, at least in comparison to their grandparents — survivors of the Great Depression and World War II.

How can so many so sheltered and prolonged adolescents claim to be all-knowing?

Ask questions like these, and the answers ultimately lead back to the university.

Millions of those who graduate from college or drop out do so in arrears. There is some $1.5 trillion in aggregate student debt in the U.S. Such burdens sometimes delay marriage. They discourage child-rearing. They make home ownership hard — along with all the other experiences we associate with the transition to adulthood.

The universities, some with multibillion-dollar endowments, will accept no moral responsibility.

They are not overly worried that many of their indebted graduates discover their majors don’t translate into well-paid jobs or guarantee employers that grads can write, speak, or think cogently.

One unintended consequence of the chaotic response to the COVID-19 epidemic and the violence that followed the police killing of George Floyd is a growing re-examination of the circumstances that birthed the mass protests.


There would be far less college debt if higher education, rather than the federal government, guaranteed its own students’ loans. If universities backed loans with their endowments and infrastructure, college presidents could be slashing costs. They would ensure that graduates were more likely to get good-paying jobs thanks to rigorous coursework and faculty accountability.

Taxpayers who are hectored about their supposed racism, homophobia, and sexism don’t enjoy such finger-wagging from loud, sheltered, 20-something moralists. Perhaps taxpayers will no longer have to subsidize the abuse if higher education is deemed to be a politicized institution and thus its endowment income ruled to be fully taxable.

If socialism has become a campus creed, maybe Ivy League schools can be hit with an annual “wealth tax” on their massive endowments in order to redistribute revenue to poorer colleges.

It is hard to square the circle of angry graduates having no jobs with their unaccountable professors who so poorly trained students while enjoying lifelong tenure. Why does academia guarantee lifetime employment to those who cannot guarantee that a graduate gets a decent job?

The epidemic and lockdown required distance learning, but at full price. The idea that universities can still charge regular rates when students are forced to stay home is not just an unsustainable practice, but veritable suicide. If one can supposedly learn well enough from downloads, Zoom talks, and Skype lectures, then why pay $50,000 or more for that service from your basement?

Universities are renaming buildings and encouraging statue removal and cancel culture. But they assume they will always have a red line to the frenzied trajectory of the mob they helped birth. If the slaveholder and the robber baron from the distant past deserve no statue, no eponymous hallway or plaza, then why should the names Yale and Stanford be exempt from the frenzied name-changing and iconoclasm? Are they seen as billion-dollar brands, akin to Windex or Coke, that stamp their investor students as elite “winners”?

The current chaos has posed existential questions of fairness and transparency that the university cannot answer because to do so would reveal utter hypocrisy.

Instead, the university’s defense has been to virtue-signal left-wing social activism to hide or protect its traditional self-interested mode of profitable business for everyone — staff, faculty, administration, contractors — except the students who borrow to pay for a lot of it.

How strange that higher education’s monotonous embrace of virtue signaling, political proselytizing, and loud social-justice activism is now sowing the seeds of its own obsolescence and replacement.

If being “woke” means that the broke and unemployed are graduating to ignorantly smashing statues, denying free speech to others, and institutionalizing cancel culture, then the public would rather pass on what spawned all of that in the first place.
 
Taxpayers do not yet know what to replace the university with — wholly online courses and lectures, apolitical new campuses, or broad-based vocational education — only that a once hallowed institution is becoming McCarthyite, malignant, and, in the end, just a bad deal.

© 2020 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Friday 3 July 2020

Black And Palestinian Issues Have Nothing In Common

'Catastrophic' elephant deaths mystery: Hundreds have dropped dead in Botswana, and no one knows why

The deaths have sparked concerns potential health impact on people living in area

By James Rogers | Fox News 

Published Last Update 1 hour ago

www.foxnews.com/science/elephant-deaths-mystery-hundreds-have-dropped-dead-in-botswana

 

 

 

Hundreds of elephants have mysteriously dropped dead in Botswana, leaving wildlife experts and government officials searching for answers.
Dr. Niall McCann, director of conservation at U.K.-based charity National Park Rescue, told the BBC that since the start of May, colleagues in Botswana had spotted over 350 elephant carcasses in the country’s Okavango Delta.
Heartbreaking aerial photos show the dead elephants dotted around the Botswanan landscape. The mysterious deaths have also sparked concerns about the potential health impact on people living in the local area.
Aerial photographs show the elephant carcasses dotted across the landscape.
Aerial photographs show the elephant carcasses dotted across the landscape. (Supplied)
“A catastrophic die-off of elephants is happing in northern Botswana, and no one knows why. It’s vital that a team of independent experts visit and sample the carcasses before any more elephants die, or this spills over into the local human population,” McCann tweeted Wednesday.
Government officials in Botswana say there is no evidence that poaching is involved in the mysterious elephant deaths.
McCann told the Guardian that elephants have been seen walking around in circles, which might indicate a neurological condition that is afflicting them. The biologist told the Guardian that some of the elephants have fallen straight on their faces, suggesting that they died quickly. Others, however, are dying more slowly.
An unknown pathogen or poisoning are two possibilities, according to the Guardian, which says that Anthrax has been ruled out.
The mysterious elephant deaths in Botswana have baffled wildlife experts and officials. (Supplied)
The mysterious elephant deaths in Botswana have baffled wildlife experts and officials. (Supplied)
Phys.org reports that last year, more than 100 elephants in Botswana died in a suspected outbreak of natural Anthrax. Subsequent investigations reported than elephants died from Anthrax while others were victims of drought, according to Phys.org.
The Guardian reports that cyanide poisoning, which is sometimes used by poachers, seems an unlikely cause of the latest die-off given that the dead bodies of scavengers, such as vultures, have not been seen near the elephant carcasses.
Fox News has reached out to Dr. McCann and National Park Rescue on this story.
The mass elephant die-off has been described as "catastrophic."
The mass elephant die-off has been described as "catastrophic." (Supplied)
In a statement released on July 2, the Botswanan government said that investigations into the unexplained deaths are ongoing.
“Following the mysterious deaths of elephants in the areas around Seronga since March 2020, to date, 275 elephant carcasses have been verified against the 365 reported cases,” it said. “Three laboratories in Zimbabwe, South Africa and Canada have been identified to process the samples taken from the dead elephants which will be interpreted against field veterinary assessments of clinically ill and dead elephants.”
Seronga is a village located near the start of the Okavango Delta.
“Members of the public are assured that tusks are being removed from the dead elephants and carcasses within proximity to human settlements continue to be destroyed,” added the Botswana government in its statement.
The African elephant is classified as “vulnerable” on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List.
Close-up of a juvenile African elephant (Loxodonta africana) in the Jao concession, Wildlife, Okavango Delta in Botswana - 2019/12/11 - file photo.
Close-up of a juvenile African elephant (Loxodonta africana) in the Jao concession, Wildlife, Okavango Delta in Botswana - 2019/12/11 - file photo. (Photo by Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Last year, more than 500 vultures in Botswana were poisoned after elephant carcasses were laced with chemicals.
Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers

Thursday 2 July 2020

A dog year isn't seven human years, scientists find, and pets might be 'older' than you think

https://www.yahoo.com/news/dog-isnt-seven-human-years-133632811.html

A commonly held belief among dog owners is that if they want to know how old their pet is, they simply have to times its age by seven.
Then, it can be decided whether man's best friend is acting up because it is a naughty teenager - or simply due to poor training.
However, new research has found that this method is not based on science, and our pooches may be far 'older' than previously believed.
As people, and animals, age, the number and placement of methyl groups in the genome change. By mapping these, scientists can tell the age of an organism.
The researchers from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine used blood samples from 105 Labrador retrievers to accurately work out how quickly the breed ages.
The study, published in Cell Systems, found the comparison is not a 1:7 ratio over time. Especially when dogs are young, they age rapidly compared to humans. A one-year-old dog is similar to a 30-year-old human. A four-year-old dog is similar to a 52-year-old human. Then by seven years old, dog aging slows, and a 12-year-old dog is 70 in human years.
"This makes sense when you think about it - after all, a nine-month-old dog can have puppies, so we already knew that the 1:7 ratio wasn't an accurate measure of age," said senior author Dr Trey Ideker, professor at UC San Diego School of Medicine.
Scientists say this new comparison between dog ageing and human could be helpful for vets, so they can work out whether illnesses in dogs are age-related.
The formula provides a new "epigenetic clock," a method for determining the age of a cell, tissue or organism based on a readout of its epigenetics, which are chemical modifications like methylation, which influence which genes are "off" or "on" without altering the inherited genetic code.
Previous studies have found epigenetic clocks for humans, but these don't translate to other species and may not even be the same for other humans.
One limitation of this clock is they only used blood from Labradors, and different breeds are known to live for different amounts of time. Dr Ideker plans to test more breeds, but said that since it's accurate for humans and mice as well as Labrador retrievers, he predicts the clock will apply to all dog breeds.
"I have a six-year-old dog -- she still runs with me, but I'm now realising that she's not as 'young' as I thought she was," Dr Ideker added.
He said dogs are interesting to study because they live so closely with us, perhaps more than any other animal, so a dog's environmental and chemical exposures are very similar to humans, and they receive nearly the same levels of health care.
The research could be useful for humans, not just their pets. The scientists believe the epigenetic clock could be used to test anti-ageing treatments, to see if they had made any difference to the methylation patterns in the genome and therefore altered the 'age' of human cells.
"There are a lot of anti-ageing products out there these days - with wildly varying degrees of scientific support," Dr Ideker said, "But how do you know if a product will truly extend your life without waiting 40 years or so? What if you could instead measure your age-associated methylation patterns before, during and after the intervention to see if it's doing anything?"

'You’ve been warned': Florida sheriff says he may deputize gun owners against protesters

https://www.yahoo.com/news/ve-warned-florida-sheriff-says-180642419.html


JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Clay County Sheriff Darryl Daniels, no stranger to making viral videos appealing to tough-on-crime politics, released a video Tuesday that said he will make “special deputies of every lawful gun owner in this county” if he feels the county is overwhelmed by protesters.
The three-minute video shows Daniels standing in front of 18 deputies as he derides civil rights protesters as godless disruptors and tells them to stay out of Clay County, a suburb of Jacksonville.
"If we can’t handle you, I’ll exercise the power and authority as the sheriff, and I’ll make special deputies of every lawful gun owner in this county and I’ll deputize them for this one purpose to stand in the gap between lawlessness and civility," he said.
"That’s what we’re sworn to do. That’s what we’re going to do. You’ve been warned."
Daniels, the county’s first Black sheriff, is himself under investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement related to an affair he had with a fellow officer when he was at the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office and a subsequent false arrest of that officer.


Daniels is a first-term sheriff up for reelection who has said he wants to one day be a congressman. He is being challenged by six opponents, including former Atlantic Beach Police Chief Michelle Cook, former Clay County Sheriff’s Office Emergency Management Director Ben Carroll and Mike Taylor, a former FDLE agent and state attorney’s investigator who has earned the endorsement of former Gov. Jeb Bush.

His challengers accused him of inviting chaos to Clay County and insulting the training necessary to become a sheriff’s deputy.
“We train under intense situations to control the adrenaline dump,” Taylor said, “and we don’t do a perfect job at it, but we train to be prepared to make decisions under pressure. That’s necessary to be effective. To think we can put anyone in that role and it’ll be OK, we’re asking for a much bigger problem and inviting chaos and anarchy in the streets. The citizens of Clay County deserve better than that.”
Taylor added that deputizing private citizens could make the county liable to pay out lawsuits if the newly deputized citizens don’t act appropriately. “I don’t believe it was intended to be a pro-police message. I believe it was intended to be a propaganda message. Real police professionalism actually acknowledges that professionally trained police officers cannot be replaced by a swearing-in ceremony.”
Cook said the video was a sign Daniels wasn’t capable of leading. “What Daniels said yesterday may sound tough and macho. But, instead, it is a call for vigilantism and another signal that he is incapable of leading the sheriff’s department and keeping Clay County safe.”
She added: “Instead of dealing with real issues in a meaningful way, he is behaving like a reality show sheriff and calling attention to himself. To make matters worse, he pulled 18 officers off the streets to be used as props for his taxpayer-funded campaign stunt. It’s no wonder morale is so low among our fine officers.”
Carroll, who spent 14 years at the Sheriff’s Office, said he runs a nonprofit that trains churches and private schools, and he believes it’s foolish to think private citizens could replace deputies.
“I’m sure that was a political production for the sheriff. I doubt seriously that there will ever be the need in Clay County to deputize all the citizens to stand in the gap. I believe the sheriff’s department is totally capable of standing in the pike.”
Carroll said he supports citizens owning and training to use firearms to protect themselves, but he believes the Sherrif’s Office must be capable of handling protesters on its own.