We have been losing money every month for eight straight months. We are out of cash and out of time on funding. If “1%” of the people who receive this message make a $30 donation, this drive will be over today.
Stop. Donate. Please.
Sincerely,
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
ALSO SEE: COVID-19 Misinformation Is a Public Health Hazard -
We Need to Start Treating It as Such
The coronavirus is almost exclusively killing the unvaccinated.
ne of the most frustrating aspects of many conservatives’ refusal to follow the advice of health experts when it comes to COVID-19 is that they don’t want to wear masks or social distance, they’re demanding that life go back to normal, and yet they won’t do the most important thing when it comes to putting the pandemic behind us, i.e. get the damn vaccine. So, you’ll have to excuse Anthony Fauci (and the rest of the Joe Biden administration) if they’re at-the-end-their-ropes piqued with what we would never dare call, but someone slightly less decorous might, these selfish mother-f--king idiots.
Appearing on CNN on Saturday—one day after Biden said social media companies like Facebook are “killing” people by allowing vaccine misinformation to spread, a critique he later clarified by saying he meant that about a dozen of Facebook’s users are killing people with misinformation—Fauci said if the world had had to deal with these anti-science pundits in years past, it never would’ve made it out alive. Asked by Jim Acosta if he thought “we could have defeated the measles or eradicated polio if you had Fox News, night after night, warning people about these vaccine issues that are just bunk,” Fauci responded, “We probably would still have smallpox, and we probably would still have polio in this country if we had the kind of false information that’s being spread now.”
Fauci, of course, has been the right’s arch nemesis since the very start of the pandemic, thanks to the fact that he represents all the things they despise (science, multiple degrees), and not only told people what to do in the midst of a global health crisis, but displayed a treasonous level of disrespect by not blindly agreeing with every single thing Donald Trump said about the virus, never once telling reporters, “Actually, I think injecting bleach into your veins is a great idea and I’m personally going to try it tonight.” All of which would just be another day in GOP crazy town if not for the fact that literal lives are at stake. Which, of course, they are.
In an analysis published on Monday, The Washington Post showed that the coronavirus is surging among the unvaccinated, particularly where the “more contagious, more powerful” delta variant has gained a foothold.
The adjusted rates in several states show the pandemic is spreading as fast among the unvaccinated as it did during the winter surge. Florida, Arkansas, Missouri, Nevada, and Louisiana all have coronavirus case spikes among the unvaccinated, with adjusted rates double or triple the adjusted national rate.
“We are on an exponential curve,” said Mark Williams, dean of the Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. “The delta variant is a different animal than the wild [original] variant. It is far more infectious and far more virulent.” Williams expects the case rate among unvaccinated people to push higher than the winter surge. “I don’t see at the minute how we can avoid it,” he said.
Like deaths, hospitalizations from COVID-19 are almost entirely limited to unvaccinated patients. When current hospital utilization is spread across only the unvaccinated population, Nevada, Missouri, Arkansas, and Florida have rates between double and triple the adjusted national rate. “Ninety-eight percent of hospitalized individuals with COVID in Arkansas are unvaccinated,” Williams said. Even though treatments are better than they were originally, a larger share of patients are ending up in intensive care, and the fatality rate for those patients remains high, experts said.
“That’s just indicative of the more virulent quality of the delta variant,” Williams told the Post. “It will make people sick, even people that are young and would not have felt any consequence from the original wild variant.” He added that “far more children are being hospitalized,” which was extremely rare until now, saying that as of the middle of July, a dozen kids were in Arkansas Children’s Hospital, and two were on ventilators. He also fears that there will be an uptick in cases in the fall in places such as Arkansas, where masks and vaccine mandates are being banned, when schools and colleges reopen. “That’s kind of like a viruses playground. There will be a lot of transmission going on,” Williams said.
“With the arrival of delta, we will have two very different epidemics—one a mild cold in vaccinated individuals, and then we continue to have deadly infections in unvaccinated individuals,” William Powderly, director of the Institute for Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis, told the Post. “The people who need to come to hospital, who end up in the intensive care unit, and the people who die are almost exclusively unvaccinated individuals.
But according to conservatives, vaccines are for suckers and anyone trying to convince you otherwise is a Nazi. Which, among other things, gives Nazis a lot of credit!
Patrons wait in line at Chaumont Bakery on Sunday in Beverly Hills. (photo: Morgan Lieberman/The New York Times)
op White House aides and Biden administration officials are debating whether they should urge vaccinated Americans to wear masks in more settings as the delta variant causes spikes in coronavirus infections across the country, according to six people familiar with the discussions.
The talks are in a preliminary phase and their result could be as simple as new messaging from top White House officials. But some of the talks include officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who are separately examining whether to update their masking guidance, according to a Biden administration aide and a federal health official.
Officials cautioned that any new formal guidance would have to come from the CDC, and they maintained that the White House has taken a hands-off approach with the agency to ensure they are not interfering with the work of scientists. But the high-level discussions reflect rising concerns across the administration about the threat of the delta variant and a renewed focus on what measures may need to be reintroduced to slow its spread.
One idea batted around by some officials would be to ask all Americans to wear masks when vaccinated and unvaccinated people mix at public places or indoors, such as at malls or movie theaters, according to two people familiar with the conversations.
So far, leaders in the White House have been hesitant about any policies that would explicitly require Americans to show proof of their vaccination status, according to a person familiar with those talks. Depending on where discussions lead, that decision could ultimately fall to business owners who want to offer mask-free environments.
The conversations are taking place as the country is seeing more than 40,000 new cases of coronavirus infections a day, an increase from a low of about 11,000 cases a day in June. The uptick is largely driven by the delta variant, a far more infectious strain of the novel coronavirus. Moreover, the rate of vaccination continues to slow, with about 500,000 people a day getting shots now, according to The Washington Post’s vaccine tracker. And breakthrough infections also are cropping up among vaccinated sports stars and politicians who are tested regularly.
“At the White House, we follow the guidance and advice of health and medical experts,” said Kevin Munoz, assistant press secretary. “Public health guidance is made by the CDC, and they continue to recommend that fully vaccinated individuals do not wear a mask. If you are not vaccinated, you should be wearing a mask.”
Any new masking recommendations would be primarily aimed at protecting the unvaccinated population, which makes up nearly all current hospitalizations and deaths caused by the virus.
A return to a recommendation of more masking or a shift in White House messaging that urges Americans to wear face coverings in more situations would be a blow to President Biden’s efforts to convince Americans that the virus is in retreat.
Success against the virus is a message that Biden hopes to use in the 2022 midterm elections to help his party retain control of the House and Senate.
During a CNN town hall meeting Wednesday evening, Biden suggested that in the fall, children under age 12 will have to wear masks in school, implying that it was unlikely that a vaccine would be approved for them by then.
“The CDC is going to say that what we should do is everyone . . . under the age of 12 should probably be wearing a mask in school,” Biden said. “That’s probably what’s going to happen.”
Biden celebrated in May when the CDC said that vaccinated Americans no longer needed to wear masks in most settings, a change that some public health officials said was premature. He doubled down weeks later, throwing a Fourth of July blowout that featured 1,000 mostly unmasked people on the South Lawn of the White House as the delta variant strengthened.
The resurgence of the virus also could undercut the country’s economic progress over the past six months and threatens to interfere with the Biden administration’s other top priorities, including passing a sweeping infrastructure package, reopening schools in the fall and returning to a sense of normalcy for all Americans.
A number of White House officials, and people in touch with the White House, have privately said that changes to the masking guidance would be difficult to communicate, confusing to Americans and hard to enforce.
But, at least in the minds of some White House officials, the need to find ways to mitigate the threat posed by the delta variant makes remasking a topic worth discussing.
“It’s fair to say they are reconsidering everything,” said Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, who spoke with CDC and state officials on several calls this week. “I think everything’s on the table,” including whether to revisit recommendations on wearing masks and social distancing, Plescia added, noting that officials were particularly worried about the surge of coronavirus cases in the South and Midwest, where a disproportionately large proportion of Americans remains unvaccinated.
The context of the conversations is “what are the levers we can pull to fight delta,” said one person familiar with the talks.
People infected with the delta variant appear to carry a viral load that is 1,000 times higher than earlier versions of the virus and can easily spread it, particularly among the unvaccinated, experts say.
Officials said the White House would defer to the CDC on whether to recommend broader use of face coverings, including among the vaccinated, according to two administration officials familiar with the talks.
“This should be CDC’s call,” one official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of not being authorized to speak to the news media.
The official noted that Biden and his deputies have vowed to “follow the science,” in contrast to President Donald Trump, who often pressured the CDC and other scientific agencies to modify their guidance last year.
“But as we saw in May, there are problems with just leaving it to the CDC,” the official added, referring to the agency’s decision to relax its mask recommendations on May 13, which caught the White House by surprise.
Experts at the CDC are thinking through all options, including masking, according to a federal health official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions continue.
“At this time, we have no intention of changing our masking guidance,” said CDC spokesman Jason McDonald.
Public health experts say the situation has changed drastically since May, when the CDC issued its guidance for fully vaccinated individuals. The delta variant is surging, accounting for 83 percent of sequenced coronavirus infections, a dramatic increase from 50 percent for the week of July 3, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told a Senate panel this week.
Nearly two-thirds of U.S. counties have vaccination coverage of less than 40 percent, and more than 97 percent of people hospitalized with severe covid-19 infections are unvaccinated, according to the CDC.
“They would be irresponsible if they did not reconsider mask advice,” said Jody Lanard, a physician who worked for nearly two decades as a pandemic communications adviser consulting with the World Health Organization.
But reconsidering mask advice would put the CDC in a difficult position.
When the agency issued guidance for fully vaccinated people in May, saying they did not need to wear masks in most places, the announcement was not explained well, Lanard said. Some people interpreted it as giving a pass to unvaccinated people to not wear masks, she said.
CDC officials “always say they want to follow the science, but they did not prepare the public early on to say ‘we are looking at multiple factors, including how science fits in with reality and social science, and how it fits with expected and unexpected changes, especially sudden changes, where we have to turn on a dime to try to protect more people,’ ” Lanard said.
But, she added, the CDC could gain credibility by directly acknowledging to the public the confusion and mixed messaging. Such a message could be: “We have delta. We are going to take a chance of enraging people who are already understandably enraged by our mask advice. … This is a new phase of the pandemic not being under control, but it’s better than the last phase.”
Many Americans have stopped wearing masks, and officials are bracing for a challenge in convincing skeptics to put them back on.
Fifty-two percent of Americans say they are regularly wearing a mask when they are in public, down from 84 percent in early May, according to an Axios-Ipsos poll released Tuesday.
“When CDC issued its guidance on masking a couple months ago, that people who were vaccinated didn’t need to wear them, we didn’t have the delta variant around,” said Linsey Marr, a Virginia Tech engineer who has studied the transmission of airborne diseases. “But cases are rising now, vaccination rates have stalled, and delta transmits much more easily than the earlier variants. And so I think we do need to revisit that guidance.”
Covid-related hospitalizations have risen 34 percent nationwide in the past week, according to The Post’s tracking, with some states reporting sharply higher figures; Louisiana has registered a 75 percent increase in covid-related hospitalizations over the past week, and Florida has reported a 52 percent jump.
“When you’re starting to see hospitalizations tick up, you have to do something. You have to make a move or you find yourself back in a place where we don’t have enough hospital capacity,” said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
Rivers said that she didn’t see the need for a national mask mandate but thought that states that were reporting “over 10 cases per 100,000 people per day could stand to use a mask mandate” — a threshold that would apply to 20 states today, according to The Post’s tracking. Those states are mostly in the South and Midwest, where fewer than half of residents have been fully vaccinated.
Already, some jurisdictions are taking matters into their own hands. Health officials in California last week recommended or required that residents in eight counties resume wearing masks indoors. That includes Los Angeles County, where officials reinstituted an indoor mask mandate over the weekend, requiring all residents regardless of their vaccination status to wear masks in indoor public spaces.
But, in an example of the power of the current CDC guidance, the L.A. county sheriff cited the federal guidelines when he said that his department will “ask for voluntary compliance” and not aggressively enforce the new local guidelines.
In Virginia, state officials are urging all elementary school students and employees to wear masks indoors this fall even if vaccinated. Virginia issued guidance Wednesday “strongly” recommending that elementary schools continue requiring mask-wearing until the coronavirus vaccine is available for children under 12. The guidance says students and staffers in middle and high schools should wear masks indoors if they are not fully vaccinated.
The tone also is shifting in Congress. On Tuesday, the attending physician of Congress, Brian P. Monahan, sent out a message that vaccinated people “may consider additional protective actions” including wearing masks, according to a copy of the message obtained by The Post.
The message also warned members of Congress and their staffers that the rules about masking could be tightened in coming weeks and months.
“Individuals have the personal discretion to wear a mask,” according to the message, “and future developments in the coronavirus delta variant local threat may require the resumption of mask wear for all as now seen in several counties in the United States.”
More than 500,000 have died of overdoses to prescription and street opioids from 1999 to 2019, and overdose deaths from opioids hit a record high in 2020. (photo: Keith Srakocic/AP)
group of US state attorneys general unveiled on Wednesday a landmark $26bn settlement with large drug companies for allegedly fueling the deadly nationwide opioid epidemic, but some states were cool on the agreement.
Under the settlement proposal, the three largest US drug distributors, McKesson Corp, Cardinal Health Inc and AmerisourceBergen Corp, are expected to pay a combined $21bn, while drugmaker Johnson & Johnson (J&J), which manufactures opioids, would pay $5bn.
“There’s not enough money in the world frankly to address the pain and suffering,” said the Connecticut attorney general, William Tong, adding that the money will “help where help is needed”.
The deal was the second-largest cash settlement ever, trailing only the $246bn tobacco agreement in 1998.
Attorneys general from 15 states were involved in negotiating the deal.
Settlement money from the distributors will be paid out over 18 years. J&J will pay over nine years, with up to $3.7bn paid during the first three years.
The money is expected to be used on addiction treatment, family support, education and other social programs.
The distributors were accused of lax controls that allowed massive amounts of addictive painkillers to be diverted into illegal channels, devastating communities, while J&J was accused of downplaying the addiction risk in its opioid marketing.
The companies have denied the allegations.
The settlement also calls for the creation of an independent clearinghouse to provide the distributors and state regulators aggregated data about drug shipments, which negotiators hope will help prevent abuse.
More than 3,000 lawsuits related to the health crisis, mostly by state and local governments, have been filed. Negotiators have struggled to find a structure that would garner enough local government support to assure the defendants a deal will put an end to nearly all litigation.
As a result, the ultimate settlement amount depends on the extent states sign up for the deal and confirm their cities and counties are on board.
“The expectation is north of 40, and well north of 40, will sign on,” said the North Carolina attorney general, Josh Stein.
The opioid crisis has claimed hundreds of thousands of US overdose deaths since 1999, but has hit some regions much harder than others, creating divisions among state governments when it comes to considering the settlement.
States will have 30 days to evaluate the agreement.
“States that don’t sign on are being irresponsible,” said the Louisiana attorney general, Jeff Landry. “We don’t want perfect to be the enemy of the good.”
About $2.1bn will be deducted from the settlement for attorneys’ fees and legal costs.
Washington state’s attorney general, Bob Ferguson, said he would not join the deal.
“The settlement is, to be blunt, not nearly good enough for Washington,” he said.
That state’s trial against the drug distributors begins on 7 September and a January trial is set against J&J.
To receive the full payout, the agreement needs support from at least 48 states, 98% of litigating local governments and 97% of the jurisdictions that have yet to sue.
Electing to participate only guarantees a state some of the money.
The settlement provides a base payout of up to $12.12bn if all states agreed to the deal, and another $10.7bn in incentive payments based on various factors concerning participation by localities.
“Everyone has a common interest to get maximum participation to get a maximum amount of funds for abatement nationally,” said Joe Rice, a lead lawyer for the local governments.
Local governments have up to 120 days to join.
About half of the states have, in anticipation of the settlement, passed legislation or signed agreements with their localities governing how settlement money will be distributed, according to Christine Minhee, who runs an opioid litigation watchdog project supported by an Open Society Foundations Soros justice fellowship.
Legislation does not guarantee success. In Indiana, cities and counties representing more than half of the state’s population have opted out after a law limited their cut to 15%.
Hard-hit West Virginia had already signaled it will not participate in the settlement.
Local governments in the state are pursuing a case that is on trial against distributors.
New Hampshire, which was deeply affected by the epidemic, also has not decided whether to join the deal, said James Boffetti, an associate state attorney general.
Meanwhile, the crisis has shown no sign of letting up. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last week said provisional data showed that 2020 was a record year for overall drug overdose deaths with 93,331, up 29% from a year earlier.
Although many deaths involve heroin or illicit fentanyl, not prescribed painkillers, most who died often turned to those narcotics after initially becoming dependent on prescription opioids.
Meanwhile, Purdue Pharma, separately, will ask for bankruptcy court approval in August for a deal that the company, which makes the branded opioid painkiller OxyContin, says is worth $10bn, to settle allegations by states and local governments.
Members of the multibillionaire Sackler family who own Purdue have agreed to contribute about $4.3bn to the plan.
The company and its owners are accused of kickstarting the crisis, while denying wrongdoing.
In November 2020, Purdue entered a guilty plea to three criminal counts for violating a federal anti-kickback law, defrauding the United States and violating the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act.
The plea deal included more than $8bn in penalties that will mostly go unpaid because the company is under bankruptcy protection.
Sen. Joe Manchin. (photo: Getty)
Joe Manchin owns millions of dollars in coal stock, founded an energy firm and Exxon lobbyists brag about their access to him. Republicans fundraise on his behalf
s “thousand-year” heat waves caused by the climate crisis rock the west coast and biblical floods engulf major cities, Senate Democrats are negotiating a $3.5tn budget package that could include an attempt to slow the use of fossil fuels over the next decade.
One prominent senator is very concerned about proposals to scale back oil, gas and coal usage. He recently argued that those who want to “get rid of” fossil fuels are wrong. Eliminating fossil fuels won’t help fight global heating, he claimed, against all evidence. “If anything, it would be worse.”
Which rightwing Republican uttered these false, climate crisis-denying words?
Wrong question. The speaker was a Democrat: Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
West Virginia is a major coal-producing state. But Manchin’s investment in dirty energy goes far beyond the economic interests of the voters who elect him every six years. In fact, coal has made Manchin and his family very wealthy. He founded the private coal brokerage Enersystems in 1988 and still owns a big stake in the company, which his son currently runs.
In 2020 alone, Manchin raked in nearly $500,000 of income from Enersystems, and he owns as much as $5m worth of stock in the company, according to his most recent financial disclosure.
Despite this conflict of interest, Manchin chairs the influential Senate energy and natural resources committee, which has jurisdiction over coal production and distribution, coal research and development, and coal conversion, as well as “global climate change”.
He even gave a pro-coal speech in May to the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) while personally profiting from Enersystems’ coal sales to utility companies that are EEI members, as Sludge recently reported.
Manchin is one of many members of Congress who are personally invested in the fossil fuel industry – dozens of Congress members hold Exxon stock – but he is among the biggest profiters. As of late 2019, he had more money invested in dirty energy than any other senator.
How can this be? Wouldn’t basic ethics prevent someone from being in charge of legislation that could materially benefit them? Unfortunately, conflict-of-interest rules in the Senate are remarkably weak. And guess who is seeking to strip conflict-of-interest rules from a 2021 democracy reform bill?
Joe Manchin.
His proposal “leaves out language that S 1 would add to federal statute prohibiting lawmakers from working on bills primarily for furthering their financial interests”, Sludge reported.
Manchin, the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, has used the evenly split chamber to block Joe Biden’s agenda. In the process he has become arguably the most powerful person in Washington. Hardly any Democratic legislation can pass without his vote.
That’s a problem – especially given that Manchin sometimes seems like he’s an honorary Republican. Earlier this month the Texas Tribune and other publications reported that Manchin was heading to Texas for a fundraiser hosted by several major Republican donors, including oil billionaires.
Manchin, along with Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, has vowed to protect the filibuster – a rule, frequently used to empower white supremacists, that requires 60 votes for most Senate bills to pass. That includes vital voting rights legislation, passed by the House, that is the only way to stop the Republican party from eviscerating what’s left of our democracy in the name of the “big lie” of voter fraud.
Because of his uniquely powerful position as a swing vote, Manchin can rewrite major legislation to his liking – effectively dictating the legislative agendas of Congress and the White House.
It appears that Manchin will have his way with the White House’s infrastructure package as well, and his changes will probably be more devastating, given the climate emergency we live in.
Manchin isn’t just sticking up for the coal industry and his family’s generational wealth; he’s doing the bidding of oil and gas executives, who also stand to lose money if the nation transitions away from toxic fuels.
Manchin’s political campaigns are fueled by the dirty energy industry. Over the past decade, his election campaigns have received nearly $65,000 from disastrously dishonest oil giant Exxon’s lobbyists, its corporate political action committee, and the lobbying firms that Exxon works with. A top Exxon lobbyist recently bragged about his access to Manchin.
In the 2018 election cycle, his most recent, Manchin’s campaign got more money from oil and gas Pacs and employees than any other Senate Democrat except then North Dakota senator Heidi Heitkamp. Manchin was also the mining industry’s top Democratic recipient in Congress that cycle.
If Biden wants to have any kind of legacy, he needs to stand up to Manchin, a member of his own party, and work with the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, to get him in line. I don’t fully know why Biden permits the West Virginian to dictate his own presidential policy agenda. But what is crystal clear is that the leader of the United States should be doing a whole lot more.
The workers at the Topeka Frito-Lay plant have been on strike since July 5, 2021. (photo: Evert Nelson/AP)
undreds of Frito-Lay workers in Topeka, Kan., are in their third week of a strike, citing so-called "suicide shifts" and poor working conditions at the manufacturing and distribution plant at a time when the company's net revenue growth has exceeded all of its targets.
Employees say sweltering 90-degree temperatures on the picket line are preferable to the 100-degree-plus heat that awaits them inside the manufacturing warehouse on any given summer day. They're demanding an end to mandatory overtime and 84-hour weeks that they argue leaves little room for a meaningful quality of life. They're also seeking raises that match cost-of-living increases.
The company, which is owned by PepsiCo, disputes their claims, calling them "grossly exaggerated" and says a recent contract offer delivered earlier this month more than met the terms put forward by the workers' union, Local 218 of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Union.
Meanwhile, workers say they want more concessions before heading back into the factory. They have also called for a national boycott on Frito-Lay products, as well as those produced by PepsiCo, for the remainder of the strike. If successful, the boycott would mean living in a world without Doritos, Cheetos, Fritos, Tostitos and Sun Chips. Temporarily, at least.
A call for an end to "suicide shifts"
One of the most contentious issues throughout the bargaining process, according to union leaders, has been the regular use of forced overtime at the plant that results in so-called "suicide shifts" where "many of the more than 800 workers at the plant are only getting an eight-hour break between shifts."
NPR was unable to reach union officials, but Local 218 Chief Steward Paul Klemme on Monday described how it worked in a podcast interview on Monday. He said workers who clock in for a 7 a.m to 3 p.m. shift are often forced to work four hours of overtime, "then [the company will] turn you right around and bring you in at 3 o'clock in the morning. So you only have 8 hours off to get home, shower, see your family, get some sleep and get back to work."
It's an unsustainable schedule that has been instituted, he says, as a way to put off addressing a larger staffing shortage of about 100 employees.
In a statement earlier this week the union's international president, Anthony Shelton, wrote, "The union has repeatedly asked the company to hire more workers and yet despite record profits, Frito Lay management has refused this request."
Frito-Lay says cases of mandatory overtime have been overstated
Company officials said claims about workers being forced to regularly work double or triple shifts at the Topeka facility "have been grossly exaggerated."
The plant, which is one of 30 in the U.S., employs about 850 people. Yet, officials said, only about 20 — approximately 2% — averaged over 60 hours per week.
"Our records indicate 19 employees worked 84 hours in a given work week in 2021, with 16 of those as a result of employees volunteering for overtime and only 3 being required to work," the company said on Monday.
Officials also noted that the latest contract offer, which was rejected by employees on July 3, includes a 60-hour workweek cap and eliminates 8-hour turnaround shifts.
The recent contract offer also included a 2% wage hike over the next two years for all job classifications. According to the company: "This is what the union proposed for wage increases, and Frito-Lay accepted the union's proposal."
The two sides returned to the bargaining table on Monday.
A photo purportedly of Princess Latifa, right, was published on a friend's Instagram account in late May, a month after the United Nations asked for proof from the United Arab Emirates that the princess was still alive. (photo: AFP)
ALSO SEE: Reporters Without Borders Demands
Israel Stop Exporting Spyware
In the days before commandos dragged Princess Latifa from her getaway yacht in the Indian Ocean, her number was added to a list that included targets of a powerful spyware, a new investigation shows
She hid in the trunk of a black Audi Q7, then jumped into a Jeep Wrangler as her getaway crew raced that morning from the glittering skyscrapers of Dubai to the rough waves of the Arabian Sea. They launched a dinghy from a beach in neighboring Oman, then, 16 miles out, switched to water scooters. By sunset they’d reached their idling yacht, the Nostromo, and began sailing toward the Sri Lankan coast.
Princess Latifa bint Mohammed al-Maktoum, the 32-year-old daughter of Dubai’s fearsome ruler, believed she was closer than ever to political asylum — and, for the first time, real freedom in the United States, members of her escape team said in interviews.
But there was one threat she hadn’t planned for: The spyware tool Pegasus, which her father’s government was known to have used to secretly hack and track people’s phones. Leaked data shows that by the time armed commandos stormed the yacht, eight days into her escape, operatives had entered the numbers of her closest friends and allies into a system that had also been used for selecting Pegasus surveillance targets.
“Shoot me here. Don’t take me back,” she’d screamed as soldiers dragged her off the boat, roughly 30 miles from the shore, according to a fact-finding judgment by the United Kingdom’s High Court of Justice. Then she disappeared.
Latifa’s failed 2018 escape from her father — Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the United Arab Emirates’ prime minister, vice president and minister of defense — sparked outrage and gave life to a troubling mystery: How, given all her precautions, had the princess been found?
An investigation by The Washington Post and an international consortium of news organizations may offer critical new insight: Latifa’s number and those of her friends appear on a list that includes phones targeted for surveillance with Pegasus, the hacking tool from the Israeli spyware giant NSO Group, amid the sprint to track her down.
Numbers for Latifa and her friends were added to the list in the hours and days after she went missing in February 2018, the investigation shows. The UAE was believed to have been an NSO client at the time, according to evidence discovered by the research group Citizen Lab.
It is unknown what role, if any, the phone-hacking software ultimately played in the princess’s capture. Their phones were not available for forensic examination, and the list does not identify who put the numbers on it or how many were targeted or compromised. In multiple statements, NSO has denied that the list was purely for surveillance purposes.
“It is not a list of targets or potential targets of NSO’s customers, and your repeated reliance on this list and association of the people on this list as potential surveillance targets is false and misleading,” NSO said in a letter Tuesday.
But when Amnesty International’s Security Lab examined data from 67 phones whose numbers were on the list to search for forensic evidence of Pegasus spyware, 37 phones showed traces, including 23 phones that had been successfully infected and 14 others that showed signs of attempted targeting.
The forensic analyses of the 37 smartphones also showed that many displayed a tight correlation between time stamps on the list and the beginning of surveillance — sometimes as little as a few seconds.
In the year after Latifa's chase, operatives appear to have entered numbers onto the list for another Dubai princess: one of the sheikh’s six wives, Haya bint Hussein, who had voiced concerns about Latifa’s confinement before fleeing with her two young children to London.
Princess Haya, her half sister, her assistants, her horse trainer, and members of her legal and security teams all had their phones entered onto the list in early 2019, both in the days before and in the weeks after she, too, fled Dubai, the investigation shows. Around that time, Haya later told a British court, she’d faced threats of exile to a desert prison and twice discovered a gun in her bed.
An NSO attorney said the company “does not have insight into the specific intelligence activities of its customers” and that the list of numbers could have been used for “many legitimate and entirely proper” purposes “having nothing to do with surveillance.”
But a person familiar with the operations of NSO who spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal operations says the company terminated its contract with Dubai within the last year after it learned of the princesses’ surveillance and other human-rights concerns.
NSO’s co-founder and chief executive, Shalev Hulio, on Sunday said he was disturbed by reports of journalists and others being hacked with his company’s software, and he promised investigations. He said the company had terminated two contracts in the past 12 months because of human rights concerns.
NSO said in a “Transparency and Responsibility Report” last month that the company had disconnected five clients from Pegasus since 2016 following investigations of misuse, including one unnamed client that a company probe last year revealed had used the system to “target a protected” individual.
Latifa’s hunters had many options for pursuit and interception, and some of the princess’s supporters have suggested that the Nostromo’s crew members made tactical errors, including sending online messages during the chase that could have given their location away.
But the records show that the phones were added to the list at critical moments in the search, underscoring how a surveillance tool that NSO says is deployed to “help governments protect innocents from terror and crime” can be abused. The Pegasus software allows operatives to track a hacked phone’s location, read its messages, and turn its cameras and microphones into live-streaming spy devices.
Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based journalism nonprofit, oversaw the investigation, called the Pegasus Project, and the news organizations worked collaboratively to conduct further analysis and reporting. Journalists from the British newspaper the Guardian and the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung contributed reporting for this article.
Officials with Dubai and the UAE, a close ally of the United States, did not respond to requests for comment but have previously declined, saying the episodes are family matters. The sheikh has argued that the assault on the Nostromo rescued his daughter from a high-ransom kidnapping, though Latifa had prerecorded a video explaining that she’d chosen to run because of years of oppression and abuse.
The sheikh’s personal attorneys in the U.K. and Germany sent letters this month denying his involvement in any attempted hacks. Officials with the sheikh’s Dubai Ruler’s Court have previously said in statements that they are “deeply saddened by the continued media speculation” and that Latifa is “safe and in the loving care of her family.”
Escape
From the outside, Latifa seemed to enjoy a life of unimaginable affluence. The Emirati princess lived in a palace compound in the Emirates’ biggest city and appeared free to enjoy wild extravagances, including riding champion racehorses and leaping out of planes.
Her father, one of the Persian Gulf’s most powerful autocrats, had presided over Dubai’s transformation into a capitalist playground for the ultrarich, famous for showpieces such as the world’s tallest tower, the Burj Khalifa, and palm-shaped islands visible from space.
When not commanding his empire, the sheikh had become a star in the world of thoroughbred horse racing, owning one of its most prestigious breeding operations, and spent heavily to portray himself as a progressive crusader for women’s rights and a family man to his 25 children, three of whom are named Latifa. He also wrote books, such as “Reflections on Happiness and Positivity,” and poetry, which he posted to his 5.7 million-follower Instagram account.
To Latifa, her father’s public persona was all a lie, she would say in the video. Her life had been rigorously scheduled and restricted. She could not drive or travel, and her every movement was tracked by her father’s office. Her siblings, she said, lived similar lives of mistreatment or neglect.
“There is no justice here. They don’t care. Especially if you’re a female, your life is so disposable,” she said. “All my father cares about is his reputation. He will kill people to protect it. … He’s even burned down houses to hide the evidence.”
In the summer of 2000, Latifa’s older sister Shamsa, then a mother figure to her, ran away from the sheikh’s stables during a family holiday in the U.K. For weeks, she lived as a fugitive, sleeping in a London hostel and staving off loneliness by calling friends back home, according to Latifa’s video and the High Court judgment released last year.
Soon after, Shamsa was abducted off the street in Cambridge, flown via helicopter to France and shuffled onto a private jet back to Dubai, the judgment found. Latifa said in the video that one of Shamsa’s friend’s phones had been bugged, allowing her father to learn where she was.
In a letter Shamsa sent to an immigration lawyer and cited by the British court, Shamsa said she’d been imprisoned and forcibly tranquilized. “They have all the money, they have all the power, they think they can do anything,” she wrote. She has not been seen since.
Two years after Shamsa went missing, a distraught Latifa, then 16, attempted her own vanishing act. She’d naively believed, she said in the video, that she could just cross the border to Oman to find help or, at worst, get locked up with Shamsa, who would at least then know “she has somebody with her.”
When the border guards caught her, Latifa said, she was returned to her father’s compound, confined alone in a windowless room and subjected to “constant torture.” “Your father told us to beat you until we kill you,” she recalled her captors telling her. “I didn’t know when one day ended and the next began.”
After three years and four months, she was freed. The High Court judge wrote later that she marveled then at the “strangeness of ordinary things”: car rides as fast as a “roller coaster,” the bliss of a bath. She appeared to live a quiet life, spending her days at the horse stables and training in the dance-fighting style of capoeira with Tiina Jauhiainen, a Finnish instructor who became her friend.
But Latifa never stopped dreaming of escape. By 2017, Jauhiainen said in interviews with a Guardian reporter in April, she and the princess had begun drawing up a daring plan, recruiting Christian Elombo, Jauhiainen’s friend and fellow trainer, and Herve Jaubert, a French businessman who’d fled Dubai after an embezzlement conviction and had moved to Florida, where he built submarines.
Latifa committed her entire life savings of more than $300,000 toward the plan, Jauhiainen said in interviews. And as a last resort, she recorded the 40-minute video in Jauhiainen’s apartment, scheduling it to post online if their bid collapsed.
“If you are watching this,” Latifa said, “either I’m dead or I’m in a very, very, very bad situation.”
Assault
By the time the leaked records show Latifa’s number was added to the list, she and Jauhiainen had already ditched their phones in the bathroom of La Serre, a Parisian cafe in downtown Dubai, and begun their doomed voyage across the Arabian Sea.
Someone then added numbers for Juan Mayer, an aerial photographer who often recorded Latifa’s skydives; Lynda Bouchikhi, an event manager who had served as Latifa’s officially sanctioned chaperone; and Sioned Taylor, another friend and chaperone whose LinkedIn profile says she worked then as a “personal assistant” for a “member of the Ruling Family.” Taylor, through an attorney, declined to comment. Mayer and Bouchikhi did not respond to requests for comment.
Aboard the Nostromo, a two-masted, U.S.-flagged sailing yacht chartered for luxury cruises around Southeast Asia, the escape team was growing anxious, Jauhiainen said. They’d planned to cross the Indian Ocean, disembark in Sri Lanka with prearranged visas and hop a flight to the United States. To pass the time, they watched bad movies and sent messages using a satellite Internet connection that Jaubert had pledged was secure.
But when they lost contact with Elombo — who unbeknown to them had, after piloting the dinghy back to shore, been arrested in Oman — the team abruptly steered toward a backup dock on India’s coast for fear they’d been compromised, Jauhiainen said. Soon, an Indian coast guard boat and low-flying plane began shadowing them.
Then one night, as they prepared for bed, the team heard heavy boots on the upper deck, Jauhiainen said. Their cabins suddenly filled with smoke. An Indian special forces unit — backed by helicopters, military boats and a squad of UAE soldiers — had blitzed the Nostromo, shouting Latifa’s name. Locking herself in a bathroom, the princess sent Radha Stirling, head of the London advocacy group Detained in Dubai, a distress call over WhatsApp: “Please help … there’s men outside.”
As the team watched, Jauhiainen said, the commandos tied Latifa’s hands behind her back and dragged her off the yacht, their guns’ laser sights shimmering through the darkness.
In the week afterward, Latifa’s supporters posted her “last video” online and filed missing-person reports with international law enforcement agencies, including the FBI. Jaubert, Jauhiainen and Elombo were questioned for days in Dubai and then released, with no idea where Latifa was being held. And all the while, the leaked data shows, operatives continued to add the princess’s allies to the list.
In the years since, the escape team has struggled to piece together what went wrong. Jauhiainen has questioned the yacht’s satellite uplink and, in a report this month, USA Today cited unnamed people knowledgeable about the operation who said the FBI had assisted with what they believed was a kidnapping investigation by pulling location data from the satellite Internet provider, Rhode Island-based KVH Industries. The FBI and KVH declined to comment.
But the yacht also carried two “burner” phones, according to Jauhiainen, which Jaubert has argued were bugged. Latifa had used them to send emails, seek help on Instagram and exchange messages through WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging firm that sued NSO in 2019, alleging the company helped spy on its users.
She had also communicated, Jauhiainen said, with Taylor, whose phone, the leaked data show, had been added to the list before the assault.
‘Exposed’
Princess Haya had for months gone along with her husband’s assertion that Latifa was the mentally unstable victim of a criminal plot. But as Latifa’s video gained attention, she began to openly question the official line.
In late 2018, Haya arranged for a doctor and psychiatrist to see Latifa at her guarded villa. When they found nothing wrong, she visited Latifa herself. Latifa, Haya would tell the High Court, appeared pale and forlorn, caged in a bedroom “akin to a prison,” sobbing that she would do anything to “take it all back.”
Haya, the daughter of Jordan’s late King Hussein, had for years boosted the sheikh’s image in elite social circles by defying the expectations of feminine royalty: The Oxford graduate had become the first woman in Jordan licensed to drive heavy trucks and, in 2000, the first Arab woman to jump horses in the Summer Olympics.
But their marriage was unraveling behind closed doors: They hadn’t “enjoyed an intimate relationship” together for some time, the court filings say, and Haya had recently pursued a romance with one of her bodyguards.
Haya’s involvement in Latifa’s case, including asking a former United Nations commissioner to check on her, had pushed their bond to a breaking point. The sheikh ordered her to stay out of it, she told the court.
Then she learned that her husband’s agents were arranging for their 11-year-old daughter to marry the then-33-year-old crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman. She found notes warning “your daughter is ours” and a pistol in her bed. One of the sheikh’s helicopter pilots landed outside her home with orders to fly her to a desert prison, according to the British court judgment; the sheikh, she said later, laughed it off as a mistake. The sheikh had also, she learned later, secretly divorced her on the 20th anniversary of her father’s death — a date, she told the court, he’d chosen to maximize the insult.
One year after Latifa’s failed breakout, Haya staged her own. She flew with her daughter and 9-year-old son to London, where she’d secured a post in the Jordanian Embassy on the belief its diplomatic immunity could keep her safe, she told the court.
But operatives had already begun attempting to trail her, the leaked data suggests. The phones of top officials at Quest, a British private-security firm that had advised the princess for years, had been added to the list: Martin Smith, the company’s chief executive, and Ross Smith, its director of investigations and intelligence. So, too, had numbers for Haya’s personal assistant, the executive assistant of her Dubai household, and John Gosden, a horse trainer who had worked with Haya’s colts.
As the sheikh’s lawyers pushed the High Court to order his children returned to Dubai, the leaked records show that numbers were added for Haya; her half sister, Princess Aisha bint Hussein; a member of Haya’s legal team advising her on the custody dispute; and Shimon Cohen, founder of a public relations firm that had worked with Haya’s private-security firm. Haya, her legal team, the Quest officials, Cohen and Gosden declined to comment. Princess Aisha did not respond to requests for comment.
In a possible episode of internal paranoia, the data shows, someone also added to the list a number for Stuart Page, a private investigator who had long worked on the sheikh’s behalf. Page confirmed the number was his but declined to comment.
Around that time, the sheikh published a poem, “You Lived, You Died,” that Haya read as a veiled threat: “I exposed you and your games. … I have the evidence that convicts you of what you have done.”
But the custody battle had also exposed unanswered questions about the missing princesses. In a statement to the British court, the sheikh said that Latifa was safe after her “rescue” and that Shamsa had been “still a child” when she fled at age 19. The sheikh and Shamsa’s mother had “jointly decided to organize a search” for her, he wrote, and “when she was found, I remember our feeling of overwhelming relief.” Both women, the sheikh told the court, declined to be interviewed.
Last year, shortly after former president Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka posed for photos with the sheikh during a Dubai women’s-equality conference, the court ruled that the sheikh had orchestrated the intimidation campaign against Haya and the abductions of Shamsa and Latifa.
The judge, Andrew McFarlane, said virtually all of Haya’s allegations were substantiated, save for the “hearsay” regarding the Saudi crown prince. (Saudi authorities did not respond to requests for comment.) As for Latifa, McFarlane wrote, she had been “plainly desperate to extricate herself from her family and prepared to undertake a dangerous mission” to do so.
For the princesses’ supporters, the judgment was only a symbolic victory. Though Haya and her children remain in London, the custody battle is ongoing, and the ruling changed little about Shamsa and Latifa’s precarious state in Dubai.
Latifa’s friends earlier this year gave the BBC several videos that she had secretly recorded on a contraband phone, in which she said she was being held “hostage” in a villa by guards who had told her she “would never see the sun again.” “Every day I am worried about my safety and my life,” she said. Her videos and messages stopped abruptly last year. In April, two months after the BBC report, U.N. officials demanded that the UAE provide evidence that she was alive and well.
Then suddenly in May, after months of silence, Latifa reappeared. In three photos posted to Instagram over a four-day span, Latifa was spotted having a “lovely evening” in a Dubai mall, eating “lovely food” near the Burj Khalifa and “enjoying dinner” with a Dubai friend.
Two of the photos had been posted by Sioned Taylor, and one also showed Lynda Bouchikhi. Numbers for both women had been added to the list before the raid on the Nostromo, the data shows. Latifa posted no photos of her own. Taylor declined to comment.
The law firm Taylor Wessing, which says it represents Latifa, also began sending letters demanding that Latifa’s friends and members of the advocacy campaign Free Latifa stop talking about her in the media, saying their comments had caused the princess distress.
In a statement attributed to Latifa, the firm reported that she said she can “travel where I want,” adding, “I hope now that I can live my life in peace.”
A lawyer at the firm said Latifa had declined a request from The Post to be interviewed by phone or video, either on or off the record. The lawyer said Latifa had read a Post reporter’s questions but did not want to talk about her past and sought only to move on with a quiet life. The lawyer declined to provide any details of their legal retainer, citing client confidentiality.
Last month, Taylor posted a photo from an airport terminal. Latifa held what appeared to be boarding documents. Taylor gripped an iPhone.
“Great European holiday with Latifa,” said the caption, with a smiley face. “We’re having fun exploring!”
No other photos of Latifa have emerged since.
Deer at the Warner Wetlands in Oregon on Feb. 22, 2017. (photo: Greg Shine/BLM)
illions of Americans are traveling this summer as pandemic restrictions wind down. Rental bookings and crowds in national parks show that many people are headed for the great outdoors.
Seeing animals and birds is one of the main draws of spending time in nature. But as researchers who study conservation, wildlife and human impacts on wild places, we believe it's important to know that you can have major effects on wildlife just by being nearby.
In a recent review of hundreds of studies covering many species, we found that the presence of humans can alter wild animal and bird behavior patterns at much greater distances than most people may think. Small mammals and birds may change their behavior when hikers or birders come within 300 feet (100 meters) – the length of a football field. Large birds like eagles and hawks can be affected when humans are over 1,300 feet (400 meters) away – roughly a quarter of a mile. And large mammals like elk and moose can be affected by humans up to 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) away – more than half a mile.
Many recent studies and reports have shown that the world is facing a biodiversity crisis. Over the past 50 years, Earth has lost so many species that many scientists believe the planet is experiencing its sixth mass extinction – due mainly to human activities.
Protected areas, from local open spaces to national parks, are vital for conserving plants and animals. They also are places where people like to spend time in nature. We believe that everyone who uses the outdoors should understand and respect this balance between outdoor recreation, sustainable use and conservation.
How Human Presence Affects Wildlife
Pandemic lockdowns in 2020 confined many people indoors – and wildlife responded. In Istanbul, dolphins ventured much closer to shore than usual. Penguins explored quiet South African Streets. Nubian ibex grazed on Israeli playgrounds. The fact that animals moved so freely without people present shows how wild species change their behavior in response to human activities.
Decades of research have shown that outdoor recreation, whether it's hiking, cross-country skiing or riding all-terrain vehicles, has negative effects on wildlife. The most obvious signs are behavioral changes: Animals may flee from nearby people, decrease the time they feed and abandon nests or dens.
Other effects are harder to see, but can have serious consequences for animals' health and survival. Wild animals that detect humans can experience physiological changes, such as increased heart rates and elevated levels of stress hormones.
And humans' outdoor activities can degrade habitat that wild species depend on for food, shelter and reproduction. Human voices, off-leash dogs and campsite overuse all have harmful effects that make habitat unusable for many wild species.
Effects of Human Presence Vary for Different Species
For our study we examined 330 peer-reviewed articles spanning 38 years to locate thresholds at which recreation activities negatively affected wild animals and birds. The main thresholds we found were related to distances between wildlife and people or trails. But we also found other important factors, including the number of daily park visitors and the decibel levels of people's conversations.
The studies that we reviewed covered over a dozen different types of motorized and nonmotorized recreation. While it might seem that motorized activities would have a bigger impact, some studies have found that dispersed “quiet" activities, such as day hiking, biking and wildlife viewing, can also affect which wild species will use a protected area.
Put another way, many species may be disturbed by humans nearby, even if those people are not using motorboats or all-terrain vehicles. It's harder for animals to detect quiet humans, so there's a better chance that they'll be surprised by a cross-country skier than a snowmobile, for instance. In addition, some species that have been historically hunted are more likely to recognize – and flee from – a person walking than a person in a motorized vehicle.
Generally, larger animals need more distance, though the relationship is clearer for birds than mammals. We found that for birds, as bird size increased, so did the threshold distance. The smallest birds could tolerate humans within 65 feet (20 meters), while the largest birds had thresholds of roughly 2,000 feet (600 meters). Previous research has found a similar relationship. We did not find that this relationship existed as clearly for mammals.
We found little research on impact thresholds for amphibians and reptiles, such as lizards, frogs, turtles and snakes. A growing body of evidence shows that amphibians and reptiles are disturbed and negatively affected by recreation. So far, however, it's unclear whether those effects reflect mainly the distance to people, the number of visitors or other factors.
How to Reduce Your Impact on Wildlife
While there's much still to learn, we know enough to identify some simple actions people can take to minimize their impacts on wildlife. First, keep your distance. Although some species or individual animals will become used to human presence at close range, many others won't. And it can be hard to tell when you are stressing an animal and potentially endangering both it and yourself.
Second, respect closed areas and stay on trails. For example, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, wildlife managers seasonally close some backcountry ski areas to protect critical habitat for bighorn sheep and reduce stress on other species like moose, elk and mule deer. And rangers in Maine's Acadia National Park close several trails annually near peregrine falcon nests. This reduces stress to nesting birds and has helped this formerly endangered species recover.
Getting involved with educational or volunteer programs is a great way to learn about wildlife and help maintain undisturbed areas. As our research shows, balancing recreation with conservation means opening some areas to human use and keeping others entirely or mostly undisturbed.
As development fragments wild habitat and climate change forces many species to shift their ranges, movement corridors between protected areas become even more important. Our research suggests that creating recreation-free wildlife corridors of at least 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) wide can enable most species to move between protected areas without disturbance. Seeing wildlife can be part of a fun outdoor experience – but for the animals' sake, you may need binoculars or a zoom lens for your camera.
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment