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Saturday, May 15, 2021

A very Canadian criminal (CP) Mounties in east-central Saskatchewan have cracked what they are calling an “extremely Canadian case.” RCMP officers from the Porcupine Plain detachment were called to a rural area on Friday to investigate a theft of posts that had been piled on a property for fencing. The thief was soon revealed to have sharp teeth, fur, and a broad tail. Const. Conrad Rickards says the posts were found in a nearby waterway and it appears a beaver helped himself to the lumber to build a dam—perhaps with the help of some buddies. Rickards says there was no sign of the culprit. He says no charges will be laid.

Desperate for workers, US restaurants and stores raise pay (AP) U.S. restaurants and stores are rapidly raising pay in an urgent effort to attract more applicants and keep up with a flood of customers as the pandemic eases. McDonald’s, Sheetz and Chipotle are just some of the latest companies to follow Amazon, Walmart and Costco in boosting wages, in some cases to $15 an hour or higher. States and cities are easing business restrictions as COVID-19 deaths and cases plummet, and in places like Florida, Nevada, and Texas, restaurant traffic is above or near pre-pandemic levels, according to OpenTable, a software provider to the industry. Many companies say they are struggling to find workers. “Customers are coming back faster than restaurants can staff up,” said Josh Bivens, research director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “By raising pay, they are able to get more workers in the door.”

Blackouts Threaten Entire U.S. West This Summer as Heat Awaits (Bloomberg) First they struck California, then Texas. Now blackouts are threatening the entire U.S. West as nearly a dozen states head into summer with too little electricity. From New Mexico to Washington, power grids are being strained by forces years in the making—some of them fueled by climate change, others by the fight against it. If a heat wave strikes the whole region at once, the rolling outages that darkened Southern California and Silicon Valley last August will have been previews, not flukes. Extreme weather fueled by climate change is exposing cracks in society’s move away from fossil fuels, even as that shift is supposed to rein in the worst of global warming. States shuttering coal and gas-fired power plants simply aren’t replacing them fast enough to keep pace with the vagaries of an unstable climate, and the region’s existing power infrastructure is woefully vulnerable to wildfires (which threaten transmission lines), drought (which saps once-abundant hydropower resources) and heat waves (which play havoc with demand).

Colonial Pipeline Paid Roughly $5 Million in Ransom to Hackers (NYT) The operator of a critical fuel pipeline on the East Coast paid extortionists roughly 75 Bitcoin—or nearly $5 million—to recover its stolen data, according to people briefed on the transaction, clearing the way for gas to begin flowing again but complicating President Biden’s efforts to deter future attacks. Colonial Pipeline made the ransom payment to the hacking group DarkSide after the cybercriminals last week held up the company’s business networks with ransomware, a form of malware that encrypts data until the victim pays, and threatened to release it online. The company pre-emptively shut down its pipeline, which stretches from Texas to New Jersey and delivers nearly half of the transport fuels for the Atlantic Coast, setting off a cascading crisis that forced some airlines to make fuel stops on long-haul flights and led to emergency meetings at the White House, a jump in gas prices and panic buying at gas pumps.

Greece joins Mediterranean race to win back tourists (AP) Greece launched its tourism season Friday amid a competitive scramble across the Mediterranean to lure vacationers emerging from lockdowns. The European Union has yet to roll out its cellphone-friendly travel pass system. But southern member-states, driven deeper into debt by the pandemic and highly dependent on tourism revenues, are not waiting. Croatia has already reopened, as has Cyprus, joined Friday by Greece where residents were allowed to leave home without an electronic permit for the first time in six months. Greece is hoping to claw back half the 2019 visitor level. It’s vowed to finish vaccinating its entire island population over the next six weeks and will even waive test requirements for tourists who have received vaccines made in Russia and China that are not approved for use domestically. Other Mediterranean countries are also looking for an edge. Malta is promising visitors vouchers to go diving and cash rebates to high-end hotel customers. In Turkey, visitors from abroad have been exempt from stay-at-home orders applying to Turks, thus enjoying an empty Istanbul, and little-populated beach resorts.

Russia deems U.S., Czech Republic 'unfriendly', limits embassy hires (Reuters) The Russian government said on Friday it had officially deemed the United States and the Czech Republic "unfriendly" states, and that U.S. diplomatic missions could no longer employ local staff while Czech missions could employ a maximum of 19. Relations between Russia and the Czechs were badly hit last month when the Czechs accused Russian military intelligence of being behind a 2014 blast at an ammunition depot, and expelled dozens of Russian diplomats. Russia rejected the allegations and retaliated by expelling Czech diplomats, and also ordered the Czechs to let go the majority of their local employees in Moscow, many of whom have staffed a Czech hospitality and business centre in the city.

Lines, tokens and money brokers: Myanmar’s crumbling economy runs low on cash (Reuters) If you need cash in Myanmar, you have to get up early. Queues start forming outside banks at 4 a.m., where the first 15 or 30 customers are given a plastic token that will allow them to enter the bank when it opens at 9:30 a.m. and withdraw cash, according to more than a dozen people who spoke to Reuters. If you do not get a token, you either have to queue for hours for the few functioning cash dispensing machines outside or go to black-market brokers who charge big commissions. The cash crisis is one of the most pressing problems for the people of Myanmar after the Feb. 1 military coup. The central bank, now run by a junta appointee, has not returned some of the reserves it holds for private banks, without giving any reason, leaving the banks short of cash. The banks themselves have been closed or open only intermittently as many staff have gone on strike to protest against the coup. Meanwhile, internet outages make online transactions difficult and international transfers have largely stopped working.

When Covid Hit, China Was Ready to Tell Its Version of the Story (NYT) In the fall of 2019, just before global borders closed, an international journalists’ association decided to canvass its members about a subject that kept coming up in informal conversations: What is China doing? What it found was astonishing in its scope. Journalists from countries as tiny as Guinea-Bissau had been invited to sign agreements with their Chinese counterparts. The Chinese government was distributing versions of its propaganda newspaper China Daily in English—and also Serbian. A Filipino journalist estimated that more than half of the stories on a Philippines newswire came from the Chinese state agency Xinhua. A South African media group raised money from Chinese investors, then fired a columnist who wrote about China’s suppression of its Uyghur minority. Journalists in Peru faced intense social media criticism from combative Chinese government officials. What seemed, in each country, like an odd local anomaly looked, all told, like a vast, if patchwork, strategy to create an alternative to a global news media dominated by outlets like the BBC and CNN, and to insert Chinese money, power and perspective into the media in almost every country in the world. China’s media strategy is no secret, and the Chinese government says its campaign is no different from what powerful global players have done for more than a century. “The accusation on China is what the U.S. has been doing all along,” a deputy director general of the Information Department at the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Zhao Lijian, told me in a WeChat message.

Israeli forces hit Hamas tunnels in Gaza as all-out war looms (Washington Post) Israel continued to press its air campaign against the Gaza Strip on Friday after a devastating overnight assault by artillery and warplanes aimed at destroying an extensive system of tunnels built by the militant Hamas group to move fighters, rockets and other weapons. Israeli airstrikes and Hamas rocket attacks on Israel both raged into Friday evening with no sign of abating. The reciprocal bombardment has resulted in the deaths of 126 in Gaza and nine in Israel, health and emergency officials say, with hundreds more injured over five days of fighting. Violence between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel also continued in cities across the country, while new clashes erupted in the occupied West Bank, which had been relatively calm in recent days, with skirmishes in Ramallah, Nablus, Tulkarem and other cities. Eleven Palestinians were killed in West Bank confrontations with security forces, according to health officials. By sunset, unrest flared in several Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, where Palestinians throwing stones and firebombs battled police wielding stun grenades and tear gas, and protesters set cars and trees afire. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem reported that Israeli settlers had set fire to swaths of Palestinian farmland in the West Bank.

Radical rabbi’s followers rise in Israel amid new violence (AP) In the 1980s, Rabbi Meir Kahane’s violent anti-Arab ideology was considered so repugnant that Israel banned him from parliament and the U.S. listed his party as a terrorist group. Today, his disciples march through the streets by the hundreds, chanting “Death to Arabs” and assaulting any they come across. This week, they took part in a wave of communal violence in Jerusalem and mixed cities across Israel in which Arabs and Jews viciously attacked people and torched cars. Israelis shocked by the violence have cast the right-wing extremism as a nasty aberration or a reaction to Palestinian violence. But to Arab citizens, who make up 20% of Israel’s population, the heirs of Kahane are a natural outgrowth of a discriminatory system—normalized by some mainstream leaders who largely share their views. Their resurgence has injected another element of volatility to the conflict. It’s also part of a broader shift to the right in Israel, where Kahane’s disciples are hardly alone in adopting a hard line toward the Palestinians and trafficking in anti-Arab rhetoric.

Beset by virus, Gaza’s hospitals now struggle with wounded (AP) Just weeks ago, the Gaza Strip’s feeble health system was struggling with a runaway surge of coronavirus cases. Authorities cleared out hospital operating rooms, suspended nonessential care and redeployed doctors to patients having difficulty breathing. Then, the bombs began to fall. This week’s violence between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers has killed 103 Palestinians, including 27 children, and wounded 530 people in the impoverished territory. Israeli airstrikes have pounded apartments, blown up cars and toppled buildings. Doctors across the crowded coastal enclave are now reallocating intensive care unit beds and scrambling to keep up with a very different health crisis: treating blast and shrapnel wounds, bandaging cuts and performing amputations.

South Sudan, nearing 10 years old, struggles for stability (AP) As South Sudan approaches 10 years of being an independent country, many challenges remain for the world’s youngest state. A 2018 peace deal ending a five-year civil war has faced delays in implementation. A government of national unity was formed only last year. Millions of people remain in need of humanitarian assistance ahead of the anniversary of independence in July. One major problem has been the formation of a unified security force, which has been hampered by lack of funding and political will. More than 25,000 trainees have yet to graduate from centers across South Sudan, many struggling without regular meals, medical care or even a curriculum. Many trainees have abandoned the centers.

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