Zajímavé aktuální zahraniční články

[davkol]

‘Held to ransom’: Pfizer demands governments gamble with state assets to secure vaccine deal

Pfizer has been accused of “bullying” Latin American governments in Covid vaccine negotiations and has asked some countries to put up sovereign assets, such as embassy buildings and military bases, as a guarantee against the cost of any future legal cases, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal.

In the case of one country, demands made by the pharmaceutical giant led to a three-month delay in a vaccine deal being agreed. For Argentina and Brazil, no national deals were agreed at all. Any hold-up in countries receiving vaccines means more people contracting Covid-19 and potentially dying.

Officials from Argentina and the other Latin American country, which cannot be named as it has signed a confidentiality agreement with Pfizer, said the company’s negotiators demanded additional indemnity against any civil claims citizens might file if they experienced adverse effects after being inoculated. In Argentina and Brazil, Pfizer asked for sovereign assets to be put up as collateral for any future legal costs.

…

Madlen Davies, Rosa Furneaux, Iván Ruiz, Jill Langlois
February 23, 2021
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

[davkol]

The greenhouse gas emissions of indoor cannabis production in the United States

The legalization of cannabis has caused a substantial increase in commercial production, yet the magnitude of the industry’s environmental impact has not been fully quantified. A considerable amount of legal cannabis is cultivated indoors primarily for quality control and security. In this study we analysed the energy and materials required to grow cannabis indoors and quantified the corresponding greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions using life cycle assessment methodology for a cradle-to-gate system boundary. The analysis was performed across the United States, accounting for geographic variations in meteorological and electrical grid emissions data. The resulting life cycle GHG emissions range, based on location, from 2,283 to 5,184 kg CO2-equivalent per kg of dried flower. The life cycle GHG emissions are largely attributed to electricity production and natural gas consumption from indoor environmental controls, high-intensity grow lights and the supply of carbon dioxide for accelerated plant growth. The discussion focuses on the technological solutions and policy adaptation that can improve the environmental impact of commercial indoor cannabis production.

Hailey M. Summers, Evan Sproul, Jason C. Quinn
March 8, 2021
Nature Sustainability

Marijuana’s High Environmental Burden

…

So, what can be done? The industry is aware of their carbon footprint and internally things are starting to shift. More and more, growers are switching to LED grow lights and trying to nutrients responsibly, for example. Similar to food certifications such as USDA Organic, Fair Trade and Rainforest Alliance Certified, marijuana is looking to find ways to certify their product as sustainable. Currently, the only certification for marijuana is the Clean Green certification, which is focused on greenhouse gas reduction through responsible product and electricity sourcing. However, this certification minimally addresses practices to reduce overall energy consumption, which accounts for more than 60% of total greenhouse gas emissions from indoor marijuana growth. Certifications should be focused on reducing energy usage from lighting, heating, ventilation and air conditioning if growers truly want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Quite possibly the easiest way to lower energy consumption would be to grow marijuana in a greenhouse or outdoors. Although, these growing practices are not entirely free of environmental burden either; concerns include illegal water diversion, nutrient runoff, deforestation and death of unintended target animals through rodenticides. Furthermore, making the shift to outdoor growth would require more than just a certification, it would require changing the law. In Colorado for example, 62 of 64 counties legally require commercial marijuana to be grown indoors. So, as you have learned, the path to sustainable marijuana is not an easy one. However, considering the significant greenhouse gas emissions from current indoor growth practices, focus should be directed toward minimizing the industries impact.

…

Hailey Summers
July 6, 2020
HUMANnature, School of Global Environmental Sustainability, Colorado State University

[davkol]

Documents Show Amazon Is Aware Drivers Pee in Bottles and Even Defecate En Route, Despite Company Denial

Ken Klippenstein
March 25, 2021
The Intercept

Document: Amazon Security Staff Reported Its Own Hostile Tweets as “Suspicious,” Fearing They’d Been Hacked

Ken Klippenstein
March 29, 2021
The Intercept

Amazon’s Twitter Army Was Handpicked for “Great Sense of Humor,” Leaked Document Reveals

Ken Klippenstein
March 31, 2021
The Intercept

[davkol]

Thinker, Tanker, Scholar, Consultant. Every former policymaker in Washington is an academic, a researcher, and an adviser to big business.

It’s common for diplomats who leave the government to wear many hats at once. So common, in fact, that very few people notice.

When I began researching Joe Biden’s national-security team, I noticed that every key adviser seemed to hold three different roles at once: a university affiliation, a think-tank job, and a gig advising corporate interests. The last one, usually linked to a consulting firm, was most often left off bios.

The way Washington works is that the university or think-tank affiliations are the label of choice. Radio hosts never introduce former officials by their corporate consulting titles. The jobs where they really earn their living are omitted from campaign, transition, and White House announcements.

…

But this isn’t just multitasking. The corporate work has an influence on the scholarly and the policy work, in ways that can be difficult to understand because so little is disclosed. Consultancies do not reveal their clients unless forced to through government-mandated disclosure. Corporations don’t discuss who offers consulting work for them or why they need it. And policymakers, even when they have to, divulge as little as possible.

Newly released ethics forms show that Biden’s national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, earned $80,000 last year from an academic position at Dartmouth College and $80,000 from Yale. But look to his affiliation with consulting firm Macro Advisory Partners for the less public but more lucrative work. Sullivan earned $138,000 for providing part-time “advisory services.” He worked for Uber, Mastercard, Lego, and big investment groups like Bank of America, Aviva, Standard Life Aberdeen, and Standard Chartered. (The Prospect reached out to all of the companies listed on Sullivan’s forms. Each one declined to comment or didn’t respond.) Separately, Sullivan earned $45,000 from Microsoft for providing advice to its president on policy issues.

Is there something dishonorable about working for big business? Sullivan never mentioned his role at Macro Advisory Partners in his bios on the websites of Yale, Dartmouth, or the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he was also a researcher. His corporate affiliation never appeared in articles he wrote for Foreign Affairs or Foreign Policy, The New York Times or The Washington Post.

At the same time as he was advising these companies, Sullivan was also serving as a top adviser to Biden’s presidential campaign. That’s a seven-days-a-week, 13-plus-hours-a-day job. Yet he still carved out time for the firm.

…

Undisclosed corporate work is detrimental to policymaking in part because it leads to a limited cross section of policy thinking. “If you’re in a room where everyone comes from a corporation, or a hedge fund, or a BigLaw firm that represents corporations or hedge funds, there isn’t intellectual diversity,” Walter Shaub, who served as President Obama’s chief ethics official, told me.

At least 20 senior Biden officials come from just three business advisories: Macro Advisory Partners, Albright Stonebridge, and WestExec Advisors, which I profiled last year. This has led Politico to describe the administration as “a team of rival consulting firms.” These staffers work on diplomacy, national security, and communications, and there are likely more that we don’t yet know about. Yesterday, the White House revealed that Biden’s senior Middle East director, Ambassador Barbara Leaf, served as a WestExec consultant in the fall.

A consultant’s job is to help corporations, hedge funds, and investment groups, based on what they know or would think may happen in the next administration. Now, firms are hiring former colleagues of Team Biden who can speak to how the administration might approach the world.

Macro Advisory Partners wasn’t hiring Sullivan for his experience writing op-eds and speeches. As Walter Shaub put it, “I suspect his advice goes beyond Dale Carnegie.” A founder of Macro Advisory Partners described Sullivan as a “super-thinker,” who provided “really important judgements for corporate leaders.” Founded by former British spy chiefs, Macro Advisory Partners does work that goes beyond the typical consulting firm. A promotional video for the firm says it’s increasingly serving the needs of Big Tech in grappling with new government regulations.

At its worst, consulting work leads to conflicts of interest. Earlier this month, when hackers broke into Microsoft’s email platform, tens of thousands of organizations, including government agencies, were under threat. Sullivan tweeted that he was “closely tracking” the breach and urged all users to download a patch to address the vulnerability. But since his ethics forms were not published at that point, the public could not have known that he had recently served as an adviser to Microsoft’s executive.

Shaub, the former Obama ethics official, told me that through disclosures and recusals, it’s possible to narrowly address the potential for conflicts. But there is a bigger question, he says: “What kind of message are you sending about the purpose of public service if you’re bringing in people who were peddling influence based on their prior public service?”

…

Jonathan Guyer
March 25, 2021
The American Prospect

[davkol]

Empire Politician. A Half-Century of Joe Biden’s Stances on War, Militarism, and the CIA

[obsáhlý přehled stěžejních příkladů amerického imperialismu a role současného prezidenta Bidena během jeho kariéry od senátora počínaje 70. léty po viceprezidenta]

Jeremy Scahill
April 27, 2021
The Intercept

[davkol]

Big Tech bankrolling AI ethics research and events seems very familiar. Ah, yes, Big Tobacco all over again. Who knows whether algorithms really harm society?

…

In a paper included in the Proceedings of the 2021 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES ’21) next month, Mohamed Abdalla, a doctoral student in computer science at the University of Toronto, and Moustafa Abdalla, a doctoral student on deferral from Harvard Medical School, explore how Big Tech has adopted strategies similar to those used by Big Tobacco.

…

The authors point out that Google has said as much about unwelcome research, insisting that criticism from Oracle-funded advocacy group Campaign for Accountability should be discounted because it is financed by a hostile competitor. Coincidentally, the Campaign for Accountability in 2017 published a post that begins, "Google has paid scholars millions to produce hundreds of papers supporting its policy interests, following in the footsteps of the oil and tobacco industries."

Big tech in this instance is defined as: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Intel, IBM, Huawei, Samsung, Uber, Alibaba, Element AI, and OpenAI. But the boffins' argument applies to a far larger set of companies that have a commercial interest in AI-powered systems.

The brothers Abdalla cite the mid 2010s as the point at which public attitudes about Big Tech began to sour. And they see similarities in Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's 2018 acknowledgement that "it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough" to prevent interference in the 2016 US election to "A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers," Big Tobacco's 1954 acknowledgement that smoking has health implications.

"Just like Big Tobacco, in response to a worsening public image, Big Tech had started to fund various institutions and causes to 'ensure the ethical development of AI,' and to focus on 'responsible development,'" they state in their paper.

…

They point to Partnership on AI, founded in 2016 by Amazon, Facebook Google, and Microsoft, among others, to formulate AI best practices as a group. They say that it has shown little interest in engaging with civil society, citing the departure of human rights group Access Now from the organization as a sign of its narrow focus on corporate concerns.

The researchers also point to the problematic nature of conference funding, noting that NeurIPS, a leading machine-learning conference, has had at least two Big Tech sponsors at the highest funding tier since 2015 and has had even more lately.

"When considering workshops relating to ethics or fairness, all but one have at least one organizer who is affiliated or was recently affiliated with Big Tech," the paper says. "For example, there was a workshop about 'Responsible and Reproducible AI' sponsored solely by Facebook."

…

Tobacco firms, [Frank Pasquale, professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School and author of The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information] said, would raise doubts by saying things like, "Who knows whether smoking really causes cancer?"

"I think the merchants-of-doubt approach successfully deflected a lot of lawmaking," he said, noting that a lot of academics today say the same thing about potential harms from YouTube and other online platforms, as a justification for further funding and study.

Pasquale argues that the key is to have more support for public and private sector researchers so they don't have to depend on funding from the firms they're investigating. He also stressed the importance of making data from these firms available to unaffiliated, independent researchers.

…

Thomas Claburn
April 29, 2021
The Register

[davkol]

But What About Hamas’s Rockets?

We must be clear: What started this immediate horror was the intensification of Israel’s ethnic-cleansing campaign against Palestinians in East Jerusalem.

The U.S.-backed, armed, and funded extreme right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu is currently engaged in a systemic collective punishment campaign against the people of Gaza. More than two million of them are trapped in an open-air prison camp with nowhere to run or hide from this scorched earth operation. Children are being slaughtered. Civilian residential buildings are being razed to the ground. Meanwhile ethno-nationalist militias are rampaging through the streets of Israel and terrorizing their Arab neighbors in a campaign of organized mob violence. We must be clear: what started this immediate horror was the intensification of Israel’s ethnic-cleansing campaign against Palestinians in East Jerusalem, forcibly evicting people from their homes to hand them over to Israeli settlers. The incendiary situation was then exacerbated during a Ramadan siege by Israeli forces at one of the holiest sites in Islam, the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

Israel is a nuclear power, armed with the most sophisticated and lethal weaponry imaginable. And it operates with a blank check of impunity bestowed upon it by its fiscal and military sponsor: the U.S. government. President Joe Biden has a career-long record of defending Israel’s worst crimes. And as president, he is now facilitating this murderous crime against humanity being committed by his “great, great friend” Netanyahu. This is all rooted in Israel’s multidecade war of annihilation against the Palestinian people.

The Israeli and U.S. governments — indeed all Western governments — are promoting an insidious lie with a propaganda campaign to make Hamas the central issue of this bloodbath. The refrain, repeated over and over, that Israel has a right to self-defense, is intended to give Israel a shield of impunity and to justify its crimes against humanity. The U.S. position is that Israel has the right to self-defense, but the Palestinian people do not. Yet anyone who speaks of the horrors meted out against the overwhelmingly defenseless Palestinians is presented with a demand to denounce the firing of rockets by Hamas into Israel. It is an effort to “both sides” what is an asymmetric campaign of terror waged by a nuclear power against a people who have no state, no army, no air force, no navy, and an almost nonexistent civilian infrastructure.

Anyone who asks “But what about Hamas’s rockets?” has a moral obligation to put themselves in the shoes of the Palestinians of Gaza and do some very serious soul-searching.

…

There are Palestinian activists and citizens who have spoken out against Hamas and made the case that its actions hurt the Palestinian cause of liberation and aid the propaganda campaign waged by Israel and its powerful allies. These voices must be heard, for they have the absolute moral right to decide the tactics of their resistance because they live with its consequences. But Western journalists, analysts, politicians, and commentators who obsess exclusively over Hamas’s actions while ignoring, minimizing, or justifying the overwhelmingly disproportionate bombardment and displacement being waged by Israel are playing defense for the war crimes of a nation state against a destitute and abused population.

Jeremy Scahill
May 14, 2021
The Intercept

[davkol]

Eleven children receiving NRC trauma care killed in their homes by Israeli air strikes

The Norwegian Refugee Council confirmed today that 11 of over 60 children killed by Israeli air strikes in Gaza over the last week were participating in its psycho-social programme aimed at helping them deal with trauma.

All of the children between 5 and 15 years old were killed in their homes in densely populated areas along with countless other relatives who died or received injuries.

"We are devastated to learn that 11 children we were helping with trauma were bombarded while they were at home and thought they were safe," said NRC's Secretary General Jan Egeland. " They are now gone, killed with their families, buried with their dreams and the nightmares that haunted them. We call on Israel to stop this madness: children must be protected. Their homes must not be targets. Schools must not be targets. Spare these children and their families. Stop bombing them now."

…

"As an urgent measure, we appeal to all parties for an immediate ceasefire so that we can reach those in need and spare more civilians," Egeland said. "But the truth is that there can be no peace or security as long as there are systemic injustices. The siege of Gaza needs to be lifted and the occupation of Palestinians must end if we are to avoid more trauma and death among children and new cycles of destruction every few years."

May 18, 2021
Norwegian Refugee Council

[davkol]

Ireland urges Israel to end 'de facto annexation' of Palestinian land

Ireland’s government on Tuesday supported a parliamentary motion condemning the “de facto annexation” of Palestinian land by Israeli authorities in what it said was the first use of the phrase by a European Union government in relation to Israel.

May 25, 2021
Reuters

[davkol]

The Tokyo Olympics Are In Peril

Staging the Olympics amid a state of emergency and a coronavirus upsurge has led top officials to question whether they should happen at all.

Ten thousand people. That’s how many Olympic volunteers quit their posts in Tokyo, with the games just 50 days away. That is one of every eight volunteers needed to pull off the 2021 (still called the 2020) Olympics. This is just the latest warning sign that, despite the Panglossian protestations of the International Olympic Committee, this summer’s Games are in peril. Japan is currently wrestling with a coronavirus upsurge and less than 3 percent of the population is vaccinated. According to polls, as much as 80 percent of the country does not want to host the games, for fear of it exacerbating this omnipresent public health crisis, currently classified as a state of emergency.

The masses of Tokyo want to postpone or cancel the games, but the government says it’s the IOC’s decision, not the host country’s, sovereignty be damned. In a, pardon the expression, viral editorial, Japanese Olympic Committee member and one-time bronze medalist Kaori Yamaguchi wrote that Japan has been “cornered” into having to host the games. She wrote, “We have been cornered into a situation where we cannot even stop now. We are damned if we do, and damned if we do not…. The IOC also seems to think that public opinion in Japan is not important.” It was an extraordinary statement that broke a wall of blithe arrogance from the JOC in the face of this public opposition.

In a sane world, the Olympics would have already been postponed. But money has trumped all other concerns, and that’s what Yamaguchi is referring to when she says the country is “damned if we do, and damned if we don’t.” Japan has officially spent $15.4 billion on the games, but government audits reveal that the actual cost could be as high as $30 billion and climbing. At least a portion of that lucre needs to be recouped, and it won’t be if the gleaming new facilities are shuttered.

For the IOC, the pressure to televise something they can call the Olympics is a matter of survival. The committee receives 75 percent of its budget from Olympic television rights and is already hurting from last year’s postponement, which was instituted against its will. If these Olympics are postponed again or—heaven forfend—canceled, the IOC stands to lose, according to the Associated Press, between $3 billion and $4 billion. If the Olympics go on, it will be the ultimate negation of its alleged purpose: profit trumping the joy of sport.

…

Dave Zirin
June 8, 2021
The Nation