Ontario Premier Doug Ford says it’s time for food delivery services like Uber Eats to pitch in and cut fees for struggling restaurants.
“We need you to help out these mom and pop shops right now. Please consider reducing the commission rates you charge restaurants impacted by these new health measures,” Ford said Tuesday at an announcement in Etobicoke, Ont.
The Ontario government announced Friday it would prohibit indoor dining in Toronto, Peel Region and Ottawa for a second time to slow down the spread of COVID-19.
“I’ll tell ya, it’s painful doing what we had to do last week. It really weighs on you,” the premier said.
Earlier: Ontario shuts down dining inside restaurants in some areas for a second time.
He urged people to order takeout if they can afford it.
“It’s never been more important to support our own … It can be the difference between a line cook getting a shift or not. It could be the difference between the delivery driver making rent or not. It can make the difference between a family keeping their business open or closing for good.”
Ford also said Tuesday that his government would spend $300 million to help businesses with costs like property taxes and hydro bills.
Tony Elenis, the president and CEO of the Ontario Restaurant Hotel and Motel Association (ORHMA), said commission rates had a “tremendous” impact on the restaurant industry even before the pandemic.
“Their commissions should come down period,” Elenis told HuffPost Canada. “It’s too high.”
He said companies charge restaurants as much as 30 per cent an order on top of the delivery fees customers pay.
He said the ORHMA will launch a new delivery service — which will charge nine-per cent commission — by December.
Both Uber and SkipTheDishes have met with his association about cutting rates, Elenis said, but only SkipTheDishes actually took action.
The company won’t charge commission for 30 days to new restaurants that sign up while COVID-19-related restrictions are in place, it said in a press release Tuesday. It will also refund 25 per cent of its commission charge to local, independent businesses, a spokesperson told HuffPost by email.
Elenis called the move “a good gesture.”
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Uber has waived activation fees during the pandemic, a spokesperson told HuffPost, and has lowered fees for restaurants that offer pick up or provide their own courier.
DoorDash has said it will offer free delivery every Wednesday to drum up business for restaurants in December. It’s also waiving some fees for small businesses who sign up before the end of the year.
Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner said Ford should legally impose a 15-per-cent cap on commission fees.
“If we want independent restaurants to survive, then we need to do more than ask Uber Eats for a favour,” he said in a statement.
This story has been updated with comment from Uber.
In the controversy surrounding Edward Snowden’s decision to leak numerous classified National Security Agency documents, one of the repeated critiques levied by his critics is that the former intelligence contractor should have gone through “propper channels” to voice his concerns about the agency’s far-reaching—and what he judged unlawful—surveillance practices.
However, according to new reporting by the Washington Post‘s Greg Miller, a similarly concerned CIA agent who attempted to get information he thought the public had a right to know discovered just how difficult and perilous efforts to “work within the system” can be.
Miller’s report tells the tale of Jeffrey Scudder, a veteran CIA employee, whose career faltered after he made efforts to have long-classified agency materials—”a stack of articles, hundreds of histories of long-dormant conflicts and operations”—released to the public.
As part of his effort, Scudder submitted a completely lawful Freedom of Information Act request, which set off a “harrowing sequence” of events. According to Miller, Scudder “was confronted by supervisors and accused of mishandling classified information while assembling his FOIA request. His house was raided by the FBI and his family’s computers seized.” The fifty-one-year ultimately resigned after being threatened that if he did not, he risked losing portions of his pension.
“I submitted a FOIA and it basically destroyed my entire career,” Scudder told the Post in an interview. “What was this whole exercise for?”
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What happened to Scudder, Miller points out,
As journalist Glenn Greenwald noted in response to the article:
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International humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) warned Monday that the highly secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership will further erode access to life saving medicines in all countries involved in the deal, hitting poor and vulnerable people the hardest.
The organization joins a crescendo of voices warning of the potentially deadly effects of the mammoth pact as another round of closed-door negotiations commences in Ottawa, Canada.
“Every TPP government is struggling to contain rising health costs, so it’s beyond reason why provisions designed to delay the introduction of low-cost generic medicines would be allowed to make it into the final TPP agreement,” said Stephen Cornish, executive director of MSF Canada, in a statement.
The “free trade” deal is currently under negotiation between Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States, and Vietnam—which combined comprise approximately 40 percent of the world’s GDP.
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The U.S. has been aggressively pushing proposals to expand and reinforce pharmaceutical corporations’ monopolies on life-saving drugs and restrict the abilities of governments to protect access to lower-cost generic medicines.
The pact is slated to include NAFTA’s infamous corporate tribunals, which allow corporations to sue governments in secret courts, circumventing national legal systems. Using this provision in NAFTA, pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly sued the Canadian government in 2012 on charges that Canada “favors” generic medicines. The secret tribunal ruling has the potential to change Canadian drug laws.
MSF declared in its statement, “To see the harmful effects of the stringent intellectual property rules that the U.S. seeks to impose on TPP countries, we need only look to the U.S. market, where medicine prices have tripled since 1987, outpacing consumer prices, which have only doubled.”
“Higher medicine prices cost lives in countries at every level of economic development, and the TPP regulations in question should be rejected outright,” said Judit Rius, U.S. manager and legal policy adviser of the MSF Access Campaign.
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That’s the message from a team of international researchers whose just-published study shows that the raising of livestock and consumption of meat—especially beef—is becoming an increasingly aggressive driver of planetary global warming and climate change.
Published this week in the journal Climatic Change and posted in the U.S. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research reveals the alarming increase in global consumption of meat from raised livestock and discovered that beef cattle in particular are releasing more methane and nitrous oxide, both potent greenhouse gases, than previously thought.
Carbon dioxide is the most-prevalent gas when it comes to climate change. It is released by vehicles, industry, and forest removal and comprises the greatest portion of greenhouse gas totals. But methane and nitrous oxide are also greenhouse gasses and account for approximately 28 percent of global warming activity.
As Damian Carrington reports for the Guardian:
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According to one of the lead researchers, in order to mitigate the threat posed by this rise in meat consumption, world government’s should end the pattern of subsidizing the mass production of beef.
“The big story is just how dramatically impactful beef is compared to all the others,” said Professor Gidon Eshel from Bard College in New York.
“I would strongly hope that governments stay out of people’s diet,” Eshel continued, “but at the same time there are many government policies that favor the current diet in which animals feature too prominently. Remove the artificial support given to the livestock industry and rising prices will do the rest. In that way you are having less government intervention in people’s diet and not more.”
According to the research, livestock emissions in the world’s more developed countries peaked in the 1970’s, but the proliferation of meat-based diets—fueled by a growing global middle class and aggressive expansion and marketing by the beef industry—has led to soaring overall emission rates.
This consumer trend—the study notes—is expected to increase further going forward, as demand for meat, dairy products, and eggs is predicted by some scientists to double by 2050.
“The developing world is getting better at reducing greenhouse emissions caused by each animal, but this improvement is not keeping up with the increasing demand for meat,” said Professor Dario Caro, a member of the research team at the University of Siena in Italy. “As a result, greenhouse gas emissions from livestock keep going up and up in much of the developing world.”
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Today’s mainstream environmental organizations continue to fall short on institutional diversity, a new study shows, still operating as “insiders’ clubs” that promote white, male leadership and impose a “green ceiling” on everyone else.
Headed by University of Michigan professor Dorceta Taylor, the report—titled (pdf)—examines 191 conservation and preservation groups, 74 government environmental agencies, and 28 green grant-making organizations and incorporates information from interviews with 21 “environmental professionals.”
The study finds that, while people of color comprise 38 percent of the U.S. population, they comprise less than 16 percent of the staff in all types of environmental institutions surveyed. Furthermore, once ethnic minorities make it in the door, they are relegated to lower-ranking positions, holding less than 12 percent of leadership roles. In conservation organizations that have budgets of over $1 million, there is not a single president who is an ethnic minority. The only position more likely to be filled by a person of color than a white employee is a diversity manager, but many organizations do not have such a slot.
Taylor told Common Dreams that, when it comes to diversity in hiring, some portions of corporate America out-pace environmental groups. “Over time we have seen some improvement, but I was surprised the numbers hadn’t creeped up more,” she said.
This is not because people of color don’t care about the environment. A new survey by Green for All shows communities of color strongly support action on climate change, and it is well-documented that people currently facing socioeconomic inequalities are harder hit by the destructive effects of human-made climate change.
“People of color care deeply about the environment and the impacts of climate change,” Green For All Executive Director Nikki Silvestri said in a recent press statement. “We understand the urgency of these threats because we experience the effects every single day.”
But Taylor explained that, throughout her research, she found that the “notion that people of color are not interested in the environment” remains a key barrier to their employment in this sector. “As long as the perception remains that people of color are not qualified, that they won’t stay, that they don’t have the skill set, there will always be reluctance to hire people of color,” she said.
The study identifies numerous other barriers, including “insider” recruiting, failure to reach out to minority-led organizations for hiring, reluctance to employ long-term interns of color, lack of commitment to diversity initiatives, lack of mentoring, and unconscious racism and discrimination. The report finds that the “internal culture” of environmental groups is “alienating” to communities of color, poor and working class people, LGBTQ communities, and others, with many perceiving environmental activism as a “white thing.” The study outlines the histories of African Americans and Native American communities pushing environmental movements to incorporate social justice into their frameworks.
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“Many people of color want to link social issues with environmental issues,” said Taylor. “They link inequality and poor environment with discrimination, racism, and other equity issues and tie that to environmental issues. Some environmental organizations are not comfortable with that linkage.”
These concerns are not new. In 1990, the Southwest Organizing Project penned an open letter to prominent environmental groups, criticizing their “lack of accountability” towards “Third World communities in the Southwest, in the United States as a whole, and internationally.
While green groups have made some progress in chipping away the “green ceiling,” most of those gains have gone to white women—who comprise 60 percent of new interns and staffers at conservation and preservation groups, the study finds. The “most popular” diversity effort among environmental groups is the promotion of white women already on staff to positions of leadership. “Women of color are still on the outside looking in, along with their male counterparts,” the study notes.
Yet even still, the gender gap remains, with men generally holding more powerful positions. Men comprise 70 percent of the presidents and board chairs at conservation and preservation groups, holding most of the executive director positions in government agencies, holding a majority of the highest-ranking positions at environmental grant-making groups, and dominating board membership across across the board.
Some environmental groups responded to the findings with concern. “Until these issues are addressed, the environmental movement will continue to be stuck in our silo while the planet and its people suffer,” May Boeve, executive director for 350.org, told the Guardian in response to the study.
The study urges environmental groups to muster a real commitment to diversity, not just lip service, and directly support “existing leaders of color.” Taylor explained that in the “environmental justice movement” there are “talented people of color organizations, pushing campaigns” worthy of backing.
“The message of this report is that we would like to see more improvement,” said Taylor.
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A program established under the Obama Administration by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) endangered about a dozen young Latin Americans by employing them to incite political revolt in Cuba by using civil society and humanitarian aid programs as fronts for the real aim of political destabilization on the Communist island, reveals an extensive new AP investigation published Monday.
The secret program “was launched during a time when newly inaugurated President Barack Obama spoke about a ‘new beginning’ with Cuba after decades of mistrust, raising questions about whether the White House had a coherent policy toward the island nation,” according to the AP.
To help it implement the plan, USAID hired the firm Creative Associates International, the same Washington-based company that played a central role in the creation of the secret “Cuban Twitter” that the AP reported on in April.
Characterizing the program as “an operation that often teetered on disaster,” the investigation’s most shocking discovery was perhaps that of an attempt to recruit dissidents using “a ruse that could undermine USAID’s credibility in critical health work around the world.” This “ruse” was an HIV-prevention workshop put together by one of the key hires made by Creative Associates, Fernando Murillo, the 29-year-old head of a Costa Rica-based human rights group. Murillo reported back to his employer that such a workshop was the “perfect excuse” to recruit political activists.”
As DSWright points out at Firedoglake, what’s so disturbing about this is that “USAID was recently involved in setting up fake hepatitis clinics for the CIA in Pakistan,” causing Pakistanis to refuse being vaccinated, and prompting the White House to promise to never again use health clinics as a front for intelligence operations.
The travelers’ program was implemented at a time when the danger of being a U.S. operative on the island “was apparent to USAID, if not to the young operatives,” the investigation found, since Alan Gross, an American USAID contractor, “had just been hauled away to a Cuban jail.” After Gross’ arrest, USAID told contractors that they should consider suspending programs to Cuba and that—in the words of one official—the warning applied “to ALL travelers to the island, not just American citizens.”
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And yet, just four months after Gross’ arrest, Murillo was sent to the island by the USAID, marking the beginning of yet another failed covert operation to overthrow the Cuban government.
Whereas Gross was paid over half a million dollars by the U.S. government, despite the fact that he had never been to Cuba and his Spanish was quite poor, the young Latin Americans were paid as little as $5.41 an hour. Other aspects of how they were used appear to have been dangerous and poorly thought out—in one example, a friend of Murillo’s who was used as a “mule” to bring money to a student group in Cuba said that his security training had amounted to about a half hour and was done via Skype.
While USAID did not deny the contents of the story, in a statement put out Monday the agency highlighted the fact that Congress funds “democracy programming in Cuba to empower Cubans to access more information and strengthen civil society,” and that “this work is not secret, it is not covert, nor is it undercover.” The statement failed to address the program in question, which is not a part of any such funding from Congress, and was secret until Monday. The same defense was used of the fake social network built by USAID, despite every aspect of it having been entirely covert.
The project was paid for out of the same fund used for the fake Cuban Twitter. USAID declined to comment on how much was spent on the travelers’ program, and has not fulfilled the AP‘s Freedom of Information Act request for a complete copy of the Cuban contracts that was filed more than three months ago.
The AP found “no evidence the political objectives were ever realized” and Cuban students belonging to what had been identified as a “target group” due to its supposed organizational abilities and political stance were “astonished to discover that the foreigners were acting on behalf of the U.S. government.” One student said that he thought the operatives mistook typical Cuban griping on things like basic infrastructure issues for full-on political dissent.
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In an in-depth interview published by Wired Magazine on Wednesday, Edward Snowden discloses what government activities proved to be the “last straw,” prompting the whistleblower to expose the depths of the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance operation.
Speaking with investigative journalist James Bamford—who blew the whistle on a government eavesdropping program when stationed in Hawaii during the Vietnam War and later wrote a number of best-selling books about government secrecy and the NSA—Snowden reveals how a botched U.S. government hacking operation caused Syria’s 2012 internet blackout.
Bamford writes:
Snowden also revealed that, after the operatives realized what they had done, one jokingly said: “If we get caught, we can always point the finger at Israel.”
During his clandestine meeting with Bamford, Snowden disclosed for the first time the existence of another “Strangelovian cyberwarfare program,” codenamed MonsterMind, which he described as the ultimate threat to privacy.
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Like other programs before it, MonsterMind automated the process of searching for the beginnings of a foreign cyberattack. Unique to the program, however, was that once a suspected attack was detected, MonsterMind would fire back with no human involvement. Snowden explained to Bamford that this is problematic because attacks are often routed through a third-party country. “You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?”
Further, for the system to work, the NSA must access virtually all “traffic flows,” or communications, coming in from overseas to people in the United States.
“And if we’re analyzing all traffic flows, that means we have to be intercepting all traffic flows,” said Snowden. “That means violating the Fourth Amendment, seizing private communications without a warrant, without probable cause or even a suspicion of wrongdoing. For everyone, all the time.”
Snowden spoke at length with Bamford about his motivations for blowing the whistle on the NSA, but said it was learning about these two particular government operations—along with the existence of the NSA’s massive data repository center located in Utah—that finally pushed him over the edge.
“Given the NSA’s new data storage mausoleum in Bluffdale, its potential to start an accidental war, and the charge to conduct surveillance on all incoming communications, Snowden believed he had no choice but to take his thumb drives and tell the world what he knew,” Bamford writes, adding that more NSA revelations will be forthcoming.
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Forget everything you think you know about global warming. The really inconvenient truth is that it’s not about carbon—it’s about capitalism. The convenient truth is that we can seize this existential crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better.
The new book by Naomi Klein. In stores September 16 and available for pre-order. For more information, tour dates, or to buy the book: http://thischangeseverything.org/
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In her most provocative book yet, Naomi Klein, author of the global bestsellers The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, tackles the most profound threat humanity has ever faced: the war our economic model is waging against life on earth.
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The alarming decline of the monarch butterfly population necessitates federal action to save the iconic orange and black pollinators.
Such is the urging of the Center for Biological Diversity and Center for Food Safety, joined by the Xerces Society and monarch expert Dr. Lincoln Brower, who sent a petition (pdf) Tuesday to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service seeking Endangered Species Act protection for the butterflies.
Over the last two decades, the groups say, population has plummeted by more than 90 percent. To put that “staggering” figure in perspective, Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, said that “in human-population terms it would be like losing every living person in the United States except those in Florida and Ohio.”
The request for federal protection follows stacking evidence against corporate agriculture for its role in these declining numbers. A primary threat to the pollinators, the petition states, is widespread plantings in the Midwest of genetically modified crops and the herbicides used on them, which are wiping out the monarch’s larval food, milkweed.
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“In the Midwest, nearly ubiquitous adoption of, glyphosate-resistant ‘Roundup Ready’ corn and soybeans has caused a precipitous decline of common milkweed, and thus of monarchs, which lay their eggs only on milkweeds. The majority of the world’s monarchs originate in the Corn Belt region of the United States where milkweed loss has been severe, and the threat that this habitat loss poses to the resiliency, redundancy, and representation of the monarch cannot be overstated,” the petition reads.
Brower, who has been studying monarchs for six decades, said we need to take action before it is too late.
“Monarchs are in a deadly free fall and the threats they face are now so large in scale that Endangered Species Act protection is needed sooner rather than later, while there is still time to reverse the severe decline in the heart of their range.”
“The monarch is the canary in the cornfield, a harbinger of environmental change that we’ve brought about on such a broad scale that many species of pollinators are now at risk if we don’t take action to protect them,” Brower warned.
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As high-level talks took place in the city of Minsk, Belarus on Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called on the convening parties to agree to an immediate ceasefire between the Ukraine Army and rebel forces still holding ground in Luhansk, Donetsk, and elsewhere.
Lavrov called on the Ukraine Army to end its shelling of civilian areas and for all parties to quiet their guns so that the necessary negotiations could take place. He also pushed back against accusations that Russian military forces have been directly involved in the fighting and said there were no future plans to do so.
“There will be no military intervention,” Lavrov told students at Moscow State Institute of International Relations on Monday, according to the Associated Press. “We call for an exclusively peaceful settlement of this severe crisis, this tragedy.”
Speaking ahead of the talks on Sunday, Russian President Vladimir Putin introduced the idea of statehood for eastern Ukraine, though his representatives made clear his language was not insinuating “independence” for the eastern regions, but a unified Ukraine that included political self-determination and some level of autonomy.
For his part, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Monday again accused Russia of giving direct support to rebels who have be able to push back Ukraine Army units in recent days, including reports of forcing a retreat near the main airport in Luhansk on Monday.
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“Direct and open aggression has been launched against Ukraine from a neighbouring state,” said Poroshenko during a speech at a military academy in Kiev. “This has changed the situation in the zone of conflict in a radical way.”
Monday’s talks in Minsk included representatives from key parties to the conflict, including: the Kiev government in Ukraine, factions of the separatist rebels in the east, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and Russia. The talks were the next phase of diplomatic engagement set forth by Putin and Poroshenko, who met last week—also in Minsk—to address the conflict.
Representatives from the self-declared People’s Republic of Donetsk, according to the Russian news agency RIA Novosti, said they were hopeful the proposals they brought to the talks will lead to direct negotiations with Kiev and the end of violence that has claimed thousands of lives over recent months.
“We came to Minsk with proposals,” said DPR Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Purgin. “In fact, it’s the preparatory stage of the negotiations, we will try to find as much common ground as possible and curb violence. We have brought proposals [needed] to start consultations and subsequently to launch negotiations.”
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