#watchdog reporting

[crinaboros]

EXCLUSIVE: Romanian Environment Ministry releases closed-doors meeting recording, revealing forest and biodiversity loss admission in talk with European Parliament delegates

Article supported by an IJ4EU grant for independent reporting

by Crina-Gabriela Boroş

(Photo: Truck transporting freshly-cut wood from a private forest (according to Romsilva employees present), driving through Romsilva’s Ocolul Domneşti on a rainy day in South Făgăraş mountains, 17 May 2023. Copyrighted - all rights reserved.)

Pressed by us and in a move to refute European Parliament’s petition delegation’s allegation of closed-door policy during a joint meeting in Bucharest, the Romanian Ministry of Environment released the event’s audio recording – probing illegal logging and environment destruction complaints – to Freedom House Romania / PressHub.

On Tuesday May 6, PREShub published the PETI delegation’s reaction to our revelation that media access to key moments of their fact-finding visit to Romania was tightly controlled and severely restricted.

The delegation held discussions with the Ministry of Environment and visited the country, following complaints regarding systemic illegal logging, as well as a list of referrals regarding the destruction of protected habitats.

The PRESShub’s feature contains a quote from the Ministry of Environment’s chief spokesperson, who told us that it was the PETI delegates who did not allow media representatives to attend the technical meeting with the Minister on a critical issue of major public interest.

But PETI delegation lead Yana Toom wrote to PRESShub to “clarify that shortly before the meeting at the Ministry the leader of the delegation asked the participants if they agreed to the participation of journalists in the meeting and that the Minister of Environment objected”.

Romania’s Ministry of the Environment responds to PETI

PRESShub requested a clarification from the Ministry of the Environment, regarding the latter statement from PETI’s response. Afterall, Environment, Waters and Forests Minister’s spokesperson Mihai Drăgan did initially tell us that „the only reason why the press did not have access to the meeting is that this was at the request of PETI delegates. The nature of this meeting is not public”.

A Ministry of Environment’s representative specified that such a discussion between the two sides, about media access, did not take place!

„Following preliminary discussions for the organisation of the meeting on May 15, as well as the PETI Commission’s usual practices for similar actions, MMAP proposed media access for image opportunities at the beginning of the meeting, as well as the support of statements by the participants at the end”, the communique sais.

“The EP representatives had no objections to the proposed format, also stating that, due to the limited time, there will be no press statements from the delegation leadership.”

“Regarding the information according to which there would have been a discussion before the actual meeting, in which the head of the EP delegation would have requested the consent for the participation of journalists and the minister would have opposed it, we specify that the information is totally erroneous, such a discussion did not exist, neither at the beginning of the meeting, nor after it”, an Environment Ministry’s spokesperson said.

As such, “in the spirit of transparency”, the Romanian Environment Ministry is granting access to the full recording of the talks, released exclusively to PRESShub.

Listen to the recording on SoundCloud - https://tinyurl.com/4s4yjmkc. 

(Original article published on PRESSHub - https://presshub.ro/exclusive-romanian-environment-ministry-releases-closed-doors-meeting-recording-revealing-forest-and-biodiversity-loss-admission-in-talk-with-european-parliament-delegates-274472/)

LORDS OF TIMBER is a project supported by an IJ4EU grant for independent reporting, managed by the European Journalism Centre and the International Press Institute. This is one article in a series exposing aspects tied to EU’s “famous” “environmental” infringement.

[alwaysbewoke]

honestly, FUCK ISRAEL!!

[pkmn-smashorpass]

I agree Anon I am Patrat's strongest soldier Watchy Watchog is the number one show on television

It’s okay to be wrong ☺️

[catinfroghat]

I had to do mandatory training at work about spotting the signs of radicalisation/extremism and they wanted to add some racial variety in there (because let's be real this whole course is just about islamic terrorism even if they pretend it's not) so they had an example of an Irish guy who keeps mentioning bombs and is part of IRA facebook groups 💀💀💀 really not beating the allegations with that one

[gendernewtral]

super quick guide about avoiding charity scams with a few links to watchdog groups too

[soon-palestine]

[afeelgoodblog]

The Best News of Last Week

1. ‘We are just getting started’: the plastic-eating bacteria that could change the world

In 2016, Japanese scientists Oda and Hiraga published their discovery of Ideonella sakaiensis, a bacterium capable of breaking down PET plastic into basic nutrients. This finding marked a shift in microbiology's perception, recognizing the potential of microbes to solve pressing environmental issues.

France's Carbios has successfully applied bacterial enzyme technology to recycle PET plastic waste into new plastic products, aligning with the French government's goal of fully recycling plastic packaging by 2025.

2. HIV cases in Amsterdam drop to almost zero after PrEP scheme

According to Dutch AIDS Fund, there were only nine new cases of the virus in Amsterdam in 2022, down from 66 people diagnosed in 2021. The organisation claimed that 128 people were diagnosed with HIV in Amsterdam in 2019, and since 2010, the number of new infections in the Dutch capital has fallen by 95 per cent.

3. Cheap and drinkable water from desalination is finally a reality

In a groundbreaking endeavor, engineers from MIT and China have designed a passive solar desalination system aimed at converting seawater into drinkable water.

The concept, articulated in a study published in the journal Joule, harnesses the dual powers of the sun and the inherent properties of seawater, emulating the ocean’s “thermohaline” circulation on a smaller scale, to evaporate water and leave salt behind.

4. World’s 1st drug to regrow teeth enters clinical trials

The ability to regrow your own teeth could be just around the corner. A team of scientists, led by a Japanese pharmaceutical startup, are getting set to start human trials on a new drug that has successfully grown new teeth in animal test subjects.

Toregem Biopharma is slated to begin clinical trials in July of next year after it succeeded growing new teeth in mice five years ago, the Japan Times reports.

5. After Decades of Pressure, US Drugmaker J&J Gives Up Patent on Life-Saving TB Drug

In what can be termed a huge development for drug-resistant TB (DR-TB) patients across large parts of the world, bedaquiline maker Johnson and Johnson said on September 30 (Saturday) that it would drop its patent over the drug in 134 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

6. Stranded dolphins rescued from shallow river in Massachusetts

7. ‘Staggering’ green growth gives hope for 1.5C, says global energy chief

The prospects of the world staying within the 1.5C limit on global heating have brightened owing to the “staggering” growth of renewable energy and green investment in the past two years, the chief of the world’s energy watchdog has said.

Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, and the world’s foremost energy economist, said much more needed to be done but that the rapid uptake of solar power and electric vehicles were encouraging.

---

That's it for this week :)

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[sayruq]

Israel organized and paid for an influence campaign last year targeting U.S. lawmakers and the American public with pro-Israel messaging, as it aimed to foster support for its actions in the war with Gaza, according to officials involved in the effort and documents related to the operation. The covert campaign was commissioned by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, a government body that connects Jews around the world with the State of Israel, four Israeli officials said. The ministry allocated about $2 million to the operation and hired Stoic, a political marketing firm in Tel Aviv, to carry it out, according to the officials and the documents. The campaign began in October and remains active on the platform X. At its peak, it used hundreds of fake accounts that posed as real Americans on X, Facebook and Instagram to post pro-Israel comments. The accounts focused on U.S. lawmakers, particularly ones who are Black and Democrats, such as Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader from New York, and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, with posts urging them to continue funding Israel’s military. ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, was used to generate many of the posts. The campaign also created three fake English-language news sites featuring pro-Israel articles. The Israeli government’s connection to the influence operation, which The New York Times verified with four current and former members of the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and documents about the campaign, has not previously been reported. FakeReporter, an Israeli misinformation watchdog, identified the effort in March. Last week, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, said they had also found and disrupted the operation.

[SOURCE]

Israel’s bot army was so obvious the New York Times had to write an article about it

[everlastingrandom]

sorry for being the town crier of food PSAs but I see a lot of breaking reports while I research for my job: as of April 9th, 2024 high levels of lead have been found in Lunchables kits, as well as other harmful contaminates

[slutweed]

I hope I didn't just goof at work I'll be embarrassed

[heritageposts]

An Israeli influence campaign is using hundreds of online avatars and fake social media accounts to attack Democratic lawmakers critical of Israel and promote news articles disapproving of the United Nations Palestine refugee agency (Unrwa), according to a report by the Israeli online watchdog, Fake Reporter. According to the report, the targeted campaign has used more than 600 avatars, sending out 58,000 tweets and social media posts to circulate articles published by The Guardian, CNN and Wall Street Journal, among other major news outlets that amplify Israel’s position on the war. The campaign relies on three major social networks, UnFold Magazine, Non-Agenda and The Moral Alliance, which were created prior to the war in Gaza. But the Hamas-led 7 October attack on southern Israel sent the accounts into round-the-clock posting. The sites, according to Fake Reporter, are geared specifically to a “progressive audience”, publishing content on climate change, AI regulation, and human rights, in addition to the war in Gaza. They have more than 43,000 followers across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. The avatars promoting the content talk up their identity with lines like, “As a middle-aged African American woman” and use hashtags like #FaithJourney and #AfricanAmericanSpirituality.

Some examples from the report:

And continuing,

The avatars were all created on the same day and their profiles were written with the same formula, subbing out just a few words. The declared gender and ethnicity of the avatars don’t match the profile photos, which have been taken from websites selling headshots. The campaign works to amplify news stories published by major media outlets. First, the fake news sites share the reports. Then, the avatars share them across social media, including on the official accounts of Democratic lawmakers. Avatars also shared social media posts showing video clips of what appeared to be Pro-Palestinian protestors calling for "massacres to be normalised" and calling for the US to "go to hell", contrasting that with peaceful protests of pro-Israel protestors.   In other cases, Avatars simply reshared widely published video clips of US lawmakers questioning the heads of Ivy League schools about antisemitism on campus.  [...] According to the report, around 85 percent of all the US politicians targeted by the campaign were Democrats, and 90 percent of them were African Americans. Ritchie Torres, a black Democratic Congressman with generally pro-Israel views, garnered the most social media engagement from the avatars. Other lawmakers targeted included Cori Bush; Lucy McBath; House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries; and Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock. Israeli news site Haaretz reported in January that the Israeli government had launched an online influence campaign to respond to pro-Palestinian content and reports about Hamas.  It’s unclear whether the campaign revealed by Fake Reporter is part of that initiative.

. . . continues at MME (20 Mar 2024)

[reasonsforhope]

"Canada's parliament has passed a bill that that will cover the full cost of contraception and diabetes drugs for Canadians.

The Liberal government said it is the initial phase of a plan that would expand to become a publicly funded national pharmacare programme.

The government estimates one in five Canadians struggle to pay for prescription drugs.

The federal government still has to negotiate individual funding commitments with Canada's provinces and territories.

A report from parliament's budget watchdog estimates this bill will increase federal spending by C$1.9bn ($1.3bn; £1bn) over the next five years.

Canadians currently pay for prescription drugs through a mix of private, public and out-of-pocket plans.

The programme will cover 100% of the cost of diabetes and contraception medication for those who do not have drug plan coverage, and out-of-pocket costs for those who do.

The federal government estimates that nine million Canadian women of reproductive age will have access to common types of contraception under the plan.

Birth-control pills and IUDs can cost between C$100 and C$300 a year.

The Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada hailed the ball as a "historic achievement".

"Women across the country will be able to make choices about contraception based on what's best for their lives, not their wallets," it said.

In addition, some 3.7 million Canadians have been diagnosed with diabetes.

Diabetes drugs covered include insulin - for people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes, which can cost between C$900 and C$1,700 a year - and Metformin, which helps lower blood sugar levels for people with type 2 diabetes.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Summit, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the bill's passage "real progress" and urged provinces to quickly move forward with signing agreements.

The federal health minister has said he hopes that some provinces will have the plan in place by the end of this year, with all on board by next spring."

-via BBC, October 11, 2024

[alwaysbewoke]

[mariacallous]

India’s $13.9 billion aviation industry—projected to cater to over 300 million domestically by 2030—is a ticking time bomb.

This July, in the sweltering heat at the Delhi High Court, additional solicitor general Aishwarya Bhati announced that new rules on pilot duty and rest periods would not be implemented this year after all. Introduced by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) in January, the rules were designed specifically to combat pilot fatigue. They were set to take effect in June, but were abruptly retracted. The hearing addressed a writ petition filed by the Federation of Indian Pilots (FIP), seeking clarity on when the new norms would be enforced. The DGCA’s response followed its request to airline companies in April for a tentative implementation timeline.

Concerns over pilot fatigue had been mounting in the months leading up to the announcement of the new Flight Duty Period, Flight Time Limitations, and Prescribed Rest Periods by the DGCA. The urgency deepened in November 2023 when a 37-year-old Air India pilot, Captain Himanil Kumar, collapsed at Delhi Airport while training to fly the airline's Boeing 777 fleet, and later died at the hospital. Kumar was the second Indian pilot to die on duty within three months; in August, Captain Manoj Subramanyam, a 40-year-old IndiGo pilot, suffered a fatal cardiac arrest just minutes before his flight from Nagpur.

These back-to-back tragedies raised alarm in the industry. “Another young Indian pilot passed away today due to a suspected cardiac event,” reportedly tweeted Captain Shakti Lumba, a retired IndiGo VP who is now the president of the Professional Pilots Society in India (His tweet was since deleted.) “If this doesn’t convince the DGCA, civil aviation ministry, and airlines to urgently address the stress, fatigue, and anxiety among pilots, nothing will.”

The DGCA, India’s aviation watchdog, regulates the country’s Flight Duty Time Limitations (FDTL). At 13 hours of flight duty time, India’s FDTL is already demanding, but after the pandemic slowdown, increased route expansion and pilot shortages have forced many to fly beyond the recommended maximum of 60 hours a week, exacerbating crew exhaustion. The DGCA finally responded to the growing crisis by revising FDTL norms in January 2024.

The new guidelines increased weekly rest periods from 36 to 48 hours and introduced quarterly fatigue reports. Its scheduled implementation on June 1, 2024, was pushed back due to pressure from operators. An airline CEO, speaking anonymously to the Economic Times in January, claimed the proposed regulations would require a 20 percent increase in pilot numbers, which would escalate expenses and lead to huge numbers of flight cancellations. Still, the DGCA held firm on the FDTL implementation deadline till early March. By the end of the month, however, it appeared to have yielded to influence from the airline lobby. A notice on the regulator’s website announced the deadline had been deferred, without providing a reason or setting a new date.

The pilot fatigue problem isn’t unique to India. In January, two pilots for Indonesia-based Batik Air fell asleep for 28 minutes mid-flight, causing their plane to veer off course between Sulawesi and Jakarta. In April, unionized Virgin Atlantic pilots in the UK voted 96 percent in favor of pursuing an industrial action in response to rising fatigue. Earlier, the CEO of Wizz Air UK faced a backlash for urging crew members to push through their fatigue to avoid flight cancellations. In May, senior pilots at Virgin Australia raised safety concerns, claiming rostering systems were pushing them "to the limits.”

But in India, the belief that overwork and fatigue are not just acceptable but essential has become entrenched across industries. The aviation crisis is just the tip of the iceberg; it is the tech industry that is leading the charge. Last year, Infosys cofounder Narayana Murthy suggested that Indian youth should work 70 hours a week for the nation's development. Murthy’s advice came up at the Indian Parliament on the first day of its winter session and found support from a list of influential Indian tech leaders, including Bhavish Aggarwal, founder of India’s first AI unicorn, Ola Krutrim; Ayushmaan Kapoor, cofounder of the AI-powered customer platform Xeno; and even veterans like Sajjan Jindal, CEO and MD of JSW Group, and Vinod Khosla of Sun Microsystems. Almost all of them justified the extended work hours, which far exceed the maximum eight to nine hours per day stipulated by the International Labour Organisation and the Indian Labour Code, as necessary for strengthening India’s economy. “We have to make India an economic superpower that we can all be proud of,” Jindal wrote on X. He cited Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, “who works 14-16 hours everyday,”as a model. In July this year, the Karnataka State IT/ITeS Employee Union said the state government had plans to increase working hours in the sector from the current maximum of 10 hours (including overtime) to a staggering 14 hours a day. As the union planned massive campaigns to oppose the move, the labor minister stated that the push for the proposal had come from the companies.

The airline companies think they have a solution to the fatigue crisis: technology. IndiGo, India’s largest airline, announced it would be an “early adopter” of a wrist-worn fatigue-monitoring device it was developing with French defense and aerospace company Thales Group. The device can provide “detailed insights into demographic data, including routes, pairings, crew profiles, and more, going beyond traditional scheduling-focused biomathematical models,” the airline stated in a press release in September. The airline, which operates 2,000 flights daily and employs over 5,000 pilots, said the device would be rolled out after a proof-of-concept trial. No date for the rollout was announced.

Wearable activity trackers are not new to the aviation industry. IndiGo’s device sounds similar to Actiwatch, a now-discontinued line of research-grade actigraphs from Philips, used to monitor sleep patterns, study circadian rhythms, and track physical activity as part of an airline’s fatigue risk-management system. But they partly rely on performance tests and subjective measures, such as self-reporting, which often results in being targeted by the airlines, says Captain C. S. Randhawa, president of the Federation of Indian Pilots. Safety management systems on the whole tend to be neglected by operators and are viewed as an additional expense, says Captain Amit Singh of the NGO Safety Matters Foundation.

In May 2023, Air India launched safety management software called Coruson, as well as BAM (Boeing Alertness Model), a fatigue-mitigation tool integrated into its rostering system, which is used by airlines to create and manage pilot schedules. Coruson, developed by cloud software company Ideagen, centralizes, analyzes, and reports on safety-related data—such as incidents, hazards, and risk assessments. BAM, developed jointly by Boeing and the software company Jeppesen, predicts and manages pilot fatigue by analyzing flight schedules and performance data. These tools were designed to prevent the creation of fatiguing rosters and pairings, Air India CEO Campbell Wilson noted in an internal message to employees. The carrier also introduced two new digital tools for its crew—the Pilot Sector Report app, to help pilots easily submit information on flight performance, incidents, and observations post-flight; and DocuNet, a digital management system that facilitates the storage, retrieval, and sharing of documents (such as flight manuals, training records, and compliance documents).

Despite these measures, the airline was fined by the DGCA in March this year for violating FDTL limits and fatigue management rules. This May, Air India Express cabin staff called in sick en masse to protest against “mismanagement.” This followed a similar protest from the crew, mostly pilots, at Vistara airlines. Both Air India and Vistara are now owned by one of India’s largest conglomerates, the Tata Group, which took over the former from the Indian government in January 2022.

Twenty-five of those who called in sick at Air India Express were terminated. Others were reportedly served an ultimatum. Those sacked were later reinstated by the airline following an intervention by the chief labour commissioner. Nearly a week before, the regional labor commissioner of Delhi had allegedly written to the Tata group chairman pointing to “blatant violations of labour laws” and insisting the legitimate concerns of the cabin crew be looked into. According to CNBC, Vistara employees said the agitation at their end had to do with recent salary updates, which fixed pilot pay at 40 flight hours—down from 70. Protesting first officers claimed that the new salary structure would result in an almost 57 percent pay cut. Under the new terms they would also have to fly up to 76 hours to earn what they were previously earning at 70 hours.

To placate the pilots and get them back to work, management had assured them that salaries for the “extra working hours” would be credited once Vistara was integrated with Air India. At the time, two Air India pilots unions had written to the chairman of the company, saying that such issues were not isolated but systemic. Burnout was the other related issue, with many pilots complaining of inadequate rest and being pushed to their limits.

Captain Singh, a former senior manager at AirAsia, tells WIRED that such effects significantly increase the risk of accidents, but also adversely affect pilot health in the long run. Tail swaps—rushing between different types of aircraft to take off immediately after disembarking from another—have become more prevalent under the 13-hour rules, and can further contribute to exhaustion, as do hasty acclimatization and, most significantly, landing three, four, or more flights consecutively, which Captain Randhawa described as a “severe energy management challenge.”

In the 2024 “Safety Culture Survey” conducted by Singh’s Safety Matters Foundation in July, 81 percent of 530 respondents, primarily medium- to short-haul pilots, stated that bufferless rosters contribute to their fatigue. As many as 84 percent indicated concerns with the speed and direction of shift rotation. “That’s the problem with the new rostering softwares the operators are introducing,” a pilot from a private airline, who requested anonymity, says. “They’re optimizers designed to make pilots work every second of their 13-hour schedule, leaving no breathing room.” The buffer-deficient timetables push pilots to their limits, so any additional pressure—like unpredictable weather—can easily overwhelm them.

Solving this issue with wrist-worn fatigue-measuring devices is contentious. But that isn’t the only problem. A year since they were hyped up, the buzz around fatigue-management tech has all but fizzled out. There have been no updates from IndiGo about the wrist device. Neither IndiGo nor the Thales Group responded to requests to comment.

[determinate-negation]

The New York Times pulled a high-profile episode of its podcast “The Daily” about sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 amid a furious internal debate about the strength of the paper’s original reporting on the subject, Times newsroom sources told The Intercept. The episode had been scheduled for January 9 and was based on a prominent article led by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jeffrey Gettleman, claiming that Hamas had systematically used sexual violence as a weapon of war. 

[dougielombax]

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