In 2023 ...

Top 3 import from 🇲🇽 Mexico: +5.29% 🇨🇦 Canada: -2.01% 🇨🇳China: -19.9%

Top 3 export to 🇨🇦 Canada: +1.13% 🇲🇽 Mexico: +0.925% 🇨🇳 China: +0.071%

List of all selected countries: https://x.com/data_graffiti/status/1782836998123974667

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This looks like a replay of the Albertsons/Safeway merger, with way more stores being sold off to a company unaccustomed to the sort of volume that would make the deal work:

C&S Wholesale Grocers, a supplier to independent grocery stores and owner of a retail pharmacy and 23 supermarkets under the Piggly Wiggly and Grand Union banners, has agreed to acquire a total of 579 stores in a revised divestiture deal worth $2.9 billion.

So the new C&S would be 25 times its current store footprint. Wholesale experience could mitigate that to some extent, but just ask Haggen how suddenly growing by an order of magnitude worked out. The story covers the Washington-state chain completely devoid of context:

In addition, Kroger will sell its Haggen banner to C&S, and C&S will license the Albertsons banner in California and Wyoming and the Safeway banner in Arizona and Colorado.

Again, this is a repeat of what the last merger did in Oregon and Washington, except this time it ropes four additional states into the problem. And, if history is any sort of barometer, there will be systemic failures on the part of C&S that result in the merged behemoth buying back the divested stores for a pittance, creating the same problems they're claiming the new plan will solve.

With an additional hitch: As a wholesale distributor to 7,500 competing independent grocery stores, there's no reason to believe that relationship will survive as a new direct competitor.

Edited because I did some research and had a major error. C&S does operate retail locations well west of the Mississippi.

The House Bill 777 was introduced on March 25 by Representative Kellee Dickerson, who helped fund the Louisiana Freedom Caucus. The bill would criminalize library workers and libraries for joining the American Library Association.

The bill says that "no public official or employee shall appropriate, allocate, reimburse, or otherwise or in any way expend public funds to or with the American Library Association or its successor". Whoever violates the law could face up to two years in prison.

The American Library Association (ALA) is the largest and oldest professional organization for library workers in the nation. It was founded in 1876.

[Edit typo.]

Cross posted from: https://feddit.de/post/11345243

For $5 million dollars, Louisiana’s flagship university will let an oil company help choose which faculty research projects move forward. Or, for $100,000, a corporation can participate in a research study, with “robust” reviewing powers and access to resulting intellectual property.

Those are the conditions outlined in a boilerplate document that Louisiana State University’s fundraising arm circulated to oil majors and chemical companies affiliated with the Louisiana Chemical Association, an industry lobbying group, according to emails disclosed in response to a public records request by The Lens.

Records show that after Shell donated $25 million in 2022 to LSU to create the Institute for Energy Innovation, the university gave the fossil-fuel corporation license to influence research and coursework for the university’s new concentration in carbon capture, use, and storage.

[Edit typo.]

Omar’s questions to the administrators during a Wednesday congressional hearing on antisemitism at Columbia touched on the school’s response to students being sprayed with a chemical at a campus rally for Gaza and its policy surrounding professors harassing students online.

University President Nemat Minouche Shafik announced that two students were suspended in relation to the January protest and that a professor was under investigation for complaints over his social media posts about students.

During a hearing premised on the idea that there is rampant antisemitism on Columbia’s campus, Omar also got Shafik to say that there had been no protests targeting specific ethnic or religious groups — Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians, or Jews.

“I think that the line of questioning which my mother asked was definitely a pressure for Columbia University,” said Omar’s daughter, Isra Hirsi, who is a junior at Barnard College, Columbia’s women’s school.

Hirsi, who has been an active participant in campus protests over the war and said she hadn’t received any prior disciplinary warning, noted that other factors may have been at play too. “And then added pressure from me also giving interviews and people knowing that I am the daughter of her at the same time,” she told The Intercept.

Cross posted from: https://feddit.de/post/11319037

U.S. officials have warned in increasingly stark terms about what they say is China's assistance in retooling and resupplying Russia's defense industrial base after early setbacks in its invasion of Ukraine, saying that continued support is a top risk to stable relations between Washington and Beijing.

The U.S. has a long record of extracting resources on Native lands and ignoring tribal opposition, but a decision by federal energy regulators to deny permits for seven proposed hydropower projects suggests that tide may be turning.

As the U.S. shifts from fossil fuels to clean energy, developers are looking for sites to generate electricity from renewable sources. But in an unexpected move, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission denied permits on Feb. 15, 2024, for seven proposed hydropower projects in Arizona and New Mexico.

The reason: These projects were located within the Navajo Nation and were proposed without first consulting with the tribe. FERC said it was “establishing a new policy that the Commission will not issue preliminary permits for projects proposing to use Tribal lands if the Tribe on whose lands the project is to be located opposes the permit.”

In November, ahead of President Joe Biden’s meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) issued a press release casting himself as a fierce opponent of China. It declared, “Since being elected to the U.S. Senate, Senator Scott has introduced dozens of bills to punish Communist China for its increased military aggression, continued cyberattacks on both private companies and U.S. government agencies, unfair trade practices and stealing of data and intellectual property from American citizens and businesses.” Several months earlier, Scott, who is up for reelection this year, called on Americans to boycott products manufactured in China and to demand that US companies halt doing business there. Last year, he declared that the United States had to “Stop buying [Chinese] stuff. Stop helping them. Stop investing in China.” And he tweeted, “You don’t do business with your enemies.”

Yet contrary to the image he now eagerly projects as a fierce China hawk looking to ban business with China, Scott, a former health care executive whose firm was fined $1.7 billion for Medicare fraud and who is worth hundreds of million of dollars, has a long record of supporting Chinese investment in the United States and personally making money off Chinese commerce.

This data comes via Mark Z. Jacobson, a Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering.

While California has hit 100% renewable energy before, for brief moments on exceptionally sunny days, this is the first time the state has sustained that success over an extended period. As Jacobson noted, there was even a portion of a recent day when wind, water, solar, and geothermal power combined to reach 109% of the state's electricity demand, with anything unused going to battery storage.

Though California does still rely on dirty energy as well as clean energy to power its grid, Jacobson predicted that the state will reach its goal of being permanently 100% WindWaterSolar by 2035.

The New York Times instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.

The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars. The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.

The memo — written by Times standards editor Susan Wessling, international editor Philip Pan, and their deputies — “offers guidance about some terms and other issues we have grappled with since the start of the conflict in October.”

Cross posted from: https://feddit.de/post/11174494

Experts like Dana Miller, director of strategic initiatives at the nonprofit Oceana, would like Amazon to reduce plastics “because of a moral responsibility … to reduce their impact on the environment.” But the company has been slow to respond to moral appeals from customers and shareholders, including three shareholder resolutions since 2021 invoking plastics’ damages to marine ecosystems and human health. The resolutions, which each received more than 30 percent of shareholder votes, asked Amazon to cut plastics use globally by one-third by 2030. When announcing that it had cut plastics use globally by 11.6 percent, Amazon did not make a quantitative or time-bound commitment to further reductions.

Instead, Amazon seems to have taken its biggest steps to reduce plastic packaging in response to stringent plastic regulations, or the threat of them. “Amazon is a clever company,” Miller said. “They see things in the pipeline and they want to move early.”

President Joe Biden has been urged to ban imports of Chinese-made electric cars to the US.

The chair of the Senate Banking Committee, Senator Sherrod Brown, wrote "Chinese electric vehicles are an existential threat to the American auto industry".

His comments are the strongest yet by any US lawmaker on the issue, while others have called for steep tariffs to keep Chinese electric vehicles (EV) out of the country.

In February, the White House said the US was opening an investigation into whether Chinese cars pose a national security risk. At the time, President Biden said that China's policies "could flood our market with its vehicles, posing risks to our national security" and that he would "not let that happen on my watch."

https://archive.is/VIsxN

Arslan Hidayat, head of the Save Uyghur campaign, says Shein's alleged use of forced labor exacerbates oppression of the Uyghur people.

“It is crucial for Muslims to use their consumer power to protest against the use of forced labor and to demonstrate solidarity with the Uyghur community,” Hidayat told VOA. “It is incumbent upon us to prioritize ethical consumption practices and advocate for justice for the Uyghur people.”

Concerns surrounding Shein's sourcing practices extend to its use of Xinjiang cotton. Bloomberg's laboratory tests conducted in November 2022 revealed that Shein's clothing contains fibers sourced from Xinjiang cotton, which is prohibited in the U.S. under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, enacted in June 2022.

The law prohibits imports from Xinjiang and goods manufactured by Uyghurs allegedly coerced into working for minimal wages, unless companies can demonstrate the absence of forced labor.

Despite U.S. bans on Xinjiang imports, Shein's shipments often evade scrutiny through the de minimis rule, which exempts packages under $800 from customs inspections, enabling them to enter the U.S. without thorough examination.

Bipartisan leaders of a congressional committee focused on the Chinese Communist Party have called on the Biden administration to enhance efforts against imports linked to Chinese forced labor, urging closure of trade loopholes utilized by e-commerce giants such as Shein and Temu.

AI will soon be grading AI submitted papers, certainly nothing can go wrong here

The views of seven current and former US government officials reflect the way internal objections to policy continue to mount. They said many government workers were voicing their frustrations in unofficial forums that include at least a dozen groups on messaging apps, which the officials said counted hundreds of administration staff as members.

A spokesperson for the US state department said it encouraged different views on policy and staff could make them known through "appropriate channels". The US had "been clear at the highest levels publicly and privately with Israel that it must abide by international humanitarian law", the spokesperson said.

Four current officials at varying levels of seniority in different government departments spoke to the BBC on condition of anonymity. Two have roles in areas with direct links to foreign policy, including on Israel and Gaza.

One who has 25 years of national security experience said internal opposition had become "deeper, wider and more despairing" than at any previous point in the war. While the increase in pressure from President Biden last week was welcome, it did not go far enough to reflect the "moral urgency" to act, they said.

"I read it as Israel doing the bare minimum to get through the day and avoid arms transfers being halted," the official added.

The far-right Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is ungovernable and should be known as “Moscow Marjorie”, said a former Republican colleague in the US House, accusing Greene of “getting her talking points from the Kremlin” when opposing new federal aid for Ukraine.

“My experience with Marjorie is people have talked to her about not filing articles of impeachment on President Biden before he was sworn into office, not filing articles of impeachment that were groundless based on other individuals in the Biden administration,” Ken Buck, a Colorado rightwinger who left Congress last month, told CNN.