Throughout the past few months, activists across the United States have called for kicking cops and corporations out of June’s annual Pride marches. This is the latest chapter in a long struggle to raise the issues of working-class queer people, queer people of color, and other groups that have been left out of the mainstream LGBTQ movement. However, there’s one critical part of this fight that hasn’t gotten as much attention: the history of queer labor activism.
Unions are some of the most powerful vehicles in the fight against workplace discrimination and harassment, and stand as some of the earliest supporters of domestic partnership and, later, marriage equality. Queer workers have played important roles within unions, valiantly fighting against both anti-queer sentiments within unions and union-busting from bosses in queer-majority workplaces. As Pride month comes to an end, this history is more important than ever.
Miriam Frank, author of Out in the Union: A Labor History of Queer America, has interviewed hundreds of queer union members and officials about their struggles at work and beyond. Meghan Brophy, a student-labor activist at Barnard College, interviewed Frank about queer workers’ victories and challenges within the labor movement, the fight to organize queer-majority workplaces, and recent efforts to bring Pride back to its militant origins.
MB: Earlier this month, Bernie Sanders tweeted about workplace discrimination against queer workers and the importance of unions. He received backlash from those who alleged he was reducing our issues to class and that unions were disconnected from queer people’s issues. Out in the Union thoroughly dismantles the idea that these are separate struggles. Could you give a broad outline of the intersections of labor organizing and queer liberation?
MF: If you’re working in a factory, in a public school, in municipal government, or in a hospital, these are all places where unions have been active and successful. These are also places where queer people work. One of the truths of our world and slogans of our movement is that we are everywhere. There really aren’t a lot of places where you can say there are no gay people. There are gay bosses and gay people leading corporations, but you can’t say there aren’t gay people working in the mines, in the building trades, as housekeepers — we are! The macro thing about being queer is that we are everywhere, and more often than not, we are working everywhere.
When Studs Turkel wrote his wonderful book of interviews with working people, he never asked that question in the 1960s, but that’s one of the reasons I started interviewing people about working while gay, working while being a lesbian, or being a union official while being a closeted gay man. How did that affect people as workers? How did that affect how they got along with people in their organizations? Everybody I interviewed was involved with a union in some way or another, and all of the people knew full well what it was like to be without a union. They knew that it was different than what work is like when you do have a union and when you have a contract. And unions aren’t just the contract you sign and the wage increase you get, but it’s also an ethic of how people relate to each other in the workplace.
The measure was intended as a rebuke of Trump’s threats and escalatory policy toward Iran and drew four Republican votes. Trump has publicly threatened Iran with “obliteration” and said he doesn’t need congressional approval for military strikes on the country.
The measure was proposed by Sens. Tom Udall, D.-N.M. and Tim Kaine, D-Va., as an amendment to an annual defense funding bill. Udall stated that the bipartisan support for the amendment “sent a powerful and resounding message: Congress is not going to roll over for an unconstitutional war. President Trump and his advisors should heed this significant vote [and] change course from the saber-rattling and reckless escalation.”
The amendment and a related bill proposed by Udall are rare attempts by Congress to use its most significant power — the power of the purse — to prevent the executive branch from waging war with a specific country before that war begins. Even the most significant restriction on presidential war-making since World War II, the 1973 War Powers Act, simply stated that the president “shall terminate” hostilities after 60 days if they have not been authorized by Congress, rather than prohibiting the spending of appropriated funds to wage such wars.
If the amendment had passed, it would have prohibited the Pentagon from using any funding to attack Iran without congressional authorization. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said the measure would “hamstring” Trump.
McConnell was largely responsible for the amendment’s defeat. Democratic and Republican Senate aides told The Intercept that under McConnell’s direction, the Senate parliamentarian ruled the measure “not germane” to the substance of the bill, thus requiring it to get 60 votes to pass instead of a simple majority.
Last week, the New York Times reported that Trump’s advisors persuaded him to authorize military strikes on Iran in retaliation for the Iranians shooting down an unmanned American reconnaissance drone, but the strikes were called off at the last minute.
The effort to pass the amendment came amid longstanding concerns that the Trump administration has been trying to lay the legal ground for attacking Iran without congressional authorization, and that such an attack could escalate into a full-scale war before Congress weighed in.
The Times also reported last month that Mike Pompeo, Trump’s hawkish secretary of state, has been trying to convince a skeptical Congress that Iran has ties to Al Qaeda dating back to the days after the 9/11 attacks. Members of Congress have expressed alarm that such a claim could serve as the basis for using the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed three days after the 9/11 attacks, to justify attacking Iran.
A total of 8,877 gigawatt hours (GWh) of green electricity were generated in the first quarter of this year, 17% more than in the same period of 2018.
The bulk of this power – 5,792 GWh – came from onshore wind farms, the figures from the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) show.
Overall, the amount of renewable energy generated was enough to power around 88% of Scottish households for a year, the Scottish Government said.
Energy Minister Paul Wheelhouse said the sector is going from “strength to strength”.
The BEIS data also shows renewable energy capacity in Scotland rose from 10.4 gigawatts (GW) in March 2018 to 11.3 GW in March this year.
Electricity exports from Scotland were at their highest since the last three months of 2017, rising to 4,543 GWh, the equivalent of enough energy to power more than 1.1 million homes for a year.
Across the UK, the total amount of electricity produced from renewable sources – which also include hydro power, biomass and solar electricity – increased from 28.5 terawatt hours (TWh) to 31.1 TWh.
Boeing staff falsified records for a 787 jet built for Air Canada which developed a fuel leak ten months into service in 2015.
In a statement to CBC News, Boeing said it self-disclosed the problem to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration after Air Canada notified them of the fuel leak.
The records stated that manufacturing work had been completed when it had not.
Boeing said an audit concluded it was an isolated event and “immediate corrective action was initiated for both the Boeing mechanic and the Boeing inspector involved.”
Boeing is under increasing scrutiny in the U.S. and abroad following two deadly crashes that claimed 346 lives and the global grounding of its 737 Max jets.
On the latest revelations related to falsifying records for the Air Canada jet, Mike Doiron of Moncton-based Doiron Aviation Consulting said: “Any falsification of those documents which could basically cover up a safety issue is a major problem.”
In the aviation industry, these sorts of documents are crucial for ensuring the safety of aircraft and the passengers onboard, he said.
‘Never a good scenario’
Doiron said even small fuel leaks are dangerous.
The temperature on the internal parts of an aircraft’s turbine engine can reach around 700 degrees.
With such high temperatures, it doesn’t take much for a flammable liquid like fuel to be ignited if there is a leak around the engine, Doiron said.
“It’s never, never a good scenario,” he said of the leak.
Air Canada said it inspected the rest of its 787 jets and did not find any other fuel leak issues.
“All of our aircraft are subject to regular and thorough inspections and we maintain them in full accordance with all manufacturer and regulatory directives,” Air Canada spokesperson Peter Fitzpatrick said in an email to CBC News.
Air Canada introduced the 787 Dreamliner to its fleet five years ago. According to its corporate website, it has 35 787s in its fleet.
Residents of the city, one of the world’s biggest with about 23 million people, must arrange their trash according to those labels under a mandatory sorting scheme starting on Jul 1.
China is in the sixth year of a “war on pollution” designed not only to clean up its skies, soil and water but also upgrade its heavy industrial economy and “comprehensively utilise” its resources, including waste.
Improving recycling rates is crucial to China’s strategy, and cities are trying to figure out what to do with the heaps of trash clogging up rivers or buried in hazardous landfills.
Huang Rong, deputy secretary general of the Shanghai government, said on Friday more than 70 per cent of residential districts should be compliant with the new trash sorting rules by next year.
“We are just starting out and we are getting ordinary people used to the new system, so we don’t want to make it too complicated,” he told reporters.
Citizens, however, are finding the new system complicated enough, with every item of waste now under careful scrutiny, from receipts and half-eaten crayfish to soggy cups of bubble tea. Residents are also unhappy about getting their hands dirty.
“It’s really a lot of trouble,” said a 68-year old resident called Shen. “Plastic bags have to be put in one bin and if they are dirty they must be cleaned out, and then your hands get filthy. It’s really unhygienic.”
Though Shanghai has hired 1,700 instructors and conducted 13,000 training sessions, confused residents on social media are demanding to know how to sort items like batteries, human hair, meat on a bone, or fruit seeds and skins. The government has set up an app to handle enquiries.
Shanghai aims to eventually burn or recycle all waste. By next year, dry waste incineration and wet waste treatment rates are expected to reach 27,800 tonnes a day, around 80 per cent of the city’s total garbage. The city will also restrict the amount of single-use plastic cutlery that food service companies give out, starting on Monday.
China is building hundreds of “waste to energy” plants that use garbage to generate power. It is also establishing a “waste-free city” scheme and constructing high-tech “comprehensive utilisation bases” across the country.
It also slashed imported waste volumes - once as much as 60 million tonnes a year - to encourage recyclers to tackle growing volumes of domestic trash instead.
Although she was warned against it by supervisors, she blew the whistle on national TV in front of a Senate committee. “My name is Bunnatine H. Greenhouse. I have agreed to voluntarily appear at this hearing,” she addressed the committee.
Bunny Greenhouse was an unlikely whistleblower. In 2005, Greenhouse was the highest-ranked civilian at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
KBR was Kellogg Brown and Root — back then, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the oil services firm Halliburton. In the weeks prior to the invasion, Greenhouse learned that KBR was being considered for a massive no-bid contract known as Restore Iraqi Oil, or RIO.
“What was the size of this contract?” Ferrer asked.
“Seven billion dollars,” she replied.
What Greenhouse didn’t know is that even more powerful forces may have been involved.
“A lot of attention fell on Dick Cheney, the vice president, and the fact was that he had been the head of Halliburton for … six years,” Vanity Fair journalist Michael Shnayerson explained. “So, the suspicion began to grow that perhaps Cheney was steering government contracts to KBR.”
A spokesperson for Dick Cheney told CBS News that the former vice president severed all ties with Halliburton and KBR in the summer of 2000 when he became candidate for vice president.
A representative for KBR said “it’s unfortunate that misinformation and myths about KBR’s role in supporting the military in Iraq continue to be circulated. These assertions have repeatedly been shown to be false.”
For Greenhouse, biting her tongue was never an option. “I can unequivocally state that the abuse related to contracts awarded to KBR represents the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career,” she told the Senate committee.
A team of German and Kurdish archaeologists have discovered a 3,400-year-old palace that belonged to the mysterious Mittani Empire, the University of Tübingen announced on Thursday.
The discovery was only made possible by a drought that significantly reduced water levels in the Mosul Dam reservoir.
“The find is one of the most important archaeological discoveries in the region in recent decades and illustrates the success of the Kurdish-German cooperation,” said Hasan Ahmed Qasim, a Kurdish archaeologist of the Duhok Directorate of Antiquites who worked on the site.
Shrouded in mystery
Last year, the team of archaeologists launched an emergency rescue evacuation of the ruins when receding waters revealed them on the ancient banks of the Tigris. The ruins are part of only a handful discovered from the Mittani Empire.
“The Mittani Empire is one of the least researched empires of the Ancient Near East,” said archaeologist Ivana Puljiz of the University of Tübingen. “Even the capital of the Mittani Empire has not been identified.”
‘Archaeological sensation’
The team had little time to spare as water levels continued to rise, eventually submerging the ruins again. At least 10 cuneiforms clay tablets were discovered inside the palace.
“We also found remains of wall paints in bright shades of red and blue,” Puljiz said. “In the second millennium BCE, murals were probably a typical feature of palaces in the Ancient Near East, but we rarely find them preserved. Discovering wall paintings in Kemune is an archaeological sensation.”
A team of researchers in Germany will now try to interpret the cuneiform tablets. They hope that the clay tablets will reveal more about the Mittani Empire, which once dominated life in parts of Syria and northern Mesopotamia.
