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Indian Express
29-05-2025
- Business
- Indian Express
India needs capital, labour-intensive policies; use of AI can be balanced: CEA
India needs to have policies that rely on capital-led growth as well as labour-intensive manufacturing given the need for competitiveness and productivity considerations going ahead, Chief Economic Adviser V Anantha Nageswaran on Thursday said. Citing a paper from a Berkeley-based artificial intelligence (AI) analyst, Nageswaran also said that there is a need to strike a balance between deployment of AI and labour with a need to recognise where to stop and not train the AI end-to-end in an industry. 'Going forward in our country while we understand that competitiveness and productivity considerations would require the increase in the number of GPUs, artificial intelligence engines being deployed etc., we are a country which has to create 8 million livelihoods at the minimum, every year, excluding agriculture. And therefore, we have to have policies that rely on capital-led growth and also policies…policy means government policies and also policies in the private sector that are able to focus on labour-intensive manufacturing as well,' he said while speaking at the CII Annual Business Summit 2025. On AI and jobs, the CEA cited a paper to underline the need to strike a balance on the usage of AI. 'It's written by independent AI analyst based in Berkeley in California…he has said we should understand that building, super intelligent, AI systems and end-to-end AI agents is a technological and policy choice or it may add a business decision. You don't have to train the AI end-to-end, you can decide where you want to stop and where you want to deploy human labour as well. We must recognise that we gave a genuine choice about whether these systems are trained at all which is not any inevitable technological destiny and this decision should remain at the forefront of our policy or non-policy conversation,' the CEA said. He also pointed out that India is at a low-income stage where it is facing the challenge of the growth in profitability exceeding not just capital formation, but the growth in compensation as well. '…and that is something that we can ill afford for the next 25 or 30 years,' he said. This kind of challenge is generally faced by developed countries and not developing countries like India, he said. 'So, there has been a small gap in the rate of growth of profitability and the rate of growth of capital formation. If we have to achieve a sustained 6.5 per cent growth minimum in real terms and aim for a higher growth rate then this gap has to close,' he said. Meeting India's capital needs would require steady growth in household incomes and savings and this can be possible when their income rises, he said. Nageswaran also underlined the importance of reducing the regulatory burden for better productivity of capital, but for this, trust has to be developed between the government and the private sector. 'In fact, a significant share of regulatory overreach is sometimes due to the non-reciprocity of trust on the part of the private sector. Therefore, from our perspective, the 'what' of deregulation is clear, but 'how' becomes more challenging, because sometimes deregulation leads to unintended consequences of abuse as well,' he said. For achieving the goals of Viksit Bharat, he said, there is a need for a collaborative approach based on trust. 'We cannot achieve the kind of development that we hope to achieve in the next 25 years unless there is a collaborative approach, not just between Union and state governments, but also between governments around the country and the private sector,' he added. Trust, deregulation and reciprocation from the private sector are the keys to avoiding the middle-income trap, he said. On the exchange rate, he said the fall in the rupee may not be too high, rather it should be in the range of 0.5-0.8 per cent going forward. 'Do not expect that the Indian rupee will necessarily be weakening as it did in the last 30 years, because, for various reasons. It is quite possible that we may have to deal with the challenge of living in an environment of a stronger currency rather than a weaker currency, because of international trends,' he said.
San Francisco Chronicle
28-05-2025
- Sport
- San Francisco Chronicle
Is your youth swimming club safe? Bay Area author's latest will make you think
Muckraking is hard work, one would assume, but Irvin Muchnick doesn't seem worn out by almost four decades of that dirty duty. We have met for coffee a couple times, and the Berkeley-based author and investigative reporter, now 70, has looked peppy and sounded upbeat. All that digging into the slimy, dark corners of sport certainly hasn't made Muchnick wealthy — he still hasn't replaced his old Honda Civic that was stolen four years ago — but it hasn't broken him down or dimmed his spirit. 'For whatever reason, this role suits me,' Muchnick says. 'The payoffs are few and far between, but they're there. I love my work, fortunately.' His work? Since the late '80s, Muchnick has written a trillion words, give or take, exposing various creeps, pedophiles, enablers, profiteers and other vermin in the world of sport. That makes Muchnick a hero to me. Some of us keyboard-pounders write the write. Others try to right the wrong, and those folks have my admiration. The least I can do is occasionally buy them a cup of coffee. Most of Muchnick's work has dealt with abuses and crimes in football, professional wrestling and swimming. He has written six books, tons of magazine and newspaper articles, and reported extensively and relentlessly on his website. His most recent book is 'Underwater: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and around the Globe.' Muchnick takes pains to point out that most youth swim coaches are honorable and honest, but, 'If it's Tuesday, a coach somewhere is preying on a young athlete, because that's just the way it is.' He learned that dirty little secret about swimming by accident, the same way he stumbled into his odd calling in the first place. The beginning: Muchnick grew up in St. Louis, where his uncle, Sam Muchnick, was a wrestling promoter, kind of the godfather of pro wrestling in America. This was before the arrival of cable TV, global advertising and Vince McMahon. Little Irv got to hang out with the wrestlers. He came to know them as people, not human cartoon characters, and when wrestling blew up into a major culture phenomenon in the mid '80s, Muchnick did some of the very first inside-wrestling journalism, peeking behind the theatrical curtain. In 2007 he published his first book, 'Wrestling Babylon: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal.' He dug hard and found stuff. Like the story behind Jimmy 'Superfly' Snuka's girlfriend's 'accidental' death. When the newspaper for whom Muchnick was freelancing got cold feet, he posted the true-crime account on his own blog. There was no turning back. Muchnick hadn't found his calling; it had found him. He wrote about Hulk Hogan's steroid issues. He wrote 'Chris & Nancy: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling's Cocktail of Death.' In that book's third printing, in 2020, Muchnick's new introduction explains how the wrestling phenomenon pushed the rise of Donald Trump, a Vince McMahon crony. The prevalence of concussions in wrestling led him to dig into the same issue in football, and he wrote, 'Without Helmets or Shoulder Pads: The American Way of Death in Football Conditioning.' Muchnick is not a big football fan. Calls it 'a system socially imposed on young men,' and 'a blood sport.' After Cal football player Ted Agu dropped dead while on a training run in 2014, local mainstream media (my hand is raised) pretty much dropped the ball on the story of Cal's shameful coverup. Muchnick dug in and wrote/reported extensively. He sued Cal under the state Public Records Act and won, uncovering a lot of coverup. Cal ultimately admitted liability for Agu's death and settled with the family. Digging up dirt, Muchnick found, was hard. From 1994 to 2000, as assistant director of the National Writers Union, he fought for writers' rights. He was the lead respondent in the landmark 2010 U.S. Supreme Court case (Reid Elsevier v. Muchnick) for freelance writers' economic rights. He successfully sued the Department of Homeland Security to obtain records of a swim coach he was investigating. Stories kept finding Muchnick. In 2004 his 8-year-old daughter took up swimming, joining the Berkeley Bears club, coached by former Cal swimmer Jesse Stovall. Muchnick loved the scene, happily taking his daughter to predawn practices. He even took some lessons himself. In 2009, after Stovall had been pushed out of the club over financial improprieties and was coaching masters swimming on the Cal campus, the story came out that the year before, he had sex with an underage club swimmer while chaperoning her at a national meet. Muchnick contributed to an investigative story in the East Bay Express, which did not endear him to the local swim community. 'The biggest danger of the kind of work that I do is that it can be perceived as trolling,' Muchnick says. 'I don't think I'm a troll, I think I'm an investigative reporter. But I haven't been perfect.' After the swim story, Muchnick was ready to move on, but fate stepped in. 'The story came out, I thought, 'I'm done, I've done my little rabble-rousing thing,' which I'd done in other areas,' Muchnick says. 'The next week (ABC News') '20/20' aired a report (on widespread sexual abuse in amateur swimming), and I realized that what I had found on my team was just a local piece of a national problem.' That plunged Muchnick into years of investigating horrors in the world of competitive and recreational swimming, culminating in his 2024 book, 'Underwater: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and around the Globe.' Please read it if you believe your club-swimmer child is protected by the U.S. Center for SafeSport. Subtle book titles, then, are not Muchnick's thing. He names names, he shines a bright light on a lot of cockroaches, but with a higher purpose. 'My real hope would be to actually change the youth sports system,' Muchnick says. 'I don't think I'm interested in getting all the bad guys, that's not really possible. I'm really interested in our taking a look at the youth sports system we have in this country, which has turned adults into children and children into adults. It's hard, because I'm a sports fan, too, we all love our sports, we just don't want to deal with the sausage factory behind them.' The swim book, Muchnick says, might have been his 'last rodeo' in muckraking. He's veered off that trail. He's finishing a biography of Rikidozan, a legendary, pioneering Japanese wrestler in the '50s. Typically, he won't make much money off this book. Monetizing his work has never been Muchnick's specialty. He has already spent most of his small advance on translation of research material. Muchnick, who has four kids, one of whom was adopted from China, says of the book, 'It's my love letter to Japanese and Korean culture.' All of his writing has been love letters, really. Like wrestlers, it's cleverly disguised.
San Francisco Chronicle
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
‘The start of something really good': Channel 24 venue energizes Sacramento arts landscape
For decades, Sacramento concertgoers have packed into cars or boarded trains to see their favorite artists in San Francisco or Oakland. But a new addition to the city's Midtown district could signal a shift in the region's migrational patterns. Channel 24, a mid-size venue developed and operated by Berkeley-based Another Planet Entertainment, the powerhouse independent promoter behind San Francisco's annual Outside Lands music festival, opened last month with a clear mission: Keep Sacramento music fans local. More Information May-June lineup Denzel Curry: 8 p.m. May 7 Madness: 8 p.m. May 14 Hippocampus: 8 p.m. May 16 Hermanos Gutiérrez: 8 p.m. May 21 Jack White: 8 p.m. May 26-27 James Arthur: 8 p.m. May 29 Charley Crockett: 8 p.m. June 8 Social Distortion: 8 p.m. June 14 Pachiko: 8 p.m. June 17 Ryan Bingham and the Texas Gentlemen: 8 p.m. June 18 Channel 24: 1800 24th St, Sacramento. For a full schedule, go to 'We'll go to the Bay Area for shows, like San Francisco, but it's hard to get out there with a job and stuff,' Jeannette Ho, 51, standing in the Channel 24 lobby just before electronic group Tycho took the stage Friday, April 25, as part of the venue's opening celebrations. Ho's boyfriend, John Conley, 56, echoed that sentiment. 'It's harder now than when we were younger to drive to the Bay Area for shows, especially during the week,' he said. 'Having shows here in Sacramento is definitely nice. We're more willing to get out to a show during the week here in town and close to us.' For fans who have long faced a 90-mile trek for mid-level acts, Channel 24 fills a longstanding void. While smaller indie bands regularly play the 530-capacity nightclub Harlow's and megastars hit the more than 17,500-seat Golden 1 Center, the state's capital has lacked a home for artists who sit comfortably mid-lineup on a Coachella poster. 'Over the years, we have had lots of artists ask to play Sacramento. They were bigger than Ace of Spades, and they weren't big enough to play Sacramento Memorial Auditorium,' said Allen Scott, president of concerts and festivals at Another Planet Entertainment, describing the goldilocks conundrum of downtown's concert scene. The former is an all-ages venue that accommodates 1,000, while the latter is a nearly 4,000-capacity space that books more graduation ceremonies than concerts these days. The hole in the market often led the concert production and artist management company to skip the market and send talent to Reno. That calculus changed with the 2016 opening of Golden 1 Center, managed by the Sacramento Kings and the City of Sacramento, that hosts cultural juggernauts like Paul McCartney, Janet Jackson and Kendrick Lamar. 'Golden 1 Center, 10 years later, is still in its honeymoon period,' Scott said, describing how the burst of energy and attendance for a new venue usually dissipates after a year or so. 'That's really a testament to what's happening in Sacramento.' With Channel 24, Another Planet is betting on a city long seen in a perpetual state of striving — but one increasingly ready to stand on its own. For pop culture proof of its underdog status, just look to the plot of the recent comedy ' Sacramento,' which hinges upon the city being a random and detached destination for its Los Angeles characters to find themselves in. Local residents are accustomed to serving up reasons for it to be taken seriously: It's a culinary destination, a mecca for cyclists, close to a lot of (arguably superior) natural attractions like Napa Valley and Lake Tahoe. But offering up the city's art scene might not be the most obvious move if one were making the case for it as a sexy metropolis. The addition of Channel 24 might not completely turn that around, but it's certainly a step in the right direction. Sam Kesh, 46, who has produced indie shows in Sacramento as a DJ and booker for most of his adult life, said he has long ventured out to the opulent Fox Theater in Oakland, Berkeley's open-air Greek Theatre and the more intimate room at the Independent in San Francisco well before knowing they were all owned and operated by Another Planet. When he learned of the entertainment company's latest venture in his hometown it was definitely welcoming news. 'All of those venues … they're huge parts of my life,' he said. 'It's just cool that there's something connected to that and means that if there's tours playing those venues, now there's an opportunity to have them in Sacramento.' Serving up a premium sonic experience was, in fact, the dominant objective when building the 2,150-capacity space, which is Another Planet Entertainment's first 'from the ground-up' project. 'This was completely built from the dirt,' Scott noted. 'I think the results will speak for themselves.' The structure, which was erected in place of an old electrical supply warehouse on 24th and R streets, was designed by Sacramento's Ellis Architects and the Bay Area's CAW Architects. With one wall adorned with a towering mural of a roving horse, by Sacramento artist Cheyenne Randall, and a modern auburn facade, the building — whose namesake references the electrical 'channels' of its warehouse days and Sacramento's converging rivers — is an unexpected addition to the mostly residential southeast corner of Midtown Sacramento's grid. Frequent concert goer Nicole Grant Kriege, 46, is hopeful about Channel 24's influence on its surroundings. 'I think it could really grow into a little bit of a micro-hood,' she pondered while sitting in a booth at Round Corner bar, which was buzzing with activity just before Channel 24's Tycho concert. 'You have Round Corner, which is kind of this dive bar institution, you have Racks, a vintage store that's been around forever. I think there's the start of something really good here.' Spotted among the bar crowd, huddled around the pool tables, was Tycho frontman Dan Hansen. The Oakland-based musician, who lived in Sacramento in the early 2000s, was mingling with friends and family ahead of the show. Later onstage, Hansen expressed his appreciation for the city of trees. 'This is amazing and so meaningful to us,' he said warmly as he reminisced about making music in a garage-turned-studio just up the street from Channel 24. Those songs would become the influential 2011 album 'Dive,' which received the loudest cheers at the venue that night. 'It was important to have a local artist play,' said Scott. 'We always knew Tycho would be in that first week.' Although the throng of mostly 30- to 50-somethings was enthusiastic about the chillwave indie rockers that night, Channel 24's roster serves a broad audience, including younger fans with a proclivity for country music. The venue's opening night on April 24 featured Tucker Wetmore, attracting a sold-out crowd outfitted in cowboy boots and wide-brimmed hats. 'Two very popular genres in Sacramento are country music and hard rock music — they perform better in Sacramento than they do in the immediate Bay area,' explained Scott, adding that shows featuring bluegrass singer Sierra Ferrell and alt-country artist Sam Barber were both sold out. From gritty Americana crooner Charley Crockett, who last drifted through the capital city five years ago, to blues rocker Jack White, who has never stepped a booted foot into a Sacramento venue, there's a bit of a sea change coming for the land-locked town. 'I'm hoping it brings shows we wouldn't normally get in Sacramento,' said Conley.
San Francisco Chronicle
01-05-2025
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
This California student could go to prison for taking four chickens. Was it a crime or a ‘rescue'?
Sitting at a UC Berkeley reflecting pool between classes, Zoe Rosenberg pulled up her left pant leg and pointed toward her ankle. There, wrapped around white, chicken-themed socks, was a black monitor tracking her movements. 'For graduation,' the animal rights activist said, 'I'm going to bedazzle it in Cal colors.' Aside from that bit of hardware, Rosenberg didn't look much different than many other students on campus that sunny Tuesday morning in mid-March. A giggly, curly-haired senior, she wore a backpack loaded with textbooks, oversized glasses and a small necklace adorned with a quote from her idol, the late British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst: 'DEEDS, NOT WORDS.' But as the 22-year-old Rosenberg tried to relax by the reflecting pool, she had far bigger concerns than finishing coursework or finding a job. Just four months after she graduates on May 17 with a bachelor's degree in social movement strategy, the straight-A student will stand trial in a Sonoma County courtroom for her June 2023 incursion into Petaluma Poultry, a processing facility owned by agribusiness giant Perdue Farms. If convicted for taking four chickens Perdue valued at around $24, she faces up to 5½ years in prison. And that's hardly the only thing at stake. Rosenberg is a prominent leader of a new generation of animal rights activists equipped with big social-media followings, investigative chops and a stated mission of 'total animal liberation.' Her trial, which recently had its May 16 start date delayed to mid-September so prosecutors would have more time to prepare, could strengthen — or hinder — a movement that doesn't just want to improve slaughterhouses. It wants to ban them worldwide. 'This case has the potential to be a real game-changer, in more ways than one,' said Rosenberg's attorney, Chris Carraway. 'It feels like everything has been leading up to this.' Desperate to seize power from a quarter-trillion-dollar industry and change how people view farm animals, Rosenberg's controversial Berkeley-based group, Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE, has spent well over a decade championing a brazen strategy. During 'open rescues,' activists like Rosenberg record themselves, often in daylight, removing animals from factory farms or slaughterhouses that they accuse of inhumane treatment. On top of sparing chickens, pigs or other farm animals from what activists claim is a cruel death, the often-viral 'rescues' are a kind of dare to law enforcement to charge the trespassers with crimes. Rosenberg is the latest activist to spurn a plea agreement in favor of a high-stakes trial, intending to force a detailed examination of the meat industry's practices. The larger goal is to establish a legal right to rescue any creature activists think is treated inhumanely. If Carraway can convince Rosenberg's 12-person jury to acquit her of one felony conspiracy charge and four misdemeanors, DxE would make its most compelling case yet that open rescues are permissible. After all, experts believe no jurisdiction in the country has prosecuted more animal rights activists than Sonoma County, where agriculture remains an important part of the economy and farmers have long felt scapegoated by highly visible protests. Ranchers view DxE's 'rescues' not only as thefts, but as dangerous security breaches at a time when avian flu is devastating the poultry industry and skyrocketing egg prices. 'DxE is more of a terrorist group than an activist group,' Bill Mattos, president of the California Poultry Federation, said in an interview. 'We have higher standards for poultry farming in California than anywhere else in the country, yet we're still being targeted by animal rights folks who, frankly, don't want us to sell meat to the public.' Few, if any, companies have endured more of DxE's wrath than Perdue, the $11 billion brand behind 7% of all U.S. chicken production. In a report published after years' worth of clandestine investigations into Perdue's techniques, DxE alleged that the company's inhumanities include boiling chickens alive, letting injured birds starve to death, and cramming chickens into feces-infested sheds that serve as breeding grounds for infectious diseases. In an email to the Chronicle, a Perdue spokesperson denied DxE's animal-abuse claims, calling it an 'extremist group' that has 'resorted to theft and other crimes' to meet its 'radical objectives.' Rosenberg's ankle monitor prevents her from going anywhere near Perdue's facilities. But as she now prepares to wage a crusade in court against the country's fourth-largest poultry company, her family worries about what will happen to the soft-spoken former high school valedictorian whose best friend is a rooster named Glenn. Rosenberg must follow a complex daily routine to manage her Type 1 diabetes. And, after being bailed out of jail just before staff there was expected to take her medical supplies, she fears that she could die in prison. 'I have not really accepted the possibility of that actually happening,' said Zoe's mother, Sherstin Rosenberg, a licensed veterinarian who runs Happy Hen Animal Sanctuary with her daughter in their hometown of San Luis Obispo. 'It's too much.' On that recent Tuesday, after finishing her research methods class, Zoe Rosenberg stood amid a grove of towering eucalyptus trees on UC Berkeley's campus as she watched squirrels scurry up and down the orange-tinted bark. 'This is my happy place,' she said. 'I come here whenever I start to feel overwhelmed.' Though Rosenberg has earned a social-media shoutout from Paris Hilton, a youth-activist-of-the-year award from the Animal Rights National Conference and her own TEDx talk, she has also been arrested eight times. Her Instagram, which boasts 100,000 followers, is flooded with messages calling her everything from a 'psycho' to a 'cult member.' Sometimes, during her political sociology class, Rosenberg glances at her ankle monitor while listening to her professor discuss the adversity great social leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi had to overcome: public ridicule, arrests, even time behind bars. 'Hey, ' Rosenberg tells herself, 'that's me right now.' As she nears the end of her Berkeley career, she has never attended a college party, drank alcohol or tailgated a Golden Bears football game. What she has done is remove — by her count — more than 1,000 chickens from poultry operations she considers factory farms. Whenever Rosenberg now begins to stress about prison time, she reflects on one of the first animals she ever took, a young hen she named Georgia. About six months after 'rescuing' her from an egg farm near Bakersfield, a 12-year-old Zoe sat with Georgia as the chicken died from a condition known as 'internal laying,' in which eggs are deposited within the hen's abdomen instead of from its vent, or bottom. During the bird's final moments, Rosenberg said, she promised to dedicate her life to saving as many chickens as she could. 'Really, my motivation comes from the animals,' Rosenberg said. 'I particularly think back to that promise I made to Georgia. If I can't protect these individuals, who will?' For as long as Rosenberg can remember, she felt a special connection with animals. When a Kindergarten-age Zoe accidentally ate her first and only Chicken McNugget, she burst into tears on the ride home from McDonald's. At age 10, after seeing video of a factory egg farm where hens were stacked in tiny cages, she went vegan. A year later, she established her nonprofit animal sanctuary, which has since housed more than 1,000 abused or abandoned animals. Then, at 14, in a presage of her brash public politics, she rushed the pitcher's mound at a Los Angeles Dodgers game in protest of a company that supplies meat used in 'Dodger Dogs.' When Rosenberg shackled herself to the base of a basketball hoop during an NBA playoff game in April 2022 to decry then-Minnesota Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor's alleged decision to roast thousands of birds alive after an avian flu outbreak, she earned the nickname 'Chain Girl.' By then, Rosenberg was notorious throughout Sonoma County's agriculture community, where her videos of alleged animal cruelty and surprise raids on slaughterhouses kept farmers up at night. According to a criminal complaint filed by the Sonoma County District Attorney's Office, Rosenberg made four unauthorized visits to Petaluma Poultry in the spring of 2023. This culminated in an early morning protest outside the Perdue subsidiary's facilities on June 13. Rosenberg, who turned 21 that day, allegedly removed four chickens from company vehicles. DxE video of the incident shared with the Chronicle shows Rosenberg wearing protective gear at Petaluma Poultry around 2:30 a.m. After examining each of the birds, she placed them in red buckets to take to a veterinarian. Though it is not clear in the video, Rosenberg has said that those chickens — later named Poppy, Ivy, Aster and Azalea — were covered in scratches, bruises and parasites. According to her, they're now safe and healthy in animal sanctuaries. Nearly six months after that incursion at Petaluma Poultry, Rosenberg watched a judge sentence DxE co-founder Wayne Hsiung to 90 days in jail and two years of probation for his role in two other factory-farm protests in the Petaluma area. About 30 minutes later, while delivering evidence to the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office of alleged animal cruelty at nearby Reichardt Duck Farm, Rosenberg was surrounded by police cars in the parking lot and arrested by deputies. 'Seeing (the four chickens) roam around and do what chickens are supposed to be doing makes everything worth it for me,' Rosenberg said. 'Even if I end up having to serve prison time for this, I'll take comfort knowing I did the right thing.' Many people, including some of the agricultural workers whose facilities have been investigated by DxE, view Rosenberg as more of a criminal than a changemaker. And, oftentimes, when DxE alleges animal abuse, farmers counter that the group is taking situations out of context. Case in point: Reichardt Duck Farm. Among owner Phil Reichardt's many complaints about DxE is that Rosenberg and other activists repeatedly posted photos from his facility of ducks on their backs — a known sign of mistreatment. 'When somebody comes in with a preconceived notion that there's something wrong going on, they're going to cherry-pick every individual issue that agrees with that and completely ignore the other 99.9% of outcomes that are good,' Reichardt said. 'Whenever you have this many animals in one place, you're going to get illness or injury or whatnot. Infallibility is an unreasonable expectation.' His farm, a 124-year-old family operation on the northwest outskirts of Petaluma that caters to Bay Area Chinese restaurants, is well-acquainted with DxE's tactics. In June 2019, hundreds of DxE activists protested alleged animal cruelty there by bussing themselves onto farm property and chaining themselves to the front gate. Some placed bike locks around their necks and hooked themselves to a conveyor belt where birds had been hanging. When the belt jolted alive unexpectedly, one activist nearly choked to death. In late November of 2023, about 10 days after Rosenberg and other DxE activists allegedly trespassed at night as part of an investigation into his farm, Reichardt learned that one of his ducks had tested positive for Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, or avian flu. Within weeks, agricultural workers say the disease had spread to neighboring farms, resulting in the euthanization of more than one million birds. Mike Weber, a fourth-generation Sonoma County egg farmer who had to euthanize his entire flock of 550,000 hens, said he has wondered whether Rosenberg or another DxE activist might have started the outbreak by tracking in the virus — either knowingly or unknowingly — during their investigation of Reichardt's farm. However, epidemiologists are skeptical. 'It may be a little disingenuous for farmers in Sonoma County to blame this on (Rosenberg) coming in on a specific occasion,' said Dr. John Swartzberg, a clinical professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccinology at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health. 'In a lot of factory farms around the country, workers aren't up to biosecurity standards to this day.' Regardless of how Sonoma County's avian flu outbreak began in late 2023, it intensified locals' distrust of DxE. The grassroots organization's radical ambitions include legal personhood for animals, worldwide veganism and an Animal Bill of Rights. What most frustrates Sonoma County farmers, though, is that DxE has dedicated so many of its resources toward investigating animal abuse in the Bay Area's most agriculturally focused region. 'It feels like they're targeting this area just because we're close to their headquarters in Berkeley,' said Santa Rosa dairy farmer Jennifer Beretta, who recently erected a massive fence around her property to keep out DxE activists. 'It's easy for them to make the quick drive over here to try and get some content for their social channels. But for us, this is our passion and our livelihood.' Sonoma County is starting to fight back. Since 2018, more than 130 DxE activists have been arrested there. This past November, a ballot measure DxE helped author that sought to rid the area of factory farms was soundly defeated, with 85% of voters rejecting it. Weber, the co-owner of Petaluma's Weber Family Farms, said he took solace knowing that so many of his fellow Sonoma County residents saw DxE as he does: a 'cultlike' group hellbent on ending the human consumption of meat. Almost 150 years after a local dentist invented the first egg incubator in Petaluma, Weber Family Farms is just one of two egg operations remaining in a town once called the 'Egg Basket of the World.' The avian flu outbreak of late 2023 'was the first time I ever saw a therapist, just to help walk me through my feelings,' Weber said. 'What really hurts about all this attention we've gotten from DxE is that the people who are farming here are doing it not only because they love it, but because they can do it in a sustainable fashion.' Weber needed over a year and millions of dollars to fully rebuild his flock. Others, like Reichardt, were less fortunate. Seventeen months removed from having to euthanize around 200,000 birds, his flock of ducks is about 10% of its original size. Reichardt had to cut his staff from 80 employees to 20. Many of the Chinese restaurants that relied on his birds for decades now fly in frozen ducks from the Midwest and East Coast. 'I don't have anything against Zoe personally, but, still, don't get me wrong,' Reichardt said. 'There will be no sadness here if she does get incarcerated.' For now, Rosenberg is juggling school papers, speaking engagements across the country, street protests in Sonoma County and conference calls with her defense team. In exchange for her freedom, she must notify an officer whenever she leaves Alameda County, stay at least 100 yards from animal-agriculture facilities and not own any domestic birds. Bidding to keep her out of prison, her lawyer, Carraway, plans to use the 'necessity defense' to argue that Rosenberg had exhausted every other option before rescuing the four chickens. Among Rosenberg's earlier attempts to get Petaluma Poultry's attention: a typed letter to its owners, and a report she sent to Sonoma County law enforcement detailing what DxE had uncovered in its investigations. Those findings now fill an eight-page document on DxE's website. During Rosenberg's trial, Carraway will cite California's animal cruelty laws, which make it a felony to subject an animal to 'unnecessary cruelty' or 'needless suffering.' Though an exemption allows animals to be killed for food, California deems it illegal to boil a chicken alive under any circumstances. 'People judge animals based on which ones are less human-like than others, but that misses the point,' Rosenberg said. 'There's tons of research out there that chickens are just as capable of emotions like happiness and fear as dogs and cats. Finally, it seems like that message is being heard.' In October 2022, a Utah jury acquitted two DxE activists of burglary and theft for removing two allegedly sick piglets from a farm owned by Smithfield Foods, the world's largest pork producer. The next year, a jury in Merced County acquitted two DxE activists — including former 'Baywatch' actress Alexandra Paul — of misdemeanor theft for taking two allegedly sick, slaughter-bound chickens from Foster Farms, the fifth-biggest poultry company in the U.S. In both cases, activists argued they had the right to save animals in distress based on the same state laws that would allow a bystander to break a window to rescue a dog trapped in a hot car. The big question now is whether Rosenberg's jury will be as sympathetic. Many experts agree that, if DxE wins more trials and open rescues eventually become widespread, they might disrupt the factory-farm system enough to spike meat prices. That could trigger an uproar from consumers, who might pressure agricultural officials into shifting toward smaller, more environmentally friendly animal farms. All this would serve DxE's ultimate plan of ending the sale of meat to the public. With the group now at what some call a 'flashpoint' moment, Rosenberg surely feels the urgency. Studies suggest that American meat consumption continues to rise, and that plant-based alternatives remain niche, which might explain DxE's stagnant membership in recent years. 'Being the lone defendant in a trial of this magnitude has to be an incredible burden for anyone to carry,' said Zoe's mom, Sherstin. 'Add in the fact that she has schoolwork and exams to think about, and I'm amazed that she's able to hold things together right now.' Still, Rosenberg has moments of panic. When she was 8 years old, her immune system attacked her pancreas, destroying the cells that supply insulin. Making matters worse: She can't feel when her blood sugar is low. To avoid yet another life-threatening trip to the emergency room, Rosenberg depends on sugar tablets, an insulin pump and carefully calculated insulin injections. After her latest arrest, she learned something sobering: Families around the country have alleged that loved ones with Type 1 diabetes died in prisons because staff there refused to provide necessary medical supplies. But on that recent Tuesday at UC Berkeley, Rosenberg pondered an outcome that scares her even more than dying behind bars. 'When I think about prison,' she said, 'what really gets me is being away from my animals.'
Business Insider
27-04-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Bill Gates, Bezos backed U.S. mining company expands into DR Congo
The U.S. mining company, backed by Bezos and Gates, aims to secure rare minerals vital for the energy transition in DR Congo's rich basin, a key move to compete with China. This development is significant for the African continent as countries seek to secure mineral deals with the US, amid ongoing talks driven by efforts to reduce reliance on China for critical metals. The newly appointed Director-General of KoBold Metals, Benjamin Katabuka, announced plans to utilize artificial intelligence in the DR Congo to discover untapped mineral deposits as US billionaires continue to invest heavily in the region. As per The Financial Times, Berkeley-based KoBold raised $537mn in January from investors including Gates's Breakthrough Energy Ventures, whose stakers include Bezos and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. The company has raised $1bn to date. In that regard, President Trump's senior adviser for Africa, Massad Boulos, revealed that he recently met with DR Congo President Felix Tshisekedi to discuss a potential US-DR Congo minerals agreement, paving the way forward. ' We're having similar discussions with other neighboring countries,' Boulos stated. 'Our role is to facilitate those private sector investments in the mining sector, including with American government funding ' he added. The US-China's interest in Africa's minerals DR Congo is the world's largest supplier of cobalt, a key component in electric vehicles batteries However, the country is in the midst of an armed conflict that has disrupted mining activities and investment, particularly in the eastern part of the country, where the M23 armed group controls significant territories. Many mines in the DR Congo are operated by Chinese companies, following the departure of major American mining firms, notably after Freeport-McMoRan sold its stake in the Tenke Fungurume copper mine to China's CMOC in 2016 Western investors' renewed interest could help counterbalance China's dominance in DR Congo's mining sector. As the world's demand for rare minerals, crucial for energy transition technologies like electric vehicles and renewable energy storage, continues to rise, DR Congo's vast mineral reserves are becoming even more strategically important. China has long been a dominant force in the region, controlling much of the extraction and trade of these minerals. However, with the increasing focus on diversifying global supply chains and securing more sustainable and ethical sourcing, Western investors are stepping up efforts to enter the market. This shift could challenge China's stronghold, introducing more competition, fostering better transparency, and potentially leading to improved labor and environmental standards in the sector.
