Nebraska town votes on plan for licences for immigrants

Nice:

A Nebraska town, angry over a surge in the number of Hispanic residents, is voting today in a referendum on a new law that would require foreign nationals to get a licence to live in the town.

The referendum in Fremont has been prompted by a sharp rise in Hispanic people drawn by work at meatpacking plants, combined with fears over job losses and demand placed on the town's social services because of the economic downturn. If approved, tenants who are not US-citizens would be required to get an "occupancy licence" from the city council. Even residents of nursing homes would be required to obtain such a licence.

Federal law requires employers to verify the immigration status of workers, but the proposed law would also open violators to local sanctions. Supporters insist it is not racist and is essential to protect jobs, healthcare and education because the town's Hispanic population has grown from 165 to more than 2,000 in 20 years.

It is unclear what proportion of those are in the US illegally, but the big meatpacking plants where many work say they only employ people whose immigrant status has been verified.

The Fremont Tribune has reported cases of Hispanic people who are legal residents being verbally abused and told to return to Mexico.

From the Guardian.

Republican reps apologize to BP for "shakedown"

Somehow they expect to make political hay from this:

Republicans on the Hill have calculated that President Obama's successful demand that BP set up a $20 billion escrow account to pay out claims is ripe for political attack. In the wake of Wednesday's White House announcement, a host of GOP officials are raising questions about both the process by which the deal was made and the deal itself -- going so far as to apologize to BP on America's behalf.

"I'm ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday," said Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) during a hearing on Thursday morning with BP's CEO Tony Hayward." I think it is a tragedy in the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown -- in this case a $20 billion shakedown -- with the attorney general of the United States, who is legitimately conducting a criminal investigation and has every right to do so to protect the American people, participating in what amounts to a $20 billion slush fund that's unprecedented in our nation's history, which has no legal standing, which I think sets a terrible precedent for our nation's future."

From the Huffington Post (h/t jblaque). Just when you think the Democrats are in for a beating in November, the Republicans do something to give you hope. And the Repubs will really look silly saying stuff like that if predictions that they might have to, say, evacuate nearly three million people turn out to be true (thanks again to Blaque for that one).

Activists jailed for putting up posters

Of course, when you put up posters advocating that people (gasp) protest, I suppose you're tempting fate:

About 200 kilometres from where world leaders will soon gather, two London political activists spent the night in city police cells over posters inviting people to Toronto to protest the G8 and G20 summits.

Darius Mirshahi, 25, and Andrew Cadotte, 19, flashed a peace sign and stood on the courthouse steps moments after their releases Wednesday afternoon and ripped open the police-issued, clear plastic bags containing their personal effects.

As the wind whipped up and papers flew, defence lawyer Dale Ives cautioned them: "Don't let that blow away guys or they'll charge you with littering."

Mirshahi, a founder of the Fanshawe College social justice club and Cadotte, who raises money for the Red Cross, Greenpeace and Amnesty International, are accused of gluing protest posters on government-owned mailboxes and hydro boxes.

They're each charged with seven counts of mischief.

But observers think the message, not the crime, was what kept them in custody.

From the London Free Press. Think they'd have been detained overnight if they put up posters about a lost kitten?

A casualty of the strong Canadian dollar?

A major call centre in Kitchener is losing clients, with predictable results:

KITCHENER — Arvato Digital Services, a Kitchener-based call centre, plans to lay off up to 200 workers later this summer after losing a couple of major contracts.

Currently, about 1,200 people work at the call centre, which occupies three floors of an office building at 235 King St. E. in downtown Kitchener.

Greg Brown, Arvato’s vice-president of human resources for North America, said a couple of major clients “consolidated their industries” in reaction to the global recession and took away projects handled by the Kitchener office.

These were global clients who didn’t want the business handled in Canada anymore, he said Tuesday in an interview from Arvato’s head office in Washington, D.C. “It’s part of the cycle of business.”

From the Record. I have to wonder why the issue of the high dollar is not mentioned, even in passing, in the article. You'd think any reporter worth his or her salt should have at least asked someone at Arvato if the dollar was a factor. Of course, it's possible that the reporter did ask and the editors removed that part, but it's more likely that it never occurred to them to ask. After all, it's always being drummed into us that a high dollar is great. Many of the Arvato workers probably rejoiced at the rising dollar -- "Wow, I can drive down to Buffalo and get even more shite for my money than before!" Of course, that only works when you have money...

Edited to add: A friend of mine, who is a veteran of the industry, tells me that nobody in the call centre industry in Canada wants to admit that the success or failure of many of these businesses is largely dependent on the exchange rate, a factor that's outside their control. Presumably they'd like to keep the illusion that they're masters of their own destiny. Still, that doesn't explain the failure of the reporter to ask the question.

Reasons to boycott BP

This is all rather academic for me, since there isn't BP station within a thousand kilometres of me. Still, it's worth a read, as are the comments, including this one:

Mary, I’m not so much concerned with FIXING the problem (which is impossible – there’ll be no return to status quo ante) as with providing the business schools with a valuable case study of how one of the world’s largest corporations destroyed itself for want of a nail.

Makes sense to me...

New desalination technique shows promise

If this works on a large scale, maybe we won't have to worry about the Yanks taking our fresh water:

The world isn’t facing a water shortage. Anyone who lives by the ocean knows that.

What we are running short of is fresh water. Only 3 per cent of the water on this planet is considered fresh water, and of that about two thirds is locked up in glaciers.

Most of the rest isn’t close to the people who need it most, with parts of Australia, India and the U.S. southwest being some of the better known water-scarce regions.

This has brought heightened attention recently to the importance of water desalination, and more specifically, lower-cost ways of removing salt from seawater that don’t require enormous amounts of heat and electricity.

On this front, a start-up from Vancouver called Saltworks Technologies has been breaking new ground with a process, explained below, called “thermo-ionic desalination.”

By way of background, most of the world’s desalination plants today separate salt by distilling seawater, but this requires an immense amount of energy to rapidly vaporize and then condense the water.

Newer desalination plants typically use a process called reverse osmosis. This is when the seawater is forced against a membrane that filters out the salt and other minerals. The approach is less energy-intensive than distillation, but the big pumps that push the water through the membrane still require lots of electricity.

How much electricity? Economist Jeff Rubin, in his book Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, cites the example of Saudi Arabia’s Shuaibah 3, the world’s largest desalination plant. It can produce 880,000 cubic metres of fresh water daily. The electricity to run this facility comes from a massive oil-burning power plant.

Shuaibah 3 is just one of several large desalination facilities in Saudi Arabia that get their power from oil-fired generation stations. “The World Bank estimates that the Middle East will need roughly another 50 to 60 billion cubic feet (1.42 to 1.7 billion cubic metres) of water annually over the next 10 to 15 years to meet the region’s burgeoning water demand,” writes Rubin. “Desalinating that immense volume of water could ultimately require the use of a million barrels of oil per day.”

This is why a company like Saltworks is so important. It has figured out a new process that can cut the energy demands of a desalination plant by more than half, and in some cases by as much as 80 per cent. Ben Sparrow, the mechanical engineer who co-founded Saltworks in 2008, says a small pilot plant is already operating in Vancouver that can process 1 cubic metre of ocean water a day.

From the Star. Interesting stuff, and a lot less troublesome than pumping water over the Rockies (or blasting out gigantic trenches with nuclear bombs, as Gary Filmon supposedly advocated in his master's thesis).

An unnerving poll result for the Manitoba NDP

This Angus Reid poll (h/t Curtis at Endless Spin) shows a commanding lead for the McFadyen Conservatives -- they have 48% support, compared to 36% for the NDP, 12% for the Liberals, and 3% for the Greens. I'm not 100% sure what to make of it; the last Angus Reid poll looked like an outlier, but this is an even more dramatic rise for the Tories. One aspect of the poll's methodology does make me wonder -- it was a poll of 800 randomly selected members of Angus Reid's panel. Presumably they make an effort to make the panel reflective of the electorate, but there may be limits to this (perhaps someone more conversant with modern polling methodology could enlighten me). On the other hand, Angus Reid is a respected pollster and it would be foolish to dismiss this out of hand. To someone like me, McFadyen's crowd look like a bunch of idiots, while Selinger carries an air of calm competence. However, I freely admit to not being the average Manitoban. We'll have to see if this trend continues with the next poll.