5 Reasons Barbenheimer Had a Massive Box Office Weekend

Movies are back. Finally. After weeks of feverish speculation about whether the combined forces of Barbie and Oppenheimer could revive the movie theater business, Barbie earned $337 million worldwide and Oppenheimer brought in another $174 million. Together, the movies delivered the biggest weekend at the box office since Avengers: Endgame dropped in April of 2019. Barbie, in particular, has skyrocketed beyond analysts’ predictions to land the biggest debut of the year so far. Writer-director Greta Gerwig can now also claim the biggest opening weekend for a female director ever.

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But what was so striking about this past weekend wasn’t the cash totals at the box office but the throngs of pink-clad fans flocking to movie theaters that have felt all-too-empty since the pandemic. For once, people didn’t opt to stay home and watch Netflix. Instead, they went out, met up with friends, and maybe even donned a T-shirt depicting a pink A-bomb explosion to celebrate the two films. Thematically, tonally, even in terms of color, Barbie and Oppenheimer could not be more different. But both offered audiences something they were sorely missing: A good time at the movie theater.

Studio executives are surely already picking apart the Barbenheimer phenomenon for lessons about future film rollouts. Maybe there’s something to be gleaned from the double feature mania: More than 200,000 people purchased tickets to see Barbie and Oppenheimer on the same day, according to the National Association of Theatre Owners. But this particular phenomenon may not be replicable. Here’s what we learned this weekend.

Read More: How Barbie Came to Life

Barbie and Oppenheimer actually boosted each other’s sales

In the lead up to Barbenheimer, much was made of whether Barbie would pull audiences away from the World War II era biopic or vice versa. Given how weak the box office has been so far this year, surely one movie would cannibalize the other. But it turns out that a rising tide lifts all boats. Every time one movie dropped a trailer, the other seemed to always trend on Twitter.

And six percent of people who bought a ticket to Oppenheimer this past weekend did so because their first choice, Barbie, was sold out, according to a poll conducted by The Quorum as reported by Matt Belloni in Puck. That equals about $5 million of Oppenheimer‘s impressive $80.5 million in domestic ticket sales.

The festive Barbenheimer challenge certainly helped. Individuals who may have been inclined to just see one of the two films may have been cajoled into watching the second by friends, family, or partners who wanted to participate in the double feature. I felt a tinge of FOMO for not watching the movies back-to-back (despite already watching Barbie months ago to report TIME’s cover story on the film) and even tried and failed to snag last-minute tickets to the doll movie to add on to my Oppenheimer experience. All but the first rows were sold out at every convenient theater.

Those Oppenheimer numbers were also significantly boosted by the fact that moviegoers sought out expensive IMAX tickets for the film. Premium ticket prices made up nearly half of all ticket sales for the film its opening weekend, according to Variety. The limited number of IMAX screens also created a sense of scarcity around Oppenheimer tickets—a quick look at Manhattan and Brooklyn’s theaters on Friday night and Saturday afternoon revealed that no seats remained in any 70 mm showings of the film, let alone IMAX screenings screening, save a few front row spots. Seats are regular screenings of both movies were nearly as rare, no doubt further driving demand. No one wants to show up to happy hour drinks this week and not have an opinion on Barbenheimer.

Read More: Why Barbenheimer Mania Is Unstoppable

Women want to see movies too

As I argued in a recent piece, Barbie is a rarity because it courts a primarily female audience, partially by embracing a hot-pink feminine aesthetic. Most big-budget action movies, from Mission: Impossible to Marvel—even the ones starring women—are mostly marketed toward young men. The few marketed toward women are often way too small in budget and scale to ever court this level of success.

Women want to see big splashy movies made by women, for women. And it turns out if you make those movies for women, they will buy tickets too. I don’t know when Hollywood forgot that: Probably around the time they started shoving rom-coms onto streaming services.

Read More: We’re Ignoring the Real Reason Barbie May Dominate the Box Office

That’s not to say men didn’t run to Barbie too. The audience opening weekend was 65% female, which means that men made up a significant portion of the audience. As Barbie producer David Heyman predicted in an interview for TIME’s Barbie cover story in June, Ryan Gosling’s performance as Ken resonated with that demographic. “I think Ryan is undeniable and so affecting in the film. People really care for Ken even when he’s misguided,” he said. “I think a lot of boys and men will find there’s a lot to relate to in Ken as they try to find their place in the world. But it’s all done with such a light touch and such generosity, and Ryan is just, I think, extraordinary.”

Read More: Barbie Is a Movie About Male Fragility. Let’s Dig In

And then there’s there are few current directors who speak directly to women quite like Greta Gerwig does. Her previous films, Lady Bird and Little Women did well at the box office, with the former making $79 million and the latter bringing in $206 million, both impressive numbers given their budgets. But those box office totals are just a fraction of the $337 million Barbie made in her opening weekend. Gerwig’s name was surely a draw to regular Letterboxd users, but the Barbie audience wound up being far more expansive than film buffs. Many of the text messages that poured in over the weekend with friends’ Barbie reviews cited Gerwig’s incredible instincts for truthfully capturing the inner lives of women and the relationships between female characters. “Watch Lady Bird and Little Women next,” I urged.

The larger culture’s discovery of this particular genius reminds me of the moment after Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther became a massive hit, and moviegoers went back to discover Creed and Fruitvale Station. Sometimes it takes a mega blockbuster based on IP for a general audience to discover a creative genius. And sometimes it takes a studio trusting a creative genius to turn its product into art.

Read More: In a Year Marked By Division, Black Panther Director Ryan Coogler Brought People Together

Trust good directors to make good movies based on original ideas

Studios and the media are rushing to draw conclusions about the state of film. Movies like Fast X, The Flash, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania underperformed at the box office earlier this year. Does the success of Barbie and Oppenheimer suggest that audiences are hungry for new ideas rather than old IP? Maybe. Superhero fatigue is real. But it’s not that simple.

When trying to dissect why movies like Fast X, The Flash, and Ant-Man failed, I can’t help but recall how those films left me feeling utterly exhausted. It’s not just that I had to expend energy trying to remember what happened in the many other installments. Or that I had to figure out which plot points I needed to retain to enjoy future entries in the Fast & Furious, Marvel, and, DC universes. These entries just weren’t very good movies.

A brief glance at Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic confirms that I’m not alone in feeling depleted by sequels. I have specific complaints about those movies, like an over-reliance on poorly-rendered CGI. (Both Barbie and Oppenheimer are beautifully shot and incredibly tactile, a respite from the muddy space landscapes of recent superhero films.) But 10, 15, and 32 movies into these franchises, respectively, it also feels as if their creators are running out of ideas.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse is also a superhero film, and a sequel. It’s currently the No. 2 movie at the domestic box office this year. Why? Because it’s actually a good movie. We’ve seen countless Spider-Man films over the years. We should be sick of this character too. But the animation is innovative and gorgeous. The ideas turn superhero tropes on their heads.

Barbie and Oppenheimer are actually good. I realize that’s a qualitative statement, not a quantitative one. And while most of the reviews for both films have been rather rapturous there are exceptions. (TIME’s own Stephanie Zacharek wasn’t a huge fan of Barbie.) Neither film is perfect. But both are ambitious and engaging. The filmmakers clearly felt passionate about the material and it shows onscreen.

Read More: Why It Took 64 Years to Make a Barbie Movie

Does making a good movie guarantee box office success? Of course not. Plenty of great movies have failed at the box office over the years. Some have become cult classics or found a second life on DVD or on streaming. I will never get over a terrific thriller like Widows faltering at the box office. Blame audiences for simply not turning off Netflix and leaving their houses enough. But it happens all the time. But word-of-mouth buzz can boost a movie significantly. Moviegoers are certainly more likely to want to see a film their friends say is good than one their friends say is bad.

And can good directors totally muck up a big IP project? Definitely. The Eternals and Thor: Love and Thunder faltered even though Chloe Zhao and Taika Waititi are some of the best directors working today. I would argue those films were bogged down with so much internal superhero lore and fan service that their failings can be attributed as much to Marvel as the individual directors.

Nolan and Gerwig seemed to operate largely free from studio machinations in the creation of these films, however unlikely that may sound. Nolan has had a blank check to make almost whatever he wants since The Dark Knight. No other director could get away with shooting a biopic like it was a thriller, hopping across multiple timelines. And in TIME’s Barbie cover story I reported extensively on how, even though executives at Mattel may have had differing ideas of what Barbie should be, ultimately Gerwig says she was allowed to make the movie she envisioned. The results speak for themselves.

Read More: Barbie Is a Movie About Male Fragility. Let’s Dig In

This may be a once-in-a-decade phenomenon

So what can Hollywood learn from the success of Barbenheimer? Perhaps not much. While a good deal of the Barbie marketing was orchestrated by Warner Bros. and Mattel—as one Mattel executive reminded me in an interview, Barbiecore “didn’t just happen”—which movies become social media sensations and which ones falter is a puzzle that will likely never be completely solved.

The people behind Barbie certainly weren’t trying to boost Oppeneheimer‘s ticket sales along with their own. Barbenheimer T-shirts featuring both the doll and the physicist were all generated by fans. And remember the #GentleMinions trend last year? That was unexpectedly born from Gen Zers nostalgic for a movie series from their childhood, not by some genius executive.

Studio attempts to control such narratives often fail. When the Spider-Man villain film Morbius released last year, fans seized onto the catchphrase “It’s Morbin’ Time” (never actually uttered in the film) to poke fun at the poorly reviewed movie. Sony tried and failed to capitalize on the viral moment by re-releasing the film, which then bombed at the box office for a second time.

The marketing for Barbie was inescapable and yet for some reason, we didn’t resent it. The absurdity of its ubiquity maybe won us over. Or we were happy to just share a laugh over the same joke about just how many products companies could turn pink.

Read More: Every Single Barbie Partnership We Could Find

We need communal culture again

If there’s one lesson to be learned here, it’s that we as a society are desperate for communal experiences. To state the obvious, we all really needed a fun weekend at the movies. It’s been a rough few years. The pandemic separated us. So do streaming services that keep us at home, and the increasing stratification of cultural experiences that preclude water cooler moments in the culture.

These movies performed well because audiences remembered for the first time in years why we go to theaters: To enjoy movies with other people. You take photos with your friends. You plan to meet for cocktails between the two legs of your double feature. You laugh when everyone else in the theater laughs, and your seat shakes when every other seat in the theater shakes.

Not since millions of people across the world decided to host Game of Thrones watch parties has a cultural phenomenon felt quite so inescapable. It’s fun to talk to your friends about a movie or TV show you’ve all seen instead of the increasingly fraught topics of politics and pandemic fears and job anxieties. Oppenheimer isn’t exactly a laugh riot. (Neither, for that matter, was Game of Thrones.) But it was a thought-provoking movie we could discuss online and in person—and contrasting it with Barbie was delightful. Maybe the big takeaway should be: Make moviegoing fun again.

source https://time.com/6297101/barbie-oppenheimer-box-office-hollywood/

Greta Thunberg Isn’t Backing Down After Swedish Court Fine For Disobeying Police During Climate Protest

(MALMÖ, Sweden) — A Swedish court on Monday fined climate activist Greta Thunberg for disobeying police during an environmental protest at an oil facility last month.

Thunberg, 20, admitted to the facts but denied guilt, saying the fight against the fossil fuel industry was a form of self-defense due to the existential and global threat of the climate crisis.

“We cannot save the world by playing by the rules,” she told journalists after hearing the verdict, vowing she would “definitely not” back down.

The court rejected her argument and fined her 2,500 kronor (about $240).

Charges were brought against Thunberg and several other youth activists from the Reclaim the Future movement for refusing a police order to disperse after blocking road access to an oil terminal in the southern Swedish city of Malmö on June 19.

“If the court sees our actions of self-defense as a crime, that’s how it is,” said Irma Kjellström, a spokesperson for Reclaim the Future who was also present at the June protest. She added that activists “have to be exactly where the harm is being done.”

The sentencing appeared to have little effect on the youths’ determination — just a few hours later, Thunberg and Reclaim the Future activists returned to the oil terminal to stage to another roadblock.

source https://time.com/6297074/greta-thunberg-swedish-court-fine/

The Head of the Global Vaccine Group Gavi Is Resigning. Here’s What He Learned During the Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic was a crucible for the public health world, and perhaps none were tested more than Gavi, the global nonprofit that makes vaccines its business. Faced with ensuring that the COVID-19 vaccines reached as many people in the developing world as possible, the organization created a new entity, COVAX, that served as the conduit for purchasing and distributing vaccines for the lowest-resource countries in the world.

Dr. Seth Berkley, who has headed the organization for years, is stepping down in August when his current term ends.

In a conversation with TIME, Berkley reflects on his tenure and what he, Gavi, and the world can learn from what went right in the world’s response to COVID-19—and what went wrong. (This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.)
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TIME: Why did you decide to step down?

I came in 2011 for a three-year term, and then they asked me to renew for another four years, and then another four years. Then they asked me to do an additional year because of COVID-19, so I’m 12 years into it now, and my term is done.

That’s more than a decade at Gavi. How are things different now compared to when you started?

The original idea for Gavi was that there were powerful new vaccines that were being made and used in wealthy countries. They could have the most effect in the poorest countries that didn’t have good health care systems, but there was no way to get them there. That was the problem Gavi was trying to solve.

Gavi was born in 2000, as an experiment that combined public and private partners. Could it work? If you fast forward to what’s happened, we now provide vaccines for about half the world’s children, and we just passed 1 billion unique children having been immunized. So one-eighth of humanity has gotten their childhood vaccines through Gavi. And countries have gone from having only six vaccines to 19 different vaccines, such as those against pneumonia, diarrhea, and even cancer vaccines like HPV for cervical cancer and hepatitis B for liver cancer. That’s led to a 70% reduction in vaccine-preventable diseases, which is contributing a more than 50% reduction in mortality for children under 5.

What contributed to Gavi’s success?

Everybody pays, so the model is that you put a little bit in if you’re very poor, and as you get richer as a country, you pay more, and then you transition out of Gavi. So 19 countries have transitioned out of Gavi since the organization started, and what allows them to transition out is market shaping. We started with five vaccine manufacturers in high-income countries. Today, there are 24 manufacturers, and the majority of these are in developing countries. The price points have dropped dramatically, and that’s allowed countries to continue to afford vaccines even after Gavi has stopped supporting them.

That’s been the secret sauce of Gavi: driving, over time, to get more affordable prices so countries can afford them. But in the interim, we subsidize them and provide a kind of guaranteed demand for the manufacturers. I think this has turned into a reasonable market and a reasonable way to work.

How did that system hold up during COVID-19?

First of all, the system for a pandemic was not in place. That’s point No. 1. And that’s important for the future, because you want to make sure that system continues and learn where it didn’t work, where there were real failures, and where there were real successes.

Point No. 2: Nowhere in the world is there a really standardized delivery system for people of all ages for vaccines. We had built a vaccine system, but it was primarily for infants and young children, and more recently for adolescent girls for the HPV vaccine. So it wasn’t a system that was built out across all aspects. It had to be adapted and adjusted.

But the big problem wasn’t that. The big problem was that we had to go and raise money. We had no money and no bandwidth for this. And that took time.

The pandemic really put Gavi’s model to the test, and you worked with other organizations—including the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the Center for Epidemic Preparedness—to create COVAX, which provided a way for developing countries to purchase COVID-19 vaccines at lower prices. Some have criticized COVAX for not acting fast enough in distributing vaccines to people who needed them in the developing world. What happened?

The donors were ultimately very generous—we raised $12 billion for COVAX. But there was terrible vaccine nationalism and export bans. The U.S. ultimately came in as a very generous supporter, but initially, the U.S. did not join COVAX.

Before COVID-19, the system built for vaccines worked really well to provide everybody in the world with the vaccines that they need. But during the pandemic, there was hoarding, and everybody wanted the vaccines for their own countries. There was no interest in sharing with other countries. That was the problem.

It wasn’t as if we didn’t anticipate that, so we had the first vaccine in the developing world delivered 39 days after the first vaccine in the U.K., and nothing like that has ever happened before. And we had hundreds of millions of doses that were planned to roll out and started to roll out and then, bang! Delta happened. India didn’t announce it publicly, but it stopped exporting vaccines. That hurt the African countries the most. And the vaccines we were getting from non-Indian manufacturers were slowed down and delayed.

While there was a delay at the beginning of 2021, by the end of that year, we basically had the supply. We ultimately purchased 11 different vaccines, and for 92 of the poorest countries, there is, as of July, a 56% primary series vaccination rate vs. 65% globally. Today there are only six countries that have less than 10% vaccine coverage.

At the same time, we saw absolutely the worst vaccine hesitancy ever. Normally wealthier countries are where you see vaccine hesitancy, because we take for granted that our children are going to live and that there’s no disease. Whereas in developing countries, parents see death around them and see the diseases from which they want to protect their children.

But in this case, all of a sudden, you had very powerful countries, and powerful leaders, challenging this vaccine. This was about systemic misinformation. That really affected the way people thought about this, and I think will have spillover into other vaccines as well. That’s something we are worried about.

Read More: What Went Wrong With COVAX?

Is there a role that Gavi can play, as a global public health organization, to address nationalism?

How? By going into [then President] Trump’s office and saying, ‘I don’t care if you want to focus on America, first you need to support the rest of the world?’ You have to be realistic in terms of what’s possible, and what is politically possible at the time. A lot depends on political leadership. So then the question becomes, how do we make it less dependent on a single country or political leader? At Gavi, that’s why we went from five vaccine manufacturers to 24. If we get to 40 manufacturers, we might be in an even better place.

How can inequity—whether it’s politically motivated or driven by weak distribution systems—be better addressed?

One of the things we are working on is regional vaccine manufacturing. It’s not a panacea, but if you consider that Africa has only 0.1% of the vaccine manufacturing for the world, even though it has an eighth of the world’s population, this is something we are trying to help with. Every country can’t have its own vaccine manufacturing. So there is now this idea of distributed vaccine manufacturers to expand the number of facilities to cover specific regions.

One of the other challenges the pandemic revealed was to use manufacturing strategically. The question becomes, do you vaccinate all the high-risk people in the world first, before you move to lower-risk populations? Many countries during the pandemic said no, they were going to vaccinate everyone in their countries first, and that’s why the hoarding was so terrible. The challenge now is to have an honest conversation about this and how to fix it.

What were the big lessons from what COVAX got right, and what it got wrong?

The big lessons of COVAX were, first, have money available at the beginning. Have contingent financing—it doesn’t have to be the full amount, but enough to jumpstart the program immediately, to get staff, and to start going to manufacturers.

The second lesson is having the risk worked out. We had to negotiate risk. We took taxpayer dollars and bought, at risk, vaccines that we didn’t know were going to work. We were lucky that most of the vaccines worked—but imagine if most of them hadn’t. Agreeing to do at-risk financing is critical.

The third lesson we learned is that we did not prioritize having delivery systems for the vaccines. This time we did not bundle financing of delivery with the cost of the vaccines, and that led to delays. Had we started with enough financing for delivering the vaccines alongside purchasing them, that would have been a really good thing.

And finally, diversify manufacturing so that there will be some places in the world with lower burden of disease that are willing to share vaccines.

Read More: Here’s How Long COVID-19 Vaccine Immunity Really Lasts

COVID-19 cases are starting to wane, and more people are vaccinated and protected against severe disease vaccines. Will COVID-19 vaccines continue to be part of Gavi’s arsenal?

At the end of this year, COVAX will be reincorporated into Gavi. But the board approved a program for 2024-2025 that will continue COVID-19 vaccines for high-risk populations. As part of our normal review for investment in vaccines, COVID-19 will be included going forward, so [continued distribution of the vaccine] will be considered [along] with those against RSV, and other vaccines against preventable diseases.

Gavi generally runs a funding rate of about $2 billion a year, and during the COVID-19 years, it jumped up to $10 billion because of the large number of vaccines we were delivering. The idea is to reduce the temporary staff and resources that were scaled up to do that, but to keep these systems warm in order to maintain some innovations that would allow us to be prepared for the next [public health threat].

There is an idea for a special program that was floated at the G7 summit to create marketplaces for vaccines to make manufacturing them sustainable over time. The big problem with these vaccines is that they can’t just be scaled up for pandemics, because what do you do with all the resources when there isn’t a threat? Gavi will continue to be involved with finding a way to create a high-quality vaccine manufacturing industry with a small number of manufacturers that can be ready to go if there is another pandemic.

source https://time.com/6296501/gavi-ceo-seth-berkley-interview/

A New Rule Could Finally Slow the Rise of Black Lung Among Coal Miners

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — A half-century ago, the nation’s top health experts urged the federal agency in charge of mine safety to adopt strict rules protecting miners from poisonous rock dust.

The inaction since — fueled by denials and lobbying from coal and other industries — has contributed to the premature deaths of thousands of miners from pneumoconiosis, more commonly known as “black lung.” The problem has only grown in recent years as miners dig through more layers of rock to get to less accessible coal, generating deadly silica dust in the process.

One former regulator called the lack of protection from silica-related illnesses “stunning” and one of the most “catastrophic” occupational health failures in U.S. history.
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Now the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration has proposed a rule that would cut the current limit for silica exposure by half — a major victory for safety advocates. But there is skepticism and concern about the government following through after years of broken promises and delays.

James Bounds, a retired coal miner from Oak Hill, West Virginia, said nothing can be done to reverse the debilitating illness he was diagnosed with at 37 in 1984. But he doesn’t want others to suffer the same fate.

“It’s not going to help me — I’m through mining,” said Bounds, 75, who now uses supplemental oxygen to breathe. “But we don’t want these young kids breathing like we do.”

The rule, published in the Federal Register this month, cuts the permissible exposure limit for silica dust from 100 to 50 micrograms per cubic meter of air for an 8-hour shift in coal, metal and nonmetal mines such as sand and gravel.

The proposal is in line with exposure levels imposed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration on construction and other non-mining industries. And it’s the standard the Centers for Disease Control was recommending as far back as 1974.

Silicosis is an occupational pneumoconiosis caused by the inhalation of crystalline silica dust present in minerals like sandstone. The U.S. Department of Labor began studying silica and its impact on workers’ health in the 1930s, but the focus on stopping exposure in the workplace largely bypassed coal miners.

Instead, regulations centered on coal dust, a separate hazard created by crushing or pulverizing coal rock that also contributes to black lung.

In the decades since, silica dust has become a major problem as Appalachian miners cut through layers of sandstone to reach less accessible coal seams in mountaintop mines where coal closer to the surface has long been tapped. Silica dust is 20 times more toxic than coal dust and causes severe forms of black lung disease even after a few years of exposure.

Read more: Coal Miners Helped Shape America’s Labor Landscape. Their Industry Is Fading, But That History Is Worth Remembering

An estimated one in five tenured miners in Central Appalachia has black lung disease; one in 20 has the most disabling form of black lung.

Miners are also being diagnosed at younger ages — some in their 30s and others with the advanced kind in their 40s. “That’s just nuts,” said Dr. Carl Werntz, a West Virginia physician who conducts black lung examinations and described cases as “skyrocketing.”

United Mine Workers of America President Cecil Roberts said there’s no reason a 35-year-old miner should be diagnosed with a disease “that’s going to cost him his life.”

“Nobody should be dying because of a job they have,” Roberts said.

The federal mine safety agency’s existing silica standards were developed in the 1970s, around the time of the U.S. Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969 and the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977.

West Virginia University law professor Pat McGinley, who was part of a state team investigating the 2010 Upper Big Branch mining disaster that killed 29 miners, called the resurgence of black lung “unparalleled” when it comes to occupational health failures. In the Upper Big Branch mine, 71% of the 24 miners who received autopsies were found to have black lung.

“I can’t think of any occupation where there has been such devastation that’s been ignored” by corporations and the government, he said. “It’s stunning.”

Read more: Coal’s Last Kick: As Clean Energy Rises, West Virginia Looks At What Comes Next

The new rule is supported by Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Bob Casey and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, and Mark Warner and Tim Kaine of Virginia, who pushed for the change and released a joint statement saying protecting miners from “dangerous levels of silica cannot wait.”

The Mine Safety and Health Administration will be collecting comments on the proposal through Aug. 28, with three hearings scheduled in Arlington, Virginia, Beckley, West Virginia, and Denver.

One issue expected to come up: the use of respiratory protection equipment.

The National Mining Association, which represents mine operators, wants workers to be permitted to use respirators as a method of compliance with the rule.

“These are recognized industrial hygiene practices utilized by″ federal regulators in other industries, “but not in mining,″ spokesman Conor Bernstein said, adding that better ventilation controls, safety awareness and regulations on coal dust have all contributed to ”exponentially lower dust levels” inside U.S. mines in recent years.

The mine workers’ union and others, however, say respirators are ineffective while performing heavy labor in hot, confined spaces common in mines. The proposed rule allows for the use of respirators on a temporary basis while operators are implementing engineering controls. But advocates say inspectors aren’t present often enough to ensure they don’t become a permanent solution.

“The history of miner safety and health enforcement teaches us that exceptions become the rule,” said Sam Petsonk, a West Virginia attorney who represented miners who were diagnosed with black lung after operators knowingly violated regulations.

The proposed rule also includes a provision that allows companies to self-report silica levels. Federal inspectors conduct spot checks to ensure accuracy, but mine operators still have leeway to manipulate reporting data, said Willie Dodson, Central Appalachian field coordinator for Appalachian Voices, an advocacy group.

Ideally, federal inspectors should take samples day after day in a given mine to determine compliance, he said.

A coal dust examiner who worked for a Kentucky mining company was sentenced to six months in prison last month for falsifying dust samples and lying to federal officials.

In rural Nickelsville, Virginia, near the Tennessee line, Vonda Robinson says miners and their families are owed more accountability from the federal government and mine operators. Her husband John was diagnosed with black lung about a decade ago at 47. Now, his doctors say he will need a lung transplant.

Vonda Robinson said her husband doesn’t know what to say when his 5-year-old granddaughter asks why he can’t run and play with her, why even walking down the end of the driveway leaves him physically spent.

“He’ll tell her ‘Honey, papaw can’t do that,’ ” she said.

During his 28 years mining, John Robinson would come home with his face covered with dust. But she tried not to worry. Everyone in the community mined coal.

“He was one of those that wanted to go in the mines to give his family the American dream — the nice house, vehicles, put our kids through college,” she said. “And this is what he got.”

___

Daly reported from Washington.

source https://time.com/6297066/black-lung-coal-miners-rule/

After 29 Weeks of Protest, Israel Passes Landmark Legislation That Will Test Its Democracy

Thousands of Israeli protesters descended on the streets of Jerusalem for a third consecutive day on Monday as the country braced for a crucial vote on legislation that would significantly weaken the authority of its Supreme Court. The legislation, which passed 64-0 after the opposition lawmakers left the Knesset in protest, marks the government’s first victory in its seven-month effort to enact the controversial legislation, which critics say could bring Israel to the brink of autocracy.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to curb the power of the judiciary—and, in turn, remove the sole administrative check on his far-right government’s power—has been the subject of 29 consecutive weeks of mass protest. As many as hundreds of thousands of demonstrators converged on Jerusalem and Tel Aviv over the weekend to voice their opposition to the upcoming vote. Their calls for Netanyahu to halt his judicial overhaul plans were echoed by military reservists, businesses, and even U.S. President Joe Biden. Netanyahu, who spent the weekend in the hospital following a pacemaker operation, refused to back down.
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Alon-Lee Green, the national co-director of the Arab-Jewish grassroots movement Standing Together, has been among the demonstrators ever since he helped launch the inaugural protest on Jan. 7. He spoke with TIME on Friday about how the protest movement came to life and why Monday’s vote is a decisive moment for Israeli democracy. His account of the last 29 weeks has been edited for length and clarity.

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The movement I am part of is called Standing Together, which is a Jewish and Arab movement in Israel fighting for democracy and equality and peace and social justice. It’s very much on the left side of the political spectrum.

And we’ve been very much involved in different struggles in the last few years, mainly for equality inside Israel, a deeper democracy also for the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, and all around the question of the occupation and peace and settlements.

During the five cycles of elections that we witnessed and participated in these last three years, we took the role of encouraging the Arab Palestinian minority to get out and vote. And we also pushed the political system to be more inclusive.

Then we came to this last election in November, and we couldn’t expect results this bad. It’s like the right wing—not even the right wing, but the extreme right wing in Israel—won the lottery. They managed to get out so many of their base to vote and to really increase their voting percentage Meanwhile, the left-wing Jewish parties, Meretz, did not pass the electoral threshold. The Arab national movement, Balad, also did not pass.

So eight full seats of the left-wing side of Parliament have been erased and that gave more proportional representation to the right. It led to the result that some people like Zvi Sukkot, a new MP who is one of the most extreme settlers in Israel, got into Parliament. The party of Itamar Ben-Gvir got five seats and the most extreme fascist settlers have 14 seats together in the Parliament. That was scary.

We saw that negotiations in December between Netanyahu’s ruling Likud and the far right over forming a new coalition, a new government, involved more and more scary demands like annexing part of the West Bank, like putting secret supervision on Arab teachers in Israel, and attacking the rights of the Palestinians living in Israel, the rights of women, the rights of the LGBTQ community. When the government reached a coalition agreement, we said “this is scary, we need to resist the new settler government,” and we called a demonstration on the seventh of January.

That was the first demonstration. We cooperated with a lot of different organizations. It started to gain speed and we were going out on the streets to show that we are still here even though the main discussion at this moment was that people are going to leave Israel from the liberal and left camp. The main discussion was of fear.

Two days before the first demonstration, the Minister of Justice Yariv Levin held a press conference and he declared the new judicial reform and then a lot more forces from the political center joined this movement. And that’s how the first demonstration exploded, with 30,000 people on the street. But honestly, it also had a lot of tension because the main organizer of it was a movement that also addressed the occupation. Many who decided to join the protests after Levin’s press conference announcing the judicial reform said, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Don’t mix the reform and the settlers. We don’t want to talk about the occupation now.” Still, the first protest had four Palestinians on the main stage during that night of demonstration. It also had a woman from the strictly Orthodox Haredi community on the stage, and it was very clear about anti-racism, anti-occupation. And then, starting from the second protest, those messages were no longer the mainstream messages of the protest.

Read More: Why Israel’s Democratic Reckoning Has Barely Begun

This is one of the biggest protests in Israel’s history. It has people in the tens of thousands and sometimes more than 150,000 people week after week after week. At some moments of the protests—like the night of the firing of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant because he demanded Netanyahu to stop with the judicial overhaul—people started flooding the streets, shouting, “Go out of your houses, there is a demonstration, go to the Kaplan Street, go to Kaplan!” And you saw that from every building on the street. I was one of those people. I left my house, I saw from the next building people leaving and then from the other building and the other. And it started to be like literal rivers of people that were connecting in the bigger streets to a bigger river and then we got to Kaplan and we were tens of thousands of people in a spontaneous moment that felt electrifying. We blocked one of the main highways of Israel and we stood there the entire night. It will be remembered as a historic moment in Israel.

The government has a lot to lose if they will not take advantage of their lottery win, the election results. It does feel for the government, for a lot of MPs and the parties of the coalition, that it’s not something to waste; it’s not something to let go of. I think that is driving them very strongly forward and it’s very scary to see.

Things have come to a head in the last four days in Israel. Last Monday, the government voted on a law that bans students in Israel that are coming from the Palestinian minority in Israel to wave a Palestinian flag. If you are a student and you wave a Palestinian flag, you’re not entitled to study in any academic institute in Israel. You are not entitled to receive an academic degree in Israel. And if you studied abroad, your degree from abroad will not be acknowledged by the Israeli state. And that was voted on on Monday and it passed two days ago in Parliament with the support of the government. That’s the preliminary voting—there’s still two more votes to go, but they actually pushed it forward.

Then, the other day, it was declared by the government that Arab teachers are going to get the supervision of the secret service and also they’re going to extend this program now so that every person who wants to become a teacher in Israel will have to undergo supervision of the secret service of Israel.

Another thing they did this week is to say that any request for child support from a woman to a man has to go through the rabbinical court, which means that if you want to get divorced, the man has the power to tell you to drop the request for child support. You cannot divorce without it in Israel; you need to get the support of the man. It’s a very bad law.

This is just one week in Israel. So if the government will see that they have the power to push through this judicial reform, despite hundreds of thousands of people on the street, the economic and financial elite fighting against them, they will feel that they have a lot of power to push the other things that they want to do. It’s a very scary moment.

It feels as though Israel stands at a historic crossroads. It feels like the very basic agreement between the state and its citizens has been broken. On Friday, we saw that 1,200 pilots from the Air Force of Israel declared that they refuse to continue their service. And what they described is that the very basic agreement; the very basic feeling that what they give and what they get in return has been broken.

The general feeling is that there is a very big thing that has been broken and cannot be restored.

source https://time.com/6297024/israel-judicial-reform-protest/

The Specter of a Right-Wing Spain Fades, After Inconclusive Election

MADRID — Spain may be facing political gridlock and possibly a new election, but a national ballot produced one result that will be welcomed across the capitals of Europe: a far-right party aiming to get its hands on the levers of power was thwarted.

Spain’s Vox party, with its ultranationalist bent, lost support among voters in Sunday’s election, dashing its hopes to be a kingmaker and enter a governing coalition that would have given the far right its first share of power in Spain since Francisco Franco’s 20th century dictatorship.

The mainstream conservative Popular Party won the election, but performed well below polling data that had forecast it could oust Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez if it formed a government with Vox as a junior partner.
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Even though Sánchez’s Socialists finished second, they and their allied parties celebrated the outcome as a victory since their combined forces gained slightly more seats than the Popular Party and Vox. The bloc that would likely support Sánchez totaled 172 seats, while parties on the right had 170.

“This is a major victory for the left,” Dr. Jason Xidias, a lecturer in Political Science at New York University’s Madrid campus, said Monday.

AP Photo/Emilio MorenattiSocialist Workers’ Party leader and current Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez greets supporters outside the party’s headquarters in Madrid, Spain, Sunday July 23, 2023.

Political horse-trading in coming weeks, when smaller regional parties could offer their support for a government in return for concessions, will be “very complicated,” Xidias said.

The closer-than-expected outcome placed a question mark over Spain’s future leadership. But the Popular Party insisted it could not be denied its shot at forming a government.

“Nobody would understand it now if (other parties) all came together to prevent the party that won the elections from becoming the government,” the PP’s deputy secretary Miguel Tellado told public broadcaster RTVE on Monday.

Sánchez put together Spain’s first ever coalition government, which took power in Jan. 2020. Sánchez has been Spain’s prime minister since 2018.

Socialist voter Delphine Fernández said she hopes Sánchez can stay in power. She is crossing her fingers that she and the 37 million Spaniards called to vote don’t have to do it all over again like in 2019, when Sánchez had to score back-to-back election victories before he was able to forge a coalition government.

“It was always going to be difficult. Now we are (practically) tied, but let’s see if we can still govern,” said Fernández, a lawyer. “I don’t want to vote again in a few weeks. It’s now or never.”

But the chances of Sánchez picking up the support of the 176 lawmakers needed to have an absolute majority in the Madrid-based Lower House of Parliament are not great.

Read More: Why Women’s Rights Are a Key Issue to Watch in Spain’s Election

The divided results have made the Catalan separatist party Junts (Together) key to Sánchez forming a government. But if Junts asked for a referendum on independence for northeast Catalonia, that would likely be far too costly a price for Sánchez to pay.

“We won’t make Pedro Sánchez PM in exchange for nothing,” Míriam Nogueras of Junts said.

With all votes counted, the Popular Party collected 136 seats of the 350 up for grabs. Even with the 33 seats that the far-right Vox got and the one seat going to an allied party, the PP was still seven seats short of a majority.

The Socialists gathered 122 seats, two more than they previously held. Sánchez could likely call on the 31 seats of its junior coalition partner Sumar (Joining Forces) and several smaller parties to at least total more than the sum of the right-wing parties, but also would fall four short of a majority unless Junts joined them.

“Spain and all the citizens who have voted have made themselves clear. The backward-looking bloc that wanted to undo all that we have done has failed,” Sánchez told a jubilant crowd gathered at Socialists’ headquarters in Madrid.

After his party took a beating in regional and local elections in May, Sánchez could have waited until December to face a national vote. Instead, he stunned his rivals by moving up the vote in hopes of gaining a bigger boost from his supporters.

Sánchez can add this election night to yet another comeback in his career that has been built around beating the odds. The 51-year-old had to mount a mutiny among rank-and-file Socialists to return to heading his party before he won Spain’s only no-confidence vote to oust his Popular Party predecessor in 2018.

PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo seemed even more unlikely to put together a majority.

Feijóo focused the PP’s campaign on what he called the lack of trustworthiness of Sánchez. The Socialists and other leftist parties, meanwhile, drummed on the fear of having Vox in power as a junior partner in a PP-led coalition.

A PP-Vox government would have meant another EU member moved firmly to the right, a trend seen recently in Sweden, Finland and Italy. Countries such as Germany and France are concerned about what such a shift would portend for EU immigration and climate policies.

Vox, however, lost 19 seats from four years earlier. The election took place during Spain’s six-month rotating presidency of the European Union, and a strong Vox showing would have sent shockwaves through EU politics.

Feijóo sought to distance the PP from Vox during the campaign. But Sánchez, in moving up the election, made the campaign coincide with the PP and Vox striking deals to govern together in town halls and regional governments following the May ballots.

Vox campaigned on rolling back gender violence laws. And both the PP and Vox agreed on wanting to repeal a new transgender rights law and a democratic memory law that seeks to help families wanting to unearth the thousands of victims of Franco’s regime still missing in mass graves.

“PP has been a victim of its expectations, and the Socialists have been able to capitalize on the fear of the arrival of Vox. Bringing forward the elections has turned out to be the right decision for Pedro Sánchez,” said Manuel Mostaza, director of Public Policy at the Spanish consulting firm Atrevia.

Spain’s new Parliament will meet in a month. King Felipe VI then appoints one of the party leaders to submit him or herself to a parliamentary vote to form a new government. Lawmakers have a maximum period of three months to reach an agreement. Otherwise, new elections would be triggered.

___

Wilson reported from Barcelona. AP journalists Aritz Parra, Renata Brito, David Brunat, Iain Sullivan, María Gestoso, Alicia Léon and José María García contributed to this report.

source https://time.com/6297014/spain-inconclusive-election/

At Least 15 Dead and 19 Missing After Overloaded Boat Capsizes in Indonesia

JAKARTA, Indonesia — An overloaded passenger boat capsized off Indonesia’s Sulawesi island, killing at least 15 people and leaving 19 others missing, rescuers said Monday.

The vessel was traveling from Lanto village in Buton Central regency in Southeast Sulawesi province to nearby Lagili village when it capsized just after midnight on Monday, local search and rescue agency head Muhammad Arafah said.

The wooden boat was carrying 40 people but was designed for just 20.

Rescuers were searching Monday for 19 people who were still missing in rough seas, while 15 bodies had been recovered and six people were rescued, Arafah said.
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Three inflatable boats, two fishing boats and six divers were deployed to search for the missing people, he added.

Thousands of residents had traveled to their villages to celebrate the regency’s 9th anniversary on Sunday, and many people were transported by fishing or passenger boats.

Television news showed footage of people on fishing boats retrieving bodies in the overnight darkness, and grieving relatives waiting for information at a port and a local hospital.

Indonesia is an archipelago with more than 17,000 islands, and ferries are a common form of transportation. With lax safety standards and problems with overcrowding, accidents occur frequently.

In 2018, an overcrowded ferry with about 200 people on board sank in a lake in North Sumatra province, killing 167 people.

In one of the country’s worst recorded disasters, an overcrowded passenger ship sank in February 1999 with 332 people aboard. Only 20 people survived.

source https://time.com/6297006/indonesia-boat-capsized/