f nice On Nov. 22nd, Winnipeg City Council’s Standing Policy Committee of Water, Waste and the Environment met to discuss a report on tools and mechanisms for phasing out natural gas use. The report represents one of the first major asks of Winnipeg’s Climate Action and Resilience Committee, a citizen group designed to help Winnipeg achieve its goal of net zero by 2050. The intention of the report was to direct the public service to begin investigating the City of Winnipeg’s capacity for climate resilience through jurisdiction, grant programs, by-laws, zoning and permitting and land use planning. During the meeting, many individuals came forward to show their widespread support for this first step in climate action. This support was seen in several delegations, including representatives from Seniors for Climate Manitoba, BizforClimate and Stand.earth, as well as 18 testimonies submitted to the City. “Please take a moment to ask yourself what you want for future generations,” Pat Wally of Seniors for Climate Manitoba says. “Today, you can start making additions [to climate action] by commissioning this.” Further speakers brought research demonstrating precedence set by other cities in Canada, such as Montreal and Toronto, who have already implemented measures to phase out natural gas. Others said that phasing out was not enough and that the City should be looking at phasing in new technologies such as geothermal. However, the final committee decision was not to approve this preliminary step, but to receive it as information - sending it back for revision. Messaging played a large role in the council member’s justification for not approving the report. Although the report was to investigate possible options, Coun. Evan Duncan felt the report “was not communicated that way”. Rather the council said much of the responses the City received from the public implied the City was in the process of going off natural gas. “Going away from natural gas may not be a doable thing in this climate,” Coun. Shawn Dobson says. “Perhaps in the future we should go off natural gas, but that may be in a century.” Both Dobson and Duncan referred to instances where attempting to move towards energy efficiency had been shot down by different levels of government .“Maybe if we had an adequate electrical supply then maybe we could be talking about that, but I don’t think we have an adequate electrical supply ... that would be up to Hydro to determine if we have enough for that,” Coun. Dobson says. “I feel our best choice right now is to work with the other two levels of government to reduce our use of [natural gas].” While members of the public service said that Manitoba Hydro has committed to increasing the province’s energy supply in line with net zero goals, Committee Chair Coun. Evan Duncan expressed that he is “not confident” in Hydro’s ability to meet the energy needs required for phasing out natural gas. Near the end of the discussion, a frustrated Councillor Brian Mayes maligned the City’s tendency towards big promises without much intention or capacity for action. “We make these grandiose commitments, we undoubtedly voted for climate action, we undoubtedly voted for the CEIR (Community Energy Investment Roadmap),” Coun. Mayes says. “It’s just theatre at some point if we don’t do any action ... what’s the action here?Xiaomi to launch its first SUV in 2025

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EDITOR'S NOTE: On Football analyzes the biggest topics in the NFL from week to week. No one wants to see any player take a vicious hit like the one that knocked Trevor Lawrence out of the game. It’s easy to agree on that point. Eliminating violent shots is the hard part. The NFL has instituted several rules to protect quarterbacks but football is a physical sport and players have to react instantly and make split-second decisions going at high speeds so injuries keep occurring. Lawrence was carted off the field in the first half of Jacksonville’s 23-20 loss to Houston on Sunday after Azeez Al-Shaair leveled the defenseless quarterback with a forearm to the facemask. The late hit put Lawrence in the fencing position — both fists clenched — and he stayed on the ground for several minutes, while a brawl ensued. Lawrence didn’t require hospitalization for his concussion but it’s unknown when he’ll return. “Thank you to everyone who has reached out/been praying for me,” Lawrence wrote on X. “I’m home and feeling better. Means a lot, thank you all.” Al-Shaair was ejected from the game and faces a fine and potential suspension after his latest unsportsmanlike penalty. The Texans' linebacker was flagged and later fined $11,255 for a late hit out of bounds on Titans running back Tony Pollard last week. He was fined earlier this year after he punched Bears running back Roschon Johnson on the sideline in Week 2. That occurred during a scuffle that started after his hard shot on quarterback Caleb Williams near the sideline that wasn’t flagged. Al-Shaair once got away with grabbing Tom Brady by the throat on a pass rush in a game between the 49ers and Buccaneers. Outraged Jaguars players called Al-Shaair’s hit “dirty” and Texans coach DeMeco Ryans made it known he didn’t condone it. “It’s not what we’re coaching,” Ryans said. “Want to be smart in everything we do and not hurt the team, get a penalty there. Have to be smarter when the quarterback is going down. Unfortunate play. Not representative of who Azeez is. He’s a smart player, really great leader for us. We felt his presence not being there. His loss really affected us on the defensive side. Just not what we’re coaching. Didn’t want to see the melee and all the aftermath. That’s not what we’re about. Not representative of us. I’ll talk to Azeez, address him personally, and we’ll move forward from it.” Fox Sports color analyst Daryl Johnston, a former fullback for the Dallas Cowboys, didn’t hold back his criticism, calling it a “cheap shot.” “It’s everything you’re not supposed to do,” Johnston said. “Everything. You’ll see this in slow motion and Azeez Al-Shaair does everything you’re trying to prevent in this situation. It’s reckless. It’s disrespectful. There’s an honor that you give to your opponent on the football field and you respect him. And there’s opportunities to be physical and give big hits and play this game in that manner. And there’s other times when there’s a respect that you grant to your opponent.” Some former NFL quarterbacks blasted Al-Shaair on social media. “There is no place in the game of football for dirty hits like this one,” Robert Griffin III wrote on X. Chase Daniel called it “one of the dirtiest hits” he’s ever seen on a quarterback. Even defensive players struggled to defend Al-Shaair. “That was uncalled for,” Hall of Fame defensive lineman Michael Strahan said on Fox’s studio show while fellow Hall of Famer Howie Long agreed. But the play also sparked debate about the quarterback slide. Lawrence slid feet first, which signals that he’s giving himself up on the play. The NFL rulebook states: “A defender must pull up when a runner begins a feet-first slide.” But defensive players aren’t automatically penalized if they make contact with a sliding quarterback if they already committed and the contact is unavoidable. The rules state it’s a foul when “the defender makes forcible contact into the head or neck area of the runner with the helmet, shoulder, or forearm, or commits some other act that is unnecessary roughness.” Al-Shaair did that so he was penalized and will face other repercussions. Still, given the hard-hitting nature of the sport, it won’t be the last time this happens.

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(The Center Square) – HelloFresh, the largest meal-kit provider in the U.S., faces accusations from the U.S. Department of Labor of employing migrant children at a factory located in Aurora, Illinois. ABC7 reports at least six teenagers from Guatemala were found working night shifts at the factory. HelloFresh cut ties with Midway Staffing, an agency that hires migrants and is being investigated by the federal labor agency. The Illinois Department of Labor told The Center Square it had “no comment.” State Rep. Chris Miller called the incident an example of “state-sanctioned” human trafficking. "Tom Homan [President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for border security] will be like a pit bull getting this stuff done. I think Illinois will be a prime place to start. I think that they should start by throwing our governor and some of these politicians in jail for facilitating this nonsense,” said Miller. HelloFresh told ABC7 they were “troubled” by the staffing agency who facilitated the hiring of migrant children but are a partner of Tent Partnership for Refugees. Miller explained Tent is a nonprofit that supplies big corporations, like HelloFresh, with cheap “refugee” labor. In December 2022, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed a memorandum of understanding with the Tent Partnership to "expand economic opportunity for refugees" in the private sector. "This is inhuman and immoral and it’s all because of the open border policy and cities and states adopting a ‘sanctuary status,’” said Miller. “This isn’t an ‘oops.’ This is on purpose and it’s all part of a multinational human/sex-trafficking and child labor ring.” According to the Reform for Illinois’ campaign finance database, Midway Staffing has made campaign contributions to many Illinois politicians like city of Berwyn, Mayor Robert Lovero, state Rep. Fred Crespo, D-Hoffman Estates, Secretary of State Alexis Giannoulias and state Sen. Donald DeWitte, R-St. Charles. A recent law impacting child labor was passed by state Sen. Robert Peters, D-Chicago, and signed by the governor. The bill requires all minors end work by 7 p.m. on school nights. Peters said the law, which goes into effect in January, ensures young Illinoisans have a healthy balance between their work responsibility and personal lives. “There are people out there who want to move our child labor laws in the other direction and weaken them,” Peters said at a news conference in the spring. “We are trying to strengthen them and people take that positively. [For example] you have a kid, you don’t want to have your kid working in that environment [hazardous meat-packing plant], you want them focused on their schooling or playing with their friends.” Miller said politicians are going to pretend to care by introducing bills like Senate Bill 3646. “The problem is that these people are illegals. They've been brought here by the Democrat administrations, both federally and in the state of Illinois,” said Miller. “They've created this huge mess now, and now they're going to pretend like they care, and they're going to go try to clean it up. It's all smoke and mirrors and political theater.” Peters was unavailable to comment on the HelloFresh federal investigation at this time.Healthy corals are colorful and full of life. And under normal conditions, corals and algae depend on one another. The corals offer the algae protection and the photosynthesizing algae provide the coral with the components they need to make proteins and sugars. As waters warm, though, corals often bleach, which means they eject their algae. "The corals look white or sometimes black cause they've died," says Dakota McCoy , a biologist at the University of Chicago. "There's no fish around. It's way less biodiverse." However, "if you snorkel over a reef after a heat wave, other animals still look healthy," says McCoy. "They've still got their algae unlike the coral. It seems to take more to get them to bleach. So that's kind of a weird biological mystery." These seemingly healthy creatures include a clam-like mollusc called a heart cockle — the name coming from the shape of its shell. "These strange little clams are a little bit tougher than corals," says McCoy, "even though they host the same type of algae inside their cells that corals do." McCoy wanted to know why that might be. In a paper published in Nature Communications , she and her colleagues conclude that the structure of the heart cockle's shell operates as its own kind of fiber optic cables to channel light to the algae living inside it. It's a finding that may have both engineering and conservation implications. Stained glass in miniature McCoy and her colleagues began their investigation by shining LED lights through the heart cockles. "In a lot of shells, there [are] tiny little triangles where the light passes through. In some of the shells, it looks more like big zebra stripes. Some of the shells, they look like stained glass windows. So there's material there but light gets through." She wanted to know how the heart cockles render their shells transparent to get the light to their algal residents that depend on it. "Are they doing something more interesting than just letting light pass through?," she wondered. So she gathered some cockles from the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History and an online collector for a closer look. An instrument called a spectrophotometer, "can measure what color light passes through a little fragment of shell suspended in seawater by scanning over every wavelength of light from ultraviolet to infrared," McCoy explains. She and her colleagues found that the little windows in the heart cockle shells stream more than twice as much useful sunlight into their interiors for their algal tenants than harmful UV radiation. In addition, some individuals have mineral lenses beneath their little windows. "What they seem to do is condense light into a beam so that it's illuminating more deeply into the algae-rich tissue that's doing all the photosynthesis," says McCoy. The lens may also spread the light out "so you're not going to actually burn your [algae] or have too much light intensity," says Stanford University physicist Jennifer Dionne , who collaborated with McCoy. Natural fiber optics McCoy and Dionne then looked more closely at the shell's architecture. They knew it was made out of a kind of calcium carbonate, aragonite, a mineral that's usually opaque in coral skeletons or other clam shells. When those structures are examined under a microscope, McCoy says, "you see lots of big plates that are jumbled together and often arranged in a very sturdy brick-like manner." But when she used an electron microscope to study the mineral structure of the heart cockle shell, the calcium carbonate crystals were organized into long, super narrow fibers that were "all oriented the same direction as the direction that sunlight needs to travel to get into the shell," she says. Dionne instantly saw something familiar. "Here's a natural organism that is guiding light essentially via its own fiber optic bundles to basically help its symbionts harness sunlight," she says. "I think it might be one of the first examples in nature." The researchers say that structure could inspire tiny cameras with miniscule lenses or even improve fiber optic cable technology. "I think there's a lot we can learn about how biology handles light," says Dionne. University of Georgia cell biologist Mark Farmer wasn't involved in the research and was impressed with the paper. "It's difficult to balance the needs of a strong structural shell — which is of course the reason that clams make shells in the first place — with light transmission," he says. "So I think the fact that the cockles have solved effectively both problems with these fiber optics is the most significant finding." Farmer says the results may help explain why corals tend to bleach more readily than heart cockles, a phenomenon triggered by stress. While both organisms may be exposed to the stress of warming ocean temperatures, "by eliminating that additional stress of ultraviolet light, which can damage DNA, the cockles are perhaps less subject to the kind of stress that would lead to a bleaching event," says Farmer. McCoy agrees and believes that this difference could provide insights into how to help corals. "Can we think a little bit more about how heart cockles manage the light environment for their algae and maybe take inspiration from that to engineer new algae or new corals — a little bit more resilient, a little bit more robust?" she asks. McCoy sees in these shells more than a billion years of evolution — what she calls "product design honed by natural selection." "The heart cockle is a very cool story of how a living creature can manipulate light as well as many human engineers can," she says. "It's a beautiful example of a sustainable creature using solar energy in a very efficient way, thanks to an amazing natural evolved technology." Copyright 2024 NPRLEADERSHIP Government Agency of the Year 2024: Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC)

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Despite the fact that his team has actually won its last two UEFA Europa Conference League fixtures and , the league and cup form of Frank Schmidt's 1. FC Heidenheim leaves much to be desired. In just their second ever season in the German top flight, Schmidt's Albogeners haven't won a league fixture since besting Mainz at the end of December. After gleaning just one point from league opponents Leipzig, Gladbach, Hoffenheim, Kiel, Wolfsburg, and Leverkusen, the BaWü borderers presently find themselves just two points above the relegation playoff place. Matters do not get any easier with matches against Frankfurt, Bayern, and Stuttgart on tap before the international break. The also still stings. Speaking to the Sky mics after the game, Schmidt cited an early injury to striker Marvin Pieringer as one reason why Things fell apart after Pieringer's subbing off in the 28th. Within four minutes, the defending champs had leveled things up with two goals. Xabi Alonso's Werkself would "The game changed after the injury," Schmidt remarked in his post-match interview with Sky Germany afterwards, "There was a three-minute breather and Leverkusen took advantage of that. At first it was perfect. We were on the ball. Then everything changed." "We're missing the bit between our teeth," Schmidt added at the post-match presser, "We don't have the winners' mentality. After the Pieringer injury, we just weren't present. We didn't defend forcefully," "This absolute will to win every duel that I saw at the beginning wasn't there anymore," Schmidt carried on during his press conference soliloquy, "The feeling that every player was confident at his position was gone." "And I think that this three-minute break allowed Leverkusen to start over," Schmidt concluded, "They effectively started from scratch. That's the reason we lost. We don't have an excuse for losing, but we did have it right at the beginning."Matt Gaetz says he won’t return to Congress next year after withdrawing name for attorney general