alanjjohnstone
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A Pentagon spokesman said Russian operatives were planning a “false-flag” operation, to allow Moscow to accuse Ukraine of preparing an attack.
The German Institute for Economic Research revived a centuries-old idea to help tackle wealth inequality.
Universal Basic Inheritance, or Grunderbe in German, would assign €20,000 ($22,720) to each resident upon reaching 18 years of age. The sum would be earmarked to pay for education or training, a property downpayment or for starting a business — not to be squandered.
Around 750,000 German residents reach adulthood every year, the universal inheritance would cost the German government around €22.6 billion per year. It could be financed by hiking inheritance tax, introducing a tax on the ultrawealthy and by reforming property taxes.
https://www.dw.com/en/universal-inheritance-would-20k-at-18-help-to-reset-inequality/a-60375347
Poorer nations last month rejected more than 100 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines distributed by the global programme COVAX, mainly due to their approaching expiry date,
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/13/poorer-nations-dump-close-to-expiry-covid-vaccines-unicef
Biden’s hopes of overhauling the US election system look doomed after two of his fellow Democrats came out against them.
Sinema, an Arizona senator, and West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, both said they would not support nuking the filibuster rule.
The very same two who killed off Biden’s Build Back Better programs.
Biden wants to repeal the filibuster, which requires a 60% majority to pass certain legislation in the Senate. The upper chamber of Congress is currently split 50-50 between the two parties. No Republicans support the two Democratic-proposed plans, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Among other things, the bills would impose federal standards on elections, ushering in the most sweeping reform in a generation.
We have Friends of Isreal groups within all the main UK political parties and donations have been made to selected MPs so how is the following so different?
he World Health Organization has warned that half of Europe will have caught the Omicron Covid variant within the next six to eight weeks.
Dr Hans Kluge said a “west-to-east tidal wave” of Omicron was sweeping across the region, on top of a surge in the Delta variant.
The projection was based on the seven million new cases reported across Europe in the first week of 2022. The number of infections has more than doubled in a two-week period.
One hundred billion tons of carbon dioxide could be removed from the air by the end of the century through veggie diets plus re-wilding farmland.
That’s the estimate of a study of potential carbon savings from turning the land freed up to nature.
A quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions come from food and agriculture, with livestock accounting for the bulk, in rich nations.
And the animals need a huge amount of land for grazing and growing feed.
If wealthier countries moved away from meat-rich diets, much less land would be needed to grow food, and vast areas could be left to revert to their natural state, with wild plants and trees drawing down carbon from the atmosphere, a study found.
Is Sanders beginning to regret his lesser evil choice?
“It is no great secret that the Republican party is winning more and more support from working people,” Sanders said. “It’s not because the Republican party has anything to say to them. It’s because in too many ways the Democratic party has turned its back on the working class.”
“I think it’s absolutely important that we do a major course correction,” Sanders continued. “It’s important that we have the guts to take on the very powerful corporate interests that have an unbelievably powerful hold on the economy of this country.”
He is ever so determined to demonstrate how clever he is with the use of a long word – discombobulated.
Lucky we all have access to online dictionaries
But what is it about the Party that results is such an intellectual transformation? Who can forget David Ramsay Steele embrace of capitalism?
The New Yorker article
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/is-a-civil-war-ahead“We’re not headed to fascism or Putinism but I do think we could be headed to recurring constitutional crises, periods of competitive authoritarian and minority rule, and episodes of pretty significant violence that could include bombings, assassinations, and rallies where people are killed.” Steven Levitsky co-author, “How Democracies Die,”
Barbara Walter, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, and author of a new book, How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them.
Not even the gloomiest pessimist is predicting a rerun of the 1861-65 civil war with a blue army and red army fighting pitched battles.
“It would look more like Northern Ireland and what Britain experienced, where it’s more of an insurgency,” Walter continued. “It would probably be more decentralized than Northern Ireland because we have such a large country and there are so many militias all around the country.”Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, agrees that any such unravelling would also be most likely to resemble Northern Ireland’s Troubles.
“We would see these episodic, scattered terrorist attacks,” he added. “The Northern Ireland model is the one that frankly most fear because it doesn’t take a huge number of people to do this and right now there are highly motivated, well-armed groups…”https://uk.news.yahoo.com/us-really-heading-second-civil-070014434.html
Other reviews (via Libcom)
https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/22/chris-knight-wrong-about-almost-everything/ by Chris Knight
by Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan NealeDr Clive Dix, the former chairman of the UK’s vaccine taskforce, has said Covid should be treated as an endemic virus similar to flu, and mass-vaccination end. Instead research into Covid immunity beyond antibodies to include B-cells and T-cells (white blood cells).
This could help create vaccines for vulnerable people specific to Covid variants.
“We now need to manage disease, not virus spread. So stopping progression to severe disease in vulnerable groups is the future objective.”
Another from Libcom with links
http://libcom.org/news/national-revolt-kazakhstan-05012022Amnesty International has urged Biden to keep his promise to close Guantanamo Bay. Biden promised during his election campaign that he would close it before his tenure is up.
https://www.dw.com/en/us-amnesty-urges-biden-to-keep-promise-to-close-guantanamo-bay/a-60365951
