alanjjohnstone
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A very long article by Time but very informative.
How easy it was for the institutions to ensure their candidate won. It certainly gives an insight into how the Establishment (Trumpers would say the ‘deep state’) ensured a Biden victory but, of course, that was not the intent of the article.
I wonder if they would have mobilised for Sanders in the same way?
‘Chakka Jam’ where protesters block traffic for 3 hours has begun across India in other states other than Delhi which has its own for some time now. But just in case, 50,000 security police have been put on stand-by.
At some places, like Bengaluru and Pune, demonstrators have been detained. In Kolkata and West Bengal, the farmer organisations have started blocking state and national highways.
This is ongoing.
Mitt Romney, Republican, proposes a child benefit tax reform that is more generous than anything Biden has on the table.
You Tube stops some progressive groups the ability to earn money from their uploads.
I don’t quite fully understand it since we have never tried to raise funds via You Tube apps but apparently some do.
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/02/05/youtube-financially-deplatforms-swath-of-indie-media-accounts/
Finally the ICC decides to investigate Israeli and Hamas/PLO abuses in Gaza and West Bank.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-55956771
But don’t expect too much.
Biden could join the ICC but it will be one more thing he will follow the Republicans’ lead.
It is a topsy-turvy world where once it was the anarchist Daniel Graeber who was extolling the feminist “freedom-fighters”.
But just to clarify, HRC didn’t write the book, but is making a movie of the book. Americans are far more influence by what they see on the screen rather than read on the page. Combined with Biden’s shift back to boots on the ground, we can perhaps foresee the Kurds once more being the excuse for more troops to the region.
The pro-war left have already applauded the end of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, America’s longest war.
Where is this “hold the feet of the Democratic Party to the fire”, that Chomsky and others said justified voting for Biden?
All i see is that a return to 2016 is being lauded rather than there is being any advance upon Obama’s policies.
Ending Saudi weaponry to Yemen has come with a lot of qualifications.
We all heard it during the referendum…vote against all that Brussels red tape.
Now instead of a page or two of documentation, a lorry of fish requires 71 pages to be exported into the EU.
How will Biden differentiate between arming the Saudis defensively against Iran and offensively against the Houthi? It will be the same weapons. He stopped short of exerting full military sanctions as pressure to bring the war to an end.
The UK’s BAE will be eying the prospective future arms deals with glee.
The USS John S McCain, guided-missile destroyer sailed into the disputed waters between China and Taiwan to demonstrate “the US commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific”, the Seventh Fleet statement said. “The United States military will continue to fly, sail and operate anywhere international law allows.”
No change there with a new president.
While many have praised the Kurdish PPK for its libertarian influences, Hillary Clinton has also now joined in the praise for the Kurdish women.
This report should be treated with caution due to the political bias of Qatar but it highlights how the right have staked a claim to the Kurdish separatists.
Hillary Clinton, and her daughter Chelsea, announced their intention to produce, through their company HiddenLight Productions, a TV drama about female Kurdish fighters based on members of the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), the female wing of the Peoples Protection Units (YPG)
“The Daughters of Kobani is an extraordinary account of brave, defiant women fighting for justice and equality,” Clinton told US media after announcing the project.
Having traded off his name, Biden’s son now does it again with a book about his addictions.
The Orthodox Church in Romania is facing growing pressure to change baptism rituals after a baby died following a ceremony which involves immersing infants three times in holy water. The six-week-old suffered a cardiac arrest and was rushed to hospital on Monday but he died.
Local media recounted several similar incidents in recent years. Church spokesman Vasile Banescu said priests could pour a little water on the baby’s forehead instead of full immersion. But Archbishop Teodosie, leader of the Church’s traditionalist wing, said the ritual would not change.
Confirming yet again our earlier exchange, MS.
American Indians and Alaskan Natives are dying at almost twice the rate of white Americans, according to analysis by APM Research Lab shared exclusively with the Guardian.
Nationwide one in every 475 Native Americans has died from Covid since the start of the pandemic, compared with one in every 825 white Americans and one in every 645 Black Americans. Native Americans have suffered 211 deaths per 100,000 people, compared with 121 white Americans per 100,000.
The true death toll is undoubtedly significantly higher as multiple states and cities provide patchy or no data on Native Americans lost to Covid. Of those that do, communities in Mississippi, New Mexico, Arizona, Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas have been the hardest hit.
We know how serious apostasy is treated within the Muslim religion, Saudi Arabia has labeled having atheist thoughts as a form of terrorism, yet still there is a shift to secularism.
https://www.dw.com/en/middle-east-are-people-losing-their-religion/a-56442163
Obviously there are some difficulty in acquiring accurate data but one recent survey among 40,000 interviewees by the Group for Analysing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran (GAMAAN), which researched Iranians’ attitudes toward religion, found that no less than 47% reported “having transitioned from being religious to non-religious”
Pooyan Tamimi Arab, assistant professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University and co-author of the survey, sees this transition, as well as the quest for religious change, as a logical consequence of Iran’s secularization. “The Iranian society has undergone huge transformations, such as the literacy rate has gone up spectacularly, the country has experienced massive urbanization, economic changes have affected traditional family structures, the internet penetration rate grew to be comparable with the European Union and fertility rates dropped,” Tamimi Arab told DW. “The rise of the so-called ‘nones,’ who do not identify with a particular faith, has been noted in Muslim majority countries as different as Iraq, Tunisia, and Morocco,” Tamimi Arab added.
Yet religious repression is still prevalent in one of the West’s major allies.
Saudi dissident and activist Raif Badawi was convicted of apostasy, or insulting Islam. Badawi was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for questioning why Saudis are obliged to adhere to Islam — and asserting that religion did not have the answers to all of life’s questions.
