alanjjohnstone
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The US puts a $5 million bounty on the head of the Venezuelan chief justice.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-53498118
In March, the US said it would pay $15 million for information leading to Maduro’s arrest.
Australia, America’s Pacific deputy sheriff, has added its support, which come as no great surprise. And it is no surprise that Australia’s loyal opposition is backing the government’s position.
Australia has declared “there is no legal basis” to China’s territorial and maritime claims in the South China Sea. Australia’s foreign affairs minister, Marise Payne, and the defence minister, Linda Reynolds, prepare to travel to Washington next week to meet with the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and the secretary of defence, Mark Esper.
It is rank hypocrisy by a country that decided in alliance with Indonesia to carve up East Timor.
https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/gold-nears-1900-inches-closer-time-high-200724134338143.html
Increasing signs that the prolonged pandemic is stalling an economic recovery and the recent spat between China and the U.S. are underpinning the metal’s appeal. Gold’s also getting support from a confluence of low or negative real rates, a weaker dollar and expectations of rising inflation amid massive liquidity injections from governments and central banks around the world.
“The pace of this thing is unbelievable,” Bob Haberkorn, a senior market strategist at RJO, said by phone. “People just want to buy, buy, buy, they just want to be in — they don’t want to miss it. People are preparing for more money printing, lower dollar in the future and hedging. And there’s no yield on Treasuries right now, so gold is a safe spot given the circumstances of the central banks and the coronavirus.”
Silver is poised for its biggest weekly advance in about four decades.
Indeed it seems that the “liberal” media has been soft on those Corbyn critics
The 851-page report blames former Labour officials opposed to Corbyn for hampering his efforts to tackle abuse and sabotaging the party’s 2017 general election campaign.
Corbyn’s former chief of staff, Karie Murphy, is called “medusa”, a “crazy woman” and a “bitch face cow” that would “make a good dartboard”.
“The freedom-loving nations of the world must induce China to change … in more creative and assertive ways, because Beijing’s actions threaten our people and our prosperity.”
Pompeo said “maybe it’s time for a new grouping of like-minded nations, a new alliance of democracies,” while adding: “If the free world doesn’t change, Communist China will surely change us.”
Pompeo said “securing our freedoms from the Chinese Communist Party is the mission of our time,” and America was perfectly positioned to lead it.
A critique of China’s foreign policy
“This time they think, ‘Maybe we are strong enough. We are equals now and therefore we can cause as much pain to you as us. We can fight’,” said Dali Yang, a professor of political science focusing on China at the University of Chicago. “For the people who are making the decisions, they see it as the price to pay and they are willing to pay it,” said Yang.
The UN again pushing for a form of UBI to fight the pandemic
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-53509270
The UN has suggested that a temporary basic income for the world’s poorest people in developing countries could help stop the spread of coronavirus.
A report by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) said that the fund would allow 2.7 billion people in 132 developing countries to stay at home.“Unprecedented times call for unprecedented social and economic measures. Introducing a temporary basic income for the world’s poorest people has emerged as one option. Bailouts and recovery plans cannot only focus on big markets and big business,” UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner said.
The report gave three ways in which the pay-out could be done – by topping up existing average incomes, awarding lump sum transfers based on the differences in the median standard of living across a country or by transferring a lump sum despite a person’s location in a country.
For those right-wingers who promote state-rights and complain about the power of central government, they now ignore Trumps use of federal paramilitary troops in a number of cities.
Law’n’order has always been seen as a vote winner. Will it be this time?
“Don’t panic!”, Gavin Schmidt, the director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York
We are often confronted with conflicting projections but this new research narrows down what we can expect in the future by suggesting best and worse case scenarios.
“It is moderately good news. It reduces the likelihood of some of the catastrophically high estimates. If we were planning for the worst, the worst has become less likely,” said one of the authors, Zeke Hausfather, of the Energy and Resources Group at University of California Berkeley.
Scientists now estimate with a 90% level of probability that climate sensitivity is between 2.3C and 4.7C. The most likely level of climate sensitivity has nudged slightly above 3C. Hausfather says a figure below 2C is extremely unlikely. Above 5C remains possible, though the study lowers that likelihood to 10%.
Where are those foolish right-wingers who kept telling us Britain is full up and can’t take new immigrants?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53503338
Hong Kong’s British National (Overseas) passport holders and their immediate dependants will have the right to apply for a special UK visa from January, Home Secretary Priti Patel said. This will now allow them to apply for two periods of 30 months’ leave or five years’ leave to remain in the UK, and then eventually become full British citizens. BNO holders are able to bring immediate dependants, including a spouse who does not have the passport, along with children under the age of 18. No one born after 1997 is entitled to a BNO passport, and it does not pass down through the generations. However, holders’ children who were born in 1997 or later and are older than 18 will be able to apply if they are part of a family unit.
Applicants do not have to have a job before arriving in the UK, and there is no minimum salary attached to the visa. However, the passport holders must be able to support themselves financially and will not qualify for benefits. They will need to have a tuberculosis (TB) test certificate and no serious convictions, though those convicted only of offences related to the recent demonstrations in Hong Kong will still qualify. They also need to show a commitment to learn English.
The BBC had a follow up article on what they see as the implications of falling fertility rates and we witness them even now.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53424290
It is not mentioned but the rise in the number of elderly is the reason why the BBC ended its free tv licences for the over-75s. They saw the rise in numbers and the future cost.
People see poverty and they see slums and they see disease and they see wars and some like Attenborough whose expertise is with animal populations project all that on to human populations as if we have no influence or control on our own numbers. They are oblivious to the fact that we ourselves determine our conditions and surroundings.
It is difficult to deny facts that we have been brought up to believe is true. Personally, for instance, i find it difficult to accept that certain foods i was told were healthy for me as a child, are now the cause of lifestyle illnesses. not to mention part of the climate problem. Milk was good for me. I went to work on an egg. It is easier for society to prescribe a statin for high cholesterol than actually change a diet pattern.
I think it is a similar problem. We live in a over-crowded highly competitive world and we see other people as a threat and it is expressed in racism, nationalism and over-populationism. It is easy to instil fear when all the evidence of the evils are so evident around us. Pointing out those as problems exacerbated by capitalism is not as simplistic as pointing a finger at a “culprit”
As Jimmy Reid said and it is a message worth conveying “A rat race is for rats. We’re not rats. We’re human beings.”
All we can do is keep challenging those who explain our misery by stating the facts and we have sufficient authorities to cite. Our SOYMB blog is a useful resource.
As for family planning, the best contraceptive is female empowerment.
The Labour party has apologised “unreservedly” and paid out a six-figure sum to seven former employees and a veteran BBC journalist, admitting it defamed them in the aftermath of a Panorama investigation into its handling of antisemitism.
In the programme, eight whistleblowers, seven of whom then sued the party, broke non-disclosure agreements to tell the BBC that they felt fatally undermined by senior Labour bosses in their attempts to tackle antisemitism, alleging consistent interference in complaints.
The ex-staffers, Withers-Green, Sam Matthews, Kat Buckingham, Dan Hogan, Ben Westerman, Martha Robinson, and Michael Creighton, worked in the Labour party’s governance and legal unit and were responsible for investigation of allegations of misconduct by party members.
Another informative article debunking over-population fears
https://newint.org/features/2020/04/07/long-read-hitting-population-brakes
Trump has threatened to send more federal law enforcement officers to major US cities to control ongoing protests, who were doing a “fantastic job” restoring law and order in Portland. He specifically named New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and Oakland in discussing problems with violence.
“…They grab a lot of people and jail the leaders. These are anarchists.”
They are part of a new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) unit made up of people from the US Marshals Service and Customs and Border Protection.
