alanjjohnstone
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An article that exposes Joe Biden, the Establishment’s favourite.
“…Joe Biden has arrived as a presidential candidate to rescue the Democratic Party from Bernie Sanders…..Biden said: “Guys, the wealthy are as patriotic as the poor. I know Bernie doesn’t like me saying that, but they are.” Later, Biden elaborated on the theme when he told an audience at the Brookings Institution, “I don’t think five hundred billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.”…”
Can the election leaflet text and lay-out be written in a manner that it can be recycled?
The relevant dates and details capable of being chopped off by the guillotine we have in HO. So that the money isn’t entirely wasted if no election occurs
Arra best
“Carbon capture usage and storage (CCUS) will be necessary to meet the UK’s existing climate change targets at least cost, the report by the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) Committee said. “Failure to deploy CCUS would also mean the UK could not credibly adopt a ‘net zero emissions’ target” the report said.
CCUS involves the capture of emissions from power plants and industry to allow them to be compressed and stored for use in industrial applications such as making drinks fizzy.
Campaigners have said the government’s current target does not go far enough to meet pledges made under the Paris climate agreement to try to limit a rise in global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and that a net zero target should be set.
Sturgeon pledges another independence referendum by May 2021
Brexit will be the spur that changes the outcome from 2014 according to political analysts
So the Brexiteers accomplished something unintended – the possible break up of the UK…. First it was the Irish border backstop…
Isn’t it time for the England’s shires to hold their referendum on leaving the UK?
And London to become an independent city-state?
If current rates of degradation continue all of the world’s top soil could be gone within 60 harvests, a senior UN official said. About a third of the world’s soil has already been degraded, Maria-Helena Semedo of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) told a forum marking World Soil Day.
Environment secretary, Michael Gove, warned that the country is 30 to 40 years away from “the fundamental eradication of soil fertility”. He added: “Countries can withstand coups d’état, wars and conflict, even leaving the EU, but no country can withstand the loss of its soil and fertility.”
A report revealed that excessive use of pesticides had depleted the Earth’s soil and contributed to a drastic decline in insect numbers that threatened a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”.
The conservation agriculture movement he advocates means no ploughing or turning the soil, instead keeping the ground covered with crops all year round and growing a wide variety of plants.
The method involves more planning, but the benefits its advocates claim are remarkable – from plummeting costs on machinery and labour to a drastic reduction in fertiliser and chemicals. This in turn leads to a huge increase in insects, birds and wildlife, as well as fewer floods and more resilient crops during droughts. Healthy soil can also absorb massive amounts of greenhouse gas emissions – playing a key role in the drive to tackle climate breakdown and the biodiversity crisis.
The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) produced a report last year backing conservation agriculture as one method of replenishing degraded soils. It warned that a combination of industrial farming practices and poor land management have resulted in dangerous levels of soil erosion, compaction and declining fertility, which costs around £1.2bn a year in England and Wales
“Through conservation agriculture, farmers can reduce costs, use fewer chemicals and rebuild biological life in the soil, making it healthier, more resilient to extreme weather and able to support more wildlife. It’s win-win for farmers, the people they feed and the environment.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/24/farmers-save-earths-soil-conservation-agriculture
“These bills present the idea that there’s something that looks like what you or a person on the street would call a baby – a thing that’s almost ready to go for a walk,” said Dr Jen Gunter, a gynecologist. “In reality, you’re talking about something that’s millimeters in size and doesn’t look anything like that.”
“It’s a process – the heart doesn’t just pop up one day,” said Imershein. “It’s not a little child that just appears and just grows larger” Dr Sara Imershein, a gynecologist and obstetrician, explained.
“Nobody is doing late-term abortions – it doesn’t happen,” said Gunter of the medical definition. “But it’s become a part of our lexicon now.” Because anti-abortion activists twisted the phrase into a political construct understood to be any abortion after the 21st week.”The whole point of these bills is to introduce terminology that makes people think differently about pregnancy,” said Gunter . “We can’t use the incorrect language in the bills,” said Gunter. “Because once you start using incorrect language, you’ve basically conceded.”
Gunter said six weeks is not enough time to make informed medical choices. It’s before most women know they’re pregnant, and before fetal malformations can be diagnosed.
Yanis Varoufakis and the Global Green New Deal
“… a pragmatic plan to raise $8tn – 5% of global GDP – each year, coordinate its investment in the transition to renewable energy and commit to providing climate protections on the basis of countries’ needs, rather than their means… public financing will involve a mix of taxes and bond instruments. On the former, we can introduce a global minimum corporate tax rate that is then redistributed on the basis of their sales. On the latter, public investment banks – including the European Investment Bank, the World Bank and the KfW, Germany’s state-owned development bank – can coordinate the issue of green bonds that the major central banks agree collectively to support in the secondary markets…”
I once mediated between a vociferous argument between two Irishmen about who was really Irish and who was the “plastic paddy”, the one born under the Free State which legally was a dominion recognising the Crown and had a British governor albeit chosen by the Irish government and the one born later in 1949 when the Republic was formally declared, although he went to the UK as a baby
Bad news keep on comin’
Up to a million species face possible extinction because of destructive human behavior. The warning comes from a forthcoming United Nations report.
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) landmark three-year assessment was prepared by 150 experts from 50 countries, with additions from another 250 contributors will show how tens of thousands of species are at high risk of extinction, how countries are using nature at a rate that far exceeds its ability to renew itself, and how nature’s ability to contribute food and fresh water to a growing human population is being compromised in every region on Earth.
I do take issue with IPBES chair Robert Watson who said that “there are also two big indirect drivers of biodiversity loss and climate change—the number of people in the world and their growing ability to consume.”
But like many scientists, his understanding about social systems and economics may not be as informed as his ecological credentials.
https://news.yahoo.com/one-million-species-risk-extinction-due-humans-draft-131407174.html
A U.S. threat to veto U.N. Security Council action on sexual violence in conflict was averted on Tuesday after a long-agreed phrase was removed because President Donald Trump’s administration sees it as code for abortion
A German-drafted resolution was adopted after a reference was cut referring to the need for U.N. bodies and donors to give timely “sexual and reproductive health” assistance to survivors of sexual violence in conflict.
French U.N. Ambassador Francois Delattre told the 15-member body: “It is intolerable and incomprehensible that the Security Council is incapable of acknowledging that women and girls who suffered from sexual violence in conflict – and who obviously didn’t choose to become pregnant – should have the right to terminate their pregnancy.”
In 2018 the Trump administration unsuccessfully tried to remove language on sexual and reproductive health from several General Assembly resolutions, then failed in a similar campaign last month during the annual U.N. Commission on the Status of Women meeting.
It’s the poor who suffer
While equatorial nations in Africa, Asia and South America have been hardest hit by hotter temperatures, those at more northerly latitudes – like Canada and Norway – have seen their economies grow by a third. The UK’s economy today is 10 per cent larger than it would have been without man made warming, while Sudan’s – the hardest hit nation – is 36 per cent smaller. India’s economy is 31 per cent smaller than it would have been without warming.
Wealthier nations, who have seen their GDP improve by 10 per cent on average thanks to warming, are also the biggest emitters of greenhouse gasses driving climate change.
The world’s lowest emitters over the past 50 years have seen their GDP fall by around 25 per cent.
Can’t I get away from the bad news.
The release of methane and carbon dioxide from thawing permafrost will accelerate global warming and add up to $70tn (£54tn) to the world’s climate bill, according to the most advanced study yet of the economic consequences of a melting Arctic. It shows how destabilised natural systems will worsen the problem caused by man-made emissions, making it more difficult and expensive to solve.
Permafrost melt is the main concern. Greenhouse gases, which have been frozen below the soil for centuries, have already begun to escape at the current level of 1 degrees Celsius of global heating. So far the impact is small. Ten gigatonnes of CO2 have been released from the ice but this source of emissions will grow rapidly once temperatures rise beyond 1.5C. On the current trajectory of at least 3C of warming by the end of the century, melting permafrost is expected to discharge 280 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide and 3 gigatonnes of methane.
“It’s disheartening that we have this in front of us,” said Dmitry Yumashev of Lancaster University. “Even at 1.5C to 2C, there are impacts and costs. But they are lower so we can limit this. We have the technology and processes, but we are not moving fast enough. We still have a time bomb, but it’s not as large as previously believed,” said Yumashev. But he warned against complacency because even at the low end the damages are huge, the study has a considerable degree of uncertainty and the costs of several other potential tipping points have yet to be calculated.
Time will tell, Marcos.
Sifting through wreckage and rubble for forensic evidence comes after the recovery of the bodies of the victims. Then there is the examination of CCTV and identification of the individual perpetuators. Then the task of back-tracking their movements.
Twenty-four suspects have been arrested and their interrogation (torture?) will be taking place.
“…National Thowheeth Jama’ath is a newly formed group in Sri Lanka committed to a militant and intolerant Islamist ideology. But though it is known for being a virulently anti-Buddhist and has been linked to the vandalisation of Buddhist statues, it has not previously been linked to terrorism. Four of its members were arrested in January. Experts say it is unlikely the organisation would have been able to rapidly develop the capability to perpetrate a complex attack involving multiple suicide bombings without very significant outside assistance…those who had carried out the attacks were all Sri Lankan nationals, but did not rule out that the attackers had international assistance. The intelligence reports indicate that foreign terrorist organizations are behind the local terrorists. Police had seized a van and driver they believe transported the suspects into Colombo, and also raided a safe house used by the attackers…”
The article refers to the dysfunctional Sri Lankan government.
“…Since that constitutional crisis, Sri Lanka’s two most senior leaders have in effect run parallel governments with little communication between the ministries and institutions they each control. The divide may have deepened the chaos in the aftermath of Sunday’s attacks: the Guardian understands that Wickremesinghe sought to call a security council meeting with the country’s armed forces chiefs in the aftermath of the attacks on Sunday morning but found none of them would come to his resident at Temple Trees without the authorisation of Sirisena, who was overseas at the time…”
If one is looking for a conspiracy theory other than the usual suspect Al Qaida or India as the article I linked to wishes to implicate being involved, then one of the government factions may well wished to use a terrorist outrage as an excuse for a coup.
But I always go for Occams Razor…Muslim fundamentalism
But I wait and i’ll see. Because there are foreign nationals involved, there will be foreign investigations into it so less chance the Sri Lankans can cover up any failings or involvement.
