alanjjohnstone
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Bernie Sanders blasted Democrats’ watered-down drug pricing plan.
“The American people want Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices like the Veteran Affairs does. The VA has been doing that for decades. The prices they pay are about half as much as Medicare. This thing will only apply to a certain number of drugs,” Sanders continued, noting that parts of the proposal would not take effect until 2026.
“So it’s a weak proposal. Is it better than nothing? I suppose,” he added of Democrats’ plan. “Pharma is spending millions to defeat a very modest drug pricing bill,”
Property sales in China could fall by one-third this year, spelling more trouble for the country’s giant housing sector as people lose faith in the market and pressure increases on struggling developers to complete presold apartments.
Amid reports that the government is preparing a bailout of the sector that could cost 300bn yuan ($44bn), experts at the rating agency S&P have concluded that the fall in sales will be twice as bad as they had originally forecast for this year.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/30/palestine-impunity-arbitrary-arrests-torture
Thousands of council workers across Scotland have voted to take industrial action after rejecting a pay offer of 2%.Staff at schools, nurseries and waste and recycling centres throughout the country took part in the strike ballot.
It was the largest strike ballot among council workers in more than a decade, the Unison union said.
Nine local authority branches exceeded the required 50% turnout threshold required by the Trade Union Act.
Further research supports the food market origin of Covid-19
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62307383
Two peer-reviewed studies published re-examined information from the initial outbreak in Wuhan the Chinese city and say there is “compelling evidence” that Wuhan’s wet market was at the centre of the Covid-19 outbreak.
The market was the epicentre of the epidemic, said Prof Michael Worobey, lead author and biologist from the University of Arizona, with sellers getting infected first and setting off a “chain of infections among community members in the surrounding area”.
Virologist Prof David Robertson from the University of Glasgow, said that he hoped the studies would “correct the false record that the virus came from a lab”.
The theory that the virus could have been leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology said Prof Stuart Neil from Kings College, “can’t explain the data”.
“…if a strike is actually effective, and thus inconveniences people — which is literally the aim of such actions — it becomes illegitimate and ought to be broken…”
Outgoing Boris Johnson Government Passes Anti-Union Law Amid Looming Strike Wave
Not a single Democrat in either the House or the Senate voted yes in 2017 when Trump passed legislation that slashed the corporate tax rate to 21% and lowered the top marginal rate for the richest people in the United States
However, five years later it remains still largely intact.
Political commentator David Dayen commented, “If the so-called party of the people cannot raise taxes on the ultra-rich they have little purpose other than being yet another handmaiden for the wealthy in Washington.”
“If you have unanimous opposition to a bad policy with no real political proponents and then can’t get a single thing done about it in the space of five years, it speaks to an essential malfunctioning at every level of the party and the process…”
He added. “It’s nothing short of an embarrassment.”
Poland calls it Putinflation
But Anthony Levitas of Brown University in Providence, United States, said, “‘Putinflation’ is a clever way to shift the blame onto an enemy that PiS was bizarrely neglectful of in the run-up to the war,”
https://www.dw.com/en/is-putin-to-blame-for-polands-runaway-inflation/a-62526275
USA boasts of one billion tree to be planted
https://apnews.com/article/wildfires-fires-forests-trees-plants-de0505c965c198a081a4b48084b0e903
This report places reforestation in perspective
https://www.dw.com/en/is-reforestation-the-answer-to-storing-carbon-dioxide/a-62466216
Ukrainian refugees discovering hardships of being refugees
Around half of the six million Ukrainian refugees who fled since February have already returned home, according to data from Frontex.
https://www.dw.com/en/ukrainian-refugees-face-poor-job-prospects-in-germany/a-62600360
Refugees from Ukraine were granted protection status in the EU for up to three years — as well as access to health insurance and the labor market.
350,000 Ukrainians are currently registered as looking for employment in Germany, but many of them are struggling. The Munich-based economics research institute ifo, conducted a survey of almost 1,000 Ukrainian refugees in June and found that while 90% of respondents would like to find employment in Germany, only half of them have managed to do so.
The International Monetary Fund has said the global economy could soon be teetering on the brink of recession amid evidence that the world’s three biggest economies are all stalling and inflation is higher than previously forecast.
It said problems in the US, China and the eurozone had resulted in global output falling in the second quarter of this year – the first contraction since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.Change of government in Australia but no change in policy. It will be business as usual
Labor will not support a moratorium on fossil fuel projects because doing so would have a “devastating impact on the Australian economy”.
Change of government in Australia but no change in policy. It will be business as usual
Labor will not support a moratorium on fossil fuel projects because doing so would have a “devastating impact on the Australian economy”.
>>>send requisitioned rail workers or teachers who refuse to work to jail?
More likely a fine for the union itself and have their assets sequestered as happened to the NUM.
There could be jailings…Ricky Tomlinson is there to remind us that examples can be made.
There could be sackings, plenty of miners were sacked for supposed infringements of the law
But my view is that Lynch’s analogy of resistance would be more about a watered-down TUC one-day strike as in 1971 rather than a 1926 event.
But it is a leadership campaign promise for Truss that she is unlikely to keep if she does become PM. She talks the talk but the opportunist she is she doesn’t walk the walk.
I fear Priti Patel’s ruthlessness very much more. And if she is still Home Secretary, I well imagine troops deployed in the factories, standing behind workers with bayonets being jabbed into their backs (I exaggerate just a little)
“ventilation shutdown plus (VSD+),” has become the main practice employed by the poultry and egg industries to address avian influenza outbreaks
https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/reduce-suffering-factory-farm-animals/
This method “requires farmers to cut off airflow and heat their barns to 104 degrees Fahrenheit until the animals die from heatstroke,” The “plus” means that, in addition to shutting down the ventilation system during VSD+, the barns are also exposed to extreme heat, humidity, and carbon dioxide (CO2) to suffocate the animals and bake them alive.
