Category Archives: News to use

Useful news for all to advance knowledge of the world and how it works

More than 300 Nigerian schoolgirls abducted

The extremist ransomers and traffickers must be stopped!!!

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More than 300 schoolgirls have been kidnapped by unidentified gunmen from a school in Nigeria’s north-western Zamfara state, police say.

The ‘fight for $15’ isn’t just about justice. It’s good economics | Steven Greenhouse

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The US has the lowest minimum wage of all G7 nations, in terms of purchasing power, and the third-highest poverty rate in the OECD

There’s one important aspect of the fight for a $15 minimum wage that is little understood: the fight isn’t so much about raising pay for a few million workers. Rather it’s about the far more ambitious goal of putting the US economy on a higher road, on a different track from being a low-wage economy. In Europe, many people scoff at the US as a country of low-wage McJobs with paltry benefits – often no paid sick days, no paid vacation and no health insurance. In Denmark, a McDonald’s hamburger flipper averages $22 an hour (with six weeks’ paid vacation), while in the US, fast-food jobs pay half that on average.

You might wonder: how can the United States, the world’s wealthiest nation, be a low-wage economy? Of the 37 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the unofficial club of rich and near-rich nations, the US has the third-highest percentage of low-wage workers, with nearly one in four workers defined as low-wage. Only Latvia and Romania are worse. (That study defines low-wage as earning less than two-thirds of a nation’s median wage.) In another study, Brookings found that 53 million Americans hold low-wage jobs, with a median pay of $10.22 an hour and median annual earnings of $17,950.

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What the Neera Tanden affair reveals about the Washington DC swamp | David Sirota

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In defense of an awful nominee and a corrupt DC culture, Republicans engage in hypocrisy while Democrats trample the causes they purport to care about

When sifting through the wreckage to try to make sense of this epoch, future anthropologists should dust off whatever records will be preserved about Neera Tanden’s star-crossed nomination to an obscure-but-powerful White House office.

The whole episode is a museum-ready diorama in miniature illustrating so many things that died in the transition from democracy to oligarchy. And in this affair, all the politicians, pundits, news outlets and Democratic party apparatchiks involved are very blatantly telling on themselves.

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Gilt-y: golden Trump statue pops up at rightwing CPAC summit

GOP’s Baal… not funny

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  • Bloomberg reporter posts video of kitsch conference monument
  • Trump due to give first post-White House speech on Sunday

Any doubts that Donald Trump still commands a near religious following will be dispelled by the appearance of a golden statue at a major conservative conference this week.

Related: Democrats’ $15 minimum wage rise under threat after Senate parliamentarian ruling – live

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Changes in Atlantic currents may have dire climate implications for the next century | Climate change | The Guardian

A reduced AMOC is projected to bring colder weather overall to the UK and northern Europe, with much more intense winters and storms off the Atlantic, as well as reduced summer rainfall and crop productivity and a greater likelihood of extreme weather events such as the 2015 European summer heatwave. The impacts are not limited to this side of the Atlantic either. Increased sea levels are predicted on the US eastern seaboard, with the associated increased risks of flooding and potentially increased hurricane intensities.

Such large changes in ocean circulation also put the ecosystems and aquaculture we depend upon at risk. Marine deoxygenation and changes in key species abundances have been linked to an AMOC slowdown, along with an overall reduction in North Atlantic ocean productivity.

The far southern end of the AMOC around Antarctica is also of concern. The global ocean as a whole has absorbed more than 90% of human induced warming, absolutely dwarfing the changes in air temperature that we are all so concerned with. The vast ocean ringing Antarctica is where most of this extra heat (and carbon dioxide) has been injected into the deep ocean, and it is warming and acidifying at an alarming rate. One of the main areas of research for oceanographers such as myself is whether the ocean will continue to essentially sweep human impacts under the carpet – and what may happen if that stops.

This should not be a cause for despair and inaction though. The same models that predict the AMOC slowdown also show that strong emission reductions now can drive an AMOC recovery towards the end of the century. Research may reduce uncertainties, but the message is clear: strong climate action at governmental and industrial levels is needed now, and it is the job of the people to force such action with their wallets and votes.

Source: Changes in Atlantic currents may have dire climate implications for the next century | Climate change | The Guardian

US releases unclassified report blaming Saudi’s crown prince for Jamal Khashoggi’s murder


A demonstrator dressed as Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman with blood on his hands and holding up a picture of Jamal Khashoggi, protesting outside the Saudi Embassy in Washington, DC, on October 8, 2018. | Jim Watson AFP via Getty Images

Classified intelligence reports blamed Mohammed bin Salman for the Khashoggi plot. Now there’s an unclassified version of that intelligence.

The Biden administration has just released an unclassified version of an intelligence report confirming who ordered the 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi: It was Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

That conclusion was an open secret, as news reports shortly after the grisly assassination cited classified intelligence pointing to Mohammed bin Salman (often referred to by his initials, MBS) as having personally ordered the killing at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. That intelligence included, among other things, information about the crown prince’s phone calls in the days before the murder, and calls by the kill team to a senior aide to the crown prince.

After a 2018 CIA briefing on the classified intelligence, retired Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), then the Senate Foreign Relations chair, said there was “zero question that the crown prince directed the murder.”

But this is the first time the public can an unclassified intelligence report on the murder for itself. While parts of the three-page document is redacted, it states up front that “We assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.”

Based on MBS’ control over the country’s intelligence and security sectors, the report continues, it was “highly unlikely that Saudi officials would have carried out an operation of this nature without the Crown Prince’s authorization.”

The ODNI has released its report on the killing of Khashoggi.

Key takeaway: “We assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.” pic.twitter.com/UzMfkgIsjY

— Kevin Liptak (@Kevinliptakcnn) February 26, 2021

Despite having been fully informed of the classified report’s conclusions in 2018, the Trump administration refused to severely punish Saudi Arabia for the murder of the Virginia resident or to directly blame MBS.

Instead of curtailing US-Saudi ties, then-President Donald Trump said it was better to maintain friendly relations in order to keep cashing the kingdom’s checks. “I don’t like stopping massive amounts of money that’s being poured into our country,” he told reporters shortly after the murder from the Oval Office, referring to his desire to sell $110 billion worth of weapons to the Kingdom. “It would not be acceptable to me.”

Trump was so proud of the decision not to punish MBS or his country that Trump later bragged to reporter Bob Woodward later that “I saved his ass.”

President Joe Biden has taken a different tact. After calling Saudi Arabia a “pariah” during the campaign, in power he’s curtailed MBS’s access to the Oval Office, making clear that Biden considers his direct counterpart in the country to be MBS’s father, King Salman, the man who actually sits on the Saudi throne. As for MBS, his counterpart is Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. The crown prince, after all, is his nation’s defense minister.

The US also ended its support for Riyadh’s offensive operations in Yemen, which began during the Obama administration, though the US military will still help protect Saudi Arabia against regional threats.

The State Department plans to announce possible retaliations against Saudi Arabia on Friday, roughly an hour after the report’s release.

The public reveal of the unclassified Khashoggi intelligence, as mandated by Congress and promised by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, is yet another signal of a frostier US-Saudi relationship. Both nations will remain partners, but MBS is surely an unwelcome interlocutor for this administration, and perhaps future ones.

You can read the redacted, unclassified intelligence report below:

Here is the declassified @ODNIgov document accusing MBS for approving operation that killed #JamalKhashoggi. It includes list of individuals who allegedly participated, complicit or responsible for the death of #Khashoggi pic.twitter.com/k4ucragl7Q

— Harun Maruf (@HarunMaruf) February 26, 2021

Why Putin wants Alexei Navalny dead

Navalny’s movement is unlike any in recent history.

In August 2020, Russian politician Alexei Navalny was campaigning in Siberia when he suddenly fell ill. He collapsed, was rushed to a hospital, then evacuated to Berlin, Germany, where doctors concluded that he had been poisoned with a lethal nerve agent called Novichok.

It was not completely unexpected. In recent years, a number of Russian dissidents and defectors have been poisoned. And Navalny is the most outspoken critic of the country’s president, Vladimir Putin. In less than 10 years, Navalny has risen from blogging about corruption to being the face of Russia’s opposition movement. When he was poisoned, he was organizing a campaign that threatened Putin’s party in elections across the country.

Watch the video above to find out how Alexei Navalny built a movement unlike any in recent Russian history, and how he became Putin’s greatest threat.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. Subscribe for the latest.

Eviction moratorium struck down by a Trump judge in a poorly reasoned opinion – Vox

On Thursday evening, a Trump-appointed judge on a federal court in Texas handed down a decision that calls into question the legality of these moratoriums. Currently, there is no congressional moratorium on evictions in place, only the CDC moratorium, although it is likely that the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill currently being negotiated in Congress will implement a new statutory moratorium.

Though Judge J. Campbell Barker’s order in Terkel v. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention only explicitly strikes down the CDC’s moratorium, Barker’s opinion is fairly broad and suggests that congressional regulation of evictions may also be unconstitutional. His opinion, if embraced by higher courts, could endanger any federal regulation of the housing market, including bans on discrimination in housing.

The implications of Barker’s opinion, explained

The opinion is a mélange of libertarian tropes, long-discarded constitutional theory, and statements that are entirely at odds with binding Supreme Court decisions.

The thrust of Barker’s Terkel opinion is that the Constitution’s commerce clause, which provides that Congress may “regulate commerce … among the several states,” is not broad enough to permit federal regulation of evictions.

But, as the Supreme Court explained in United States v. Lopez (1995), the commerce clause gives Congress broad authority to regulate the national economy — including any activity that “‘substantially affects’ interstate commerce.” Though Lopez struck down a federal law prohibiting individuals from bringing guns near school zones, the Lopez opinion emphasizes the breadth of Congress’s power to regulate the economy. “Where economic activity substantially affects interstate commerce,” Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote for the Court, “legislation regulating that activity will be sustained.”

Source: Eviction moratorium struck down by a Trump judge in a poorly reasoned opinion – Vox