Category Archives: Viva!

Tom Steyer makes moves toward a presidential bid

That would make him Tom the Con, I think.

San Francisco billionaire Tom Steyer took the biggest steps yet toward a potential 2020 presidential bid Tuesday, laying out a progressive policy platform and announcing a tour of five key primary states.

Steyer, a former hedge fund manager who left his company in 2012 to focus on political activism,…

Russian Twitter trolls stoking anti-Islamic sentiment in Australia, experts warn

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Researchers say Russia-linked accounts strongly back Julian Assange and try to destabilise democracy by amplifying social divisions

Russian Twitter trolls have targeted Australia’s democracy primarily through attempts to stoke anti-Islamic sentiment and have begun to advocate on behalf of Julian Assange, researchers have warned.

On Tuesday academics from the University of Canberra’s News and Media Research Centre told a parliamentary inquiry that tweets identified by Twitter as belonging to an “organised influence operation” from Russian troll-farm the Internet Research Agency were playing on fears around Islam.

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For hard-right revolutionaries, Brexit is cover for a different end | Polly Toynbee

British brown shirts!

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A group of extremists within the Tory party would welcome the havoc unleashed by ‘no deal’ to advance their cause

The vultures circle a wounded prime minister, who is attacked by the hordes of extremists in her party while beset by new inconvenient facts daily exposing the damage Brexit can do. Look, the British army is preparing for the worst: emergency troops are at the ready. Operation Temperer, which usually provides soldiers for terrorist attacks, is now ordered to make 10,000 soldiers available to keep order on the streets and in shops, and to distribute emergency medicines in case of a no-deal crash-out.

“Our firms are spending hundreds of millions of pounds preparing for the worst case – and not one penny of it will create new jobs or new products,” warns the Confederation of British Industry chief, Carolyn Fairbairn.

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Trump inflated importance of Saudi arms sales to US job market, report says

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Saudi Arabia needs the US far more than the other way round, report argues amid crisis over murder of Jamal Khashoggi

US arms sales to Saudi Arabia give Washington extensive leverage on Riyadh, while accounting for fewer than 20,000 US jobs a year – less than a twentieth of the employment boost Donald Trump has claimed – according to a new report.

Trump has repeatedly cited the importance of Saudi arms sales to the US economy as a reason not to cut the supply of weapons in response to the murder of the Saudi writer and Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi.

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Federal government needs more authority to properly manage nation’s forests, Trump Cabinet members say

States don’t count when GOP smells cash!

Federal agencies need more authority to choose how and where to cut down trees, remove dying vegetation and where to ignite prescribed burns if communities in the wildland-urban interface want to avoid another catastrophic disaster like the Camp fire, two of President Trump’s Cabinet secretaries…

Moderation still won in the midterms – even if moderate Republicans didn’t | Geoffrey Kabaservice

Press does not get it – competence and caring won!

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Though the Republican losses bode poorly for the party, it may not be a bad thing for the US: nearly all Democrats who flipped seats are themselves moderate

I had mixed emotions watching the returns from the House of Representatives races on election night. I was dismayed to see the moderate wing of the Republican party, which I have worked for and supported over many years, virtually wiped out. But I also wondered if their defeats really mattered.

Related: Conservatives are terrified of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And so they should be | Arwa Mahdawi

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Viking city: excavation reveals urban pioneers not violent raiders | Cities | The Guardian

“We can see in Ribe that Viking society was based on sophisticated production and trade,” Hodges says. “It is a paradox: they made these beautiful things, they had gorgeous cloth, wonderful artefacts, but at the same time they are known to history for their brutality.” Advertisement European history has been written from the perspective of Christian chroniclers who wanted to tell us that Vikings were barbarians, Hodges notes.

Source: Viking city: excavation reveals urban pioneers not violent raiders | Cities | The Guardian