#it could potentially damage the unions' negotiating power

[vakarians-babe]

i wanna say just for clarity's sake that, during the length of the SAG and WGA strike, since promotion is considered crossing the picket line and there are grey lines around online content like cosplay as promotion and scabbing (according to SAG's own statements, promo for any properties that are being struck/would have been struck if released today is to be avoided, even in cosplay), i'm not gonna be making any fan content of any struck properties, nor will i be reblogging it. i'll go back to reblogging stuff for struck shows and movies and such when the strike is over, but until then stuff will be staying in my drafts. solidarity forever!

[essay110us]

The Coup in 1953: A Turning Point for Iran

给大家推荐一篇优秀的代写Paper--  The Coup in 1953: A Turning Point for Iran。1953年的伊朗政变标志着现代伊朗历史上最重要的事件。  政变期间，由摩萨迪领导的公开选举政府被推翻，取而代之的是权威政府。  政变的成功意味着伊朗民族主义运动的失败，自此以后，该国中产阶级所支持的民主道路就受到了阻碍。  政变的成功有三大力量：英国是主要的计划者和推动者，美国是共同的计划者和最大的获胜者，而伊朗的异化力量则是政变的催化剂。  在讨论政变的历史意义和意义之前，本文将讨论各方参与的动机以及政变成功的决定因素。

The Iranian coup in 1953 marked the most important event in modern Iranian history.  During the coup, the publicly elected government led by Mossadi was overthrown and replaced by an authoritative government.  The success of the coup meant the failure of Iran’s nationalist movement. Since then, the democratic path supported by the country’s middle class has been hindered.  The success of a coup has three main forces: Britain is the main planner and promoter, the United States is the common planner and the biggest winner, and Iran’s alienating forces are the catalyst for the coup.  Before discussing the historical significance and significance of the coup d’état, this article will discuss the motivations of all parties involved and the determinants of the success of the coup d’état.

Iran is a country with abundant oil resources and lack of technology.  Therefore, it is not surprising that the earliest profits of Iranian oil went to foreigners instead of Iranians.  By establishing almost government-owned oil companies, the British government was able to obtain most of the oil profits.  For example, in 1950, Iran made a total of more than 200 million pounds of profits from oil production, while the Iranian government could only get 16 pounds from 200 pounds through taxation and land use.  There are no Iranians in BP. For the Iranian government, the cost of buying oil from the company is even higher than importing oil.  By the 1940s, Iranians had generally believed that the nationalization of BP would bring great progress to the country and free it from financial difficulties.

Mossadegh was appointed Prime Minister of Iran in 1951.  After he took office, he actively promoted the nationalization of the oil industry.  After several rounds of failed negotiations, the British government clearly knew that replacing Mossad with pro-British politicians was the only way to maintain control of Iranian oil.  Compared with the straightforward motives of the British, the Americans’ motives for involvement are much more complicated.  Unlike the United Kingdom, the Truman government expressed public support for Mossad because he was considered a stabilizing factor preventing Iran from entering a communist country.  After the Soviet Union’s successful nuclear weapons test and the news of the founding of the People’s Republic of China came out, the United States was deeply concerned about the power of communism.  Countries and regions that oscillated between the two sides of the Cold War became the main focus of the United States, including Iran.

The Truman government has made a lot of efforts to distribute profits for Iran and the United Kingdom.  However, neither party agreed to the plan proposed by the United States.  On the other hand, the struggle with the nationalization process has severely damaged the Iranian economy.  The chaotic situation in the country has weakened Mossadi’s reputation as a key stabilizing figure in the country.  Due to some of his policies as prime minister, the Iranian nationalist forces that once supported Mosadi gradually collapsed.  Some of these forces include religious figures who are almost as influential as Mossadi, and they can play a huge role if they want to.  The Mossadegh regime has been hit hard and worries the United States because Iran is located in a key location near the Soviet Union.  Replace Mossadi as a potential solution to stabilize Iran.  Pressure from long-time British allies eventually made the United States an active planner and participant in the coup.

Preparations for the coup began with the newly established Eisenhower government in 1953.  Dissatisfied with the previous wasted negotiating energy, important figures in the United States, including the candidates for the new secretary of state and the new leader of the CIA, respectively expressed their support for the coup d’etat with the British side.  These preparations have accelerated the process and plan of launching a coup in Iran so that it can be completed on time.  After some discussions between the United States and Britain, a plan to overthrow the Mossad government was formulated and the CIA was responsible.  In June 1953, "Ajax Action" was proposed at a cabinet meeting and was quickly approved, with a proposed funding of 5 million US dollars.  When Mossad knew about the actions of the United States and Britain, he had been overwhelmed by the domestic opposition forces.  Some of these troops were supported by Britain and the United States in the dark.  The Shah of Iran is the final obstacle to the coup.  The planners of the coup held a meeting with Shah and revealed plans to replace Mossad.  Shah had no choice but to agree to cooperate.

With the support of the king, things accelerated. On August 13, the King (Shah) signed an order to revoke Mossadegh’s role and form a new government. However, Mossad refused to recognize the legality of the order, claiming that the order was forged by opposition forces. The King (Shah) fled after being captured by Mossadegh’s defender. The initial setback prompted the CIA to formulate a new plan. When Mossadi questioned the authenticity of Shah’s order, the CIA hired hundreds of Iranians to distribute copies of the order, accusing Mossadi of being unfaithful. In addition, some Iranians were purchased to organize large-scale demonstrations. The parade was disguised as support for Mossadi, but they were secretly asked to destroy Shah’s tombs and religious facilities. These actions successfully deceived the Iranian people and opposed Mousadi. Mossadegh tried to reverse the situation by dissolving the demonstrations, but only angered some of his supporters, they did not see the truth. As the armed conflict between the two countries killed hundreds of people and the gap between Mossadi and the people continued to widen, he ultimately had no choice but to surrender.

As a result of the coup, Iran suppressed the rest of Mossadi’s supporters, thereby eliminating the seeds of democracy.  The direct consequence of the coup was the 26-year dictatorship under Mohammad Reza Shah.  It is forbidden to use different political voices to reconstruct the power of society.  After the coup, the middle class and working class no longer have a say in Iran, and the United States and Britain should be held responsible for this.  The consolidation of power has made Iran a more concentrated country.  After the Iranian people discovered the truth about the coup d’état years later, it also planted the seeds of the Iranian people’s hatred towards the United States.  After the Islamic Revolution in 1979, anti-Americanism, terrorism and extremist sentiments are on the rise, which has exacerbated the complexity and turmoil in the Middle East.  For Iranians, the image of the United States has shifted from an advocate of freedom to evil imperialism, which directly promotes the current relationship between the two countries.

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[garudabluffs]

“Unwinnable War”? Calls Grow for Negotiated End to Ukraine War

V.Z. "My idea was to map out how would it look after Russia has to accept its defeat, and how to make it a more palatable solution for some parts of the Russian elites that want to switch from this attitude of aggression, aggression and imperialism, to a different, more pragmatic approach to the West.

So, I went through several obvious aspects of possible maps. First of all, continue to help Ukraine, of course, to achieve military gains, but also indicate on a political level to Russian elites and Russian populace that this war is unwinnable for them, and they — the longer the war continues, there will be a greater danger of another collapse, just as what happened to the Soviet Union 30 years ago.

The second part of this map is to offer some possible carrots, up to negotiations, up to tradeoffs, to return Russia, after it accepts its defeat and withdraws its forces from Ukraine, into the international economic, financial and political space. In political sense, I wrote that we need to offer the return of legitimacy to certain individuals and certain groups of Russian elites as a trade-off for them accepting a defeat. In the economic field, there should be some talk about the conditions for removing sanctions, because we know from the Cold War that — and, actually, from the history of World War I, after Germany accepted an armistice, it was still subject to very humiliating and painful blockade by the Allies. So, there should be some discussion: What will the Russians gain economically if they accept status quo ante and agree to talk with Ukraine on the damage control. And financially, there’s an issue, of course, of frozen assets and compensation to Ukraine."

All we hear from some supporters of Ukraine and Ukrainians themselves is about sticks and punishment. We don’t hear anything about carrots, which is understandable. We are in the midst of brutal war, while Russians committed so many atrocities. But without certain carrots, at least addressed for the postwar period, we risk repeating the dangerous path after World War I."

S.W. :"However, I think it is a mistake to believe that these Minsk agreements, just because they did not lead to full implementation, were actually a complete failure, because they were not. And this is where we can learn potentially some things for the situation today. The Minsk agreements did not solve the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. They did not. But they did bring about certain humanitarian positive steps. They brought about temporary ceasefires. They brought about disengagement zones around the humanitarian facilities. They brought about the reconstruction of critical infrastructure. So, they brought about humanitarian steps. They did a second thing. And this is, they kept a minimum of trust between the sides, between the Russians and the Ukraine — between the Russian Federation and Ukraine, because they were simply meeting every two weeks, and they had a real possibility to voice their concerns, to talk to each other, to talk to each other officially, but also to talk to each other outside of the official settings, which is something that brings a minimum minimum of trust.

So, and therefore, my proposal was to somehow try to get to proper negotiations, to real political negotiations, of a ceasefire in the current conflict via first really small steps. That means: Why can Russia and Ukraine not find a forum, an internationally mediated forum, where they will talk about exactly humanitarian protection zones, about a disengagement around the atomic power plant in Zaporizhzhia, about small potential ceasefires for the beginning of school, for the harvest, for the sowing of the fields? This would bring about these exact same advantages, namely humanitarian advantages. And every life saved is a big step in the right direction. Secondly, the ground could be prepared to establish some kind of little, small trust, which has been completely lost by now by both — by the sides. And thirdly, such a forum, where the sides would meet and be in a position to interact on a permanent basis, with neutral mediation, but with other countries, such as the West, as observers, would probably also have a deescalatory effect. This would probably and likely have the effect of preventing escalation that may otherwise take place. So, this is what we can maybe take from the failed Minsk negotiations forward into some kind of segue into negotiations, how they could start now."

"Now, the question is: Why should the sides to the conflict, at this point in time, be ready to engage in something like this? Let me just underline, participating in such negotiations does not cost the sides anything. It does not mean a change in the position in the field. It does not mean giving up any type of political or military position that you have held so far. So this would be negotiations that could be entered into at zero cost for the sides, but with potentially great benefit, but, therefore, they should also be entered into with no preconditions. And I think it would be the duty of the West, on the one side, and of China and India, on the other side, to convince both Russia and Ukraine to inform them, constructively, that participation in such negotiations would be deemed as highly welcome.

LISTEN 42:12 READ MORE https://www.democracynow.org/2023/3/2/ukraine_war_g20_meeting

The post-Soviet roots of the war in Ukraine 26 February 2022 by Vladislav Zubok

[stoweboyd]

Air Nostrum orders fleet of Airlander 10 airships | CNN Travel

(CNN) — As the quest for less environmentally damaging aviation continues, one Spanish airline has thrown its hat into the ring by ordering new hybrid airships -- which pack as much of a punch visually as they are said to do environmentally.

Air Nostrum, which operates flights under the Iberia Regional umbrella from its Valencia base, has ordered 10 Airlander 10 aircraft, with delivery scheduled for 2026.

Previously, its manufacturers had predicted the aircraft -- which was unveiled in 2016 -- would be in service by 2025.

Made by UK-based Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV), the hybrid airships could cut emissions by 90%, according to the company. Related content World's biggest aircraft, Airlander 10, moves toward commercial model 

Held aloft by helium and powered electricity, they will seat 100 passengers, and typically fly 300-400 kilometers (186-249 miles), according to the manufacturer. Don't expect a lightning-fast flight, however -- the maximum speed will be 80 mph (129 kph). 

The deal follows six months of "rigorous studies and modeling" of internal Spanish routes, according to the manufacturer.

The aircraft is fondly know as 'the flying bum.' 

Hybrid Air Vehicles HAV says that in future, potential short-range routes for the aircraft could include Liverpool to Belfast (168 miles), Seattle to Vancouver (127 miles), and Oslo to Stockholm (263 miles). The aircraft can make point-to-point journeys, since it doesn't need an airport runway to land -- waterfronts, greenfield sites and underutilized airports have all been earmarked by HAV.  

"Airlander doesn't need airport structure to operate. HAV is exploring novel operating locations with Air Nostrum," a spokesperson told CNN. The interiors are rather more glamorous than typical airplane cabins, with a 1-2-1 configuration, some seats facing each other with, and transparent walls giving views of the countryside below. For those who like to see where they're going, it will fly at a maximum of 20,000 feet.

The cushy interiors are a step up from regular airline seats. 

Hybrid Air Vehicles Air Nostrum President Carlos Bertomeu said the airships will help his company toward European Union "Fit for 55" goals of cutting emissions by at least 55% by 2030. 

"The Airlander 10 will drastically reduce emissions and for that reason we have made this agreement with HAV," he said in a statement. "Sustainability... is already a non-negotiable fact in the daily operations of commercial aviation. 

"Agreements such as these are a very effective way to reach the de-carbonization targets contemplated in the Fit for 55 legislative initiative." 

HAV CEO Tom Grundy added: "As countries like France, Denmark, Norway, Spain and the UK begin to put in place ambitious mandates for the decarbonization of domestic and short haul flight, Hybrid Air Vehicles and Air Nostrum Group are demonstrating how we can get there -- and get there soon. 

"Airlander is designed to deliver a better future for sustainable aviation services, enable new transport networks and provide rapid growth options for our customers." 

HAV will start building the fleet this year, creating 1,800 jobs in Yorkshire, UK. 

The company said that that it was working on "further developments in electric propulsion," and hope that the Airlander 10 will become the first large scale aircraft to achieve zero-emissions flight.

(via Air Nostrum orders fleet of Airlander 10 airships | CNN Travel)

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

The Cryptoliberal creep/the left is dead: Anarchist-Individualist critique of the left in Ireland

“Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; Freedom is something that people take and people are as free as they want to be” — James Arthur Baldwin

“I think my basic viewpoint is that everything the left and right say about each other is true. And the reason it’s true is because they have so much in common.” — Bob Black

The so called “radical left” has been a total failure, has done nothing and has not made any “radical change”. The “radical left” has only been successful in re-creating institutions of hierarchy and dominance via its parties, unions and front groups/campaigns. Many leftists building nice careers for themselves in the process.

The “radical left” of the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s (most notably former members of the Workers Party) are now the very people that have been pushing and implementing neoliberalism in Ireland. The old “radical” leftists have swapped their radical language and false promises for Mercedes cars, designer suits and high waged state or union positions.

There is no doubt that many modern leftist will have the same faith as their counterparts. It’s not hard to imagine. The exact same problems that existed within the left today are the very ones that were always there. These problems can be broken down into factors such as: populism, opportunism, careerism, and reformism (to name but a few).

There is no order of importance, all these factors have equally damaging effects. These factors are not specific to any one current within the left but to the whole left. These factors contribute differently but equally to the left’s failure to create any “radical change” or transformation they proclaim to want.

Let’s break it down a little:

“SOCIALISM: Discipline, discipline; obedience, obedience; slavery and ignorance, pregnant with authority. A bourgeois body grotesquely fattened by a vulgar christian creature. A medley of fetishism, sectarianism and cowardice.

ORGANIZATIONS, LEGISLATIVE BODIES AND UNIONS: Churches for the powerless. Pawnshops for the stingy and weak. Many join to live parasitically off the backs of their card-carrying simpleton colleagues. Some join to become spies. Others, the most sincere, join to end up in jail from where they can observe the mean-spiritedness of all the rest.” — Renzo Novatore

Opportunism:

Whether as an individual activists or as a member of a party, union or some other type of organization, leftist take part and use struggles for a whole lot of reason. These struggles could be in a workplace, housing, abortion rights, even supporting struggles in other countries that are a popular, etc. In struggles leftists use political maneuvers in order to hijack, centralise, and harness the energy, power, and enthusiasm of angry people for their own political gain, aims and motivations. Leftists use campaigns and struggles as ways of gaining followers and support for their programmes, building their own power cliques and personal networks, climbing the political or union careerist ladders, or even at the least, for activist scene points.

Careerism:

Many leftists take part in struggles to use them as means to build careers. The career could be in politics, unions, academia, journalism, NGOs, etc. Some Leftists becoming “experts”or “specialists” on certain topics/struggles, using the gained knowledge to further their career.

Populism:

Populism is a curse in the fight for liberation. Populism is dangerous, populism risks losing or gaining “the party”, “the movement”, “the organization” or “the campaign” support, credibility or new members. Populism also creates a dynamic within left organisations that will determine what “the party” or “group” will support or what actions taken, projects, or campaigns they will get involved with. They will always go with the popular option, even if it is wrong. If activists in a campaign, party, or group swerve off the populist road, they are at risk of being punished and vilified by the majority. They could have their names tarnished, blackened, lies made up and spread about them. All attempts at discrediting and to remove people seen as opposition. Populism will make people tell lies to mislead others and tarnish opponents. Struggles have been destroyed and lost because of populism. These dirty tactics are used against any threats to their positions, to discredit and isolate people that are opposed to their strategies or views, to remove opposition in campaigns or projects to clear the field which will help with them hijacking, having more influence and control; making people look “bad”,“mad”, “crazy” or “troublemakers” so no one will listen to their opinion or ideas, to save or gain support.

Reformism:

A large majority of the left, whither they call themselves, socialists,marxists, leninists, trotskyists, and even some anarchists, are in fact crypto-liberals. These liberals disguise themselves with radical language and bullshit. They do not want to overthrow or destroy the state and capitalism, although they may say they do. They want to reform it away, make it more “nicer” for people bit by bit. They naively believe this can be done peacefully and with well thought out arguments, protest marches and lobbying. The “resistance” they proclaim is of pacifism, delegation, negotiation and compromise with the state and bosses.

Trade unions like all formal organizations based on growing in membership are prone to populism and the other factors I mentioned above. At worst union officials undermine and disempower struggles, compromising with bosses, negotiating deals on what would appear to be the best outcome for workers, but realistically contribute towards keeping this society intact. At best unions are reformist that help to make improvements to conditions of exploitation making the daily toil of work a little bit more bearable. Ultimately unions are a cog in the machine of capitalism, with the outcome of helping towards the creation of social peace between exploited and exploiters. There is no revolutionary potential from trade unions.

For the leftist politico their intentions are to run in elections which they hope to win so they can make “radical changes” to the state and therefore make life better for “the people” (as they view it anyway).

The politicos say if they do not have enough power in parliament to make “radical change” at the least they will be able to make “radical” challenges to the government.

The outcomes of such bullshit tactics are well known. If a leftist is elected into parliament they can make counter arguments to the government, this usually falls to nothing. We have seen this in the South of Ireland with socialist TD’s (elected representatives) making arguments against a variety of issues such as the use of Shannon airport by the US military, the Shell oil company plundering natural resources in Mayo, the struggle for housing, and the struggle against water privatization.

If a Leftist party wins enough seats to win power or share power with another party they end up watering down their “radical” views and implement the most right wing of policies, we have seen this in recent history with the Irish Labour party in the South of Ireland and we have seen it with Sinn Fein in the North of Ireland (not that either party had very radical views to start off with, but they gave lip service to socialism at some point), both parties completely selling out to every person that voted for them implementing neo liberalist policies.

Politicos running in elections and playing in the parliamentary circus water down their “radicalism” the more they take part in it, constantly being on the watch, making sure they don’t lose support and wanting to gain support. This inevitably makes them compromise and sell out little by little, till they finally stop preaching any type of “radicalism”.

During the struggle against water privatization we have seen the crypto-liberals use their vanguardist tactics blatantly. From when people from working class neighbourhoods defended their neighbourhoods against the installation of water meters in homes in many communities throughout Ireland. The resistance sparked off sporadically. People resisting from different neighborhoods linked up together to help each other. Politicos and union bureaucrats infiltrated different neighborhoods that were resistant, to hijack the struggle. The politicos (Parties such as Sinn Fein, Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party, the Communist Party of Ireland, Eirigi; and unions such as Unite and Mandate) invented “Right2Water” a campaign group which plonked itself on top of the struggle attempting to claim to be the representative of the all the people resisting water privatization. The politicos used this campaign as means to bring the struggle down the road of parliamentary politics. In lots of areas the politicos were successful in their hijacking, in some neighbourhoods people were wise to them.

Every couple of months there would be a call for a “peaceful march” through the streets of Dublin with loads of bull shit boring speeches at the end, from politicos of course. Any people at the march that didn’t go by the “peaceful march” narrative were tarnished as the “bad protesters” and “trouble makers”. These so called “troublemakers” would block traffic or occupy buildings (usually banks) and blocking busy roads. These type of tactics didn’t suit the politicos because it was out of their control and did not suit their narrative. During a demonstration in a working class neighbourhood a youth threw a brick at a pig car. A Socialist Party politico (and member of parliament) that had infiltrated the water struggle, publicly condemned the youth calling for the pigs to arrest, charge and convict the youth. Others were denounced by politicos for burning vans that belonged to the company that was installing water metres.

The water struggle came to a head when the Right2Water politicos and union bureaucrats thirsty for any scrap of power, sat on “the Expert Water Commision” which was created by the government, and accepted that a private company would own the water services (ie the privatization of water). Charges for domestic use of water have been put on hold (for now). The leftist politicos and bureaucrats try to claim this as a “great victory”. To this day the Irish Water company continue to put in water meters into homes, laying the ground for in the future when it wants to implement charges for using water in homes. The politicos and bureaucrats done this without any consent, and ultimately they disempowered the struggle in the process.

These tactics are used time and time again by the crypto-liberals. It was seen in popular struggles such as: struggle against water privatisation in the late 1990’s, the anti war movement in the early 2000’s, struggle against bin charges 2000’s, struggle against property tax in the 2010’s and recently in the struggle for housing, with the same sex marriage and abortion referendums — crypto liberals maneuvering themselves into position of mediator between the state or bosses and excluded and exploited individuals. Of course all these struggles were (and some still are) hot topics and were high up on agendas for electionaring.

[thesagedahlia]

Pick A Card: Weekend Edition

Which is your story, this weekend?

*for entertainment purposes only, energy is fluid not linear, roles are interchangeable*

Group 1 🦸🏾‍♀️

Theme: be bold & make the first move

•take charge of your destiny

•be bold & follow your heart & your emotions

•avoid recklessness or moving too fast

•come into your power, the time for action is now

I'm getting that a past influence, or experience with a past person has undergone ultimate change, & has possibly reached completion. There are war-making tendencies that is rooted in immaturity (this can be coming from the male energy). Someone has to be the more mature & reflective of the situation, & it's looking like it would be the feminine energy. A downfall or weird experience of some kind that is low vibrational may be approaching & may impact your weekend & cause some discontinuance of efforts.Things will progress in this situation after a period of withdrawal & regression. Caution may be needed as conflicting influences will arise over the weekend. You will reach a resolution to the problem or it will reach it's conclusion, as long as there is a mature person who can take charge & defuse any difficulties, you will reach or maintain a certain level of peace, or the problem can be solved all together. Being stubborn in the situation will result in partial loss, or more extremely, an incomplete union with a partner or friend. This turmoil brought confusion to a what was once in a perfect state. Things happen quickly & suddenly, after a lot of rest after strife & you may be in need of replenishment from a bitter experience. With the war & opposition, there is happiness & devotion. What you don't see coming leaves a feeling of despair. The opportunity with this person, (who is a compassionate, kind, & reliable person) is in a neutral state, & is can lead to prosperity & the start of meaningful experience, but too much force & the odds become more overwhelming, could lead to complete & sudden change (the downfall). A separation may occur where it will be a difficult transition, & there is a need to overcome the sadness & be the maturity this situation calls for.

Group 2 😒

Theme: It's time to release negativity

•emote, it's all better out than in

•it's time to move from living fearfully to living joyfully

•you're right to have your suspicions

•grudges are toxic-let something go

•the end of an argument

There is a chance to get justice & clarity in a situation this weekend, & cutting out negativity may be a theme this weekend. You may have been holding out for progress in this situation, but you may need to just quit trying. You may be feeling trapped by this person & it brings great sadness. There may be a slow moving development in an apology to bring harmony back to the situation, because there is devotion here, but the stability is diminishing. One may be readily in the mood to start a family with the other, but it's a back & forth choice. A tower has happened (if not yet, it may this weekend), & it caused an unexpected change that could result in transformation of the situation & its dynamic. Whether you were aware of this escalation or not, there is a call for strength & courage in the face of adversity. A withdrawal altogether may be initiated where the cycle will be closed out. This feels like a commitment & something someone is sympathetic in building in this situation, but the bad influences still seem to show up. This seem to involve petty communication with them that really brings judgment to their character. Anxiety still creeps in around this person & there may be a stubborn energy around the despair. This may reach a stalemate around taking further action, but there will be an opportunity to negotiate what will be done about things, but moving forward with this person may either bring more burdens & oppression, or problems may still be resolved though it will be like trying to maintain a level of peace.

Group 3 🤐

Theme: Work through your fears

•👀🍆 feeling sexy maybe?

•time to let go if a grudge you're holding

•move on from jealousy

•stop being obsessive

•could it be you're being paranoid?

•make an investment

You may be receiving recognition or attainment, or have the opportunity to (may relate to work), & it may be resulting from greater self knowledge & strength through persistence (possibly over-ambition). There may be contradictory issues involving your abilities to attain material gain & actually are just able to take the necessary actions to achieve enough, but it isn't stabilizing. But there is a wise visionary that helps you see wisdom & inspiration from above or within. This person also brings vulnerability & goodness our of you, & for a lot of you could be seeking mercy & forgiveness from them. There could be a lot of inner conflict you're going through where there is a need to balance dark & light energies, for things may be fluctuating for you. There is a need to release this energy in the proper way, as there may be distance rn. You need to be courageous enough to overcome the challenges to come regarding reconciliation with this person, & the odds may seem outwardly against you, whether they actually are or not. You will need the strength of personal integrity when arriving to them, as you may want to propose something to them. Success & honors may come at a price, & you may be fulfilling obligations while oppressed by their weight. The mystery of the situation may bring some fear or a negative attitude, but you feel your loyalty was misplaced in favor of a potentially damaging habit or desire & there was limited rational thinking in the decision making. This may have even caused you anxiety over them, & you may even fear that they are done with you. You're blaming yourself & probably contradicted how you wanted to be with this person, or contradicted yourself in general through your actions. But this weekend's theme could be considering escaping from the imprisonment which is your life without them, & you could be undergoing a change of heart that you want use your determination for the right purpose. You're paying attention to the fact that there is a need to start over. There may be feelings of restlessness or boredom, or general dissatisfaction with the current lot, & regret is strong here. You may be lacking love & that bitterness could be spoiling the good things for you, but a possible new start is under manifestation & evolve through progression is noted. Unexpected events may push forward the union with your person.

Group 4 🧘🏾‍♀️

Themes: Meditate & contemplate

•use your feelings to guide your way (logic won't work rn)

•face your fears-they may be holding you back

•this situation is being healed

•time to surrender to the Divine

•avoid being deceptive or wiling deceived

There may be an opportunity (possibly for a job or prosperity), but it could be a win for losing situation (or you feel it that way), or you may just get a kick out of being petty. There is a need to transform yourself by being a little more of a calm & healing energy to actually be in an embodiment of feminine power. Some unfulfilled desires may be having you feel confused or imprisoned, but you are determined to end these mental cycles & you will have forward progression in that. Some romance may be incoming for you & this person (or you) think about you/them a lot. Subconscious work is at play here, & there may be dreams or visions you (or they) whether realized or not. This may be hidden for you at this time, but things may be revealed to you soon, & you may be subconsciously aware of it. This person is commit to coming toward you & is looking back on what they've once know, which where mostly toxic & low vibrational energy. They may be in deep concentration regarding you & are trying to manifest their direction but this may be a challenge for them, as they be taking a stand, or mounting a defense. You're attracting & manifesting this person back into your life to bring forth new creation & a fresh start in a relationship that still has a mutual interest or its possible that this is a first love. Your inner journey & guidance is has to do with this person, but you have been having anxiety & mental harrassment over new love because there is a transcendence & need to have forgiveness needs to happen, but you may be confused by this or restricted from doing so. There is an advantage you have & a choice to make regarding this connection since it brings truth & balance to you. You have the spiritual knowledge needed for this journey, & you are called to have strength & willpower against untrustworthy forces. This love is a spiritual one & a re/union is in the works for you. You're headed on a new path, but you may need to let go of the past, that caused the unexpected change to your connection. There is a chance for regeneration & this was nearly a missed opportunity because of disruption or lack of engagement or focus, isolation & blocked communication. There is still a slow moving offer coming forward, but the block is caused by maintaining stability.

[newstfionline]

Headlines

Power outages begin in California amid hot, windy weather (AP) Millions of people in California woke up in the dark Wednesday after Pacific Gas & Electric started shutting off power to prevent what the utility called an unprecedented wildfire danger. PG&E said it cut power to more than 500,000 customers in Northern California and that it plans to gradually turn off electricity to nearly 800,000 customers to prevent its equipment from starting wildfires during hot, windy weather.

Johnson’s Baby Powder sued for causing cancer (NYT) Thousands of people who trusted Johnson’s Baby Powder for decades are suing the company after developing cancer. Johnson & Johnson says its baby powder is safe, but plaintiffs say it is made from talc that is contaminated with asbestos, a known carcinogen. Talc is also an ingredient in many cosmetics, and the Food and Drug Administration has recently found asbestos in several products, including children’s makeup kits sold by Claire’s. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends against using any powder when you’re diapering your baby because it can cause lung problems. Use lotion instead.

Ecuador’s government on edge (Foreign Policy) Facing nearly a week of indigenous-led mass protests against austerity measures, Ecuador’s President Lenín Moreno relocated the government from the capital of to the coastal city of Guayaquil on Tuesday and called for a curfew around state buildings. A general strike has been called today, and the next few days are expected to be crucial for the president. Moreno has accused ex-President Rafael Correa--a former ally--of engineering the protests as a coup.

A mystery oil spill in Brazil (Foreign Policy) Around 100 tons of crude oil are drifting toward Brazil’s northeast, polluting pristine beaches across nine states. Officials say the state oil company is not to blame for the spill, which President Jair Bolsonaro has suggested is the fault of another country. The spill comes amid growing criticism of Bolsonaro’s environmental policies.

EU Says Brexit Deal ‘Very Difficult’ if Not Entirely Impossible (Reuters) The European Union made clear on Wednesday it was not shutting the door to any Brexit deal and made itself available for last-minute negotiations but also stressed that London would need to move considerably to secure an agreement.

UK PM Johnson Urges Trump to Reconsider U.S. Crash Case Stance (Reuters) British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday urged President Donald Trump to reconsider a decision to let a U.S. diplomat’s wife use diplomatic immunity after she was involved in a fatal car crash in England and then left the country.

Synagogue Attack Sparks Fear Among Jews in Germany (Reuters) As Jews left Yom Kippur prayers across Germany on Wednesday, they were jolted by word that an anti-Semitic gunman had attacked a synagogue in the eastern city of Halle hours before, killing two people.

Ukraine President: ‘No Blackmail’ in Conversation With Trump (AP) Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy says there was “no blackmail” in the phone call with U.S. President Donald Trump that helped spark an impeachment inquiry.

Turkey launches offensive against Kurdish fighters in Syria (AP) Turkey launched a military operation Wednesday against the Kurds in northeastern Syria after U.S. forces pulled back from the area, with a series of airstrikes hitting a town on Syria’s northern border. After Turkey’s offensive began, there was sign of panic in the streets of Ras al-Ayn-- one of the towns under attack with residential areas close to the borders. The Kurdish forces have warned of a “humanitarian catastrophe” that could potentially unfold because of the Turkish military operation. Kurdish forces later said Turkish bombing of the border region killed five civilians and injured dozens more on Wednesday.

China and the U.S. to impose visa restrictions on each other’s nationals (Reuters) China is planning tighter visa restrictions for U.S. nationals with ties to anti-China groups, people with knowledge of the proposed curbs said, following similar U.S. restrictions on Chinese nationals, as relations between the countries sour. China’s Ministry of Public Security has for months been working on rules to limit the ability of anyone employed, or sponsored, by U.S. intelligence services and human rights groups to travel to China.

Super Typhoon on Track to Drench Japan’s Main Island (AP) Japan is bracing for a super typhoon on track to hit central and eastern regions over the three-day weekend with potential damage from torrential rains and strong winds.

[foreverlogical]

The election season of 2015 and 2016 was defined by chaos, infighting and a pool of deep resentment that came boiling over when votes were cast. But this election was barely noticed. It happened on February 17, 2016, in a rundown labor union hall in Portland, Oregon. Union members were voting on a new contract with their employer, Koch Industries. The union members felt powerless, cornered, and betrayed by their own leaders. The things that enraged them were probably recognizable to anyone who earns a paycheck in America today. Their jobs making wood and paper products for a division called Georgia Pacific had become downright dangerous, with spikes in injuries and even deaths. They were being paid less, after adjusting for inflation, than they were paid in the 1980s. Maybe most enraging, they had no leverage to bargain for a better deal. Steve Hammond, one of the labor union’s top negotiators, had fought for years to get higher pay and better working conditions. And for years, he was outgunned and beaten down by Koch’s negotiators. So even as the presidential election was dominating public attention in late 2015, Hammond was presenting the union members with a dispiriting contract defined by surrender on virtually everything the union had been fighting for. He knew the union members were furious with his efforts. When he stood on stage to present the contract terms, he lost control and berated them. “This is it guys!” his colleagues recall him yelling. “This is your best offer. You’re not going to strike anyway.”

I thought of the free-floating anger in that union hall often as I travelled the country over the last eight years, reporting for a book about Koch Industries. The anger seemed to infect every corner of American economic life. We are supposedly living in the best economy the United States has seen in modern memory, with a decade of solid growth behind us and the unemployment rate at its lowest level since the 1960s. Why, then, does everything feel so wrong? In April, a Washington-Post/ABC Poll found that 60% of political independents feel that America’s economic system is essentially rigged against them, to the advantage to those already in power. Roughly 33% of Republicans feel that way; 80% of Democrats feel the same.

What reporting the Koch story taught me is that these voters are right— the economy truly is rigged against them. But it isn’t rigged in the way most people seem to think. There isn’t some cabal of conservative or liberal politicians who are controlling the system for the benefit of one side or the other. The economy is rigged because the American political system is dysfunctional and paralyzed—with no consensus on what the government ought to do when it comes to the economy. As a result, we live under a system that’s broken, propelled forward by inertia alone. In this environment, there is only one clear winner: the big, entrenched players who can master the dysfunction and profit from it. In America, that’s the largest of the large corporations. Roughly a century after the biggest ones were broken up or more tightly regulated, they are back, stronger than ever.

I saw this reality clearly when I went to Wichita, Kansas to visit Charles Koch, the CEO of Koch Industries, a company with annual revenue larger than that of Facebook, Goldman Sachs and U.S. Steel combined. Charles Koch isn’t just the CEO of America’s biggest private company. He also inhabits one extreme end of the political debate about our nation’s economy. A close examination of his writing and speeches over the last 40 years reveals the thinking of someone who believes that government programs, no matter how well-intended, almost always do more harm than good. In this view, most government regulations simply distort the market and create big costs down the road. Taxing the wealthy only shifts money from productive uses to mostly wasteful programs. Charles Koch has been on a mission, for at least 40 years, to reshape the American political system into one where government intervention into markets does not exist.

But for all the free-market purity of Charles Koch’s ideology, there is not much of a free market in the corporate reality he inhabits. Koch Industries specializes in the kinds of businesses that underpin modern civilization but that most consumers never see—oil refining, nitrogen fertilizer production, commodities trading, the industrial production of building materials, and almost everything we touch, from paper towels and Lycra to the sensors hidden inside our cellphones. This is the paradox of Charles Koch’s word – he is a high-minded, anti-government free-marketeer whose fortune is made almost exclusively from industries that face virtually no real competition. Koch Industries is built, in fact, on a series of near-monopolies. And it is these kinds of companies that do best in our modern dysfunctional political environment. They know how to manipulate the rules when no one is looking.

Consider the oil refining business, which has been a cash cow for Koch Industries since 1969, just two years after Charles Koch took over the family company following his father’s death. Charles Koch was just in his early 30s at the time, but he made a brilliant and bold move, purchasing an oil refinery outside Saint Paul, Minnesota. The refinery was super-profitable thanks to a bottleneck in the U.S. energy system: the refinery used crude oil from the tar sands of Canada to be refined into gasoline later sold to the upper Midwest. The crude oil was extraordinarily cheap because it contained a lot of sulfur and not many refineries could process it. But Koch sold its refined gas into markets where gasoline supplies were very tight and prices were high.

Why didn’t some competitor open up a refinery next to Koch’s to seize this opportunity? It turns out that no one has built a new oil refinery anywhere in the United States since 1977. The reason is surprising: the Clean Air Act regulations. When the law was drastically expanded in 1970, it imposed pollution standards on new refineries. But it “grandfathered” in the existing refineries with the idea that they would eventually break down and be replaced with new facilities. That never happened. The legacy oil refiners, including Koch, exploited arcane sections of the law that allowed them to expand their old facilities while avoiding the newer clean-air standards. This gave them an insurmountable advantage over any potential new competitor. The absence of new refineries to stoke competition and drive down prices meant that Americans paid higher prices for gasoline. Today the industry is dominated by entrenched players who run aged facilities at near-full capacity, reaping profits that are among the highest in the world. In this industry and others, the big gains go to companies that can hire lawyers and lobbyists to help game the rules, and then hire even more lawyers when the government tries to punish them for breaking the law (as happened to Koch and other refiners in the late 1990s when it became clear they were manipulating Clean Air regulations).

The oil refining business is just one example of how Koch has benefited from complex regulatory dysfunction while public attention was turned elsewhere. In the 1990s, for example, a Koch-funded public policy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) pressured states to deregulate their electricity systems. California was a pioneer in this effort, and the results were disastrous. Lawmakers in Sacramento created a sprawling, hyper-complicated system that surgically grafted a free-market trading exchange onto an aged electricity grid. Virtually no one paid attention to the 1,000-page law as it was being written. Almost immediately after the markets went online in the early 2000s, electricity traders at Koch Industries and Enron began gaming the system. They earned millions of dollars doing so, even as prices skyrocketed and the state’s grid collapsed in rolling blackouts. Lawmakers were blamed when the lights went out, and then Governor Gray Davis was recalled. The role that traders played in the crisis was hard to understand and hidden from view. Federal regulators filed a case against Koch for manipulating markets in California, but the legal proceedings dragged on for more than a decade. Koch ended up settling the charges and paying a fine of $4.1 million, long after the damage was done.

To take another example: In 2017, Koch helped kill part of the Republican tax reform plan to impose a “border adjusted” income tax that almost certainly would have hurt Koch’s oil refining business. The plan was being pushed by none other than Paul Ryan, a onetime Koch ally who was then Speaker of the House. Ryan wanted to include the border adjustment in President Trump’s tax overhaul because it would have benefited domestic manufacturing and would have allowed the government to cut corporate taxes without exploding the deficit. But former Koch oil traders told me that the border adjustment tax would have hurt profits at the Kochs’ Pine Bend refinery in Minnesota. Koch played a vital role in killing the border adjustment tax before a vigorous public debate about it could even begin (A Koch Industries spokesman insisted that the Koch political network opposed the border-adjustment measure only on ideological grounds, because it was basically a tax, and not to protect profits at Koch’s oil refineries) . By the time most people started paying attention, Paul Ryan admitted defeat and jettisoned the border adjustment.

Charles Koch doesn’t talk about issues like this when he talks about free markets. When I met him, Charles Koch was giving interviews for his new book that described his highly detailed business philosophy, called Market-Based Management. I had heard a lot about this philosophy, but what surprised me most when I interviewed the people who worked with him, some for decades, is how much they admire him. They said he was brilliant, but also unpretentious. He was uncompromising, but fair. I felt this way too, the minute I met the billionaire. I remember him telling me something along the lines of: “Hello, Chris! You didn’t need to put on a tie just to see me,” when I walked in the door (my audio recorder wasn’t even running yet, so the quote might be inexact).

Charles Koch’s avuncular, aw-shucks persona masks his true nature. I think of him instead as an uncompromising warrior. He has been fighting since he was a young man. He fought his own brothers, Bill and Freddie, for control of the family company (and won). He fought a militant labor union at the Pine Bend refinery (and won). Most of all, he fought against the idea that the federal government has an important role to play in making the economy function properly—even while taking advantage of government laws to maintain his company’s advantages.

When Charles Koch became CEO in 1967, the U.S. economy operated under a political system that is almost unimaginable today. The government intervened dramatically in almost every corner of the economy, and it did so to the explicit benefit of middle-class workers. This happened under a broad set of laws called the New Deal, which was put in place in the late 1930s. The New Deal broke up monopolies, kept banks on a tight regulatory leash, and even controlled energy prices, down to the penny in some cases. It greatly empowered labor unions and boosted wages and bargaining power for workers. Charles Koch dislikes every element of the New Deal. He has formed think tanks to attack the ideas behind it, donated money to politicians who sought to dismantle it, and built a company that was hostile to it.

As it turned out, the American public joined Charles Koch, to a certain extent, during the 1970s. Vietnam, Watergate, rampant inflation and multiple recessions shattered Americans’ confidence in the government’s ability to solve problems for ordinary people. Passage of the Civil Rights Act shattered the political coalition behind the New Deal, which had relied on Southern segregationists for support. Ronald Reagan rode the tide of antigovernment sentiment to the White House. But even Reagan wasn’t able to repeal the New Deal. He failed miserably when he tried to repeal Social Security, for example. He cut taxes, but never could restrain spending. What emerged during the 1980s and 1990s was an incoherent governing system, one that is deregulated in some key areas, like banking and derivatives trading, but hyper-regulated in others like the small business sector.

If the American political system is confused, Charles Koch is not. He rules over his company with undisputed authority, and he uses that authority to spread his Market-Based Management doctrine. This philosophy inspires the rank-and-file employees at Koch Industries—the company cafeteria is full of young, entrepreneurial workers who thrive in a system that heaps promotions and bonuses on top performers, while unsentimentally weeding out employees considered weak. But the unbending nature of Market-Based Management, and how it applies to the factory floor, played a big role in building the rage that swept through that union hall in Oregon.

When Steve Hammond, the union boss, tried to bargain with Koch, he found himself fighting over ideology, not benefits. In one case, the Koch negotiators wanted to strip down workers’ health care benefits, requiring employees to pay more money out of pocket for their benefits. The Koch team framed their request not as a way to make more money for Koch, but to create a system that better reflected the ideals of Market-Based Management. “It’s a matter of principle,” recalled union negotiator Gary Bucknum. “The principle is that an employee should be paying something toward their healthcare, or otherwise they’ll abuse their health care.” It was hard to bargain against principle. And the unions didn’t have the leverage to fight. The policies that once supported labor unions have been steadily undermined since the 1970s, dragging union participation in the private sector down from about 33% of the workforce to less than 10%. The union took the cut in health care benefits.

The current American political debate is focused on the shiny objects, the high-profile contests between Team Red and Team Blue. But companies like Koch Industries have the capacity to focus on the much deeper system, the highly complicated plumbing that makes the American economy work. This is where Charles Koch’s attention has been patiently trained for decades, as administrations have come and gone in Washington.

Thanks to this focus, Koch wins every time.

VISIT WEBSITE

[bountyofbeads]

Holding Ukraine hostage: How the president and his allies, chasing 2020 ammunition, fanned a political storm (Donald Trump used the levers of the United States government and taxpayer dollars to chase a conspiracy theory to prove the Russian government didn't attack our elections in 2016!! This should outrage every American, reublican, democrat and independent.)

By Greg Miller, Paul Sonne, Greg Jaffe and Michael Birnbaum | Published

October 04, 2019 10:14 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 5, 2019 9:40 AM ET |

By mid-May, the U.S. relationship with Ukraine was unraveling: The U.S. ambassador had been recalled home for no apparent reason, the country’s new president was anxious about U.S. support, and President Trump’s personal lawyer was hawking Kiev conspiracy theories.

Amid this turbulence, an unexpected figure stepped forward to assert that he was now in charge of the U.S.-Ukraine relationship. Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, had no apparent standing to seize this critical portfolio, nor any apparent qualifications as a diplomat beyond the $1 million he’d given to Trump’s inauguration.

But when some in the White House and State Department sought to block his power grab, current and former U.S. officials said, he rebuffed their demands to know who had granted him such authority with two words:

“The president.”

Over the next four months, Sondland worked closely with Kurt Volker, the U.S. special representative for Ukraine, to reorient America’s relationship with Kiev around the president’s political interests.

Newly released texts exchanged by Sondland, Volker and other U.S. officials during this period read like a government-sanctioned shakedown. Again and again, they make clear that Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, would not get military aid or the Oval Office invitation he coveted until he committed to investigations that Trump hoped would deliver damaging information on former vice president Joe Biden and undermine the origins of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Rather than official State Department email, the text exchanges between the diplomats took place over WhatsApp, a U.S. official said.

Only if Zelensky can convince Trump that he will “ ‘get to the bottom of what happened’ in 2016” will he be granted a meeting with the president, Volker tells one of Zelensky’s top advisers in late July in a text that alludes to Trump’s belief that Ukraine sought to sabotage him in the presidential election. In a separate message weeks later, Sondland emphasizes that the president “really wants the deliverable.”

The exchanges reveal the direct participation of State Department officials sworn to serve the country in events that increasingly bear the markings of a multipronged political conspiracy.

At the same time Sondland and Volker were using diplomatic channels to press Trump’s demands, the president and his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, were using other channels to deliver the same message. At the center of the scandal is a July 25 phone call between Trump and Zelensky that was exposed by a government whistleblower and triggered an impeachment inquiry.

On the receiving end of these demands was a country turning to the United States for help with legitimate desperation. Over the past five years, Ukraine has endured incursions by Russian paramilitary forces, the loss of the Crimean Peninsula after its seizure by Moscow, and a deadly and ongoing conflict with Russian-backed separatists — not to mention its own internal political and economic problems, and corruption.

Against this backdrop, Ukrainian officials cited in the texts released by House committees late Thursday come across as feeling abused by their American counterparts. Zelensky “is sensitive about Ukraine being taken seriously, not merely as an instrument in Washington domestic, reelection politics,” a U.S. official, dispatched to Kiev after former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was removed on May 7, said in a text.

Sondland brushed aside his counterpart’s apprehension. “We need to get the conversation started and the relationship built,” he wrote back, “irrespective of the pretext.”

Although brief and cryptic, that exchange captures a more pervasive divide within the Trump administration between career national security officials disturbed by what they perceived as a dangerous decoupling of U.S. foreign policy from core national interests, and political appointees who became complicit in the president’s use of American influence to advance his electoral interests.

This account is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former U.S. officials, as well as documents released in recent days by congressional committees involved in the impeachment inquiry against the president. The officials interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitive nature of the subject as well as fear of retaliation. Sondland did not respond to requests for comments.

RE-LITIGATING 2016

Trump’s preoccupation with Ukraine traces back to the 2016 U.S. presidential race, when a financial ledger surfaced in Kiev linking Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, to millions of dollars in secret payments from a pro-Russian, Ukrainian political party he advised. The disclosures forced Manafort to resign his campaign position and fueled suspicions that Trump’s candidacy was being assisted by interference from Moscow.

Trump came to see the ensuing investigations of his campaign’s possible ties to Russia as part of an effort to delegitimize his presidency. In his July 25 call with Zelensky, Trump complained about the Russia probe and recycled discredited conspiracy theories, including that Russia had not really hacked the computers of the Democratic National Committee, and that the proof of that supposed hoax — the DNC hard drives — had been smuggled into Ukraine for hiding.

There is no evidence to substantiate any of these allegations.

“A lot of it started with Ukraine,” Trump said at a point in the conversation where he also alluded to aid and arms promised to Ukraine while telling Zelensky, “I would like you to do us a favor.” Among other things, Trump explicitly asked Zelensky to initiate an investigation of Biden and his son.

Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, became similarly entangled in webs of unfounded accusations. By the time the Russia investigation concluded without uncovering clear evidence that Trump’s campaign had conspired with Moscow, Giuliani and Trump had both turned their attention to Ukraine as a potential ally that could both help validate their theories and provide ammunition against political adversaries.

To advance this shared agenda, Trump began exploiting the powers of the executive branch.

Trump enlisted Attorney General William P. Barr to launch investigations into the origins of the Russia probe, searching for proof that the work of the FBI and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III were politically tainted. As part of that effort, The Washington Post revealed this week, Barr traveled to Britain and Italy, hoping their security services could expose improprieties by American intelligence agencies.

Trump also began circumventing his own National Security Council at the White House and deploying trusted allies to pursue political dirt and re-litigate the history of the 2016 election. His target was a country that Manafort had long said was out to get Trump in 2016: Ukraine.

Sondland, 61, appears to have never held a position in government before being named U.S. ambassador to the European Union in June 2018. He amassed much of his wealth by acquiring and managing luxury hotels in cities including Seattle and Portland, Ore.

Sondland sought to distance himself from Trump in 2016, backing out of a Seattle fundraiser for the GOP candidate over what a company spokesman described as concerns with Trump’s “anti-immigrant” policies.

But Sondland didn’t stay away for long, later routing $1 million to the president-elect’s inaugural fund through a collection of shell companies that obscured his involvement.

In Brussels, Sondland garnered a reputation for his truculent manner and fondness for the trappings of privilege. He peppered closed-door negotiations with four-letter words. He carried a wireless buzzer into meetings at the U.S. Mission that enabled him to silently summon support staff to refill his teacup.

Sondland seemed to chafe at the constraints of his assignment. He traveled for meetings in Israel, Romania and other countries with little or no coordination with other officials. He acquired a reputation for being indiscreet, and was chastised for using his personal phone for state business, officials said.

Sondland also shuttled repeatedly back to Washington, often seeking face time with Trump. When he couldn’t gain entry to the Oval Office, officials said, he would meet instead with White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, preferring someone closer to Trump’s inner circle than national security officials responsible for Europe.

“He always seemed to be in D.C.,” a former White House official said. “People would say, ‘Does he spend any time in Brussels?’ ”

TRUMP’S MAN

Sondland’s approach to the job was seen more as a source of irritation than trouble until May, when he moved to stake his claim to the U.S.-Ukraine relationship.

After Zelensky’s election, White House officials began making plans for who would take part in the U.S. delegation to attend Zelensky’s inauguration.

National security adviser John Bolton removed Sondland’s name from the list, only to see it reinserted, a clear indication that Bolton had been overruled by the Oval Office.

Photos of the event show a beaming Sondland alongside Zelensky, as well as other U.S. officials including Volker and Energy Secretary Rick Perry.

In the ensuing months, Sondland maneuvered to cement a position of influence in the relationship between Trump and the new Ukrainian president. In early June, Sondland threw a lavish Independence Day reception — a month ahead of the U.S. holiday — at a cavernous antique car museum in central Brussels.

An enormous U.S. flag was projected onto a wall. Jay Leno — whom Sondland billed as a personal friend — delivered a standup routine whose U.S.-focused patter fell flat on the ears of European officials. At a private dinner afterward, Sondland hosted an eclectic mix of guests. Among those at the candlelit table were Zelensky, Leno and Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner.

Within weeks, Sondland and Volker were deep into their efforts to consummate a secret political pact between Trump and Zelensky. Texts show the extent to which they explicitly pursued a transaction tying U.S. military aid and a future visit to the White House to a hard commitment from Ukraine to revive a corruption probe of a company, Burisma, that had employed Hunter Biden, the vice president’s son, as a board member making between $50,000 and $100,000 a month, according to people familiar with the matter.

A July 19 exchange between Sondland and Volker shows them discussing the status of their efforts to secure clear cooperation from Zelensky before the approaching Trump-Zelensky phone call.

Sondland said that he had spoken “directly to Zelensky and gave him a full briefing. He’s got it.” Volker replied that he had met over breakfast with Giuliani to apprise him of their progress, and the two later went on to discuss what Zelensky would need to do to secure the Oval Office meeting.

“Most impt is for Zelensky to say that he will help investigation — and address any specific personnel issues — if there are any,” Volker wrote.

Officials in Washington and Kiev were increasingly alarmed by developments that were out in the open, including the mysterious suspension of aid and Giuliani’s penchant for revealing his schemes in appearances on cable television.

Behind the scenes, other red flags surfaced. In a White House meeting in early July, Sondland surprised a room of U.S. officials and members of a small Ukrainian delegation when he diverged from U.S. talking points approved in advance by Bolton and others. As part of the conversation, U.S. officials recited their desire for Ukraine to continue seeking to rid its government and state-run companies of corruption.

But Sondland interjected that the United States also had other targets in mind for Kiev that went beyond its active, ongoing investigations. He didn’t cite Burisma or Biden by name, but the implication of his words struck others in the room as troubling and obvious, particularly given Giuliani’s public comments.

“What was shocking was that he said it in front of so many people,” said one official familiar with the meeting.

Such concerns in Washington were by then already tributaries in a stream of information flowing to a CIA employee who shared their dismay and would soon begin compiling an extraordinary whistleblower complaint to the intelligence community’s inspector general.

In Kiev, William B. “Bill” Taylor, who had served as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009 under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and had agreed to return on an emergency basis after Yovanovitch’s removal, was raising alarms.

Taylor, who was recruited by Volker, had been hesitant to even take the job.

“I’m still trying to navigate this new world,” Volker texted him this spring.

“I’m not sure that’s a world I want to set foot in,” Taylor replied.

On July 21, he voiced his concern about Ukraine being treated as a pawn in America’s “domestic, reelection politics,” only to have his concerns dismissed by Sondland, who suggested that Taylor was failing to recognize how bending to Trump’s demands was the only path to improving the countries’ fraught relationship.

The next day, one of Zelensky’s top advisers, Andrey Yermak, spoke by phone with Giuliani. Coached by the tandem of Sondland and Volker, Yermak appears to have given Giuliani the reassurances he needed to secure Zelensky’s phone call with Trump.

When that call happened three days later, some White House officials who had suspicions but were not read-in to the hidden agenda were so alarmed by Trump’s conduct, and the pressure he applied to Zelensky for a political “favor,” that they stuffed a transcript of the call onto a computer system reserved for some of the government’s most highly classified secrets.

Among those engaged in the shadow diplomacy, however, the call was regarded as a breakthrough. Yermak told Volker that the “call went well,” and that Zelensky got his promised invitation to the White House, but no specific date. “Great,” Volker wrote back, noting that he would now set in motion a preliminary meeting in Madrid between Yermak and Giuliani.

Giuliani told Yermak that the Ukrainian president needed to make a public promise to pursue the corruption investigations, according to Volker’s testimony. Sondland and Volker set about revising the wording of a statement proposed by the Ukrainians that Zelensky could issue upon announcing his trip to Washington. When the two diplomats sent the statement to Giuliani, he was dismayed that it wasn’t more specific, and according to Volker, he demanded that the Ukrainians insert specific references to the 2016 election and Burisma, the gas company where Hunter Biden served on the board.

In an Aug. 10 text message, Volker tells Yermak that once the statement is ironed out, they can then “use that” to get the date for the meeting between Trump and Zelensky.

Yermak’s response makes the bargain clear. “Once we have a date, will call for a press briefing, announcing upcoming visit and outlining vision for the reboot of US-UKRAINE relationship, including among other things Burisma and election meddling in investigations,” he writes.

“Sounds great!” Volker replies.

Ultimately, Volker testified Thursday on Capitol Hill, the statement was shelved, because the Ukrainians didn’t feel comfortable making explicit reference to the Burisma and election interference investigations.

But by that point, Volker and Sondland were themselves unwitting to developments in Washington that would in time expose their months-long enterprise and trigger an impeachment inquiry against the president.

On Aug. 12 — the day before Volker and Sondland traded triumphant texts about the statement they wanted issued by Zelensky — the CIA whistleblower submitted his nine-page document to the inspector general of the intelligence community. Over the next several weeks, events proceeded along two separate tracks that finally converged this week in the secure hearing room of the House Intelligence Committee.

On Sept. 1, Taylor raised his concerns again. “Are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?” That same day, at a meeting in Warsaw, the Ukrainians were hearing the same message from Vice President Pence when he told Zelensky that the United States was still concerned that Ukraine was not doing enough on corruption.

Sondland refused to engage Taylor on the matter by text, telling him to “Call me.”

A week later, on Sept. 8, Taylor issued a more forceful warning, saying that he would not be part of coercing a public pledge from Zelensky and withholding aid that Ukraine desperately needed. “The nightmare is they give the interview and don’t get the security assistance,” he said. If that were to unfold, he said, “The Russians love it. (And I quit.)”

One day later, on Sept. 9, Taylor confronted Sondland one last time by text, saying, “I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.”

Sondland, perhaps anticipating how this exchange would play out if it came into the possession of investigators or were released to the public, replied in an earnest tone: “Bill, I believe you are incorrect about President Trump’s intentions. The President has been crystal clear: no quid pro quo’s of any kind.”

Birnbaum reported from Brussels. Julie Tate and Michelle Ye Hee Lee in Washington contributed to this report.

In call to Ukraine’s president, Trump revived a favorite conspiracy theory about the DNC hack

By Craig Timberg, Drew Harwell and Ellen Nakashima | Published September 25, 2019 6:27 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 5, 2019 9:35 AM ET

For years cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike was a source of news, not a subject, as it unraveled some of the world’s most notorious hacks.

But ever since the company exposed Russian intrusions into Democratic Party computers in 2016 — findings President Trump repeatedly has attacked — CrowdStrike has been a subject of allegations that rippled through conservative news sources, onto social media, into the criminal trial of longtime Trump friend Roger Stone and, finally, in July, into a call between the president and his Ukrainian counterpart.

The release Wednesday of the text of that call prompted an ecstatic response on right-wing corners of the Internet. “CROWDSTRIKE IS BACK ON THE MENU BOYS,” said one thread Wednesday on the Reddit message board “the_donald,” devoted to pro-Trump discussion. In another thread, a commenter wrote, “Trump just put ‘Ukrainian CrowdStrike’ into the consciousness and conversation of every normie that is following this story.”

But more broadly, the vilification of CrowdStrike, a firm that long has worked closely with U.S. officials, illustrates the shape-shifting nature of misinformation as it moves across media, mixing fact with innuendo before ultimately reaching the president — owner of the world’s loudest megaphone.

“This is insane,” said Robert Johnston, CEO of Adlumin and a former CrowdStrike investigator who worked on the probe into the hacking of Democratic National Committee computers. “This is absolute babbling to the president of Ukraine. It’s hard to finger exactly which conspiracy theory he’s subscribing to. But none of them have any grounding in reality.”

The month before the Ukraine call, Trump voiced dark suspicions about CrowdStrike in a call with Fox News commentator Sean Hannity. That same day, Breitbart News had published a story, based on documents that had emerged in Stone’s trial on charges of lying, obstruction and witness tampering, about how the FBI relied on information from CrowdStrike in its probe of the DNC hack.

“Take a look at Ukraine,” Trump said to Hannity in a conversation that was broadcast on his show. “How come the FBI didn’t take the server from the DNC? Just think about that one, Sean.”

People familiar with the president’s thinking said he has come to suspect the DNC server hacked by Russian intelligence agents in 2016 may have been hidden in Ukraine. The president has been known to embrace conspiracy theories, but it wasn’t immediately clear how he reached that belief about the DNC server or how that would even have been physically possible.

While it’s true that the FBI did not take custody of the affected servers, people familiar with FBI hack investigations say the agency often relies on forensic analysis by outside firms, including CrowdStrike, which is among the nation’s most prominent, having handled North Korea’s hack of Sony Pictures in 2014, among others. CrowdStrike said it “provided all forensic evidence and analysis to the FBI.”

The FBI felt it was not necessary to enter the DNC's premises and take custody of the affected servers, as agents were able to obtain complete copies of forensic images made by CrowdStrike, according to people familiar with the investigation.

The issue emerged again, on July 25, when Trump urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate CrowdStrike during a call in which he also belittled special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and urged investigation of the son of former vice president Joseph Biden. Notes from the call were released Wednesday amid a scandal over whether Trump improperly pressured a foreign leader to investigate a political opponent, using nearly $400 million in expected foreign aid as leverage.

The nature of Trump’s reference to CrowdStrike is not obvious from the notes the White House released. At one point, he said, “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people … The server, they say, Ukraine has it.”

Trump added, “I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it.” Zelensky appeared to agree to the request, saying his new prosecutor general “will look into the situation, specifically to the company that you mentioned.”

The Silicon Valley-based cybersecurity firm’s assertion in June 2016 that Russia had hacked the DNC has been repeatedly confirmed by the Justice Department, members of Congress and Mueller’s office, which indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers last year for their role in the breach.

Nevertheless, the company has become a boogeyman of right-wing conspiracy theorists, who have falsely claimed that the company helped Democratic leaders cover up what they insist was a breach by a secret party insider.

Trump's comments on Wednesday helped solidify the company as a punching bag for his allies in the right-wing media. Talk-show host Rush Limbaugh said the “reference to CrowdStrike, mark my words, is momentous,” and added, “The Democrats are bent out of shape that Trump even knows about CrowdStrike."

President Trump has long made CrowdStrike a target. He’s echoed conspiracy theorists in claiming that the company is owned by, as he said in 2017, “a very rich Ukrainian.” The company’s co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch is a Russia-born cyber and national security expert and a U.S. citizen. He is also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a major Washington think tank whose donors include the foundation of Viktor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian billionaire.

The company has also been pulled into the QAnon conspiracy theory, after an anonymous author — purportedly, a top-secret intelligence officer slowly revealing Trump's plot to foil a global pedophile cabal — claimed last year that CrowdStrike had helped China access Hillary Clinton's emails. (No officials have alleged anything close to that.)

CrowdStrike said in a statement Wednesday that it stands by its “findings and conclusions that have been fully supported by the U.S. intelligence community.” The $14 billion company saw its stock fall roughly 1 percent Wednesday.

As CrowdStrike trended on Twitter Wednesday, driven by false claims about the company, Facebook also surfaced misinformation for queries of the firm's name. Among the top results was an article featuring a meme of DNC chairman Tom Perez in a wig along with erroneous claims about the “CrowdStrike ruse.” The site touts itself as “The First Stop on Your Daily Commute to the Truth."

Suspicion about CrowdStrike’s role appears to have first entered the conservative media ecosystem in early 2017, following a BuzzFeed report that the FBI had not requested access to the DNC servers before concluding that they were penetrated by Russian hackers. In January 2017, Breitbart ran an article conveying basic details about the firm’s leadership and raising questions about its ties to Google. (CrowdStrike has plainly advertised investments made by a private equity firm affiliated with Google.)

Two months later, Tony Shaffer, a member of Trump’s 2020 reelection advisory board, posted on Facebook, “When the FBI accepts info from DNC-Hired Cybersecurity Firm & adopts the report as their own we have a big problem."

In June 2017, the conservative news site Daily Caller said “a cloud of doubt (was) hanging over the DNC’s Russia narrative” in part due to the involvement by CrowdStrike, which it said was “Funded By Clinton-Loving Google $$." A month later, the conservative Washington Times wrote that “CrowdStrike’s evidence for blaming Russia for the hack is thin."

That theory has been boosted by Stone, Trump's longtime adviser, who has argued in legal filings this year that CrowdStrike's analysis was fatally compromised. Stone and others in Trump's orbit have alleged without evidence that Democratic insiders spearheaded the breach.

Trump’s mention of CrowdStrike suggests he still doubts the intelligence community’s findings of Russian involvement. DNC spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa tweeted that it was “complete nonsense” and “surreal” that “Trump used “a call with a foreign leader to push conspiracy theories.”

Devlin Barrett and Isaac Stanley-Becker contributed to this report.

[progressivemillennial]

If the Trump administration and its allies continue to pursue their reckless course in Venezuela, the most likely result will be bloodshed, chaos, and instability.

The following open letter—signed by 70 scholars on Latin America, political science, and history as well as filmmakers, civil society leaders, and other experts—was issued on Thursday, January 24, 2018 in opposition to ongoing intervention by the United States in Venezuela.

The United States government must cease interfering in Venezuela’s internal politics, especially for the purpose of overthrowing the country’s government. Actions by the Trump administration and its allies in the hemisphere are almost certain to make the situation in Venezuela worse, leading to unnecessary human suffering, violence, and instability.

Venezuela’s political polarization is not new; the country has long been divided along racial and socioeconomic lines. But the polarization has deepened in recent years. This is partly due to US support for an opposition strategy aimed at removing the government of Nicolás Maduro through extra-electoral means. While the opposition has been divided on this strategy, US support has backed hardline opposition sectors in their goal of ousting the Maduro government through often violent protests, a military coup d’etat, or other avenues that sidestep the ballot box.

Under the Trump administration, aggressive rhetoric against the Venezuelan government has ratcheted up to a more extreme and threatening level, with Trump administration officials talking of “military action” and condemning Venezuela, along with Cuba and Nicaragua, as part of a “troika of tyranny.” Problems resulting from Venezuelan government policy have been worsened by US economic sanctions, illegal under the Organization of American States and the United Nations ― as well as US law and other international treaties and conventions. These sanctions have cut off the means by which the Venezuelan government could escape from its economic recession, while causing a dramatic falloffin oil production and worsening the economic crisis, and causing many people to die because they can’t get access to life-saving medicines. Meanwhile, the US and other governments continue to blame the Venezuelan government ― solely ― for the economic damage, even that caused by the US sanctions.

Now the US and its allies, including OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro and Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, have pushed Venezuela to the precipice. By recognizing National Assembly President Juan Guaido as the new president of Venezuela ― something illegal under the OAS Charter ― the Trump administration has sharply accelerated Venezuela’s political crisis in the hopes of dividing the Venezuelan military and further polarizing the populace, forcing them to choose sides. The obvious, and sometimes stated goal, is to force Maduro out via a coup d’etat.

The reality is that despite hyperinflation, shortages, and a deep depression, Venezuela remains a politically polarized country. The US and its allies must cease encouraging violence by pushing for violent, extralegal regime change. If the Trump administration and its allies continue to pursue their reckless course in Venezuela, the most likely result will be bloodshed, chaos, and instability. The US should have learned something from its regime change ventures in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and its long, violent history of sponsoring regime change in Latin America.

Neither side in Venezuela can simply vanquish the other. The military, for example, has at least 235,000 frontline members, and there are at least 1.6 million in militias. Many of these people will fight, not only on the basis of a belief in national sovereignty that is widely held in Latin America ― in the face of what increasingly appears to be a US-led intervention ― but also to protect themselves from likely repression if the opposition topples the government by force.

In such situations, the only solution is a negotiated settlement, as has happened in the past in Latin American countries when politically polarized societies were unable to resolve their differences through elections. There have been efforts, such as those led by the Vatican in the fall of 2016, that had potential, but they received no support from Washington and its allies who favored regime change. This strategy must change if there is to be any viable solution to the ongoing crisis in Venezuela.

For the sake of the Venezuelan people, the region, and for the principle of national sovereignty, these international actors should instead support negotiations between the Venezuelan government and its opponents that will allow the country to finally emerge from its political and economic crisis.

Signed:

Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus, MIT and Laureate Professor, University of Arizona Laura Carlsen, Director, Americas Program, Center for International Policy Greg Grandin, Professor of History, New York University Miguel Tinker Salas, Professor of Latin American History and Chicano/a Latino/a Studies at Pomona College Sujatha Fernandes, Professor of Political Economy and Sociology, University of Sydney Steve Ellner, Associate Managing Editor of Latin American Perspectives Alfred de Zayas, former UN Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order and only UN rapporteur to have visited Venezuela in 21 years Boots Riley, Writer/Director of Sorry to Bother You, Musician John Pilger, Journalist & Film-Maker Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research Jared Abbott, PhD Candidate, Department of Government, Harvard University Dr. Tim Anderson, Director, Centre for Counter Hegemonic Studies Elisabeth Armstrong, Professor of the Study of Women and Gender, Smith College Alexander Aviña, PhD, Associate Professor of History, Arizona State University Marc Becker, Professor of History, Truman State University Medea Benjamin, Cofounder, CODEPINK Phyllis Bennis, Program Director, New Internationalism, Institute for Policy Studies Dr. Robert E. Birt, Professor of Philosophy, Bowie State University Aviva Chomsky, Professor of History, Salem State University James Cohen, University of Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, Associate Professor, George Mason University Benjamin Dangl, PhD, Editor of Toward Freedom Dr. Francisco Dominguez, Faculty of Professional and Social Sciences, Middlesex University, UK Alex Dupuy, John E. Andrus Professor of Sociology Emeritus, Wesleyan University Jodie Evans, Cofounder, CODEPINK Vanessa Freije, Assistant Professor of International Studies, University of Washington Gavin Fridell, Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor in International Development Studies, St. Mary’s University Evelyn Gonzalez, Counselor, Montgomery College Jeffrey L. Gould, Rudy Professor of History, Indiana University Bret Gustafson, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis Peter Hallward, Professor of Philosophy, Kingston University John L. Hammond, Professor of Sociology, CUNY Mark Healey, Associate Professor of History, University of Connecticut Gabriel Hetland, Assistant Professor of Latin American, Caribbean and U.S. Latino Studies, University of Albany Forrest Hylton, Associate Professor of History, Universidad Nacional de Colombia-Medellín Daniel James, Bernardo Mendel Chair of Latin American History Chuck Kaufman, National Co-Coordinator, Alliance for Global Justice Daniel Kovalik, Adjunct Professor of Law, University of Pittsburgh Winnie Lem, Professor, International Development Studies, Trent University Dr. Gilberto López y Rivas, Professor-Researcher, National University of Anthropology and History, Morelos, Mexico Mary Ann Mahony, Professor of History, Central Connecticut State University Jorge Mancini, Vice President, Foundation for Latin American Integration (FILA) Luís Martin-Cabrera, Associate Professor of Literature and Latin American Studies, University of California San Diego Teresa A. Meade, Florence B. Sherwood Professor of History and Culture, Union College Frederick Mills, Professor of Philosophy, Bowie State University Stephen Morris, Professor of Political Science and International Relations, Middle Tennessee State University Liisa L. North, Professor Emeritus, York University Paul Ortiz, Associate Professor of History, University of Florida Christian Parenti, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, John Jay College CUNY Nicole Phillips, Law Professor at the Université de la Foundation Dr. Aristide Faculté des Sciences Juridiques et Politiques and Adjunct Law Professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law Beatrice Pita, Lecturer, Department of Literature, University of California San Diego Margaret Power, Professor of History, Illinois Institute of Technology Vijay Prashad, Editor, The TriContinental Eleanora Quijada Cervoni FHEA, Staff Education Facilitator & EFS Mentor, Centre for Higher Education, Learning & Teaching at The Australian National University Walter Riley, Attorney and Activist William I. Robinson, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara Mary Roldan, Dorothy Epstein Professor of Latin American History, Hunter College/ CUNY Graduate Center Karin Rosemblatt, Professor of History, University of Maryland Emir Sader, Professor of Sociology, University of the State of Rio de Janeiro Rosaura Sanchez, Professor of Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature, University of California, San Diego T.M. Scruggs Jr., Professor Emeritus, University of Iowa Victor Silverman, Professor of History, Pomona College Brad Simpson, Associate Professor of History, University of Connecticut Jeb Sprague, Lecturer, University of Virginia Christy Thornton, Assistant Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University Sinclair S. Thomson, Associate Professor of History, New York University Steven Topik, Professor of History, University of California, Irvine Stephen Volk, Professor of History Emeritus, Oberlin College Kirsten Weld, John. L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of History, Harvard University Kevin Young, Assistant Professor of History, University of Massachusetts Amherst Patricio Zamorano, Academic of Latin American Studies; Executive Director, InfoAmericas

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to a weekly collaboration between FiveThirtyEight and ABC News. With 5,000 people seemingly thinking about challenging President Trump in 2020 — Democrats and even some Republicans — we’re keeping tabs on the field as it develops. Each week, we’ll run through what the potential candidates are up to — who’s getting closer to officially jumping in the ring and who’s getting further away.

This week, the presidential field grew more diverse with the entrance of Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Harris — who was born to an Indian mother and Jamaican father — announced her presidential campaign on “Good Morning America” and Buttigieg — who could make history as the nation’s first openly gay presidential nominee of a major party — posted video about his forming an exploratory committee on Wednesday.

They join a growing and diverse field of Democratic hopefuls, a cadre that could prove too large for a single debate at the first opportunity in June. Anticipating a crowded field, Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez revealed in December that the DNC would set thresholds, including polling and fundraising targets, to pare down the first group of candidates, then “draw lots,” should the group still be too large. However, the DNC has yet to reveal specific targets for those thresholds, but some figures — including Harris, who aides tell ABC News brought in $1.5 million in her first day as a candidate — are already clearly aiming for one of the coveted spots.

Jan. 18-24, 2019

Michael Bennet (D)

The Colorado senator attracted attention Thursday when he criticized fellow Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. Bennet labeled Cruz’s current government shutdown-related concerns “crocodile tears,” and reminded Cruz of actions that led to a 2013 shutdown while Bennet’s home state was dealing with flooding.

Asked on MSNBC Thursday afternoon whether he was running for president, Bennet said he was “thinking about it … like every other person in [the Senate.]”

Joe Biden (D)

At a National Action Network Martin Luther King Jr. Day breakfast in Washington, Biden said that white Americans need to acknowledge and admit the fact that systemic racism still exists and must be rooted out.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that in a paid speech given by Biden in Michigan in October, the former vice president praised Republican Rep. Fred Upton, who then went on to defeat his Democratic opponent. The remarks were criticized by local Democrats, who saw it as a damaging error, according to the Times report. On Friday, at the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Biden defended the speech, explaining that he was proud of Upton’s work on a cancer research funding bill and argued that not everything should be viewed through the lens of partisanship.

Michael Bloomberg (D)

Bloomberg spoke at a National Action Network Martin Luther King Jr. Day breakfast in Washington on Monday, during which he joked he would ask former Vice President Joe Biden, who was also in attendance, for tips on living in Washington. He added, of himself and Biden: “I know we’ll both keep our eyes on the real prize, and that is electing a Democrat to the White House in 2020, and getting our country back on track.”

The former New York City mayor faced criticism from Democrats this week after defending the use of stop-and-frisk policing during a speech at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland Tuesday, and labeling efforts to legalize marijuana “perhaps the stupidest thing we’ve ever done.”

Cory Booker (D)

The New Jersey senator spoke at a South Carolina statehouse rally on Martin Luther King Jr. Day Monday after brief stops over the weekend in Louisiana and Georgia. In Georgia, Booker met with former President Jimmy Carter and the pair appeared on an Instagram Live video. “I’m very glad to have you here this morning, and I hope you come back,” Carter said to Booker. “And I hope you run for president.”

Sherrod Brown (D)

On Wednesday, Brown told MSNBC that he continues to “very seriously” consider a presidential campaign. As has been the case in past interviews on the subject, the Ohio senator referred to the importance of Democrats competing in the center of the country and a focus on employment and job conditions.

“To win Ohio, to win the industrial Midwest, the heartland, and the Electoral College you’ve got to speak to the progressive base, to be sure, as I have my whole career, but you’ve got to talk to workers and live where they live,” he said, later echoing the sentiment on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” where he said his party can’t choose between progressives and workers, but represent both groups.

Brown kicks off his “Dignity of Work” tour in Cleveland on Wednesday, followed by a visit to Iowa Thursday.

Pete Buttigieg (D)

Buttigieg announced the formation of a presidential exploratory committee Wednesday, with the 37-year-old South Bend, Indiana mayor explaining that he felt it was time for a generational shift in the nation’s leadership.

“I belong to a generation that is stepping forward right now,” Buttigieg said in a video announcing the committee, “We’re the generation that lived through school shootings, that served in the wars after 9/11. And we’re the generation that stands to be the first to make less than our parents, unless we do something different.”

Asked Wednesday by KCBS about potential concerns about his youth and experience, Buttigieg said his two terms as mayor and service in the Navy were more executive and military experience than President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.

Julian Castro (D)

Castro spent Martin Luther King Jr. Day in San Antonio, where he took part in the city’s parade, marching alongside his brother Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas.

An adviser to Castro told The Daily Beast that the former Housing and Urban Development secretary’s campaign already formulated workplace harassment policies and that it would support unionization among its staffers, should they decide to do so.

John Delaney (D)

Delaney spent last weekend in New Hampshire at multiple meet-and-greet events and attended the Concord Women’s March. After speaking with reporters and editors at the Nashua Telegraph last Friday, the newspaper’s editorial board described the former Maryland congressman as “somewhat impressive.”

Tulsi Gabbard (D)

In an interview with CNN Sunday, Gabbard said she did not regret her 2017 meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, arguing that it is “very important for any leader in this country to be willing to meet with others, whether they be friends or adversaries or potential adversaries if we are serious about the pursuit of peace and securing our country.”

Eric Garcetti (D)

Garcetti helped facilitate negotiations in the Los Angeles teacher strike, which ended in a deal that the mayor called “a historic agreement.”

Jeff Flake (R)

At a Vanderbilt University panel, Flake criticized the Republican Party for moving away from “traditional conservatism.” He also said, “The Trump base is very real, very solid, but politically it’s just not large enough to carry ahead. I say that’s a good thing.”

Despite his differences with the president, Flake said at the event, “I hope we don’t go through an impeachment process because of what it does to a divided public.”

Kirsten Gillibrand (D)

In her first week since the announcement of her presidential exploratory committee, Gillibrand visited Iowa, where she addressed the Des Moines Women’s March Saturday. The New York senator addressed allegations of anti-Semitism against two of the Women’s March leaders, saying that there was “no room for anti-Semitism” in the movement and that the movement is empowered when everyone lifts each other.

At additional stops across Iowa, Gillibrand explained the moderate positions dotting her past, including her former defense of the Second Amendment: “I had only really looked at guns through the lens of hunting. My mom still shoots the Thanksgiving turkey,” she said, later noting that the NRA now gives her an F rating.

On Monday, Gillibrand spoke at the National Action Network’s King Day Public Policy Forum in New York, invoking the Bible as she discussed “speak[ing] truth to power,” in a moment that NAN’s founder Al Sharpton characterized as “preaching.”

Kamala Harris (D)

Harris officially announced Monday that she is running for president, telling ABC’s “Good Morning America” that she feels “a sense of responsibility to stand up and fight for the best of who we are” and that she’s confident in her “ability to lead” and “listen and to work on behalf of the American public.” She then grabbed a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich, before heading back to Washington and answering questions from reporters at her alma mater, Howard University.

In the 24 hours following her announcement, aides to Harris told ABC News their campaign raised $1.5 million from 38,000 donors.

The California senator hits the campaign trail starting Friday in South Carolina to speak at an event held by a local chapter of her sorority. On Sunday, Harris will hold a campaign launch event in Oakland, then on Monday she’ll participate in a CNN townhall in Iowa.

John Hickenlooper (D)

On Sunday, the former Colorado governor is visiting Iowa for a stop at a house party and a local brewery, one of his advisers told ABC News. On Tuesday, he told CNN that he would decide whether to run for president by March, and that he could separate himself for the field by sharing his bipartisan record.

“I’m probably one of the few, if not the only candidate who’s actually been able to bring people together who were in conflict, they were feuding, and get them to put down their weapons, take the time to hear each other and then actually achieve progressive goals through their willingness to work together and create a compromise,” Hickenlooper said.

Jay Inslee (D)

The Washington governor visited New Hampshire Tuesday to speak with students at Dartmouth and Saint Anselm colleges. He spent much of his time talking about climate change, an issue he claimed wasn’t being highlighted by other possible presidential nominees.

“Here’s an existential threat to the United States, and they do their rollouts and the words ‘climate change’ don’t appear,” he said.

Inslee also told the Associated Press that he’s been emailing with the billionaire Tom Steyer, a fellow environmentalist who recently passed on a presidential run of his own, but who has not committed to supporting another candidate.

John Kasich (R)

Kasich repeated a position he’s shared before when asked about a potential 2020 run during a question and answer session at the University of Florida Wednesday: “If I can’t win, I’m not going to do it,” he said.

The former Ohio governor wrote an op-ed for the Boston Globe to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Day. He decried the political division that led to the ongoing government shutdown and called upon Americans to take personal action to better their communities.

“Instead of sitting around worrying about what’s broken and not working in Washington, we’ve got to get off the couch and figure out what we can do by ourselves — right here at home, where we live. Volunteer at the food bank. Engage with your schools if something needs to be fixed. Drop in on a neighbor who has no one else to listen,” he wrote. “The opportunities are there, but we need to grasp them. That’s the cure for the breakdown in Washington.”

John Kerry (D)

Asked during a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, if he had any message for Trump, Kerry answered that he should “resign.”

Amy Klobuchar (D)

Klobuchar delivered last week’s weekly Democratic address, criticizing Trump for “holding the hardworking people of America hostage by requiring them to pay ransom to reopen their government,” referring to Trump’s insistence on the inclusion of border wall funding in any appropriations bill to end the government shutdown.

Mitch Landrieu (D)

Landrieu spoke to MSNBC Wednesday where he discussed the government shutdown, saying, “The president is way stuck on stupid right now.”

“There is no mayor in America in his right mind, or her right mind, that would ever think about shutting down the government,” the former New Orleans mayor continued. “This is why the people of America are really frustrated with Washington.”

Terry McAuliffe (D)

Though he didn’t definitively commit to the race, McAuliffe told the New York Posts’s Page Six of a presidential run: “It’s not easy — but I’m a heck of a fighter.”

The Associated Press dug into McAuliffe’s PAC’s 2018 spending and found that it raised over $300,000 in the second half of 2018 and spent money on donations to the state Democratic parties of New Hampshire and Iowa — expenditures that a spokesperson maintains said were not related to a presidential campaign.

“Funds from Common Good were used to support governor candidates and state parties across the country who share Governor McAuliffe’s values,” Carson told the AP, adding that the PAC is closing.

Jeff Merkley (D)

In an interview with the Associated Press, Merkley said he would decide on a presidential run before the end of April.

Beto O’Rourke (D)

O’Rourke continued his tour of the American heartland, visiting Kansas and Colorado this week and blogging about it — to some mockery — along the way.

The New York Times reported Saturday that some Democrats were perturbed by O’Rourke’s individualistic style, and his merely lukewarm embrace of fellow Texas Democrat Gina Ortiz-Jones during the midterms.

Mother Jones dug up a video of O’Rourke covering The Ramones in a onesie and a sheep mask.

Bernie Sanders (D)

Sanders spoke at a rally at South Carolina’s statehouse on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and remained in the Palmetto State for three additional events on Tuesday. During a NAACP forum he said of a presidential campaign, “I’m going to look at it; I’m going to assess it.”

In a GQ profile Thursday, Sanders detailed what he felt his 2016 presidential campaign was able to achieve, even without capturing the Democratic nomination. ““We have had more success in ideologically changing the party than I would have dreamed possible,” he said. “The world has changed.”

Howard Schultz (D)

Advisers to the former Starbucks CEO are probing the possibility of an independent presidential campaign, The Washington Post reported last Friday, citing two sources with knowledge of the conversations. CNN matched the story Monday, quoting a source who said Schultz is “thinking deeply about his future and how he can best serve the country.”

Eric Swalwell (D)

Swalwell visited South Carolina Saturday to speak at the Greenville Women’s March and a gala for the Spartanburg County Democratic Party. During the day, he told the Spartanburg Herald Journal that he is “getting close to deciding” about a presidential run and discussed the role that the state will play in deciding the Democratic nominee.

“Any presidential contender better come through Spartanburg County if they are going to be in the White House,” he said. “It’s a steep mountain to climb for a Democrat in South Carolina since the state is mostly Republican.”

Elizabeth Warren (D)

Though still only in the exploratory committee phase, Warren continues to travel. She held an organizing event in New Hampshire last Friday, attended a Martin Luther King Jr. Day memorial breakfast in Boston Monday, visited Puerto Rico for a “community conversation” Tuesday, and visited South Carolina for another organizing event Wednesday. Friday, Warren stops in Las Vegas for an additional organizing event.

The Massachusetts senator was asked about the state of the presidential race in a CNN interview Tuesday, demurring when questioned whether she was “too far to the left.”

“I’m out talking about the economic issues, about how government works, about what’s happening to middle class families, working families, all across this country — why the path has gotten rockier and rockier. This is what I’ve worked on all of my life,” Warren said. “I’m delighted that there are lots of Democrats who want to talk about ideas, who want to talk about a way to build a stronger America; I believe in that.

Andrew Yang (D)

Yang, an entrepreneur, was interviewed by Rolling Stone this week about his under-the-radar campaign, where he explained why he was running for president.

“I was stunned when I saw the disparities between Detroit and San Francisco or Cleveland and Manhattan. You feel like you’re traveling across dimensions and decades and not just a couple of time zones,” he said. “None of our political leaders are willing to acknowledge the elephant in the room that is tearing our communities apart, in the form of technological change.”

He additionally outlined a key component of his platform: a universal basic income of $1,000 per month for all Americans 18 and older, which would be funded by a value-added tax, explaining: “If you have a town in Missouri with 50,000 adults and they’re all getting $1,000 a month, that’s another $50 million in purchasing power that comes right into that town’s local economy — into car repairs, tutoring or food for your kids, the occasional night out, home repairs. And that money ends up circulating all through that town.”

[hudsonespie]

The Evolving Risk of China's "Gray Zone" Operations

[By Peter Layton]

As competition with China deepens, the nation’s use of gray zone techniques is becoming of increasing importance and interest. China has been using this approach for many years in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, and the India/China border, to name some prominent examples. Understanding the history behind these is important, but equally so is where China’s gray zone stratagems may be heading. In this, we live in the future, not the past. Understanding the direction towards which Chinese gray zone activities may evolve could give early warning about China’s likely next steps. 

This article discusses three forward-leaning aspects: long-term trends, wild cards, and the shape of China’s future gray zone actions. Considered together, these outline future Chinese gray zone possibilities at the strategic and tactical levels, helping avoid potentially nasty surprises. 

Potential Evolutionary Paths

China has been using gray zone techniques for more than a decade, allowing some high-level trends to be discerned. The first trend is that the more China uses such techniques, the more others become involved in one way or another. China prefers to have bi-lateral relationships with other countries rather than work through multi-lateral channels, but gray zone activities tend to work against this. Others notice China’s assertiveness, worry about being picked off individually, and if not join in, at least passively support the country being targeted by China.

The South China Sea dispute has been running the longest and is now noticeably dragging in more countries. Originally, China sought to negotiate bi-laterally and then only grudgingly agreed to accept multilateral discussions under the ASEAN institutional framework. This has further evolved with many countries now issuing diplomatic Notes Verbales so as to involve the United Nations.

Moreover, the dispute has been part of the rationale for the formation of the Quad, comprising the United States, India, Japan, and Australia. The Quad is steadily becoming a more cohesive, pseudo-alliance grouping, as India’s border troubles with China worsen and China steps up pressure on Japan in the East China Sea. More third parties are piling in with the European Union’s (EU) views of China as a “systemic rival.” The United Kingdom, France, and Germany are now sending naval patrols to the South China Sea.

A second trend is that China is making increasing use of non-military means of coercion, particularly coercive diplomacy and cyber. A recent study found that over the past 10 years, there were 152 cases of such coercion affecting 27 countries and the EU, with a very sharp exponential increase in such tactics since 2018. In terms of cyber, China has long been noted for its cyber intrusions to steal intellectual property and industrial secrets. A recent shift though is towards using cyber means to inflict damage on others as part of a gray zone operation. In a notable recent example, China mounted a broad cyber-campaign against India’s electrical power grid that coincided with the 2020 military border clash. Both coercive diplomacy and cyber have major advantages in terms of giving a global reach. China’s gray zone activities can now impact very distant nations, not just those on its borders.

A third trend is a perceptible movement towards more violent actions, even if these do not involve armed attacks. In June 2020, People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers killed twenty Indian soldiers in a border clash. Previously, China’s gray zone actions did not intentionally aim to kill others. The year also saw a PLA Navy warship aim its gun control director at the Philippine Navy’s anti-submarine corvette BRP Conrado Yap in the Spratly Islands. In the naval domain, this can be considered as a hostile act and seems the first time that a Chinese warship has directly threatened a Philippine government vessel in the South China Sea. A second incident involving a PLA Navy warship pointing a laser at a US Navy P-8 maritime patrol aircraft drew criticism from the U.S. Navy as being “unsafe and unprofessional.” This was a new step as such actions, while increasing in the last couple of years, have previously emanated from Chinese fishing vessels, not PLA Navy warships.

Wild Cards

Trends can only tell us so much. There is always a chance of a sharp deviation in the future onto a very different path. Four wild card possibilities are worth discussing.

Embracing Hybrid War. While China is destabilizing the existing international order through its gray zone activities, so also is Russia through hybrid warfare. China may be tempted at some stage to shift up the conflict continuum a notch, move beyond gray zone activities, and embrace Russia’s hybrid model.

Chinese gray zone activities aim to gain lasting strategic advantage over another. In contrast, the Russian armed forces define hybrid war as a war in which the means used, including military operations, support an information campaign. The aim of this campaign is to gain “control over the fundamental worldview and orientation of a state,” shift its geostrategic alignment, and shape its governance. China’s gray zone activities may irritate another, but the Russian hybrid warfare model tries for regime change.

Proxy Wars. China might not move as far as hybrid wars; however, its gray zone activities could be extended to include supporting proxy wars. In the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States fought each other vicariously through their various client states. Wars in countries as varied as Ethiopia, Angola, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan all engaged the superpowers of the day in providing overt and covert support for their chosen sides. If the U.S.-China relationship deteriorates into approximating a new Cold War, proxy wars may make a comeback.

Playing the Russia Card. There is a possibility that Russia and China may choose to actively work together. In this, there are uncertainties over the synergies their combined actions might generate, in particular how Russia might amplify Chinese gray zone efforts. Today, China is mainly leveraging its Russian relationship to fill gaps in its military capabilities and to accelerate its technological innovation.

In terms of gray zone activities, a new development has been the undertaking of joint China-Russian air patrols in the East China Sea. The first in July 2019 was heralded as taking the two nation’s military-to-military cooperation to a new level appropriate to ‘the new era,’ but finished with South Korean fighters firing warning shots when one of the Russian aircraft intruded into Korean territorial airspace. Given this fiasco, a second try was not attempted until late December 2020. 

Nevertheless, such patrols hint at the possibilities of Russia and China at least coordinating actions in their border zones. For example, Russia might conduct hybrid warfare operations in Europe while China ramps up concurrent gray zone activities in the South and East China Seas. Such an approach of working together but separately could tax any Western responses.

Mirror Image. If China is pleased with its gray zone activities, there is a possibility that others might not just take up the technique but use them against China. China has more borders than any other country, leaving considerable space for nefarious actions. Moreover, the Party faces many domestic problems and continually worries about internal stability. A gray zone activity over an extended period, using diverse means, that was ambiguous, stayed within red lines, and exploited the Party weaknesses could be a definite annoyance, shifting the strategic advantage away from China to others. China’s gray zone sword might become two-edged, able to inflict damage on its originator.

The Shape of China’s Future Gray Zone Activities

In general, gray zone activities involve purposefully pursuing political objectives through carefully designed operations; moving cautiously towards goals rather than seeking decisive results quickly; remaining below key escalatory thresholds so as to avoid war; and using all instruments of national power including non-military and non-kinetic tools. These characteristics suggest that in terms of its application in a specific circumstance, gray zone activities have two important variables. These are whether violent or non-violent actions are undertaken and whether non-military or military instruments are used.

The drivers created by these variables implies four possible alternatives as illustrated in the Figure below. These are the manner in which future Chinese gray zone activities might be undertaken. None of these four alternatives are considered more probable than the others, but that which actually occurs is hopefully captured within the wide span of possibilities encompassed.

Figure 1. Possible Chinese Gray Zone Alternative Futures. 

The ‘playing by the rules China’ is an optimistic future where a responsible stakeholder China abides by the rules to which it has agreed with others. The ‘whatever it takes China’ is a minor deterioration from now and is perhaps a near-term prospect. The ‘pushing the envelope China’ is an evolved future where much greater use is made of the PLA but in a non-violent way. The ‘do as you are told China’ is a near worse-case possibility that is arguably on the limits of gray zone activities; there would be a high risk of peace breaking down and serious armed conflict starting. An indicator and warning of this might be the shoot down of an uncrewed air vehicle, such as a Triton maritime surveillance drone.

Long-term trends, wild cards, and the shape of China’s future actions combine to give an overview of the strategic- and tactical-level gray zone possibilities, but the future should not necessarily be thought of as simply getting worse. As gray zone activities are undertaken at the direction of the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership, they could just as easily be wound back towards something approximating the positive ‘playing by the rules China’ future. However, the killing of the twenty Indian soldiers on the border with China is a most worrying development. Prudence would suggest paying close attention to China’s near-to-medium term gray zone activities. This appears a “Danger, Will Robinson” moment where the omens look distinctly gloomy.

Dr. Peter Layton is a Visiting Fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University and an Associate Fellow, Royal United Service Institute (London). A retired RAAF Group Captain, Peter has a doctorate in grand strategy and taught national security strategy at the U.S. National Defense University. 

This article appears courtesy of CIMSEC and is reproduced here in an abbreviated form. It may be found in its original form here.

from Storage Containers https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/the-evolving-risk-of-china-s-gray-zone-operations via http://www.rssmix.com/

[fastworldnews1]

Facebook eyes 10,000 EU jobs to build ‘metaverse’

Facebook  announced plans to hire 10,000 people in the European Union to build the “metaverse”, a virtual reality version of the internet that the tech giant sees as the future.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been a leading voice in Silicon Valley hype around the idea of the metaverse, which would blur the lines between the physical world and the digital one.

The technology might, for example, allow someone to don virtual reality glasses that make it feel as if they’re face-to-face with a friend — when in fact they are thousands of miles apart and connected via the internet.

“The metaverse has the potential to help unlock access to new creative, social, and economic opportunities. And Europeans will be shaping it right from the start,” Facebook said in a blog post.

The European Union hires, spread over the next five years, will include “highly specialised engineers”, but the company otherwise gave few details of its plans for the new metaverse team.

“The EU has a number of advantages that make it a great place for tech companies to invest — a large consumer market, first class universities and, crucially, top quality talent,” the blog post said.

‘A bad reputation to fix’

The announcement comes as Facebook grapples with the fallout of a damaging scandal, major outages of its services, and rising calls for regulation to curb its vast influence.

The company has faced a storm of criticism over the past month after former employee Frances Haugen leaked internal studies showing Facebook knew its sites could be harmful to young people’s mental health.

Andreas Aktoudianakis, EU lead digital policy analyst at the European Policy Centre, noted that Facebook has “a bad reputation to fix” and that the metaverse announcement represented “a positive narrative” in troubled times.

The hiring spree could also lend Facebook some bargaining power as it seeks to influence two mammoth pieces of tech legislation being negotiated by the EU, the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act.

But Aktoudianakis said the EU’s tough tech regulation was in fact one of the reasons why Europe made sense as the location for Facebook’s new metaverse team.

“If there is a place where there is clarity about what you can do with artificial intelligence — at least compared to others — that place is Europe,” he said, pointing to similarly strong regulation on data protection.

“From a company point of view, if you want to start something like the metaverse, I think Europe would be the place to do it.” Zuckerberg predicted in July that Facebook will transition from “primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company” over the next five years.

Facebook bought Oculus, a company that makes virtual reality headsets, for $2 billion in 2014 and has since been developing Horizon, a digital world where people can interact using VR technology.

In August it unveiled Horizon Workrooms, a feature where co-workers wearing VR headsets can hold meetings in a virtual room where they all appear as cartoonish 3D versions of themselves.

Metaverse evangelists point out that the internet is already starting to blur the lines between virtual experiences and “real” ones.

Stars such as pop diva Ariana Grande and the rapper Travis Scott have performed for huge audiences, watching at home, via the hit video game Fortnite.

In Decentraland, another online platform widely seen as a forerunner to the metaverse, you can already get a job as a croupier in its virtual casino.

“No one company will own and operate the metaverse. Like the internet, its key feature will be its openness and interoperability,” Facebook said.

Other companies are pouring millions into developing the technology that could turn a fully-fledged version of the metaverse into reality.

Epic Games, the company behind Fortnite, has raised $1 billion in new funding, with some of that money set to support its vision of the metaverse.

Other tech giants, including Google and Amazon, are meanwhile investing heavily in innovations that could prove crucial to the development of the metaverse, not least cloud computing and data storage.

https://ift.tt/3aV6efi

[opedguy]

Blinken Asks Netahyahu About Iran Nuke Deal

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), May 30, 2021.--U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, 58, consulted with 71-year-old Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about Iran’s role in the latest skirmish between Hamas and the Israel.  U.S. officials find themselves flummoxed over what to do with Hamas, a recognized terrorist group and part of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, with whom Eyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisis negotiated May 20 an end to the 10-day rocket war with Israel.  Everyone knew it would end badly for Hamas with mass casualties and infrastructure damage to the dilapidated Gaza Strip.  U.S. and European Union [EU] officials do not have diplomatic relations or enter into peace negotiations with Hamas, largely because its 1987 charter calls for the destruction of Israel.  Yet it’s beyond ironic that El-Sisi, who views the Muslim Brotherhood as a mortal enemy, negotiated with Hamas.      

       Since seizing Gaza in 2007, Hamas has been the new normal in the Palestinian territories.  While the U.S. and EU officially recognized 85-year-old Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as the official representative of the Palestinian people, Gaza’s 56-year-old leader Ismail Haniyeh represents one half of the Palestinian people.  Haniyeh ignores Abbas because he believes Abbas is too old and too out-of-touch to lead the Palestinian people.  Whatever the misery Haniyeh brought to Gaza with its rocket war with Israel, Hamas also refreshed the global dialogue about Palestinian rights.  Whatever the actual costs in the billions to Gaza, Haniyeh managed, after four-long years with former President Donald Trump, to refocus world attention back on Palestine.  Blinken met with Netanyahu in Jerusalem and Abbas in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

             Meeting with Netanyahu over the fragile ceasefire, Blinken knows that the prime minister’s tenure may be over soon with conservative Yamina Party leader Naftali Bennett announcing he would join with opposition leader Yair Lapid to form a new coalition government as early as Sunday, May 30.  Joining forces Bennett and Lapid could effectively end the12-year rule of Natanyahu, who received high marks for prosecuting the latest skirmish with Hamas.  With Hamas firing largely Iranian rockets at Israel, Blinken wanted to ask Netanyahu about what should be done with Iran.  Blinken’s well aware of upcoming Iraninan presidential elections June 18, Blinken wants to know how any new Iranian Nuke Deal would affect Israel’s national security.  Iran uses Hamas in its ongoing proxy war against Israel much like it supplies missiles-and-cash to Yemen’s Houthi rebels to battle Saudi Arabia.    

         Blinken reassured Netanyahu that whatever happens with any new Iranian Nuke Deal currently underway in Vienna, the U.S. would strengthen its ties with Israel.  Netanyahu told Blinken that without a firm commitment by Iran to stop its proxy wars in Saudi Arabia and Israel, he would oppose any new deal with Iran.  Blinken knows that Iran’s 82-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei seeks to install conservative cleric Ebrahim Raisi to replace moderate President Hassan Rouhani.  Rouhani tired-but-failed to get Khamenei to add moderate candidates to Iran’s presidential list.  But the Ayatollah is committed to find a potential successor as he nears the end of his 30-year-rule as Supreme Leader.  Picking Raisi as president would continue Iran’s anti-Israel policies, prompting Blinken to pause about rubber-stamping a new Nuke Deal.  U.S. and EU officials have no real peace partner in Palestine.        

          Abbas is simply too old and out of touch with more radical trends in the Palestinian population.  While Abbas has served as a U.S.-backed peace partner in the past, he’s shown he doesn’t have the backing of the West Bank population.  Abbas called off parliamentary elections April 30 because he knows that Hamas would likely win a majority.  Hamas won parliamentary elections in 2006, prompting the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007.  If Abbas holds elections in Ramallah, he’d likely be replaced by a new Hamas leader. U.S. and EU officials pretend that Abbas represents the Palestinian people.  Any new parliamentary election, like in 2006, would consolidate more power for Hamas.  U.S. and EU officials have a difficult time recognizing Hamas because its charter calls for the destruction of Israel.  If Hamas wants legitimacy, it needs to change its charter to recognize Israel.    

    Blinken needs a foreign policy success after botching recent attempts with China and Russia.  U.S.-Russian and U.S.-Chinese relation are worse now that any time since the Cold War.  China didn’t appreciate Blinken accusing Beijing March 18 in Anchorage, Alaska of genocide against its Muslim Uyghur population.  Russia didn’t appreciate Blinken demanding Feb. 1 that Russian President Vladimir Putin release 44-year-old Russian dissident Alexi Navalny from a Russian penal colony. Biden didn’t help U.S.-Russian relations when he called Putin as “soulless killer” March 16.  When Biden meets with Putin in Geneva for a summit June 16, he needs to park the hostile rhetoric at the door and deal with a host of cooperative issues, including dealing with regional conflicts in Ukraine and climate change.  Putin’s more than willing to meet Biden halfway on all issues that affect both superpowers

. About the Author

 John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma. 

[xtruss]

Iran Starts Enriching Uranium To 60%, Its Highest Level Ever

— By Jon Gambrell | April 4, 2021 | Associated Press

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran began enriching uranium Friday to its highest-ever purity, edging close to weapons-grade levels, as it attempts to pressure negotiators in Vienna during talks on restoring its nuclear deal with world powers after an attack on its main enrichment site.

A top official said only a few grams an hour of uranium gas would be enriched up to 60% purity — triple its previous level but at a quantity far lower than what the Islamic Republic had been able to produce. Iran also is enriching at an above-ground facility at its Natanz nuclear site already visited by international inspectors, not deep within underground halls hardened to withstand airstrikes.

The narrow scope of the new enrichment provides Iran with a way to quickly de-escalate if it chooses, experts say, but time is narrowing. An Iranian presidential election looms on the horizon as Tehran already threatens to limit international inspections. Israel, suspected of carrying out Sunday’s sabotage at Natanz, also could act again amid a long-running shadow war between the two Middle East rivals.

Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, Iran’s parliament speaker, announced the higher enrichment on Twitter.

“The young and God-believing Iranian scientists managed to achieve a 60% enriched uranium product,” Qalibaf said. “I congratulate the brave nation of Islamic Iran on this success. The Iranian nation’s willpower is miraculous and can defuse any conspiracy.”

The head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, the country’s civilian nuclear arm, later acknowledged the move to 60%. Ali Akbar Salehi told Iranian state television the centrifuges now produce 9 grams an hour, but that would drop to 5 grams an hour in the coming days.

“Any enrichment level that we desire is in our reach at the moment and we can do it at any time we want,” Salehi said.

It wasn’t clear why the first announcement came from Qalibaf, a hard-line former leader in the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard already named as a potential presidential candidate in Iran’s upcoming June election

While 60% is higher than any level Iran previously enriched uranium, it is still lower than weapons-grade levels of 90%. Iran had been enriching up to 20% — and even that was a short technical step to weapons-grade. The deal limited Iran’s enrichment to 3.67%.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors Iran’s nuclear program, did not respond to a request for comment. Earlier this week, it sent its inspectors to Natanz and confirmed Iran was preparing to begin 60% enrichment at an above-ground facility at the site.

Israel, which has twice bombed Mideast countries to stop their nuclear programs, plans to hold a meeting of its top security officials Sunday over the Iranian announcement.

“Israel is determined to defend itself against any attempt to harm its sovereignty or citizens, and will do whatever it takes to prevent this radical and anti-Semitic regime from acquiring nuclear weapons,” Israeli Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi said in Cyprus.

Iran insists its nuclear program is peaceful, though the West and the IAEA say Tehran had an organized military nuclear program up until the end of 2003. An annual U.S. intelligence report released Tuesday maintained the longtime American assessment that Iran isn’t currently trying to build a nuclear bomb.

Iran previously had said it could use uranium enriched up to 60% for nuclear-powered ships. However, the Islamic Republic currently has no such ships in its navy.

The threat of higher enrichment by Iran already had drawn criticism from the U.S. and three European nations in the deal — France, Germany and the United Kingdom. On Friday, European Union spokesman Peter Stano called Iran’s decision “a very worrisome development.”

“There is no credible explanation or civilian justification for such an action on the side of Iran,” Stano said. The Vienna talks aim to “make sure that we go back from such steps that bring Iran further away from delivering on its commitments and obligations.”

Diplomats reconvened Friday in Vienna, with more talks planned Saturday, Russian representative Mikhail Ulyanov said. Chinese negotiator Wang Qun earlier called for doing “away with all disruptive factors by moving forward as swiftly as we can on the work of negotiations, especially by zeroing in on sanction lifting.”

The 2015 nuclear deal, which former President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from in 2018, prevented Iran from stockpiling enough high-enriched uranium to be able to pursue a nuclear weapon if it chose in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.

In Washington, President Joe Biden said Tehran’s latest step was contrary to the deal. “We do not support and do not think it’s at all helpful,” he said. But he added that the Vienna talks had not been sidetracked.

“We are nonetheless pleased that Iran has agreed to continue to engage in indirect discussions with us on how we move forward and what is needed to get back” into the nuclear deal, he said. “It’s premature to make a judgment as to what the outcome will be, but we’re still talking.”

The weekend attack at Natanz was initially described only as a blackout in its electrical grid — but later Iranian officials began calling it an attack.

One Iranian official referred to “several thousand centrifuges damaged and destroyed” in a state TV interview. However, no other official has offered that figure and no images of the aftermath have been released.

In the coming weeks, Iran has threatened to further impede IAEA inspections and potentially destroy video recordings it now holds of its facilities. Meanwhile, it continues to use advanced centrifuges and gain know-how in high enrichment, something that worries nonproliferation experts.

“Because the deal has started to unravel, Iran has begun to acquire more knowledge about how to operate more advanced machines,” said Daryl G. Kimball, the executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association. “This particular operation, enriching to 60%, is going to give it even more information.”

Borrowing a term used to describe diluting high-enriched uranium, Kimball added: “That knowledge cannot be down-blended. It cannot be reversed.”

— Associated Press writers Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran; Fares Akram in Gaza City, Gaza Strip; Samuel Petrequin in Brussels; and David Rising and Frank Jordans in Berlin contributed to this report.

[newstfionline]

Headlines

More people are traveling the world than ever. But the number coming to America is dropping. (Washington Post) Travelers can’t get enough of globe-trotting. But have they had enough of the United States? According to the World Tourism Organization, a United Nations agency, the number of international tourist arrivals around the world reached 1.4 billion last year. That represented a 6% increase, and the organization forecast the number to grow by another 3 or 4% in 2019. But in the first half of 2019, the number of international visitors coming to America has actually dropped nearly 1.7%. That’s according to preliminary data from the Department of Commerce’s National Travel and Tourism Office, which shows slightly more than 37 million foreign travelers came to the country between January and June.

Has paying for college become a moral obligation for parents? (LI) That’s what New York University’s Caitlin Zaloom has found, after conducting interviews with 160 middle class college students and their parents for her new book, Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost. A college education is now considered the prime gateway to the middle class, leaving parents with immense pressure to clear the way for their kids to not only attend any university, but the best one possible, no matter the cost. Amid rising tuition and student debt rates, such well-intentioned efforts can yield financial pain and uncertain payoffs.

Dorian topples crane, knocks out power in eastern Canada (AP) Dorian arrived on Canada’s Atlantic coast Saturday with heavy rain and powerful winds, toppling a construction crane in Halifax and knocking out power for more than 300,000 people a day after the storm wreaked havoc on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Residents of Nova Scotia braced for heavy rainfall and potential flooding along the coast, as officials in Halifax urged people to secure heavy objects that might become projectiles.

Stranded North Carolinians take stock of Dorian’s damage (AP) As the sky cleared and floodwaters receded Saturday, residents of North Carolina’s Outer Banks began to assess the damage wrought by Hurricane Dorian. Steve Harris has lived on Ocracoke Island for most of the last 19 years. He’s ridden out eight hurricanes, but he said he’d never seen a storm bring such devastation to his community, which is accessible only by boat or air and is popular with tourists for its undeveloped beaches. “We just thought it was gonna be a normal blow,” Harris, a semi-retired contractor, said Friday. “But the damage is going to be severe this time. This is flooding of biblical proportions.”

Guatemalan Congress Approves Controversial State of Siege Declaration (Reuters) Guatemala’s Congress voted overwhelmingly on Saturday to approve a temporary state of siege in six northeastern provinces, a measure designed to tighten security after several soldiers were killed by suspected drug traffickers.

UK’s Johnson Sticking to Brexit Plans, Says Foreign Minister (Reuters) Prime Minister Boris Johnson remains determined to pull Britain out of the European Union on Oct. 31 come what may, his foreign minister said on Sunday.

Turkey’s Erdogan says will discuss Syria with Trump at U.N. (Reuters) Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday he expects to meet U.S. President Donald Trump at the United Nations later this month to discuss military operations in northeast Syria, where Turkey plans to resettle one million Syrian refugees.

Russia and Ukraine trade prisoners, each fly 35 to freedom (AP) Russia and Ukraine conducted a major prisoner exchange that freed 35 people detained in each country and flew them to the other, a deal that could help advance Russia-Ukraine relations and end five years of fighting in Ukraine’s east. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who was elected in a landslide in April, has promised new initiatives to resolve the war in eastern Ukraine. The exchange of prisoners also raises hope in Russia for the reduction of European sanctions imposed because of its role in the conflict.

Trump says he canceled peace talks with Taliban over attack (Reuters) U.S. President Donald Trump on Saturday said he canceled peace talks with Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders after the insurgent group said it was behind an attack in Kabul that killed an American soldier and 11 other people.

Iraqi Official: 4 Blasts Hit Baghdad, 14 Wounded (AP) A senior Iraqi security official says four bombs have exploded in the capital, Baghdad, wounding a total of 14 people.

UN Nuclear Official in Iran as Atomic Accord Unravels (AP) The acting director-general of the United Nations nuclear watchdog is in Tehran for meetings after Iran announced it would begin using advanced centrifuges prohibited by its 2015 atomic deal with world powers.

Typhoon kills 3 in South Korea before moving to North Korea (AP) One of the most powerful typhoons to ever hit South Korea swept along the country’s coast on Saturday, toppling trees, grounding planes and causing at least three deaths before moving on to North Korea. Typhoon Lingling knocked out power to more than 161,000 homes across South Korea, including on the southern island of Jeju. After hitting Jeju, the storm remained offshore as it moved up South Korea’s west coast on Saturday morning before making landfall in North Korea in the afternoon.

Tokyo Cancels Flights, Trains Ahead of Typhoon Faxai (Reuters) Japan braced for Typhoon Faxai on Sunday cancelling trains and flights in Tokyo with destructive winds of up to 216 kph (134 mph) and heavy rain expected to hit the region overnight, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.

China’s Trade With US Shrinks as Tariff War Worsens (AP) China’s trade with the United States is falling sharply as the two sides prepare for more negotiations with no sign of progress toward ending a worsening tariff war that threatens global economic growth.

Hong Kong police fire tear gas after fending off airport protest (Reuters) Hong Kong police prevented anti-government protesters from blocking access to the airport on Saturday, but fired tear gas for a second night running in the Chinese-ruled city’s densely populated district of Mong Kok in the 14th week of unrest.

Pope, on Madagascar Visit, Condemns Clan Culture of Privilege, Graft (Reuters) Pope Francis, on a visit to Madagascar, on Sunday condemned what he said was its clan culture of privilege and corruption that allows a very few to live in wealth while the vast majority languish in grinding poverty.