Thursday, April 26, 2018

In the news, Friday, April 6, 2018


________

APR 05      INDEX      APR 07
________


Information from some sites may not be reliable, or may not be vetted.
Some sources may require subscription.

________

from Asia Times Online

Trump brandishes art of the deal flair with new, bigger tariff threat
Beijing counters that negotiations haven’t started, impossible under these conditions

Generals board PLA’s gravy train, but the next stop is jail
China is under pressure to make its military spending more transparent, but has a big problem: not even the PLA knows where the money trail leads

________

from Competitive Enterprise Institute
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS

Option for States Dealing with Illegal Teacher Union Strikes
An uptick in teacher union strikes has occurred over past few months. Teachers have abandoned students in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma with rumblings of a potential strike in Arizona. What is spurring this increase in union walk-outs? Governing magazine puts forth the idea that the labor laws in these Republican-dominated states, which limit union collective bargaining privileges, may be a contributing factor. But anyone who has been watching the U.S. Supreme Court case Janus v. AFSCME, which could eliminate public-sector union’s ability to compel workers to pay union fees, might have been able to predict labor unions would flex their power by walking off the job.

________

from Conciliar Post

As the whales demonstrated, everything we know—everything—is given to us. What we discover we did not create. We can set up all the right conditions, prepare ourselves completely . . . and ultimately have no control over what is revealed (or not revealed) to us. Thank goodness there are things made known to us independent of our efforts. Not only does such disclosure add color to life, but it also serves as the distasteful medicine we desperately need to subdue the fever of our pride in progress. Knowledge, I suspect, has become the idol of our day.

________

from Defense News

Germany, France to move ahead on sixth-generation combat aircraft
Plans for a Franco-German combat aircraft are set to kick off in earnest at the Berlin Air Show later this month, officials told French media on the sidelines of a meeting of the two countries’ defense ministers in Paris on Thursday. The idea of a joint “systèmedecombat aérien dufutur,” or SCAF, came out of a bilateral Cabinet decision last summer, part of a larger effort to promote the Berlin-Paris relationship in a militarily stronger Europe. The aircraft program would initially be led by Germany and France, and later opened to other European states.

________

from EUobserver
Media/News Company in Brussels, Belgium

Opportunity not to be missed in Greece-Macedonia row
A long-running row over the ex-Yugolsav republic of Macedonia's name - which it shares with a region of neighbouring Greece, shows that words matter in EU politics.

Data breach affected 2.7 million people in EU, says Facebook
US social media giant Facebook has told the European Commission that information about up to 2.7 million people in the EU may have been compromised, in the scandal around UK consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. It is the first time a full figure for the entire 28 EU member states has emerged.

Orban, the 'anti-Merkel', emboldens European right
When in 2010 Viktor Orban returned to power in Hungary with a landslide two-thirds majority he promised a revolution. He delivered: his government rewrote economic rules, challenging foreign banks, imposing special taxes, he rolled back the rule of law, cracked down on a free press, changed election laws.

Germany's Puigdemont release puts Spanish court in bind
The German ruling not to extradite Catalan ex-president Carles Puigdemont to Spain will have major ramifications for the further course of Spain's legal action against the organisers of the independence referendum. By deciding that Puigdemont cannot be extradited on the charges of 'rebellion' – and to be released on bail on Friday morning – the German court in the state of Schleswig-Holstein on Thursday (5 April) has effectively intervened in the legal affairs of a fellow EU country.

________

from Mises Institute
[Information from this site may not be reliable.]

The Myth They Used to Pass Canada's Universal Healthcare
Tom Kent was the senior government policy person in Canada when the Medical Care Act was passed in 1966. Kent described the impetus to universal health care: "...many poorer people just did not get care when it was needed." Tom Kent wanted us to believe there was a crisis whereby health care was being denied to many poor people, thus justifying the imposition of universal health care in Canada. The evidence does not support his story.

________

from Reuters
International news agency headquartered in London, England

Special Report: How a secret Russian airlift helps Syria's Assad
3:21 AM  In a corner of the departures area at Rostov airport in southern Russia, a group of about 130 men, many of them carrying overstuffed military-style rucksacks, lined up at four check-in desks beneath screens that showed no flight number or destination. The chartered Airbus A320 waiting on the tarmac for them had just flown in from the Syrian capital, Damascus, disgorging about 30 men with tanned faces into the largely deserted arrivals area. Most were in camouflage gear and khaki desert boots. Some were toting bags from the Damascus airport duty-free. The men were private Russian military contractors, the latest human cargo in a secretive airlift using civilian planes to ferry military support to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his six-year fight against rebels, a Reuters investigation of the logistical network behind Assad’s forces has uncovered.

________

from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

________

from The Times and The Sunday Times
London, UK

Salisbury poison ‘made at Russia’s Porton Down’
A Russian military research base has been identified as the source of the nerve agent used at Salisbury in a British intelligence briefing for its allies, The Times has learnt. It was used to persuade world leaders that Moscow was behind the poisoning and said that the novichok chemical was manufactured at the Shikhany facility in southwest Russia.

________


No comments:

Post a Comment