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from Asia Times
LEAST BIASED, HIGH; News & Media Website based in Hong Kong
Ever since President Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999, Russia has steadily lost influence in neighboring countries such as Ukraine and Georgia, and as far away as Cuba. Now, however, it is attempting to rebuild international influence with a presence in Sudan, thereby inserting itself more firmly into security issues – and eventually energy ones – in northeast Africa, the Middle East and further afield. Moscow is planning to build a naval base in Sudan – no completion date is yet apparent – that will be able to berth up to four warships at a time, including nuclear-powered vessels. The deal with Sudan also will allow Russia the right to use Sudanese airspace.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro seemed to be walking on a tightrope, apparently favoring cooperation with China at the recent BRICS summit but doing his best to ban Huawei and Chinese-made vaccines from Brazil. These contradictory postures risk sinking the Brazilian economy and worsening the country’s Covid-19 epidemic. At the 12th BRICS Summit last month, Bolsonaro pledged to work with the other four leaders (of Russia, India, China and South Africa) to address Covid-19 and economic recovery in the post-pandemic period. God only knows that Bolsonaro needs the support of his fellow BRICS leaders because it is the third-worst-hit country, after the US and India, in the world, in terms of infections and deaths from the disease.
Forty-two years ago, Iran was a crucial party to the alliance of Western powers, crowned by US president Jimmy Carter as “an island of stability in one of the most troubled areas of the world.” Today, the same country, having undergone a political metamorphosis, is the bête noire of that alliance, aggregated by George W Bush into an “Axis of Evil,” blamed as culpable for a catalogue of challenges facing humanity. As a comeuppance for its post-1979 policies and actions seen by the world as destructive and malign, Iran has been disciplined with unsparing economic sanctions. The United States, the foremost enforcer of these punitive measures, oversees sanctions regimes targeting nearly 30 countries. Yet the sanctions on Iran are more broad-ranging, forceful and sophisticated than any country in history has ever been subjected to. ... In the case of Iran, there are nearly 85 million human beings who have been helplessly bearing the brunt of this perdition, only to witness their economies shrinking, their purchasing power eroding, their civil liberties vanishing, their international mobility tapering off, their educational opportunities ebbing away, their health deteriorating and their jobs slipping out of their grasp.
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from Crosscut
News & Media Website in Seattle, WA.
Nine months into the pandemic, the state’s unemployment system is still rife with issues, and thousands are stuck in limbo. ... As of Dec. 5, the agency said 1.8% of people who had filed for unemployment since March were still waiting for ESD to resolve their claims. But with this year’s deluge of unemployment applicants, 1.8% still amounts to nearly 27,000 people. And, while ESD normally aims for claims with issues to be resolved within three weeks, the department is now taking nearly 10 weeks to resolve complicated claims, on average.
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from HumanProgress.org
Education Website
Our eighteenth Center of Progress is Edinburgh. The city was at the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment – a vital period in intellectual history that spanned the 18th and early 19th centuries. The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment made important breakthroughs in economics, mathematics, architecture, medicine, poetry, chemistry, theatre, engineering, portraiture, and geology.
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
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This week’s subject is the technology behind WA Notify, the nickname for Washington Exposure Application. While it will be another layer in the Swiss cheese model for reducing the inherent risks of living with an endemic virus, it won’t be an easy fix. It has more holes than cheese.
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from Sputnik
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, MIXED, Broadcasting & Media Production Company out of Moscow, Russia
In a recent speech to the nation, 74-year-old King Carl XVI Gustaf described 2020 as a terrible year, emphasising that Sweden has failed to save lives during the coronavirus pandemic. "I believe we have failed. We have a large number of people who have died, and that is terrible. It is something we all suffer together", Carl XVI Gustaf said, as quoted by national broadcaster SVT. "The Swedish people have suffered enormously in difficult conditions", he added. "You think of all the people who have been unable to say farewell to their deceased family members. I think it is a heavy and traumatic experience not to be able to say a warm goodbye", he added about the public health restrictions.
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