Sunday, September 20, 2020

In the news, Monday, September 7, 2020

 

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SEP 06      INDEX      SEP 08
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from ABC News (& affiliates)
TV Network in New York, New York

A key opposition leader in Belarus has disappeared in the country's capital, Minsk, after another weekend of mass protests against the rule of embattled President Alexander Lukashenko. Maria Kolesnikova, the central opposition figure inside the Eastern European nation, was seen being bundled into a vehicle by men in plainclothes, according to independent Belarusian news outlet Tut.By. Kolesnikova’s press representative, Gleb German, confirmed to ABC News that their team had had "no contact" with her Monday. Her whereabouts, along with that of two other leaders involved in the opposition's Coordination Council, Anton Ronenkov and Ivan Kravtsov, are unknown and their lawyers are looking for them, according to German.

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from DW News (Deutsche Welle)
Broadcasting & Media Production Company in Bonn, Germany

The poisoning of Russia's opposition leader Alexei Navalny with the nerve agent Novichok has raised tensions between Germany and Russia. The affair is casting doubt on the future of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline being built to carry Russian gas to Germany.

All eyes are on the chancellor as calls for Germany to end the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline grow louder. By pulling the plug on the pipeline, Angela Merkel could make history all over again, DW's Miodrag Soric writes.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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In the news, Sunday, September 6, 2020

 

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from BBC News (UK)

Hundreds of people have been arrested in Belarus following a fourth consecutive weekend of protests against President Alexander Lukashenko. At least 633 people were detained during the unrest, the interior ministry said on Monday. Thousands more defied heavy security and rallied in the capital Minsk, where troops and water cannon were deployed. The demonstrators want Mr Lukashenko to resign after his re-election last month amid allegations of ballot-rigging. Mass unrest since then has seen at least four people killed and hundreds injured as the government tries to stamp out dissent. A number of opposition figures have fled the country. On Saturday, activist Olga Kovalkova became the latest to say she had taken refuge in neighbouring Poland amid threats of imprisonment.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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from Vatican News
Religious Organization · Media/News Company

Massive protests were underway in Belarus on Sunday, with demonstrators demanding that long-time President Alexander Lukashenko step down.

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In the news, Saturday, September 5, 2020

 

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SEP 04      INDEX      SEP 06
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from American Military News
Media/News Company in New York, NY

Two-thirds of Americans think quarantining during coronavirus pandemic has made them a better person, found new hobbies, study finds
Many Americans think they’ve become better people, have found new hobbies and have decided they want to spend more time with family due to the coronavirus pandemic. A new study, commissioned by Coravin and conducted by OnePoll, found that 70% learned more about themselves and that 55 percent of respondents were a bit embarrassed by some of the things they valued pre-quarantine, according to People.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

So many people were now driving autos in Spokane that parking was a serious downtown problem. The city was trying to help solve it by opening up the space under the elevated train tracks as a city parking lot. The Spokesman-Review ran a photo of this new lot with a headline saying, “Municipal Parking Grounds in Heart of City Prove Valuable to Motorists.” It had space for several hundred cars. A caption noted that this would help with the city’s congestion – but it actually accommodated only “a comparative few” of the cars jamming downtown.

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from Sputnik
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, MIXED, Broadcasting & Media Production Company out of Moscow, Russia

Anti-mask and anti-lockdown sentiment is growing throughout Europe, leading to mass demonstrations against what they consider to be an encroaching government tyranny. Hundreds flocked to Edinburgh's Parliament Square on Saturday in a massive demonstration against mandatory mask-wearing and further lockdown measures in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

Last month, President Donald Trump warned that if implemented, former Vice President and current Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's tax plan may result in an unprecedented economic depression in the US. In an interview with Fox News on Friday, the Forbes editor-in-chief cautioned that a possible Joe Biden presidency would be "a disaster" for the US economy. Steve Forbes made the remarks while touching upon the Democratic presidential hopeful's tax policy, which specifically stipulates raising taxes on those wealthy individuals who earn more than $400,000 per year. This is expected to collect approximately $3.2 trillion over the following 10 years. Forbes warned that such a policy would "trash" the nation's economy, earlier hit by fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to specialists, due to the bounty of ripened fruit at this time of the year many wasps will gorge on their fermenting juices, making them "tipsy and extra bold". Britons are facing an "invasion from Germany", as millions of yellow jacket wasps (Vespula Germanica) have migrated to the country, Metro reported. Those wasps are bigger than usual ones and are believed to be more aggressive, with an ability to give a way more painful sting.

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Saturday, September 19, 2020

In the news, Tuesday, June 29, 2004

 

 

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JUN 28      INDEX      JUN 30
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, WA

Looking back: Spokane pioneers in 1926
Remembering early days
A dozen members of the Spokane Pioneers Society were photographed at the Masonic Temple for this Dec. 4, 1926, Spokane Chronicle picture. More than 300 pioneers who lived in the state for at least 50 years gathered to discuss the “good old days.” Pictured from left were Mrs. E.H. Wimpy, F.H. Hayfield, Mrs. Paul Walsh, R.E. Bigham, Charles E. Berry, Tom Morris, Mrs. E.S. Babb, F.H. Benge, Mrs. A.S. Johnson, M. Thomas Newlon, Mrs. Ida Sartz and E.S. Babb.


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Tuesday, September 15, 2020

30 Quotes Attributed to Plato


“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”

“Courage is knowing what not to fear.”

“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”

“Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.”

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”


“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”

“Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”

“The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.”

“According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.”


“…and when one of them meets the other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment…”

“Love is a serious mental disease.”

“Never discourage anyone…who continually makes progress, no matter how slow.”

“One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”

“Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws”


“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”

“There is truth in wine and children”

“Ignorance, the root and stem of every evil.”

“I’m trying to think, don’t confuse me with facts.”

“If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.”



“The measure of a man is what he does with power.”

“Those who tell the stories rule society.”

“The madness of love is the greatest of heaven’s blessings”

“Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge. ”

“There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.”


“Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.”

“When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them.”

“There are two things a person should never be angry at, what they can help, and what they cannot.”

“In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill… we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.”

“How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state? ”


Saturday, September 12, 2020

In the news, Friday, September 4, 2020


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SEP 03      INDEX      SEP 05
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from National Review  RIGHT BIAS

The posts are a staple of liberal social media: Attacking the greedy billionaire who could “easily” give everyone $1 million. “Jeff Bezos could give every single American $3 million and he’d still have $188.8 billion.” “Imagine if @JeffBezos decided to give $1,000,000 to each of those 33 million out of work. It’s pocket change to him.” It is not just random social-media postings. In March, MSNBC’s Brian Williams went on the air and endorsed a tweet that stated: “Bloomberg spent $500 million on ads. U.S. Population, 327 million . . . He could have given each American $1 million.” His guest, New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay, concurred that “It’s an incredible way of putting it. It’s true. It’s disturbing.” It is not true. Instead it is a spectacular failure of arithmetic. Michael Bloomberg’s $500 million in ad purchases could have otherwise given each American $1.52 — not $1 million. And dividing Jeff Bezos’s $200 billion in wealth equally among 330 million Americans would provide $600 each, not $1 million or $3 million.

There’s a giant scheme afoot to disenfranchise voters in November — it’s called mail-in balloting. Mail-in voting has, like many things in our politics, taken on the aspect of tribal warfare — if President Donald Trump is vociferously against it, Democrats must be vociferously for it, and vice versa.Absentee voting is unquestionably less secure than in-person voting, but there’s no evidence of widespread fraud. Nor is there evidence that, at least prior to this campaign, mail-in voting has favored Democrats, as the president believes. Trump shouldn’t be trying to delegitimize the process, a point that journalists have often made. Yet there hasn’t been enough focus on the other side of the equation: Does it make sense for Democrats to be fervent boosters of a process that may lead to a historic number of votes cast in a presidential election not counting? Stacey Abrams, call your office.

The current period of national unrest and racial turmoil began in Minnesota. It was in Minneapolis that George Floyd died in police custody, sparking protests and a renewed emphasis on criminal-justice reform nationwide. It was in Minneapolis that protests first descended into riots, with other cities soon following suit. Yet while most of the country will eventually move on from this turmoil, Minneapolis will be among the cities facing the greatest difficulty in recovering from the financial devastation that the riots left behind.  The economic fallout will haunt it for decades to come.

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from Orthodox Christianity – orthochristian.com
Religious Organization in Moscow, Russia

Philaret Denisenko, the “Patriarch” of the schismatic “Kiev Patriarchate,” has tested positive for COVID-19. Denisenko, 91, the former canonical Metropolitan of Kiev, is undergoing treatment in a hospital after the virus was discovered during routine testing, and his state of health is satisfactory, reports the site of the “Kiev Patriarchate.” A few days ago, Alexander Drabinko, a former bishop of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church who went into schism with the “Orthodox Church of Ukraine,” also reported that he has the coronavirus, though without symptoms. In June, Symeon Shostatsky, the only other bishop who went into schism together with Drabinko, was being treated in the hospital for the coronavirus. He has since recovered.

The cross on the grave of a royal Greek couple at the cemetery at the Tatoi Palace outside Athens was found vandalized on Monday. The Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports stated that police found the cross on the grave of King Paul I of Greece and Queen Frederica broken into three pieces during a routine afternoon patrol, reports Royal Central. King Paul ruled from 1947 until his death in 1964, being succeeded by his son, Constantine II, who currently heads the deposed Greek royal family. Queen Frederica, born Princess of Great Britain and Ireland and Prince of Brunswick- Lüneburg, was Queen Consort during Paul I’s reign, thereafter Queen Mother.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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In the news, Thursday, September 3, 2020


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SEP 02      INDEX      SEP 04
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from Competitive Enterprise Institute

What determines whether your child school is open this fall? Apparently, the strength of the teachers local union. That was what analysts found using data on school openings and the relative strength of those school districts’ unions. Corey A. DeAngelis, director of school choice at free market Reason Foundation, and Christos A. Makridis, assistant research professor at Arizona State University, based their findings on reporting from the trade publication Education Week. They found that every percentage point of teacher union membership at the state level corresponded with a 1.5 percent point lower chance that a school district would offer in-person instruction this fall. States that had right-to-work laws, which are associated with weaker unions, were 14 percent more likely to offer in-person classes than states that didn’t have the laws.

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from The Hill
LEAST BIASED, MOSTLY FACTUAL, News & Media Website in Washington, D.C.

Ending counterproductive, counterintuitive regulation
Early in the COVID-19 crisis, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) chided the Trump administration’s response and demanded “testing, testing, testing.” Yet, when the administration recently rescinded a Food and Drug Administration policy that caused many of the early testing delays, Pelosi’s colleague Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, declared the action “deeply concerning” and demanded an investigation. The administration’s early handling of the pandemic was far from flawless, but its curb on FDA regulation of laboratory-developed diagnostic tests should be applauded, not criticized. When the first COVID-19 cases were detected in the United States in January, several academic and hospital laboratories offered to create tests for the novel coronavirus but were thwarted by the FDA and Centers for Disease Control. A research lab at the University of Washington that had already collected nasal swabs for an ongoing study of influenza started to test the samples for coronavirus but was ordered to stop. The FDA insisted no COVID-19 tests could be used without its say-so, which usually means lengthy premarket approval or clearance. The declaration of a public health emergency gave the agency authority to issue expedited emergency use authorizations. But the only authorization FDA granted during February was for a CDC-developed test that proved defective. It wasn’t until Feb. 29 that the agency relented and allowed hospital and academic laboratories to use their own tests in advance of seeking emergency authorization, a move that kick-started the wide-scale testing necessary to combat the pandemic.

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from Hoover Institution
Nonprofit Organization in Stanford, California

The Army Marches Into The Future
During a public speech last week, Army Chief of Staff General James C. McConville called for rapid transformation of the U.S. Army to deal with new domains of warfare, particularly the electronic, cyberspace, and space domains. The Army has been seeking to adapt to “multi-domain operations” for several years, but McConville and others are dissatisfied with the rate of progress. With the outbreak of war possible at any time, they argue, the transformation has to take place at breakneck pace. Central to the Army’s transformation is the “Multi Domain Task Force”—a combat-ready unit equipped to fight in all domains simultaneously. The concept was initially fielded at the Rim of the Pacific exercise in 2018, and is being expanded to Europe. The task force possesses an array of assets that includes aviation, unmanned surveillance, air defense, electronic warfare, cyber, and space, as well as the traditional assets of land warfare.

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from Orthodox Christianity – orthochristian.com
Religious Organization in Moscow, Russia

The infamous terrorist group ISIS was planning for the last month and a half to attack Agia Sophia and other sites and to kidnap senior Turkish statemen and politicians to Syria, though Turkish police managed to foil the group’s plans. ISIS was attempting to form hit-teams of 10-12 people to carry out the attacks, Minister of the Interior Süleyman Soylu announced after Mahmut Özden, codenamed Abu Hamzi, the so-called “Emir of Turkey,” was arrested, reports the Hurriyet Daily News.

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from RenewableEnergyWorld.com

The U.S. Department of Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation is seeking proposals to develop pumped-storage hydroelectric power using Lake Roosevelt in Grand Coulee, Wash. Lake Roosevelt, impounded by Grand Coulee Dam, is the main storage reservoir on the Columbia River for the U.S. The reservoir is lowered in the spring, to make room for the spring runoff and prevent flooding on the lower Columbia River. Operation of Grand Coulee Dam requires the release of water from Lake Roosevelt through the dam for power generation. The project has a capacity of 6,809 MW.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

For drivers stymied by the many one-way streets in downtown Spokane today, the story began in the mid-1960s. A new east-west freeway, soon to be named Interstate 90, was under construction, and it prompted the city to make Lincoln and Monroe streets into a couplet to handle increased traffic. They were also working on a Washington-Stevens couplet, not for a freeway interchange, but to better move north-south traffic through the downtown area. Main and Trent avenues also became a couplet. Eastbound traffic would take Main Avenue, where stores including The Bon Marché, The Crescent and JC Penney were the focus of downtown shopping.

Unless you are a teacher, were a teacher or live with a teacher, you don’t really know what teachers do all day. Nor do you really understand how much teachers do outside of the classroom. Traditional home-schooling parents already know. This year, every parent gets to find out. And every teacher has to let them. The best predictor of academic success has always been parental involvement, regardless of parental education level. It’s why students graduating from structured home-school or charter school programs perform at a higher level than the broad population of public school students, regardless of household income.

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In the news, Wednesday, September 2, 2020


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SEP 01      INDEX      SEP 03
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from Asia Times
LEAST BIASED, HIGH;  News & Media Website based in Hong Kong

China on Tuesday declined to explain why an Australian journalist working as an anchor for state TV has been detained without charge for at least two weeks, the latest case to fray relations between Beijing and Canberra. Cheng Lei, an anchor for CGTN, China’s English-language state broadcaster, has been held since at least August 14 but Australian diplomats say Beijing has given no reason for her detention. While the cause of her detention remains a mystery, she has written a number of Facebook posts critical of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Beijing’s approach to the coronavirus outbreak.

Owners will tell you that Toyota’s venerable FJ-Series Land Cruiser has a reputation for off-road 4×4 prowess in any kind of terrain or weather conditions — but what about off-planet adventures? Back in 2019, Toyota and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced plans for a hydrogen fuel-cell lunar rover. According to Green Car Reports, the vehicle now has a name — the Toyota Lunar Cruiser. Toyota and JAXA expect to launch the Lunar Cruiser in the latter half of this decade, the report said.

In 2001, finding the Pentagon at 500 knots in a commercial airliner may have been challenging for an al-Qaeda suicide pilot — but a dedicated cruise missile of today would have no trouble finding it. That attack killed 125 and forced a partial evacuation. The Defense Department showed impressive resilience: Even as one side of the building collapsed, its command center kept functioning, writes James Hasik of Defense News. In 2019, half of Saudi Arabia’s oil refining was temporarily incapacitated by a barrage of just two dozen Iranian missiles. More ominous was the total failure of the kingdom’s air defenses to defend against or even detect the attack before the first impact. Highly precise, long-range weapons are readily available to America’s enemies. In that context, contemplate the possibility of not a singular attack upon the Pentagon, but one with missiles slamming into all fives sides, and down through the “bullseye” center court, the report said. With its concentrated culture of scripted updates, hostility to analysis and mid-century office technologies, “The Building” is much of the problem. Emptying it permanently could help multiple, and hopefully better, military cultures flourish. What really matters is dispersing that concentration of leadership beyond one building in northern Virginia, lest someday America loses it all at once.

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from DW News (Deutsche Welle)
Broadcasting & Media Production Company in Bonn, Germany

Leaders from around the world have expressed condemnation over news that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was the target of an assassination attempt. Moscow, however, claims it knows nothing.

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from HumanProgress.org
Education Website

You almost certainly woke up this morning in a structure with artificial bedrock made from it. It is the abrasive compound in your toothpaste, in the porcelain basin, the tile grout, and the silicone of your bathroom. It is in the glass display of your mobile phone and in the road on which you drove to work. It is in the chip that powered your computer and in the optical fiber that transmitted the data. All of that and much more was made possible through the use of sand. The tiny grains of silicon dioxide that we commonly call quartz sand is used in tens of thousands of critical applications to advance civilization's flourishing. Humans have been using sand in the manufacturing of glass, the casting of metals, and as a building material for thousands of years; however, at no other point in history has sand been a more integral part of human civilization than during the modern age.

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from National Review  RIGHT BIAS

I keep getting reassured that House speaker Nancy Pelosi is a master strategist who earns all of that glowing press coverage. Today Pelosi insisted she had been “set up” by the hair salon where she had her hair done this week, and that the salon owes her an apology.

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from Orthodox Christianity – orthochristian.com
Religious Organization in Moscow, Russia

Turkish authorities on Wednesday demolished a historic Greek Orthodox church in the region of Bursa, north-western Turkey, which had been abandoned. The Georgios Greek Orthodox Church, known as the “Hagia Sophia” of Bursa, was destroyed amid warnings over the safety hazard posed by the structure seven years after the regional Directorate General of Pious Foundations took over the building from Bursa’s Nilüfer municipality, according to reports from the news website Duvar.

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from Reuters
International news agency headquartered in London, UK

Seven years after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful - and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth. In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans’ telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may well have been unconstitutional.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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