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Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 01:35

(The monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI) is scheduled for release by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Thursday, January 12th at 8:30 AM Eastern Time.) The overall inflation rate in November was just 0.1 percent, held down by a 2.0 percent drop in gas prices. However, inflation in the core index was also moderate, coming […]

The post Inflation Preview: What to Look for in the December CPI appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 01:28

A few recent headlines reveal the painfully inhumane, dangerously volatile state of U.S. relations with its own home region, the continent of North America. A record-breaking 2.76 million border crossings from Mexico filled homeless shelters to the bursting point in cities nationwide in 2022. This year, the possible cessation of Covid restrictions could allow tens of thousands more migrants, now huddling in the cold of northern Mexico, to surge across the border, as some are already able to do. Most of those refugees are Central Americans, fleeing cities ravaged by gang warfare and farms devastated by climate change. The inept U.S. response to such a disturbing world ranges from the Biden administration’s nervously biding its time without a plan in... Read more

Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 01:17

CEPR has long been a leader in examining economic and political developments in Latin America. Highlights of our work in 2022 included the following:  Co-Director Mark Weisbrot joined Joseph E. Stiglitz to author this op-ed for Foreign Policy on the February 2022 agreement between Argentina and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The piece highlighted that […]

The post CEPR Spotlight: Latin America appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 01:07
Skwawkbox will be in London later this month to livestream ‘#FreeTheTruth: Secret Power, Media Freedom and Democracy‘, an event in support of wrongly-jailed Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, featuring leading international journalists. The livestream will run on Skwawkbox and Socialist Telly and will be embedded in the organisers’ pages and feeds. Streaming links will be published […]
Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 01:00

Yona Harvey is a poet of the speculative, a poet of other worlds—other words—that turns out to be our worlds and words. Her first full-length collection of poems was Hemming the Water, which won the Kate Tufts in 2013, and her second was You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love which appeared when the pandemic was six months old. It’s not just that Mars is far from disturbed Earth, but also that it’s alien, that feeling human sometimes means feeling alien. She works slowly and deeply—there’s a third collection close to finished, but still a ways off—and sometimes she takes time away from poetry to write words for Marvel comics with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Hemming the Water is a riff on sound and song, a book that gets in the head of—or into conversation with—figures like Mary Lou Williams, Toni Morrison, Ruth Stone, Pablo Neruda. “A door & the darkness,” a “song in the head of a heathen.” One poem is called “The Riot Inside Me,” one is titled “Chatterblue,” another “Gingivitis, Notes on Fear.” As a book of discovery, discovering the self and its histories and burdens, it registers, in brash delicate gorgeous styles, “The shock / Of your voice.”

Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 01:00
Inverting the “tragedy plus time” formula Late night comics weighed in on the Republicans’ 15-round House Speaker fight (New York Times): “Things really started to spin out on the floor of the House. It got so out of control, I thought I was watching the Oscars.” — JIMMY KIMMEL “Ahead of the last round of voting for House speaker, Alabama Congressman Mike Rogers appeared to charge at fellow Republican Representative Matt Gaetz. And, out of habit, Gaetz yelled ‘I’ve never even met your daughter!’” — SETH MEYERS “That’s a face mask violation — 15 yards. It was really the most exciting hour of cable news in quite some time.” — JIMMY KIMMEL “Oh, my God. I don’t know if men should hold political office. They’re just too emotional!” — STEPHEN COLBERT “After 15 rounds of voting, McCarthy pulled off the impossible — he got people to watch C-SPAN for an entire week.” — JIMMY FALLON “I can’t even imagine what McCarthy was going through.
Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 00:38
Residents raising funds for memorial park and community hub A Liverpool community is coming together to raise funds to create a local memorial park named after Olivia Pratt-Korbel, who was tragically shot and killed aged nine when a gunman forced his way into her family’s home in the West Derby constituency last August. The planned […]
Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 00:30
New York University has launched a new interdisciplinary program to support, coordinate, and disseminate research about the well-being of wild animals. Co-directed by Becca Franks (environmental studies) and Jeff Sebo (environmental studies, philosophy, bioethics, law), the Wild Animal Welfare Program “aims to advance understanding about what wild animals are like, how humans and wild animals interact, and how humans can improve our interactions with wild animals at scale.” Of particular interest are questions such as “How much positive welfare (pleasure, happiness, satisfaction, and other such states) do wild animals experience, and how much negative welfare (pain, suffering, frustration, and other such states) do they experience? To what extent is humanity helping and harming wild animals at present?
Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 00:03

            Only God and Kevin McCarthy know how long George Santos, the disgraced Republican freshman congressman from Long Island whose antipathy for the truth stands out even by politician standards, will be able to remain in office. If and when he is forced to step down, say, after an explanation for his mysteriously improving financial...

The post May the Second-Best Person Win first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.
Created
Tue, 10/01/2023 - 23:58
A consultation closing next week has raised concerns with campaigners over the ‘hugely regressive’ plans Campaigners have attacked Government plans they say will turn bedsits and hostels into accepted housing for vulnerable older children in the care system. The Department for Education launched a public consultation last month on new rules for so-called ‘supported accommodation’ […]