Reading

As Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative enters its 10th year, a strong Sino-Russian geostrategic partnership has revitalized the BRI across the Global South.

The Cradle
Why BRI is back with a bang in 2023
Pepe EscobarIndia Punchline
India’s got the BRICS blues
M. K. Bhadrakumar | retired diplomat with the Indian Foreign Service and former ambassador

If we could freeze time, a soft-landing is upon us.

The Supremes bear responsibility for building it Denis Aftergut in Slate: Ultimately, in politics, only voters can deliver the message, “You’ve hit bottom, and you need to change your ways.” But the MAGA House majority’s inability to select a speaker may already be pushing voters to stage an intervention in 2024. There’s an irony in this early failure. Republicans came to it through a shameless addiction to power without principle. Starting in 2010, they gained political dominance across the country in state legislatures and wielded that power by gerrymandering congressional maps. The distorted districting maps they adopted herded minority voters and Democratic ones into electoral zones that looked like intoxicated amoeba. All that extreme gerrymandering has led directly to the current fiasco in the House. The effort has put more Republican members of Congress in safe seats, with fewer Democratic constituents to answer to. That left the victors free to test the limits of their extremism. Momentously, in 2019, a radical Supreme Court majority composed of Republican nominees issued a 5–4 decision in Rucho v.

The year 2022 marked the 150th anniversary of the establishment of North Queensland goldfield Charters Towers and the rise and riotous fall of the gold commissioner who inspired its name. read now...

As I prepare my Spring semester courses, I’m wondering how people handle office hours these days. For my entire pre-Covid teaching career, office hours were a drop-in affair. I encouraged students to make an appointment outside of office hours if they wanted to be sure they could talk to me without the chance of another […]

In the debate over American workers’ welfare versus the Federal Reserve’s inflation-cooling rate hikes, the workers are losing.

The post Financial World Celebrates Slowing Wage and Employment Growth in New Jobs Report appeared first on The Intercept.

Copyright and licensing associate Craig Topham discusses the work done by the Licensing and Compliance Lab to answer licensing questions via articles, the FAQ, and email.

If you have the time, click through to that link for a thorough January 6th timeline. It’s as astonishing today as it was then. And considering what these people are doing today on the House floor, it’s clear they were not in any way chagrined. They are still making a mockery of the United States by acting like petulant children who will burn the place down if they don’t get their way. And keep this in mind:

This is the eleventh in a series of blog posts addressing a report by Diego Escobari and Gary Hoover covering the 2019 presidential election in Bolivia. Their conclusions do not hold up to scrutiny, as we observe in our report Nickels Before Dimes. Here, we expand upon various claims and conclusions that Escobari and Hoover make […]

The post Red Herrings: Escobari and Hoover’s Geographic Controls and Common Trends Add Nothing appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Although the House of Representatives has yet to conduct any business due to a far...

~ Today's Water Cooler ~

A lot of what I was doing on my recent trip was Tech Support For The Elderly and please, Tim Apple, make it easier!

Years ago it was somewhat true that Apple products "just worked" but really now they are as complicated as Windows or Android products.

It’s infuriating that he had to deal with that but it’s a pleasure to watch someone so capably slap that nonsense into tomorrow. I don’t normally think Democrats should waste their breath on Fox because they are usually just there as target practice. Buttigieg is one of the very few who has the talent and the temperament to handle it with lethal class. These people are so shameless. When you think about how Trump took his toxic spawn on trips all over the world, including to meet the queen of England, it makes your head explode. He even had that airhead Ivanka running meetings at the G8. Please.

So, 4 days, 13 votes as of this writing. A small band of right wing House members are holding candidates hostage.

To win the bloc of rebels thwarting his rise, McCarthy was apparently prepared to agree to conditions that he had not been previously willing to accept. That includes reinstating a rule that would allow a single lawmaker to force a vote to remove the speaker, effectively placing himself at the mercy of his detractors who could trigger a vote at any point.

“I obeyed my conscience rather than the law,” ex-Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Ana Belén Montes declared on her way into a federal prison. Accused of spying for Cuba, she is a hero on the besieged island, where she foiled countless US destabilization operations. On January 8, 2023 the US has to release a federal prisoner who is known as one its most notable opponents of treatment of Cuba since its revolution. She is Ana Belén Montes, and she will be […]

The post Honored in Cuba and condemned by Washington, Ana Belén Montes walks free from federal prison appeared first on The Grayzone.

Greetings from the gurney. I’m the woman you’re about to cut open, and I’d like to start by saying that I’m supremely grateful for this scheduled c-section. As I lounge around in your hospital’s finest full-body napkin dress with a peekaboo butt, it’s nice to know that my ten-pound breech baby and I won’t end up like a couple of dead extras on Clive Owen’s operating table in The Knick.

Rest assured, I’m not one of these high-maintenance patients who arrives with lace-bound, scented copies of an 85-page birthing plan; I do find it quite chilly and bright in this operating room, but I am more than happy to sacrifice ambiance so that you can all see which organs you’re shuffling around down there.

In Asian media this week – Indonesia to be an active ASEAN chair. Plus – South Korea’s global aspirations; Western and Asian views of the West; Anwar pledges to crack down on corruption; Softer tones in Taiwan rhetoric; Kishida’s diminishing political capital. Indonesia this year is the chair of ASEAN and The Jakarta Post lists Continue reading »

Moscow has now warned that Japan’s ‘openly unfriendly positions’ make delayed peace treaty talks impossible. Australia has some connections with those ‘unfriendly positions.’ They include joining in sanctions against Moscow over the war in Ukraine. Sanctions are an ugly business and Moscow is right to react against them. They can be as destructive to a Continue reading »

Medicare must now focus on how health services are delivered. When it was established in 1974, Medicare funded the way health services were delivered at that time. That delivery system has not been changed much at all since then. After fifty years the way we deliver health care needs substantial reform and updating. Our health Continue reading »

Why do we have a problem in recruiting General Practitioners and how can we overcome the shortage? The answer – to quote Aneurin Bevan, the Health Minister in the Post World War II Labour Government: ‘By stuffing their mouth with Gold’. In 2001 the Author Chaired a Review of the Australian Medical Workforce Advisory Committee Continue reading »

You need to fix your eye on the ball if you want keep up with the frocking and de-frocking of America’s offshore political proteges – especially in Venezuela. After Nicolas Maduro claimed he had won victory in Venezuela’s presidential election in 2018, Washington said, no you haven’t. The US approved Venezuelan opposition leader, Juan Guaido, Continue reading »

Geopolitical interests between the Anglo-American establishment and the Sino-Russian-led axis will clash over the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route. First published in The Cradle January 2, 2023 On 12 December 2022, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) hosted a conference on the future of Eurasia’s Middle Corridor, a transport and energy infrastructure development project that stretches from Continue reading »

Israel’s new administration will be one that does not conceal its intention to preserve and further entrench the apartheid tyranny over the Palestinians, while fully cultivating Jewish supremacy as a political and legal credo. Salmon P. Chase, a renowned 19th century American lawyer and abolitionist, once said that no one’s rights are protected until everyone’s Continue reading »

The post A House Divided appeared first on Roosevelt Institute.