The military dictatorship now ruling the Southeast Asian nation has brushed aside the entreaties and threats, even as the country of 54 million people hurtles toward paralysis and possibly civil war that could destabilize the region.
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US airstrikes on Iran drone attack bases
Green is Slave Labor and Biden weeps -WaPo
Most Americans likely don’t know that approximately 40 percent of the world’s polysilicon, a key component of solar panels, is manufactured in China’s northwest Xinjiang region, where the United States has determined the Chinese government is perpetrating a genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities. As evidence amassed in recent …
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Virus is coming through the shield
More than 4,100 people have been hospitalized or died with Covid-19 in the U.S. even though they’ve been fully vaccinated, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Climate change critic fired for “failing to act in the collegial and academic spirit”
His comments included telling Sky News that bodies like the Australian Institute of Marine Science “can no longer be trusted” and saying that many scientists examining the health of the Great Barrier Reef were “emotionally attached” and “not objective”. He was also accused of “failing to act in the collegial and academic spirit”, and of …
What a surprise
It turns out China is a geopolitical threat too
If CRISPR germline is banned in the West it will be offshored to China
The 2018 announcement in China by He Jianqui who genetically altered human embryos via CRISPR—producing twins known as Lulu and Nana—helped strengthen policies about germline gene editing. Despite the worldwide scorn leveled against him for conducting a brazen act of human experimentation, his research also helped usher in a more moderate point of view regarding …
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Who was it who said: ‘politics is where the real money is’?
Beware the hippo
A defining human characteristic
Walkback to two-track
WASHINGTON—President Biden walked back comments tying the fate of a roughly $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure agreement to a separate, Democratic effort to pass a broad antipoverty plan, recommitting to the bipartisan deal after Republicans threatened to withdraw their support.
The serpent in revolutionary Eden
Twenty-four years ago, while in charge of a small television operation at Al Quds University, my team and I decided to broadcast live sessions of the Palestinian Legislative Council dealing with corruption in the newly established Palestinian Authority. The broadcast angered people in Yasser Arafat’s entourage and I was arrested and jailed for seven days …
What if social media users owned their data?
(Bloomberg) — Frank McCourt, the billionaire real estate mogul and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is pouring $100 million into an attempt to rebuild the foundations of social media. The effort, which he has loftily named Project Liberty, centers on the construction of a publicly accessible database of people’s social connections, allowing users …
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As we were going to say …
The Gettysburg Address speech that no one gives before it turns into a pie fight The best political speech in many years was not delivered. Instead, incoming Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid set it aside and reprimanded members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s departing coalition for their nonstop heckling of incoming Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, which was …
UFOs: ‘The truth is still out there’
A boolean variable can have values true, false and null. Most of the universe is still a mystery whatever the fact checkers say.
The next pandemic is coming — scientists
Covid is set to cost the world at least £21.5 trillion But scientists say the world needs to spend just £35 billion to make sure it never happens again.
The morphing pathogen defies planners
Authorities in Israel and Australia imposed new Covid-19 restrictions in response to the spread of the highly infectious Delta variant of the coronavirus, while India warned of a worrying new mutation, emphasizing how the morphing pathogen continues to challenge a return to pre-pandemic life world-wide… “The entrance of the Delta variant has changed the transmission …
“Indonesia’s Doctors Got Vaccinated With Sinovac, and Got Sick” — NYT
Other countries are discovering that certain vaccines may not be as effective as others in preventing infections caused by these variants. … Dr. Adib said that the association is now discussing the possibility of administering to medical workers a third shot of another vaccine, such as Oxford-AstraZeneca. Some countries are supporting a mix-and-match scheme to …
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“How China Spreads Its Propaganda Version of Life for Uyghurs”
by Jeff Kao, ProPublica, and Raymond Zhong, Paul Mozur and Aaron Krolik, The New York Times
‘Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling’ — NYT opinion
It was only in 2004 that a prominent virologist, Peter Palese, wrote that Chi-Ming Chu, a respected virologist and a former member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told him that “the introduction of this 1977 H1N1 virus” was indeed thought to be due to vaccine trials involving “the challenge of several thousand military recruits …