Waiting for vaudeville to come back

It’s sad to watch people who used to be respected conservative names in liberal media wandering in search of an audience, victims of a shift in audience composition. Big names that suddenly aren’t who are the last to know. The tide has moved on leaving them stranded in some shrinking pool. Maybe some wave will carry them back out among the big fish. Or maybe this is it.

In a way it’s better to say “I am Nobody” than “I used to be important”.

The sound of silence

The chief health officer of New South Wales, Australia, told reporters Tuesday that in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19, citizens should avoid talking to each other.

World leaders were bugged

The Paris prosecutor’s office announced it is investigating the suspected widespread use of the Pegasus spyware to target journalists, human rights activists and politicians in multiple countries.

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POLITICO-Harvard poll: Most Americans believe Covid leaked from lab

Most Americans now believe that the coronavirus leaked from a laboratory in China, according to a new POLITICO-Harvard poll that found a dramatic shift in public perception of Covid-19’s origins over the last year.

U.S. Treasury blacklists 7 Chinese officials under Trump-era Hong Kong Autonomy Act

The Biden administration blacklisted seven Chinese officials over violations of the Hong Kong Autonomy Act, a bill signed into law by former President Donald Trump in July 2020. President Trump ended the special economic status granted to Hong Kong in response to China’s drive to erode the territory’s autonomy guaranteed by the Communist regime under the “one country, two systems” policy when it took control of the territory in 1997.

To some Cuba is a tropical socialist paradise

1619 Project writer Nikole Hannah-Jones said she believes Cuba is the most equal country in the western hemisphere. She noted how Cuba was one of the most ‘equal’ and ‘multiracial’ countries in the with ‘very little inequality’ between black and white people living there.

Cuban woes

From what I can tell Cuba is in trouble for 4 immediate reasons:

  1. The demise of Venezuela’s Daddy Oilbucks largesse;
  2. The collapse of the tourism industry;
  3. The pandemic;
  4. The lack of FX to import food and other essentials due to the abolition of their dual currency system

Together they add up to no hay nada.

Microsoft Exchange hack caused by China, US and allies say

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration and Western allies formally blamed China on Monday for a massive hack of Microsoft Exchange email server software and asserted that criminal hackers associated with the Chinese government have carried out ransomware and other illicit cyber operations.

Germany knew the floods were coming, but the warnings didn’t work

The first signs of catastrophe were detected nine days ago by a satellite orbiting 500 miles above the tranquil hills around the Rhine river

How the West became East Germany

Few pause to think that their phones can be transformed into surveillance devices, with someone thousands of miles away silently extracting their messages, photos and location, activating their microphone to record them in real time… in the coming days the Guardian will be revealing the identities of many innocent people who have been identified as candidates for possible surveillance by NSO clients in a massive leak of data.

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Psaki: deniers should be everywhere banned

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday that the Biden administration believes social media users who spread COVID-19 misinformation should be banned from all platforms if one platform has given them the boot. Psaki had revealed the day before that White House staff were tracking dangerous coronavirus misinformation with help from the surgeon general’s office and flagging problematic posts to Facebook.

Not changing lanes, a U-turn

Although officials still remain divided on whether the virus emerged from nature, passing from animals to humans, the acknowledgment marks a shift from the scorn that was heaped on former President Trump and a group of European scientists who first brought up the lab-leak theory during the height of the pandemic last year.

Biden admin says lab leak now level with natural theory

Tighter than a fast and furious movie U-turn

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No hay comida

HAVANA — Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel for the first time is offering some self-criticism while saying that government shortcomings in handling shortages and other problems played a role in this week’s protests.

Dying alone rather than infecting others

JAKARTA — Indonesia has overtaken India as Asia’s new epicenter for the coronavirus pandemic, with daily infections exceeding 40,000 for two straight days and officials warning that the delta variant is spreading outside the most populous island of Java.

Southeast Asia’s largest economy on Tuesday reported 47,899 new infections, a record high, up from 40,427 the previous day. India’s cases, meanwhile, dropped to 32,906 from 37,154.

More alarming is that despite having more daily infections, Indonesia’s population of 270 million population is just a fifth of India’s. Indonesia now has around 132 cases per million people, compared with India 26 as of Sunday, according to ourworldindata.org.

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