It’s Italy which will fire the starter’s gun on a turnaround on the EU’s policy on Russia and the Ukraine war.
It might well be Italy which marks the starting point of a demise of sorts of the EU, as the coalition government collapses. Mario Draghi, who might be remembering interest rate hikes like the ECB’s this week, which only happened previously when he was the boss overseeing the eurozone crisis, is out.
By resigning his post as PM, he must be that he sees the writing on the wall and that we are heading towards another eurozone crisis.
Right now, the euro has already slumped to parity with the dollar and Eurozone inflation averages about 8.6 per cent (although it’s now 10 per cent in Spain, 12 per cent in Greece and a thundering 20 per cent in Estonia). Have a heart for Croatia which is planning on joining the eurozone soon.
But it’s Italy which will fire the starter’s gun on a turnaround on the EU’s policy on Russia and the Ukraine war. In September a snap election is almost certain to put in power as a coalition two of Italy’s far-right groups, whose leaders both have an admiration for Putin.
Once this happens, others in the EU will see how ludicrous it is to continue the so-called punishment of Putin, which in reality destroys economies and ruins lives across the EU 27-member bloc. Other EU countries will see that Italy’s desperate situation of having debt at 150 % of its GDP and double-digit inflation can only be rescued by a radical political change.
Elites in other EU countries will be scared that populist uprisings which throw out incumbent mainstream parties are heading their way once they see the Italian economy go from boiling to a gentle simmer. And once the Italian coalition is in place, dialogue — something which we haven’t seen yet from the EU — will begin with Putin.
Although Luz Raquel Padilla was under protective measures, she was doused in alcohol before being burned alive.
According to Mexican authorities on Thursday, a Mexican activist and mother of an autistic child died after being set on fire, which ignited protests, condemnation, and demands for justice.
35-year-old Luz Raquel Padilla was doused in alcohol by a woman and 3 men and then blazed in fire at a park in Zapopan, Jalisco state, according to prosecutor Luis Joaquin Mendez, citing sources.
Padilla, who is part of a caregivers’ rights group “I take care of Mexico,” died after suffering burns on 90% of her body on Tuesday, according to authorities. The case is being looked into as possible femicide.
Sergio Ismael “N”, one of Padilla’s neighbors, was arrested for causing injuries, making threats, and crimes against a person’s dignity in connection with previous incidents, according to Mendez.
Ismael has not been charged with femicide until now, and, according to witnesses, he was not present at the time of Saturday’s attack, according to prosecutors.
In May, Padilla had accused Ismael of threatening her and writing graffiti with messages saying “I’m going to burn you alive” on her residential building’s walls.
“How long am I going to have to live in fear that something could happen to me and my family,” she wrote.
On July 25th, a group of between three and four thousand people of various nationalities, including Venezuelans, Cubans, Central Americans and some African countries, left the city of Tapachula heading for Huixtla, with the intention of reaching the offices of the Comprehensive Border Transit Attention Center (CAITF) in order to obtain permits that allow them to travel through Mexico and thus be able to reach the northern border and cross into the United States, saying that it is their goal and they do not plan to stay in Mexico.
According to the spokeswoman for this sixteenth caravan, they made the decision to leave Tapachula after being stranded in“inhuman conditions”for almost two weeks without receiving a response from the National Migration Institute,“it is intolerable, we have waited for a response from Migration and until 11 o’clock they don’t come out to show their faces…
note. here on thefreeonline they got my twitter account. -for misonformation – while THEY are the ones collaborating with a BILLION LIES. —@thefreeonline.. Account suspended Twitter suspends accounts that violate the Twitter Rules — Lost all my friends. same on Farcebook, 4000 friends lost.
Twitter suspended a record 4,466 accounts for violating its “COVID-19 misinformation” rules in H1 2022, according to the latest stats in its COVID-19 Misinformation Transparency Report.
This represents a more than 70% increase from its previous record of suspending 2,614 accounts for violating the COVID-19 misinformation rules in H2 2021.
The report also revealed that Twitter removed 13,803 pieces of content and challenged (forced the account owner to verify their account with an email or phone number) 7,025 accounts for violating its COVID-19 misinformation rules in H2 2021.
When Twitter introduced this rule, even the CDC was admitting that vaccinated people can become infected and “have the potential to spread the virus to others.”
More recently, former White House COVID response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx admitted during congressional testimony that the US government’s claim that the vaccinated can’t spread the virus was based on “hope” and acknowledged during a recent interview that she “knew” the vaccines do not protect against infection and that the US government “overplayed them.”
Despite these admissions and acknowledgments, this rule that bans users from saying vaccinated people can spread the virus is still in place.
Other claims that are banned under Twitter’s COVID-19 misinformation rules include “claims contrary to health authorities” that Twitter deems to “misrepresent research or statistical findings pertaining to the severity of the disease, prevalence of the virus, or effectiveness of widely accepted preventative measures, treatments, or vaccines” and claims that the vaccines are part of a “global surveillance” effort.
“Climate deniers, mostly privileged US rightwing males, love to fan their egos and support their bigoted earth destroying lifestyles with spurious “proofs” that Climate Change and Biosphere Collapse are not largely man made. Playing on the fact that mountains of evidence is never absolute proof in complex interacting systems, these climate criminals, largely financed by US corporations, have delayed for 40 years any concerted human effort to save our only home”.
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The earth is warming. But can we be sure that humans are the cause? Yes. The same way cycling officials were sure that biker Floyd Landis doped with synthetic testosterone while winning the 2006 Tour de France.
With Lance Armstrong retired and most of the other top riders expelled for illegal drug use, Landis had become one of the favourites.
He was leading when in stage 16 he fell to eleventh place. Then, just as his chances of winning seemed dashed, Landis won the next stage going away and went on to ride the Champs-Élysées in the winner’s yellow jersey.
A few days later, Landis’s team announced he had failed a test for banned steroids. Landis appealed the ban, raised an estimated $1M for his defence, and wrote a 300-page book titled, “Positively False: the Real Story of how I won the Tour de France.”
After years of denial, in 2010 Landis reversed himself and admitted that from 2002 through 2006 he had used a grab-bag of banned substances and methods. Why did he finally have to give up his denial? Because the carbon isotope test proved beyond reasonable doubt that he had doped with synthetic testosterone.
Testosterone is mostly carbon. Synthetic testosterone is made entirely from plants, which have a different carbon isotope ratio than our environment overall. The carbon in Landis’s body had the distinctive plant ratio, proving beyond reasonable doubt that he had doped with synthetic testosterone.
So how do scientists use the method to confirm that humans are causing global warming?
Since 1800, CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere has risen 40% and because of the greenhouse effect, warmed the planet. The obvious source of the added carbon is the 330 billion tons of carbon that burning fossil fuels has added to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. Yet global warming deniers deny this obvious fact. Well then, let’s prove it.
First, coal, oil, and natural gas also come from plants and also have the distinctive carbon isotope ratio of plants. As CO2 in the atmosphere has built up steadily, its isotopic composition has shifted just as steadily in the direction of plant carbon. That tells us the added carbon is coming from plants. But what kind of plants? That question we can also answer.
One carbon isotope, C14, is radioactive and dies away to undetectable levels in 50,000 years or so. Fossil fuels, being millions of years old, have no C14 left. Adding ancient carbon should have lowered the proportion of C14 in the atmosphere—and it has. For the last 50 years, as the amount of carbon in the atmosphere has increased, its C14 ratio has fallen steadily.
Just as the carbon isotopes prove that Landis doped his body, they prove beyond reasonable doubt that humans are doping the atmosphere with ancient plant carbon, carbon from fossil fuels.
Unlike people, isotopes do not lie.
By. Dr James Powell
James Lawrence Powell is the author of The Inquisition of Climate Science. Powell is also the executive director of the National Physical Science Consortium, a partnership among government agencies and laboratories, industry, and higher education dedicated to increasing the number of American citizens with graduate degrees in the physical sciences and related engineering fields. This article is cross-posted with permission with the Columbia University Press blog.
‘Even if the leading contenders to replace Boris Johnson had wings and haloes, they still could not govern us well.’ Nadhim Zahaw. Congratulations to some of Labour’s leading figures, who have begun to discover some 19th-century proposals for political reform.
Proportional representation, devolution from the centre, abolition of the House of Lords: a few senior Labour politicians are now taking the daring step of contemplating these “radical” innovations.
While I have nothing against 19th-century solutions to our 18th-century government, would it be too much to ask, at the risk of sending these bold pioneers into a dead faint, that they might also start exploring some more recent ideas?
Regardless of which creep beats the other creeps to become the next prime minister, inordinate power will again be granted to someone who should not be allowed anywhere near it.
But even if the leading contenders to replace Boris Johnson had wings and haloes, they still could not govern us well. Society is a complex system, and complex systems can never be sensibly and benevolently controlled from the centre.
A centralised, hierarchical system means concentrated power, and concentrated power favours concentrated wealth. Systems like ours are easy for billionaires and their media empires to co-opt.
In the last part of our interview, a special 20 minute discussion with anthropologist David Graeber about anarchism, Syria, building a new kind of democracy, the bureaucracy of activism and his visit to Rojava where the building of a new kind of society is underfoot
The human urge to take back control, loudly promised by governments that have done the opposite, is real. To a far greater extent than has been permitted in our recorded history, we should be allowed to manage our own lives.
Bees are not the only pollinating species at risk: “many pollinators are disappearing through processes of silent extinction, imperceptible to human vision,” biology doctor Luis Navarro warned Efe.
Navarro, who is currently a full professor at the University of Vigo, has pointed out that although “the species best known by society is the honey bee, there is a great variety of different bees, more than 1,200 species in the Iberian Peninsula and up to 20,000 in the world”, to which must be added other “functional groups” responsible for the pollination of plants.
“Each plant has different characteristics that require a pollinator adapted to them”, he specified, as is the case with the marigold that transfers its pollen with the help of butterflies, the orchid that does it with wasps, the honeysuckle with bombilidae bombs or avocado, poppy and rockrose with beetles.
All these small animals and others that also work in the reproductive processes of plants are in danger for various reasons that threaten their ecosystems, such as “the appearance of invasive alien species such as the Asian hornet, macro-crops, the use of fungicides and pesticides or the consequences of climate change, which implies displacement of species or problems of lag between the appearance of animals and flowers”, Navarro pointed out.
The Free 