Internation Events X - Why such a long break...?

[Impmk2]

It's a bit of a weird law. Requires reporting by an immediate family member so unlikely to be used against tourists, unless they get involved with a local.

Given same sex marriage is still illegal there it will absolutely be used to oppress the LGBT community though.

[The Anti-Targ]

Just in the news here today NZ officials are looking into the alleged presence of a Chinese Police station here. So we finally caught up with the rest of the world.

[The Anti-Targ]

Reporting one's own family members as the mechanism for the law to be enforced. I imagine it will happen for some very hardline religious people, but I can't imagine a large proportion of the population wanting to subject their own family members to prosecution and punishment for this. Though I can possibly imagine siblings maliciously reporting each other when they are pissed off at each other for a completely different reason.

 

[Luzifer's right hand]

 

1 hour ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Reporting one's own family members as the mechanism for the law to be enforced. I imagine it will happen for some very hardline religious people, but I can't imagine a large proportion of the population wanting to subject their own family members to prosecution and punishment for this. Though I can possibly imagine siblings maliciously reporting each other when they are pissed off at each other for a completely different reason.

 

People who are really into a religion are usually willing to throw their close relatives under the bus tough. Also another useful tool for controlling women. Just another step towards an lslamic republic I fear.

[Fez]

Castillo in Peru appears to be attempting a self-coup 

Seems unlikely to work, though it's hard to get accurate info when events move so quickly.

However, it appears that Congress just went into session and is voting to remove him from office immediately. There's a statement from at least one general saying the military supports Congress, but the big question is how accurate that is.

[Fez]

1 hour ago, Fez said:

Castillo in Peru appears to be attempting a self-coup 

Okay, so in the past hour or so:

• Congress voted 101-6 to remove him from office
• The Constitutional High Court denounced his moves as a coup attempt and appears to have unilaterally declared he was removed from office
• The armed forces and national police issued a statement rejecting him and affirming support for the constitution
• National police have reportedly arrested him

This seems to be an even more poorly planned self-coup attempt than what Trump tried in the US.

[Tywin et al.]

Staying the region, Argentina's sitting VP and former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is sentenced to six years in the slammer, but because of her position she isn't going away immediately. She was president when I was living down there and it seemed like every single person in Buenos Aires knew she was corrupt garbage. 

[Corvinus85]

1 hour ago, Fez said:

Okay, so in the past hour or so:

• Congress voted 101-6 to remove him from office
• The Constitutional High Court denounced his moves as a coup attempt and appears to have unilaterally declared he was removed from office
• The armed forces and national police issued a statement rejecting him and affirming support for the constitution
• National police have reportedly arrested him

This seems to be an even more poorly planned self-coup attempt than what Trump tried in the US.

His wikipedia page has kept up.

Quote

José Pedro Castillo Terrones (Spanish pronunciation: [xoˈse ˈpeðɾo kasˈtiʝo teˈrones] (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8a/Loudspeaker.svg/11px-Loudspeaker.svg.pnglisten); born 19 October 1969) is a Peruvian elementary school teacher, union leader and politician. From 28 July 2021 to 7 December 2022, he was the president of Peru, having won the 2021 Peruvian general election.^[1][2] On 7 December 2022, he was removed from office after an attempted coup d'etat against the Congress of Peru.^[3]

 

[Zorral]

Two attempted coups reported today -- this one, and the one in Germany.

Is it insurrection or is it revolution in the global atmosphere?:

[Winterfell is Burning]

57 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Two attempted coups reported today -- this one, and the one in Germany.

Is it insurrection or is it revolution in the global atmosphere?:

It's in the atmosphere, in a way: challenges like global warming, immigration, corruption and money laundering, supply change disruptions and it's effects, etc, require solutions that are difficult, complex and demand international cooperation and agreement as well as a lot of thinking.

Saying climate change is a hoax, immigrants should be banned, only the other side is corrupt and everyone that supports it should go to jail or killed, and the fault of the economy is on the bad guys on the other side (specially the Jews) requires none of that, specially the thinking part.

Think the Warnock vs Hershel dispute on a global scale (Warnock ultimately won his specific race because Hershel is too much of a caricature even for his type of candidate)

Edited December 8, 2022 by Winterfell is Burning

[Larry of the Lawn]

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

Two attempted coups reported today -- this one, and the one in Germany.

Is it insurrection or is it revolution in the global atmosphere?:

 it's revolution if you win.  

[Wade1865]

5 hours ago, Zorral said:

Two attempted coups reported today -- this one, and the one in Germany.

Is it insurrection or is it revolution in the global atmosphere?:

Zorral, et al. -- great question; what is the zeitgeist in the West? Does it reflect the feelings of Berlin ... Weimar ... 1930s? I need a herstorian to fill me in.

[lacuna]

"If we succeed, great! If we fail, well, at least we won't have to do any Xmas shopping."

[kiko]

11 hours ago, Zorral said:

Two attempted coups reported today -- this one, and the one in Germany.

Is it insurrection or is it revolution in the global atmosphere?:

I'm sorry, but there was no attempted coup in Germany. Police was watching a group of loons (well connected loons, but loons) and put them in the slammer before they were ready to do whatever nonsense the planned.

[The Anti-Targ]

I guess we should be under no illusions that there aren't similar groups of loons in every democracy. The alarming thing in Germany's case is that the loons became so organised and funded as to be a sufficient threat that arrests needed to be made, and one assumes criminal charges will be laid.

We've had it explicitly confirmed that our intelligence services is keeping a close eye on all sorts of groups with different ideological reasons to want to get violent on the people / govt. But arrests of large numbers of people have not occurred...yet...at least not publicly.

 

[Darzin]

Well China is more open then it's been in years.  You don't need to scan a QR health code to  ride the metro or take a plane which hasn't happened since the pandemic started. Most everything has opened in almost every city.  Seems the protests did spook the government though of course they had to wait a tasteful distance so they could imply that the protests had nothing to do with it. Politicians and health ministry officials are downplaying omicron as if that hasn't been the dominant strain for a while. Still everyone seems to be willing to buy their lies as long as this ends. On the other hand China hasn't had the elderly die offs or hospital rushes the rest of the world has, the government's or people's mood could easily change once that starts to happen. 

[Zorral]

‘Cuba Is Depopulating’: Largest Exodus Yet Threatens Country’s Future

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/world/americas/cuba-us-migration.html?

Quote

 

.... The avalanche of Cubans leaving has also become a challenge for the United States. Now, one of the highest sources of migrants after Mexico, Cuba has become a top contributor to the crush of migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border, which has been a major political liability for President Biden and which the administration considers a serious national security issue.

“The numbers for Cuba are historic, and everybody recognizes that,” said a senior State Department official who was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. “That said, more people are migrating globally now than they ever have been and that trend is certainly bearing out in our hemisphere, too.”

Many experts say that U.S. policy toward the island is helping fuel the very migration crisis that the administration is now struggling to address.

To appeal to Cuban American voters in South Florida, the Trump administration discarded President Barack Obama’s policy of engagement, which included restoring diplomatic relations and increasing travel to the island. President Donald J. Trump replaced it with a “maximum pressure” campaign that ratcheted up sanctions and severely limited how much cash Cubans could receive from their families in the United States, a key source of revenue.

“This is not rocket science: If you devastate a country 90 miles from your border with sanctions, people will come to your border in search of economic opportunity,” said Ben Rhodes, who served as deputy national security adviser under Mr. Obama and was the point person on talks with Cuba.

Although President Biden has begun to retreat from some of Mr. Trump’s policies, he has been slow to act for fear of angering the Cuban diaspora and incurring the wrath of Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat and a powerful Cuban American who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said William M. LeoGrande, a professor at American University, who has written extensively on U.S.-Cuba relations. ....

 

 

[Zorral]

Why Xi Jinping Changed His Mind on “Zero COVID”
After weeks of protests, China will ease its stringent pandemic restrictions. The reversal could be a boon for the economy—and lead to a wave of deaths.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-xi-jinping-changed-his-mind-on-zero-covid

Quote

 

.... Until spring of this year, economically, the government’s covid approach worked because of the strong export sector. Now, with the bigger opening of the economy, people who are infected can stay in home quarantine. That’s a big change from previous policies. Hopefully, economically that’s going to improve prospects. I suspect that it will to some extent.

As we know, because we’ve gone through it several times, the problem comes a month or two later. There will be a massive wave of covid infections, and this means that there’s going to be a lot of people with heavy symptoms, and, inevitably, there will be some deaths—a lot more covid-related deaths than what China is used to. Does Xi then reinstate a very draconian lockdown? Does he go to some partial level of lockdown, but push through with it? It’s unclear at this point. Right now, the optics are good. There’s an opening. People are a little bit more satisfied, a little bit less frustrated. For the next month or so, it’s going to be good. But when China does get this massive wave of infection and hospitalization, what is Xi going to do?

State propaganda is going to shape the messaging. But what we learned during these protests is that, privately, people have witnessed a lot of tragedy that has unfolded because of the lockdown policy.

Xi and the Party built a reputation on doing a better job on covid than the rest of the world. What kinds of P.R. challenges, and public-health challenges, are they going to face when things get bad?

There are not that many intensive-care beds in China relative to its enormous population. Even in major cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, this is kind of a problem. It’s an even more dire situation in some third-tier and fourth-tier cities, where the population is older, too.

In Hong Kong, we saw some hospitals reach their limits. They’ve had to set up beds outdoors. In China, the timing is not great. It’s winter. It’ll be pretty cold through March. With the more relaxed approach, we’re probably going to see a wave going into January, February. So, where are they going to put people? One possibility is that the quarantine facilities are going to be turned into makeshift hospitals.

But then the challenge is where they are going to find the doctors and nurses to take care of these people. It will produce some pretty negative optics. For the past three years, China has been very successful in controlling covid, compared to the rest of the world. But now covid will hit China. ....

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

China risks 1mn Covid deaths in ‘winter wave’, modelling shows

https://www.ft.com/content/4e1f0062-279c-4390-86f8-4d331418a8f5

Models predict massive wave of disease and death if China lifts ‘zero COVID’ policy

https://www.science.org/content/article/models-predict-massive-wave-disease-and-death-if-china-lifts-zero-covid-policy

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Nobody commented on the corruption scandal, that is hitting the EU parliament at the moment.

Greece's Eva Kaili (Vice Üresident of the European parliament) is under arrest. Apparently she was lobbying for a gulf state, which may or may not host a sport washing event these days. (Hint it starts with a Q and ends on atar).

Edited December 10, 2022 by A Horse Named Stranger
Edit: fixed her name it's Kaili

[The Anti-Targ]

40 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

, which may or may not host a sport washing event these days. (Hint it starts with a Q and ends on atar).

Is that similar to extreme ironing or something?