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📚 📱 📙 📒 🌏 💫 Myanmar - Civil war: While the Myanmar military junta that grabbed power through a coup attempts to crush protests, resistance against the military dictatorship grows into an insurgency and civil war.
Asia Times (19 May 2021) A wider war spreads fast and far in Myanmar
CHIANG MAI – Another military airbase has come under rocket attack in central Myanmar, a shadowy but strategic assault that even tightly censored, military-controlled media felt compelled to report.
On May 15, three 107mm rockets were fired at Toungoo airbase, situated just 95 kilometers from the capital Naypyitaw, according to the state mouthpiece Global New Light of Myanmar. The rocket attack follows similar assaults on air bases at Magwe and Meiktila in late April.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attacks, but they come after recent Tatmadaw aerial bombardments in Kayin and Kachin states, where ethnic armies are battling the military and anti-coup protesters have recently taken refuge from rising, lethal military violence in urban areas.
📚✒ 💻 ⌨ 📙📒 Brazil: lack of work affects who?: Over at Folha De S. Paulo (19 May 2021) data reports are out about impact ofabsence of work or study opportunities. Unsurprisingly Lack of Work and Study Affects Women, Blacks and Heads of Households
Rio de Janeiro
The lack of study and work that affects young people is greater among women, Blacks, heads of families and people with no education, according to a study published on Monday (17) by the social policy center of the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV Social).
The coronavirus pandemic has increased the proportion of those who neither study nor work, the so-called “nem-nem.” According to the survey, 25.52% of young people aged between 15 and 29 years were not working or studying in the fourth quarter of 2020.
The cut by sex shows that the rate among women was higher than the general average. In the fourth quarter of 2020, 31.29% of young women aged 15 to 29 were considered “nem-nem.” Among men, the rate reached 19.77%.
Blacks (29.09%) and browns (28.41%) also registered a percentage above the average at the end of 2020. Among whites, the percentage was 21.26%.
When the variable is the level of schooling, the group with the highest proportion of “nem-nem” is the one with no education: 66.81%.
📚 ⌨ 📙 📒 Spain - Hey hey we got a plan too: With so many national governments announcing various timeline and ambitions for economic or social developements tied to target dates, Spain joins in with own programme. El Paso (21 may 2021) Spain’s PM announces sweeping plan to transform country by 2050
Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez of the Socialist Party (PSOE), on Thursday presented España 2050, a sweeping development plan for the country aimed at improving performance on key issues such as education, health, pensions, jobs, taxes and the environment over the next three decades.
The 675-page document received input from more than 100 experts from various fields and ideological backgrounds, and it is now open to amendments by political parties, local and regional authorities, unions and employer groups, non-profits and universities.
In the presentation, the Spanish leader called for “a great national dialogue on the future of Spain” to be carried out over the coming months. “Let’s have a dialogue to decide what kind of a country we want to be 30 years from now,” said Sánchez, who heads a minority center-left coalition government with junior partner Unidas Podemos
📚 ⌨ 📙 📒 🌏 Italy: We got a strategy too: Over at ECFR, policy brief, so a bit long read, you might want to come back to it when you have abitmore time to read Rome’s moment: Draghi, multilateralism, and Italy’s new strategy
Summary
- Italy is set to play a defining role in the use of the EU recovery fund, whose success or failure will likely shape European integration for years to come.
- Under Prime Minister Mario Draghi, the country is focused on dealing with the pandemic while promoting Italian and European interests as president of the G20 and co-chair of COP26.
- The Draghi government is shifting the priorities of Italian foreign policy towards the European Union, the transatlantic relationship, and multilateralism more broadly.
- This marks a break with the approaches of the previous two governments, which were intent on partnership with China and Russia.
- Draghi’s Italy will work primarily alongside other EU member states – particularly on health security, climate, and economic and infrastructure development – but could also act as a bridge between competing great powers.
- In doing so, Italy has an opportunity to position itself closer to the Franco-German engine and to help construct a multilateral system in which the EU and the US are equal partners.
📚 📙 📒 🌏 Philippines - Regime Change?: With President Duterte not completely siding with USA, Marc Valencia analyzes the activities and signals from USA to look for hints of regime change process foreign policy with regards to Philippines. Previously USA has cultivated control through CIA assets. Of course swapping them around as and when if they deviated from USA foreign policy. Not that it has anything to do with brutality of Duterte regime, USA has supported and propped up brutal regimes like that of Ferdinand Marcos.
Asia Times (19 May 2021) Is US engineering regime change in Philippines?
On July 4, 1946, the US granted the Philippines its independence and guided its “democratic transition to a fully sovereign republic.” Ever since, it has had a keen interest in the Southeast Asian country’s domestic politics and especially its foreign policy.
The confluence of this “interest,” the US-China struggle for dominance in the South China Sea, and the domestic row regarding the Philippines’ policy toward China’s actions there, raise the question as to what, if any, ongoing and future role the US may play in Philippine political affairs.
The presence of US forces in the Philippines has always been controversial. In 1947, the two countries signed the US Military Bases Agreement that allowed the United States to establish and operate air and naval bases there. In 1951 the US strengthened its interest in Philippine political affairs by entering a Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) with it.
📚 ✒ 📙 📒 🌏 💫 Israel/Palestine/Gaza: Over at Counter Punch (21 May 2021), Jeffery St.Clair reflects Roaming Charges: Once Upon a Time in Palestine
“If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up. You begin by stopping the torture and killing of the unprotected.”
– Adrienne Rich
+ I’ve heard a lot of people of say that Israel has finally over-reached this time. But what if “over-reaching” is the point? That each fresh atrocity the world tolerates becomes the new benchmark to be exceeded by the next?
+ Almost any atrocity committed against Palestinians will be rationalized and justified merely by Palestinians continued existence, where even the most reflexive acts of self-preservation become an excuse to inflict extreme violence.
+ How perverse to see the Israeli government make its habitual assertion of the “right of self-defense” against a population that it denies the right of a “self” at all.
📚 ✒ 📙 📒 💫 India - disaster by design: Over at Counter Currents (21 May 2021) , Satya Sagar explores the system design of India in Caste, Class and India’s Covid Catastrophe
Covid-19 patients dying on the streets gasping for oxygen. Hundreds of wailing, desperate folks searching for hospital beds to access treatment. Even the dead denied dignified funerals, their bodies dumped unceremoniously in the rivers of India.
Much has been written about the reasons for the Indian government’s abysmal failure to prepare for the devastating surge in Covid-19 cases in India since early April this year.
Among other things hubris, incompetence, intolerance of opposing views and the penchant of Indian PM Narendra Modi to put his own publicity above all national priorities have been blamed. To deflect criticism of the government, its supporters themselves have identified the ‘system’ – presumably the country’s rickety healthcare system — as being at the heart of the problem.
📚 📙 📒 🌏 Research Grants and Bias: Over at Nature journal, Prestigious European grants might be biased, study suggests
Funding panels are more likely to give prestigious European Union early-career grants to applicants connected to the institutions of some of the panellists, a study of the 2014 funding round suggests.
The effect seems to be limited to the life sciences, social sciences and humanities, and the results have not yet been peer reviewed. But given the high profile of the grants administered by European Research Council (ERC), “the findings should be taken seriously”, says study co-author Peter van den Besselaar, a social scientist at the Free University of Amsterdam.
Although previous studies have found evidence of favouritism in funding in various European countries, “I was surprised that the phenomenon has been recorded at a level as high as the ERC grants”, says Giovanni Abramo, the technology research director at the National Research Council (CNR) of Italy in Rome.
The preprint1 was posted on 9 March on the academic networking platform ResearchGate.
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