What happens if there is no agreement

If there is no deal and there is no agreement on extending the deadline, then the UK automatically leaves the EU after the two-year period. In addition if no agreement is reached on trade relations, the country would have to trade with the EU under WTO rules.

The role of the Parliament

The withdrawal agreement cannot enter into force without the consent of the Parliament. In the coming weeks MEPs are expected to adopt a resolution setting out the red lines for the Parliament.

TV viewers in the United Kingdom will likely not miss watching Fox News, as the network's parent company 21st Century Fox announced on Tuesday that the company would pull the channel amid low ratings.

"Fox News is focused on the U.S. market and designed for a U.S. audience and, accordingly, it averages only a few thousand viewers across the day in the U.K.," 21st Century Fox said in a statement provided to CNN. "We have concluded that it is not in our commercial interest to continue providing Fox News in the U.K."

While 21st Century Fox said its decision was based on the channel's inability to attract a considerable audience, critics say it's actually an attempt to smooth over the media giant's bid to take over European satellite company Sky. (21st Century Fox owns a controlling stake in Sky PLC, the parent company of the London-headquartered network.)

William Hague has blamed the British public for making "a mistake" at the general election, by failing to return a Conservative majority and weakening the country's hands in the Brexit negotiations with the EU.

The former foreign and Conservative leader, who has been brought back as an advisor to the government, told Radio 5Live's Emma Barnett: "I don't think calling the election was a mistake. I think the result was a mistake.

Is this supposed to be satire because it's fucking awesome pic.twitter.com/EOCbjo7wha

— Baeric Dandelion (@primfandango) 30. August 2017

luis_de_sousa@mastodon.social

A few days ago, "Activate UK " announced itself to the world. First, with an electric-blue Union Flag logo in which the "v" in "Activate" was replaced with a square root sign, in reference to the famously cool discipline of maths. Second, with a hyperbolically stupid 2010-style meme, contrasting a picture of Jeremy Corbyn with what amounts to a pouting film-reference "nuh-uh", helpfully hashtagged "#activatebritain #meme #retweet #rt". (When viewed on Twitter, the meme was helpfully cropped to show just a blue-tinted Corbyn.)

It looked like a sort of "Tory Momentum" - a grassroots mass campaigning movement for the party that impoverishes the masses.

On Wednesday, however, we learned that it's more than that: we learned that young Tories are actually deeply unpleasant people. Screenshots of the group's internal WhatsApp conversation were leaked that show senior Activate members jokingly describe themselves as Nazis, talk about "gassing chavs", "shooting peasants" and performing medical experiments on the poor. A few days from now, nobody will remember it even existed.

Gets better when it goes on.

Irgendwie will in diesen Wahlkampf kein Schwung kommen: Am 24. September wählt Deutschland den neuen Bundestag, doch von einem echten Kampf der politischen Inhalte ist wenig zu spüren - und das, obwohl sich die Programme von CDU und SPD auf Seite 87 klar unterscheiden.

Austria, Research Affairs poll:

ÖVP-EPP: 33%
FPÖ-ENF: 24% ↑
SPÖ-S&D: 23% ↑
GRÜNE-G/EFA: 7%
PILZ-: 5% ↓
NEOS-ALDE: 5%
G!LT-: 1% ↓#nrw17

— Europe Elects (@EuropeElects) 1. September 2017

I still can't really bring myself to seriously write about the coming Austrian election. Or even read about it so the following is a bit vague.

The conservatives under Kurz are still getting away with running without policy, coddled by friendly media. Exhibit A is a story in the Kurier where a gushing journalist talks about Kurz's discipline in interviews. Specifically how he is entirely unperturbed by changing questions and repeats the same sentence 15 times if necessary. Just imagine what one full clip of this robot act would do to a politician. The scandals about manipulating studies about Islamic child care and racism in his old organisation seem to have gained no traction.
The socialists meanwhile are as useless as they have ever been. Their defence minister futilely keeps trying to win the racist lottery and recently suggested sending the army to the Italian border to keep us safe from the darkies. He does poll decently but it is rather doubtful that people who approve of his performance would actually vote SPÖ under any circumstances. Meanwhile Tal Silberstein who was one of the (hired) minds behind their campaign was arrested in Israel.
The Greens, after getting international recognition for winning the Austrian presidency are close to dead. First they threw out their youth wing who fused with the communists, then their most popular parliamentarian lost his place on the party list in an internal election. So he packed up and runs his own list now (PILZ). Overall I'm not surprised by this development. The campaign for the presidency had them basically campaign for the status quo and Pilz never got traction in his party for the left wing populism he thought was needed. Now, he talks about left wing populism and gives Sanders and Corbyn as examples but he still has close links to the worst elements in the gutter press and the breakdown in relations with his party was more about his campaign on Turkish networks in Austria. Which I suppose are a problem but I'm not looking forward to nearly all contending parties talking about some nefarious foreign influences.

Also note the role of polling in shaping election results, here we have a case of including joke party G!LT* but not the communists that have run in each election since the founding of the republic and are the second biggest political force in Graz, Austria's second biggest city.

Uwe Faust vom saarländischen Ableger der Satire-Partei Die Partei stellte dem NPD-Politiker eine kleine Falle. Während der Diskussion fragte er: "Herr Best, laut Baugesetzbuch, Paragraph 126, ist jeder Eigentümer verpflichtet, sein Grundstück mit der durch die Gemeinde vorgegebene Nummer zu kennzeichnen. Jetzt ist mir erschreckend aufgefallen, dass in Völklingen viele Hausnummern mit arabischen Zahlen gekennzeichnet sind. Wie möchten Sie gegen die schleichende Überfremdung vorgehen?"

Die 600 Gäste der Veranstaltung brachen in schallendes Gelächter aus, wie auf einer Audio-Aufnahme des Saarländischen Rundfunks zu hören ist. Doch davon ließ sich Best nicht irritieren. Der Grund für das Amüsement des Publikums blieb ihm offenbar rätselhaft. "Da warten Sie mal ab, Herr Faust, bis ich Oberbürgermeister bin. Da werd ich das ändern. Da werden da mal normale Zahlen drankommen", antwortete er im vollen Ernst.

Kurz vor der Wahl verliert die AfD ihren Einfluss auf viele Facebook-Gruppen, in denen oftmals besonders engagierte Anhänger sich im Geheimen austauschten. Mitgliedern von der ,,Partei" ist es gelungen, mit falschen Accounts zu Administratoren aufzusteigen. Am Sonntag haben sie die anderen Administratoren entfernt und die Gruppen auf öffentlich gestellt.

Members of the party PARTEI infiltrated 31 AfD facebook groups, got mod privileges and now turned them public.

The EEA, which Norway joined in 1994, gives the country access to the EU single market.

In exchange, it has to implement EU law, without having a say in its making.

A comprehensive review of the agreement in the form of a so-called Norwegian official report (NOU), commissioned by the Norwegian government and published in 2012, found that the EEA served Norway's economic interests well, but worked in ways that weakened Norwegian democracy, by making the parliament irrelevant in the formulation and adoption of laws effective in the country.

Independent

Hailed by Brexiteers as a triumphant symbol of a return to the days of independence from the EU, the new-style blue British passports could be made in France or Germany, it has been claimed.

Two foreign firms have reportedly been shortlisted alongside British company De La Rou by the Home Office to manufacture the new passports ahead of the UK's departure from the EU in March 2019.

The £450 million contract was tendered out by the Government immediately after Article 50 was triggered in March, with the winner expected to be announced by this Christmas.

Expensive as it is, what Mr. Evans has packed into that counter space is rather remarkable. Inside the machine is a series of gears and metal plates that exert 8,000 pounds of pressure on packs of chopped fruits and vegetables.

To make a glass of juice, you insert a pack ($4 to $10 each) into the machine, close the door and press a button. There are five flavors, including Sweet Roots (carrot, beet, orange, lemon and apple) and Spicy Greens (pineapple, romaine, celery, cucumber, spinach, parsley and jalapeño).

Each pack has a QR code on it. A camera in the machine scans the code on each pack and, using Wi-Fi, checks in with an online database. If the pack is no longer fresh, or has been deemed contaminated, the machine won't press it. If the pack is O.K., the gears start turning and out squirts the juice.

So far, so complicated. But the real logistical feat is behind the scenes. To create those packs in the Los Angeles plant, workers receive truckloads of produce from nearby organic farms, triple-wash it, then chop it into specific shapes (carrots are finely diced, while beets are chunkier)

In April, Bloomberg published an article and video demonstrating that Juicero's expensive and highly engineered press was essentially unnecessary. Reporters squeezed Juicero's produce packs using their bare hands, and extracted just about the same amount of juice as they did using the press. Last month, Juicero said it was working on further reductions to the price of the press and the pouches.

The People's Bank of China said on its website Monday that it had completed investigations into [initial coin offerings] ICOs, and will strictly punish offerings in the future while penalizing legal violations in ones already completed. The regulator said that those who have already raised money must provide refunds, though it didn't specify how the money would be paid back to investors.

It also said digital token financing and trading platforms are prohibited from doing conversions of coins with fiat currencies. Digital tokens can't be used as currency on the market and banks are forbidden from offering services to initial coin offerings.
[...]
Bitcoin tumbled 7.2 percent, the most since July on a closing basis, to $4,530.73. The ethereum cryptocurrency was down more than 6 percent Monday, according to data from Coindesk.

PBoC erects another wall against yuan inflation and RMB capital flight. The article goes on to say, there were 43 ICO platforms in China as of July 18, but not to reiterate that The Big (datatype) Split (from EU/US bitcoin marketing) purportedly originated with an engineering faction in China. Top Line: Don't expect EU/US bitcoin price speculation to relax further, YoY. Bottom Line: PBoC retains pricing prerogatives in all sectors, thwarting EU/US free-market penetration and trade dependencies.

:: archived
Always Read the footnotes

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

A 2009 study by the Cleveland Fed found that 60 percent of all mortgages in the U.S. were based on LIBOR. Buried somewhere in your home, you probably have a piece of paper that outlines the terms of your credit card, student loan, or auto loan, and if you peek in the fine print, you have a good chance of seeing that the rate you pay every month is based on LIBOR.

Years ago, we found out that the world's biggest banks were manipulating LIBOR. That sucked.

Now, the news is worse: LIBOR is made up.

Actually it's worse even than that. LIBOR is probably both manipulated and made up. The basis for a substantial portion of the world's borrowing is a bent fairy tale.  

The short version is that banks don't borrow from each other as they used to, which means that the interest rate LIBOR is supposed to measure doesn't exist.

Taibbi: Is LIBOR, Crucial Financial Benchmark, a Lie? - Rolling Stone

But these new revelations tell us forcing honesty won't work, either. There could be a team of regulators sitting in the laps of every LIBOR submitter in every bank, and it wouldn't help, because there is no way to honestly describe a nonexistent market.

The FCA's Bailey put it this way (emphasis mine):
"I don't rule out that you could have another benchmark that would measure what Libor is truly supposed to measure, which is bank credit risk in the funding market," he said. "But that would be - and I use this term carefully - a synthetic rate because there isn't a funding market."

I'm listening to "On Point" talk show @ Bal'more NPR affiliate. The host empaneled experts to decrypt millennial participation in the US labor market, not even foreshadowing the neo-liberal agenda. The prompt for this feature is the article Millennials are obsessed with side hustles because they're all we've got. The discussion skirts "holy grail" competition with full-time "professionals" by acknowledging so-called pragmatism required to bill 70 hrs/wk to two or more employers, netting a "living wage". US Dept. of Labor out-dated U3 data collection methods don't get a mention, but AMZ and Ebay marketing channels do.

There are more creative members of the class.

These homeowners faced an Airbnb nightmare as renters left them facing huge fines and angry neighbors

The listing that had been pulled down from Airbnb appeared with the same photos and copy on a site called Vacayo.com. It turns out that Grewal's tenants, Isabel Berney and Temitope "Truth" Oladapo, were behind that site -- Oladapo registered the domain, and Berney lists herself as the company's co-founder on her LinkedIn page.

And Bloomberg Editorial weighs EU liberal "reform" with approval(short on detail, like, "What is a posted-worker?" and "What do trade unions resist the invevitable?").
Macron's First Step Toward Transforming France
(A. France, not UK, reports second-highest population of these - Euractive)

(*)A 1099 is a form with which an US employer declares the earned income of a contractor, "contingent" employee, or any such self-employed individual to the IRS and

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Wealth = credit

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Canada demands U.S. end `right to work' laws as part of NAFTA talks

One source familiar with the discussions said Canada wants the United States to pass a federal law [!]

stopping state governments from enacting right-to-work legislation; the source said the United States has not agreed to such a request. Canada believes that lower labour standards in the United States and Mexico, including right to work, give those countries an unfair advantage in attracting jobs.

< wipes tears >

Macron get this memo, too?

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

The delay in the formal dismantling of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program would be intended to give Congress time to decide whether it wants to address the status of the so-called Dreamers in legislation, according to two people familiar with the president's thinking. But it was not immediately clear how the six-month delay would work in practice and what would happen to people who currently have work permits under the program, or whose permits expire during the six-month stretch.

Oddly, no 'pinions yet from the pubic intellectual "class" castigating the uncertainty this action poses to markets ... or the future of the US volunteer armed forces to be pacifying N. Korea.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Joy Reid is perhaps the most dominant Democrat establishment media personality after Rachel Maddow; in what follows, Reid describes a party devoid of any economic message and explicitly not making any form of universal appeal; that is, what the Democrat Party would look like were its identity politics faction able to purge all its enemies; with regard to politics and power, Reid raises issues that are not only ideological, but institutional, as the Democrat Party moves through its crack-up -- or not!

[...]

However, kudos to Reid for being so open and direct; it's clear, for example, that in Reid's politics of tribalism the interests of working people will never, ever come first. This is wonderfully clarifying.

In the wake of two fatal collisions of Navy warships with commercial vessels, current and former senior surface warfare officers are speaking out, saying today's Navy suffers from a disturbing problem: The SWO community is just not very good at driving ships.

   North Korea has carried out a sixth nuclear test. It claims the device is a hydrogen bomb that could be loaded into an intercontinental ballistic missile.
    The underground test was registered as a magnitude 5.6 earthquake with North Korea and came hours after Pyongyang boasted it had built a new, more advanced nuclear warhead.
    Japan's defence minister said the larger magnitude of the earthquake suggests "capability significantly exceeding the last one."
    US National Security Adviser, HR McMaster, spoke with his South Korean counterpart, Chung Eui-yong, for 20 minutes in an emergency phone call following the test.
    South Korea's weather agency, the Korea Meteorological Administration, estimated Sunday that the nuclear blast yield of the presumed test was between 50 to 60 kilotons, or five to six times stronger than the North Korea's fifth test in September 2016.

The bearded, gravel-voiced leftist leader's rule ended seven years ago, yet he remains the most popular Brazilian president in decades, if not in the country's history.

"Do you know any phenomenon bigger than Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva?" said Flavio Balreira, 65, using the full name, unusual in Brazil.

The former metal worker, union leader and two-times president once described by Barack Obama as "the most popular politician on Earth" has been criss-crossing Brazil's semi-arid, impoverished north-east to address adoring crowds like this one in Ouricuri, in Pernambuco state. Lula and his team travel in a fleet of buses, which he calls "the caravan".

"I want to thank President Lula," said Francilene da Silva, 44, a maid who benefited from a housing scheme introduced during his eight-year reign.

"There are many who enter government and do nothing. He did something," said Fabiana de Lima, 36, a smallholder, explaining that a cash transfer scheme that helped 36 million people escape extreme poverty still "holds up" the town. "He helped the poor."

When Democrats made their post-election populist "Better Deal" pitch, they took a strong stance against pharmaceutical and financial monopolies. But they conspicuously left out the most profound antitrust challenge of our time--the tech oligarchy.

The information sector, notes The Economist, is now the most consolidated sector of the American economy.

The Silicon Valley and its Puget Sound annex dominated by Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft increasingly resemble the pre-gas crisis Detroit of the Big Three. Tech's Big Five all enjoy overwhelming market shares--for example Google controls upwards of 80 percent of global search--and the capital to either acquire or crush any newcomers. They are bringing us a hardly gilded age of prosperity but depressed competition, economic stagnation, and, increasingly, a chilling desire to control the national conversation.

Jeff Bezos harrumphs through his chosen megaphone, The Washington Post, about how "democracy dies in the dark." But if Bezos--the world's third richest man, who used the Post first to undermine Bernie Sanders and then to wage ceaseless war on the admittedly heinous Donald Trump--really wants to identify the biggest long-term threat to individual and community autonomy, he should turn on the lights and look in the mirror.

(3) The relationship between Japan and Korea has been mostly bad for 800 years, and bad relations prevail now between Japan and both Koreas.
[...]
In the final weeks of World War II, the U.S. and its wartime ally, the USSR, simultaneously occupied the Korean peninsula and accepted the Japanese surrender. The Russians arrived first, through Manchuria, advancing as far as the 38th parallel where they stopped by agreement with the U.S. U.S. forces arrived soon thereafter and occupied the south. The division was meant to be temporary; Stalin wanted immediate independence for Korea. But the U.S., which initially ordered Japanese administrators to remain at their posts, and viewed Korea as occupied enemy territory, did not want to risk the prospect of a Korea united under communist rule. There was much leftist opposition to the occupation of the south; the U.S. suppressed the "People's Republic of Korea" that had been pronounced in Seoul in the last days of the war and the the popular committees wherever they had been established. In 1948 the U.S. unilaterally proclaimed the formation of the Republic of Korea, sealing the division of the peninsula; the DPRK was proclaimed in the north only afterwards. Soviet troops withdrew; U.S. troops stayed.

Happy Black History D137 Y2

:: Archived
I'll leave to the reader the futile task of recounting Japanese invasions of Korea in a reddit thread.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem Shlomo Amar called Reform Jews worse than Holocaust deniers because they reject traditional Jewish law.

Amar, who is a former chief rabbi of Israel, in his weekly class last week referenced the Israel Supreme Court decision, handed down hours earlier, in which it called on the government to either reinstate the Western Wall agreement with non-Orthodox groups or explain why it should not force the state to honor the deal.

Yair Netanyahu, son of the prime minister, outdid even his father on Saturday when he published an anti-Semitic cartoon on his personal Facebook page.

The cartoon shows Manny Naftali, the former superintendent of the Prime Minister's Residence, who is at the forefront of the struggle to put pressure on the police to indict Netanyahu for corruption, being baited by Israeli politico Eldad Yaniv, who is seen baited by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Barak is seen tempted by the money of the Illuminati, who according to the cartoon are being tempted by a Reptilian -- a common anti-Semitic codeword for Jews. The Reptilian, for his part, is portrayed as controlling the world in the service of the Grand Jew: George Soros.

To clarify, DO NOT shoot weapons @ #Irma. You won't make it turn around & it will have very dangerous side effectshttps://t.co/CV4Y9OJknv

— Pasco Sheriff (@PascoSheriff) September 10, 2017

The track on which the Kalinga Utkal Express derailed was under repair near Khatauli but there was negligence in conveying the information to the train driver, initial probe into the accident revealed.

Railway officials said at least 15 metres of the track had been taken off and was being replaced when the Puri-Haridwar train appeared.

With no option left, labourers ran for their lives leaving the equipments and the replacement track, which were later found under coach A-1 of the derailed train.

Men generally outperform women in Scrabble tournaments because female competitors are less willing to spent their time improving a largely pointless skill, according to new research.

The Public Relations and Communications Association imposed the sanctions after complaints about the campaign conducted on behalf of Oakbay Capital, owned by the controversial Gupta family. Critics said Bell Pottinger played on racial tensions to distract attention from scandals surrounding the Guptas, who are under scrutiny for alleged efforts to leverage ties to South African President Jacob Zuma for their own [!] benefit.
[...]
Francis Ingham, the association's director-general, said in a statement. "The PRCA has never before passed down such a damning indictment of an agency's behavior."

The association on Monday terminated Bell Pottinger's membership and said the firm couldn't reapply for corporate membership for at least five years. [!]

Preposterous!

London-based Bell Pottinger was accused of engineering a publicity campaign against "white monopoly capital" in South Africa, a catchphrase that taps into resentments among the black majority that white people still have significant control of the economy more than two decades after the end of apartheid. The campaign, critics say, was designed to deflect anger about the corruption allegations swirling around the Guptas and focus on whites as the scapegoat for South Africa's problems.

Giant portrait of toddler peers over US-Mexico border wall https://t.co/IdQNYS3RYc

— The Guardian (@guardian) September 9, 2017

Giant portrait of toddler peers over US-Mexico border wall

The boy appears to grip the barrier with his fingers, leaving the impression the entire thing could be toppled with a giggle.

A French artist who goes by the name JR erected the cut-out of the boy that stands nearly 65 feet (20 metres) tall and is meant to prompt discussion of immigration.
[...]
JR has done other large-scale portraits around the world, with much of his recent work focused on immigrants.

He told reporters at Wednesday's unveiling of the portrait that he was spurred by a dream in which he imagined a toddler looking over the border wall.

A passenger jet has been delayed overnight so it can be fumigated after a scorpion was spotted on board.

The easyJet flight from Paris to Glasgow was postponed after a passenger noticed the arachnid on the preceding flight and alerted staff. The plane is being held at Charles de Gaulle airport before its rescheduled departure on Tuesday.

Passengers waiting to fly to Glasgow from the French capital received a message about the delay on the easyJet app: "We were hoping that we would be able to continue with your flight today but we were informed that a scorpion was sighted on board your plane," adding that the aircraft needed to be fumigated.