Both Parties have reached agreement on the following articles of Part Three of the draft
Agreement1:

• Title I, Art. 42, Title II, Title IV Art. 56, Title IV, Title VI Art 63,  Title VIII Art 72, Title IX Art 79, Title IX Art 94-95
  
• Annex y+7 in re: Art 45 (temporary storage or customs procedures; Annex y+4 in re: 46 (ITC), Art 49 (ITC), Art 94-95 (admin and collection of taxes, duties)

"After Brexit the UK will continue to work with the EU and the EU Member States. We have excellent relationships with intelligence and security agencies right across the continent. For example, in the last year we've played a critical role in the disruption of terrorist operations in at least four European countries. Those relationships, and our ability to work together, save lives," stated Fleming.

"The UK is not ready to accept the free movement of people, the jurisdiction of the Court and the Charter of Fundamental Rights," he said. "This means that the UK cannot take part in the European Arrest Warrant".

archived cui bono
Tory gov. It just opened a new line of credit in PESCO.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

France and Germany have agreed to work together on a sixth-generation fighter, the so-called Future Combat Air System, or FCAS, to begin to replace the Tornado by 2040. The previous chief of the Luftwaffe, Lt. Gen. Karl Müllner, had been in favor of replacing the Tornado with the F-35. Partly for that reason, he was dismissed in May.  

Going with the F-35 would "eliminate the need for a next-gen European fighter and possibly cripple Europe's capacity to develop such a system for years to come," said  Ulrich Kühn, a German political scientist and senior research associate at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation.

Not sure that has much to do with any trans-atlantic strains than the fact that the turkey won't fly.
More relevant might be the (not very well sourced) speculation in the next paragraph that they might make the plane French but not US nuke capable. As they say, big if true.

Very big crowd for the #copyright vote in Juri today #savetheinternet pic.twitter.com/znBxx01iiK

— Mathias Vermeulen (@mathver) June 20, 2018

archived whataboutsockpuppets
an individual's persona is the personal property of the individual


Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Leistungsschutzrecht

The cost of complying with the link tax will make starting a competitor to one of those platforms effectively impossible. For one thing, the EU is planning on leaving the details of the link tax up to each of its 28 member states, with no limits on how restrictive these rules can be. Under Article 11, members could create link taxes that required a license for quoting even very short snippets from an article. Even if some states create more sensible rules, it won't matter, because the only way to stay out of trouble is to comply with all 28 versions of the rule, so the most restrictive rule will be the one to which everyone defaults.

Great Firewall of Europe

Under Article 13 of the proposal, sites that allow users to post text, sounds, code, still or moving images, or other copyrighted works for public consumption will have to filter all their users' submissions against a database of copyrighted works. Sites will have to pay to license the technology to match submissions to the database, and to identify near matches as well as exact ones. Sites will be required to have a process to allow rightsholders to update this list with more copyrighted works.

Even the loss of national sovereignty which has been invoked in the past, and which continues to be invoked today, to justify neoliberal policies is largely the result of a willing and conscious limitation of state sovereign rights by national elites. The various policies adopted by Western governments to this end include:

(1) reducing the power of parliaments vis-à-vis that of executive bureaucracies;

(2) making central banks formally independent of governments, with the explicit aim of subjugating the latter to `market-based discipline';

(3) adopting inflation targeting as the dominant approach to central bank policymaking -- an approach which stresses low inflation as the primary objective of monetary policy, to the exclusion of other policy objectives, such as full employment;

(4) adopting rules-bound policies--on public spending, debt as a proportion of GDP, competition, etc.--thereby limiting what politicians can do at the behest of their electorates;

(5) subordinating spending departments to the control of treasuries;

(6) readopting fixed exchange rate systems, which severely limit the ability of governments to exercise control over economic policy; and, perhaps most important,

(7) surrendering national prerogatives to supranational institutions and super-state bureaucracies such as the European Union.

The reason why governments chose to willingly `tie their hands' is all too clear: as the European case epitomises, the creation of self-imposed `external constraints' allowed national politicians to reduce the political costs of the neoliberal transition--which clearly involved unpopular policies -- by `scapegoating' institutionalized rules and `independent' or international institutions, which in turn were presented as an inevitable outcome of the new, harsh realities of globalisation.

Anyone who is crazy enough to lend to a moribund economy which has had its head held under water for ten years... oh you can all complete the angry rant in your own terms.

But all that pain was worth it : they get ten years of free credit!!! Let's extend and pretend again, like we did last summer.

Also 26% discount on their GDP.
43% youth unemployment, despite the emigration rate.
Etc.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

«Scusa tanto ma sto cercando solo ragazze del Triveneto e della Lombardia. Niente di personale».

La frase è quella di un proprietario di casa di Trento, ricevuta in risposta da una studentessa universitaria di Pescara, che cercava un appartamento per il prossimo anno accademico. Ne ha riferito un giornale studentesco «l'Universitario», sul quale la studentessa, Marta, che sta per concludere il terzo anno di giurisprudenza, afferma: «Non è giusto minimizzare, non è giusto sdrammatizzare, non è giusto chiudere gli occhi. Bisogna chiamare le cose con il loro nome, e le uniche parole che possano dirsi per questa situazione sono: pregiudizio e discriminazione».

Time is running out for Merkel. The CSU seems willing to blow up the coalition if she doesn't find "equivalent" solutions to turning back people at the border. The likelihood of finding such solutions with the likes of Saldini&Co is rather... The fortress Europe approach is now the default option that governments are sliding into.

_{Schengen is toast!}

Homes, cars and possessions belonging to Sergei Skripal and the police officer poisoned in the Salisbury nerve agent attack will be bought by taxpayers in a £1 million deal, it has been reported.

The former Russian spy's house, which is still the scene of an ongoing investigation, will be bought by the Government for about £350,000, according to the Sunday Times.

21st Century Fox Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch (net worth $15.9 billion) said Wednesday morning that Disney's proposal was "superior" to that of Comcast, while making it clear that he would still consider bids from other companies, including a revised Comcast proposal.

Under the Disney-Fox agreement, Disney would acquire Fox's 20th Century Fox film and TV studios, Fox's FX cable channels and regional news stations, Fox's stakes in international networks such as the UK's Sky broadcaster and the Star India TV channel, and Fox's one-third stake in Hulu, making Disney the majority owner of the streaming service.
[...]
The AT&T-Time Warner merger is a so-called "vertical [TRUST]," involving firms that do not directly compete against one another, as opposed to the merger of Disney and 21st Century Fox, which is called a "horizontal [TRUST]." Comcast, like AT&T a distribution company, made its bid for 21st Century Fox the day after the AT&T-Time Warner ruling, which is seen as a green light for similar vertical mergers in the telecom/media sector as well as other sectors.

Telecom giants and traditional cable companies are scrambling to acquire content producers to ward off a growing challenge from digital companies such as Facebook, Google, Amazon and Netflix, which are increasingly producing their own [?] programming.

archived
blockbuster summer for media mergers!

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Despite many impressionistic claims about the growth of precarious work, a comparison between the 2005 and 2018 BLS results shows a slight decline in the proportion of these forms of irregular employment from 10.7% of the workforce to 10.1% in 2017. The total number of such jobs in the BLS survey grew from 14,826,000 in 2005 to 15,482,000 in 2017. That's a relatively small gain of 656,000 jobs or by 4.6% over twelve years. The total number of employed workers, however, grew faster by 14,379,000 or by 10.4%.

The New York Times reported these results under the headline, "How the Gig Economy Is Reshaping Work: Not So Much." Doug Henwood similarly headlined his analysis "No, It's Not a Gig Economy." An Economic Policy Institute comment on the new BLS report agrees that "we are not becoming a nation of freelancers."

It's just that regular jobs have grown worse.

Federal Register: Ink's not yet dry on this one

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO) said in a statement: "Over the last month, 123 immigrants seeking asylum have been detained and transferred to Oregon's Sheridan federal prison in Yamhill County.
[...]
Mr. Singh, who runs a shop in Sheridan city, said that the detainees were picked up from communities in California, Texas and Oregon. "There were brought here from several places," he said by phone. Valarie Kaur, a Sikh community activist, posted on Twitter that 52 of these detainees were from India; 13 from Nepal; and two from Bangladesh.
[...]
"Most are Sikh or Christian. Instead, they were incarcerated in a federal prison. They said they came to the United States for religious freedom [!], but they felt as if they were `going crazy' because they are being confined in small cells for up to 22 hours a day (They pointed out that the other non-immigrant prisoners get far more time out of cells)," [Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici] wrote.

archived
valid religion
US jobs saved or created


Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

It started as a leisurely jog along a Canadian beach on a cool spring evening. But it turned into a two-week nightmare after Cedella Roman accidentally veered across the US border and was seized by US border patrol agents.

The French citizen was visiting her mother and studying English, when the family headed to White Rock, about an hour's drive from Vancouver in May.

As dusk approached, the 19-year-old went for a jog along the beach. She swerved on to a dirt path as the tide came in, stopping briefly to snap a photo of the stunning scenery before turning around to retrace her steps.

It was then that she was confronted by two officers from the US border patrol.

"They're going to die anyway"
Listen to Yvette read aloud a passage from Superpredator: Bill Clinton's Use and Abuse of Black America by Nathan Robinson. 6 1/2 minutes.

"We call that whataboutism" ~ Megyn "$20M" Kelly to Vladimir Putin, March 2018

archived weighing cruelty
"Our system was conceived as a means of ..."
White House official [!] mocked 'dying' McCain

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Once upon a time this was all the polythene in the world! Sample from the first ever batch of polythene (made by ICI in 1936), which I just saw in the Royal Society vaults. pic.twitter.com/rlFj79mexT

— Marcus Chown (@marcuschown) 24. Juni 2018

on this day: USSR recovers 2 dogs, Belka and Strelka, the first animals to be launched into orbit and returned alive pic.twitter.com/hZQQmTeNh6

— Old Pics Archive (@oldpicsarchive) 20. Juni 2018

The upshot is that global politics are currently dominated by a handful of men -- and only men -- who have nothing but contempt for liberal democracy and who aspire to absolute control of politics, of the economy, of the judiciary and of the media. They are the predominant figures of the present -- and the decisions they make will go a long way toward shaping the future ahead. The globalized, high-tech, constantly informed and enlightened world of the 21st century finds itself in the middle of a slide back into the age of authoritarianism.

I also like that part:
temp

These days, it is rare that democracies collapse under attack from armed, uniformed adversaries. Such images belong to the past; the coup d'état has become a rarity. On the contrary, many autocrats have come to power by way of the ballot box, govern in the name of the people and regularly hold referenda to solidify their power.

But once in power -- in Turkey, Venezuela or Russia -- they bring the institutions of democracy under their control.

Funny how it is the "authocrats" we currently don't like who come to power through the ballot box.