In one image, he was a new relative in the Huxtable family from "The Cosby Show." In another, his face was superimposed on the body of Michael Jordan as he glided to the rim. In another, he was placed in a scene from a classic Italian film in which the actor Totò, wearing blackface, plays an ambassador from a fictional African country.

When Luigi Di Maio, Italy's foreign minister, returned to Rome from a vacation on the island of Sardinia, it took little time for Italians to notice his deep tan. By Aug. 25, images and memes featuring Mr. Di Maio in a form of blackface appeared across the Italian web. One of these instances depicted Mr. Di Maio as a Black migrant on a crowded boat.

Instead of criticizing the images, Mr. Di Maio embraced them, sharing some on his own Instagram account, including the ones of Mr. Jordan, Totò and the Huxtables.

PARIS (Reuters) - French President Emmanuel Macron will head to Beirut next week to pressure local politicians into pressing ahead with the creation of a government that can implement urgent reforms, a French presidential official said on Friday.

"The president has said it he will not give up. He made a commitment to do what needs to be done and to apply the necessary pressure to put this programme in place," the official told reporters ahead of Macron's visit to Beirut next Monday and Tuesday.

The official added it was time for Lebanese political parties to temporarily step aside and ensure a government of change was put into place.

Note: The French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon, under the then League of Nations, ended in 1943; the last French troops left in 1946.

WARSAW (Reuters) - Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko's comments that Warsaw may be plotting to seize part of the country if its political crisis worsened are unacceptable, Krzysztof Szczerski, an aide to Poland's president, said on Friday.

Relations between Warsaw and Minsk have become tense in recent days following Lukashenko's suggestions quoted by state news agency Belta that Poland planned to take over the Grodno region bordering Poland and Lithuania if Belarus falls apart.

On Thursday, Poland summoned the Belarus ambassador to protest the "unfounded accusations".

VALLETTA (Reuters) - A businessman suspected of masterminding the murder of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia has told police that the ex-chief of staff of the former prime minister wanted her dead, a court heard on Thursday.

Caruana Galizia, who wrote extensively about corruption on Malta, was killed by a car bomb in October 2017. Wealthy entrepreneur Yorgen Fenech was arrested last November and accused of complicity in the murder. He has denied the accusation.

Police inspector Kurt Zahra, one of the officers who interrogated Fenech, told a court that the businessman had said Keith Schembri, the chief of staff of the then prime minister, had wanted Caruana Galizia killed.

This is rather bizarre. Why is NATO having a meeting about Navalny? Ultimately, he's a Russian citizen who was allegedly poisoned in Russia. Also, did NATO meet meet when US/UK ally Saudi Arabia chopped up journalist & political opposition figure Khashoggi with a bone saw? https://t.co/HNJKmkXwvA

— Bryan MacDonald (@27khv) September 3, 2020

Oops. Our friends at BBC Breakfast may want to review their "UK" graphics this morning. 😳 <pic.twitter.com/YfbusaSba7>

— David Blevins (@skydavidblevins)September 4, 2020

They've apologized, without saying what they should have used. This?

Foreign Minister Heiko Maas over the weekend became the first member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet to link the natural-gas conduit's fate to Russian cooperation with an inquiry into the poisoning of dissident Alexey Navalny. A lawmaker from Merkel's party suggested suspending the project.

While there's no sign that Merkel is about to pull the plug, the comments amplify the latest flare-up of exasperation about President Vladimir Putin in Berlin and suggest an emerging debate in Merkel's governing coalition. The German leader has consistently backed the pipeline in the face of opposition by the U.S. and some European Union allies.

The word "ensauvagement" has been a favorite dog whistle of France's far right in recent years, used to suggest that the nation is turning savage. With its colonial and racist overtones, it has been wielded in discussion of immigration and crime to sound alarms that France is being transformed into a dangerous, uncivilized place, stripped of its traditional values.

"Behind it, there is an underlying imaginary world, with savages on one side and civilized humanity on the other," said Cécile Alduy, a French expert on the political use of language who teaches at Stanford University.

So it did not go unnoticed this week when sitting ministers of President Emmanuel Macron's government started throwing around the word themselves, arguing forcefully that talk of France's "ensauvagement" was legitimate.

"Personally, I use the word ensauvagement and I repeat it," said Gérald Darmanin, the powerful interior minister and head of the national police.

The same Darmanin who is under criminal investigation for alleged rape.

As with many things in France, an unresolved colonial history lies below the surface of the battle over the word ensauvagement.

The word is a direct outgrowth of France's colonial and slave-trading past, a history that the French have yet to come to terms with and that they have often preferred to ignore, said Pascal Blanchard, a historian on French colonialism and its enduring impact on French society.

More than any other imperial power, France justified colonialism by describing it as a "civilizing mission," Mr. Blanchard said.

"The idea of guiding savages out of the darkness into the light was omnipresent in France's discourse," he said. "The idea of the savage is still deeply rooted in French society."

Despite the deep recession caused by the coronavirus crisis and a rising budget deficit, Athens has decided it's time to act. Fighter jets, frigates, torpedoes and helicopters are all on Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis' shopping list.

France, which has given Athens political and military backing in its confrontation with Ankara, will be a big beneficiary of the procurement push. A deal between the two countries was on the agenda when Mitsotakis met French President Emmanuel Macron in Corsica ahead of a summit of Mediterranean leaders on Thursday.

But other key allies are also likely to benefit from plans that are expected to raise military spending by some €10 billion over the next 10 years, according to Greek officials. That would amount to an increase of about one third on current levels.

The Greek budget deficit is expected to slide to 5 percent of GDP, as the pandemic has blown large holes in the state budget.

The European Commission has lifted the deficit rules for this year and next to help governments deal with the pandemic. But sooner or later, Greece will face the problem of how to return to surpluses -- as it is required to do according to its bailout exit terms -- and pay back its debts.

"There are at least 40 family-based criminal networks -- or clans -- in Sweden, he confirmed: immigrants who came to the country `solely for the purpose of organising and systematising crime'.
[...]
Conflicts between rival criminals last month escalated to a point where gangs took an unparalleled move to establish their dominance. Masked and armed men set up roadblocks, and controlled cars entering certain neighbourhoods in Gothenburg.
[...]
At the end of August, two teenage boys were abducted, raped and abused for hours at a cemetery outside Stockholm. When police found them they had been stabbed and buried alive in a pit. Somehow they survived."

-----
sapere aude

Imagine if 50% of all eligible (not just registered) voters were required for elections in the US....

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union's chief Brexit negotiator said on Friday that talks with Britain this week often appeared to going backwards rather than forwards and, at this point, it looked unlikely that a deal could be clinched before a year-end deadline.

"At this stage, an agreement between the UK and the European Union seems unlikely," Barnier told a news conference after two full days of negotiations in Brussels.

"On the European side, we are very concerned about the state of play in our negotiations. The clock is ticking."

The UK government has renewed its attempt to reopen the chapter of the Brexit divorce treaty protecting specialty food and drink, such as Parma ham, roquefort cheese and champagne, in a move that left the EU chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, "a little bit flabbergasted".

The British proposal on protected status for food and drink was included in a draft free-trade agreement handed to Barnier by his opposite number, David Frost, last week, according to two EU sources.

But EU officials have ruled out diluting the divorce deal provisions that protect more than 3,000 high-end food and drink products from copycats. "It's just not going to happen," said one official.

Brexit: UK plans to override parts of EU withdrawal deal

The UK government is planning legislation that will override key parts of the Brexit withdrawal agreement, British newspaper the Financial Times reported Sunday.

The so-called internal market bill, due to be published Wednesday, is expected to "eliminate the legal force of parts of the withdrawal agreement" in areas relating to state aid and Northern Ireland customs, according to the newspaper.

Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney, who was key in negotiating the withdrawal agreement, tweeted that the reported plan "would be very unwise."

The status of the UK's only land border with the EU, between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, has been one of the most difficult sticking points in negotiations.

Environment Minister George Eustice attempted to downplay the legislation on Monday morning, saying that the UK was committed to the Northern Ireland protocol and that the internal market bill would tidy up some "legal ambiguities."

But EU diplomats said any plan to override part of the divorce agreement would be a "desperate and ultimately self-defeating strategy."

"I remain worried ... the negotiations are difficult, because the British want the best of both worlds," the EU's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier told French radio.

Ministers are increasingly nervous that a Scottish breakaway is on the cards (the cabinet was recently briefed that the latest opinion polls show 56% of Scots would vote for independence, and 44% to stay in the UK).

Between Brexit and Covid it is looking more and more like the UK will lose the "U" in the not-so-distant future.


She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

archived  Minister of the Crown duties, EU (Withdrawal Agreement Bill Delegated Powers Memorandum, Oct 2019

UK workers slowly move off furlough programme - statistics office
7.5% unemployment

Bank of England looks harder at negative rates in case troubles deepen
QE II NIRP

reference
ONS "Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme statistics: June 2020"

LAW & ORDER!!!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 30, 2020

Is it safe to go to the grocery store? Can my kids have a play date? Will the other child wear a mask? Can I send them back to school? When my boss asks me to come back to the office, should I?

Shayla Bell lies awake at night racking her brain for answers and preparing for another day of unprecedented choices.

"There's all these little, small decisions all the time," said Bell, a suburban Chicago retail professional with two kids. "I find myself being my own devil's advocate so often to try to reach the best conclusion. And I'm tired."
[...]
"It's a state of low willpower that results from having invested effort into making choices," said Roy Baumeister, a psychology professor at Florida State University who coined the term in 2010.

Like a mental gas tank, the human brain has a limited capacity of energy, and as you make decisions throughout the day, you deplete that resource. As you become fatigued, you may be inclined to avoid additional decisions, stick to the status quo or base a decision on a single criteria, Baumeister said.

The European Union's chief diplomat on Thursday said U.S. moves to sanction top officials with the International Criminal Court (ICC) are "unacceptable" and "unprecedented measures" meant to obstruct the court's official duties.

E.U. Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell was responding to moves by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday that put sanctions on the ICC's top prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, and the court's head of jurisdiction, Phakiso Mochochoko.

"The sanctions announced by the United States administration on 2 September against two Court staff members, including its Prosecutor, are unacceptable and unprecedented measures that attempt to obstruct the Court's investigations and judicial proceedings," Borrell said in a statement.

"The ICC must be able to work independently and impartially, free from outside interference. The United States should reconsider its position and reverse the measures it has taken. Impunity must never be an option," he said.

The Trump administration has targeted ICC officials and those aiding investigations for sanctions and visa restrictions over the court's pursuit of investigations into allegations of American service members committing war crimes in Afghanistan.

Several of the recipients were puzzled to get the checks, including pensioner Manfred Barnreiter, 73, who said he believed he was the victim of a scam at first.

"We quietly went to the bank ... where we were told they'll see if it's real," Barnreiter told Austrian public broadcaster ORF. "Three days later, we had the money in our bank account."

Barnreiter, who briefly worked in the U.S. in the 1960s, received the full $1,200, as did his wife. Neither are citizens of the U.S. or live there, which are required to be eligible for the checks.

"People initially thought it's a treacherous form of fraud -- but the checks were real," a spokeswoman for Austria's Oberbank told the Washington Post.

The report comes the month after NPR reported thousands of foreigners who once worked in the U.S. had accidentally received checks. Government officials attributed the error to likely tax return errors.

archived abridged

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Champion Of Gender Equality, Dies At 87 https://t.co/V0b7oSFYPy

— NPR Politics (@nprpolitics) September 18, 2020

Before you argue that Ruth Bader Ginsburg should have resigned, remember that women have been asked to step aside for the greater good since time immemorial. RBG doesn't owe you anything.

— Matt Bruenig (@MattBruenig) September 18, 2020

I'm Joe Biden and I approve this message. pic.twitter.com/TuRZXPE5xK

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) September 20, 2020

The United States has reached yet another grim milestone Tuesday: 200,000 coronavirus deaths.

The news comes as states grapple with opening restaurants, small businesses, and schools; and cases are peaking in Montana, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming, according to a USA TODAY analysis of Johns Hopkins data. Social distancing fatigue and continued contention over mask-wearing threaten to compound COVID-19 cases and deaths as the year goes on.

In March, President Donald Trump said keeping the death toll between 100,000 to 200,000 people would have indicated that his administration had "done a very good job." With models predicting that number to be eclipsed by the end of the year, Trump has sought to reshape the significance of the death tally.

Japanese PM Shinzo Abe has announced his resignation for health reasons.

He said he did not want his illness to get in the way of decision making, and apologised to the Japanese people for failing to complete his term in office.

The 65 year old has suffered for many years from ulcerative colitis, an inflammatory bowel disease, but he said his condition had worsened recently.

Last year, he became Japan's longest serving prime minister. His current period in office began in 2012.

In 2007 he resigned abruptly from an earlier term as prime minister because of his struggles with ulcerative colitis, a chronic condition that he has lived with since he was a teenager.

BAMAKO (Reuters) - Coup leaders in Mali have released President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita and he has returned home, his representative said on Thursday, a potential sign of good faith a day ahead of a regional summit on the country's political future.

A group of military officers has controlled Mali since Aug. 18, when they detained Keita at gunpoint and forced him to resign in a takeover foreign powers fear could further destabilise the West African nation and undermine a fight against Islamist militants in the wider Sahel region.

Police in Delhi were "complicit and an active participant" in the February violence in which 53 people, mostly Muslims, were killed, according to an investigation by Amnesty International India.

"The Delhi police personnel were complicit and an active participant in the violence that took place in Delhi in February 2020, yet in the last six months not a single investigation has been opened into the human rights violations committed by the Delhi police," the rights group said in a statement on Friday.

Amnesty said it spoke to riot survivors, witnesses, human rights activists and retired police officers and analysed several user-generated videos for the investigation that reveals a "disturbing pattern of grave human rights violations committed by the Delhi police during the riots".

Thomas Piketty confirmed that his latest book won't be published in China, since he refused to bow to censors' demands to cut a section on rising inequality under the CCP in China https://t.co/UeWlr7yTm7

— Laurie Chen (@lauriechenwords) August 30, 2020

In a crowded field, this publication is up there with the most unashamed Anglo-American state propaganda organs. Pravda for NATO neoliberals. pic.twitter.com/V1rHUpJH91

— Matt Kennard (@kennardmatt) August 31, 2020

MELBOURNE -- The land now known as Australia is an invaded, colonized place. When the invaders arrived, they settled on the basis of the legal fiction of terra nullius, or land belonging to no one, despite the existence of more than 500 clans or nations of Traditional Owner groups.

Digging up this land is the cornerstone of Australia's modern economy. The rocks we've sold to China have seen us avoid recession for 29 years. And while our run of economic growth has ended, we're ever more dependent on blowing up, digging out and putting our land on ships to make steel for buildings in faraway places.

Australia's determination to ignore its Indigenous people and their heritage in favor of economic exploitation was made evident in May, when news broke that mining giant Rio Tinto had deliberately destroyed the Juukan Gorge Caves, a cultural site of the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura Traditional Owner (PKKP) people of Western Australia.

And yet, on Australia's National Sorry Day -- which remembers the mistreatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people who were forcibly removed from their families and communities -- Rio Tinto went ahead with its plans.

Because of the weak protections offered by the outdated Aboriginal Heritage Act of 1972 (WA), Rio Tinto's destruction of the site was, in fact, lawful.

.@UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria releases report on how SNA, with Turkish military forces support, committed war crimes of hostage-taking, cruel treatment and torture, and rape. Looting and appropriation of land was rife, particularly in Kurdish areas. https://t.co/pfBSZSg1pS

— Rejna Alaaldin ڕێژنه‌ علاءالدين (@RejnaAlaaldin) September 17, 2020

`Artificial coronavirus' study linked to Steve Bannon and Chinese fugitive Guo Wengui - SCMP

A foundation associated with fugitive Chinese tycoon Guo Wengui and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is linked to a non-peer-reviewed study that alleges the coronavirus
is an artificial pathogen.

The Rule of Law Foundation's name appears on the title page of the paper published on the Zenodo open-access research repository on Monday.

In the paper's abstract, the researchers said the theory of a natural origin of the coronavirus "although widely accepted, lacks substantial support".

"The alternative theory that the virus may have come from a research laboratory is, however, strictly censored on peer-reviewed scientific journals," it said.

The study's first author is Yan Limeng
, a former University of Hong Kong postdoctoral researcher who alleged in July that HKU silenced her when she claimed to have discovered early in the outbreak that the coronavirus could be transmitted between people.

Yan made the allegations on Fox News and claimed she made the discovery three weeks before the Chinese government confirmed human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus on January 20.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFDgsa5fz9w

SleepyJoe and Pelosi should take it on the road:

• Say Good Night, Nancy!
  
• Good morning, Sunday morning!

Nearly all the oil from a damaged Japanese ship that caused a spill off the coast of Mauritius has now been removed, the country's Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth said on Wednesday.

The prime minister's office also said that everything in the ship's fuel tanks had been removed but there was still residue in parts of the ship.

Jugnauth said Mauritius will seek compensation from the ship's owner, Nagashiki Shipping, for the environmental damage it has caused.

MV Wakashio, a bulk carrier, has been stranded on a coral reef off the nation's coast for over two weeks now.

The vessel ran aground on July 25 and has since leaked an estimated 1,000 tonnes of oil into coral reefs, mangrove forests and protected wetlands.

It is unusual to find a fully instrumented weather station which experienced a hurricane eyewall passage. It's like out of a textbook. pic.twitter.com/aLhQVL4uKZ

— Geoff Fox (@geofffox) August 28, 2020

chartered by Indian Oil Corp (IOC) [...] The ship sailed from the port of Mina Al Ahmadi in Kuwait, loaded with Kuwait Export Crude, Refinitiv Eikon tracking data showed. It was headed for the Indian port of Paradip, where state-run IOC has a 300,000 barrel-per-day refinery.

The smoke blocked out so much sunlight that a forecast for temperatures to climb to 90 degrees (32 Celsius) instead dipped to the 60s (15.5 Celsius) as though "we're in perpetual morning without the sun to help us warm up," said Drew Peterson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service's Bay Area office.

Some of the smoke settled in San Francisco Bay and formed a 15-mile (24-kilometer) trail of ash along the tidal line, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

Borrmann said the conditions were expected to linger until Friday. By then, the district expects to issue its 25th consecutive Spare The Air alert requiring residents to cut pollution -- the longest stretch since the program began in 1991. The alerts began Aug. 18 after thousands of lightning strikes ignited three massive wildfires to the north, south and east of San Francisco.

The previous streak was 14 days of alerts in 2018 when the Bay Area was choked by smoke from a fire that devastated the town of Paradise and killed 85 people.

This time, strong winds from the north and northeast pushed smoke from devastating wildfires in the Sierra Nevada foothills and in Oregon and Washington state into lower elevations. A fire that exploded in size Tuesday and prompted evacuation orders for some 20,000 people in Oroville sent the air quality index in Sacramento to a hazardous reading at one point.

Marge Simpson responded to a tweet uploaded by a senior advisor to president Donald Trump in which she mocks vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris, comparing her voice that of "The Simpsons" character.

In a video uploaded to Twitter, Marge (voiced by Julie Kavner) said that she feels disrespected by Jenna Ellis' comment, which she interpreted as an insult to both herself and to Harris.

Marge Simpson has something to say. pic.twitter.com/viux96bAPf

— TheSimpsons (@TheSimpsons) August 14, 2020

Under ByteDance's latest proposal, Oracle would be the firm's technology partner and assume management of TikTok's U.S. user data, sources told Reuters on Sunday. Oracle is also negotiating taking a stake in TikTok's U.S. operations, they said.

The data is currently stored in Alphabet Inc's ["]cloud["].

There is a more basic reason for describing the UK and US as plutocracies, and that is by analysing how we got here. The place to start is neoliberalism. Neoliberalism eulogizes the market. In the past I've characterised the ideology as what you might believe if you did Econ 101 (a first year course) and skipped some of the lectures on market imperfections. However an ideal market for any economist involves competition, and as any student doing Econ 101 would know, any form of imperfect competition takes you away from that ideal. However neoliberalism in practice has become increasingly relaxed about monopoly power. Colin Crouch distinguishes between what he calls market-neoliberals and monopoly-neoliberals.

Neoliberalism's success owes a great deal to it being a very attractive ideology for the wealthy, and that in turn helps explain why it has been increasingly relaxed about monopoly. Wealthy funders of think tanks that promote neoliberalism, like the IEA in the UK, will not look kindly on the think tank suggesting their monopoly should be broken up. This is an illustration of how neoliberalism has increasingly adapted as an ideology to serve the interests of wealthy individuals. It is no accident that under neoliberalism the relative incomes of the 1% and 0.1% have taken off, which greatly increases both the ability and incentive for the wealthly to meddle in politics.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, on multiple occasions brought with them from Israel suitcases of clothes to be laundered and dry cleaned while staying at the White House guesthouse, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.

Jay Powell, September 16, 2020, 3:18 pm EST "I would say it was notable for the lack of the emergence of some sort of a financial bubble, the popping of which could threaten the expansion. That didn't happen."#FamousLastWords

— Danielle DiMartino Booth (@DiMartinoBooth) September 16, 2020

Yesterday the best person in a world, my husband and my friend .@davidgraeber died in a hospital in Venice.

— Nika Dubrovsky (@nikadubrovsky) September 3, 2020