The scandalous way the US criminalizes children

In reading this article about how one county treats children, one cannot help but think that if you wanted to turn young children into hardened criminals, you could not think of a better way. The system seems designed to find ways to arrest children and haul them up before a judge and send them to juvenile detention systems, even when they have not done anything that deserved such harsh treatment.

This story is about eleven young children, one as young as eight, who were arrested for doing nothing more that being spectators to a schoolyard scuffle, the kind of thing that takes place between children all the time, with one of them taking video of it.
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What is in the infrastructure bill

If you have been following the dreary ‘debate’ in the US congress about the infrastructure bill that progressive Democrats want to pass and Republicans and right-wing Democrats want to block, what is usually mentioned is the total figure of $3.5 trillion, though the fact that it is spread over ten years and thus much less scary is rarely spoken about.

Mehdi Hasan is fed up that people are not being told what is actually being proposed and he explains it in 60 seconds

Could the CIA have leaked the Pandora Papers?

I blogged about the Pandora Papers, the leak of confidential documents that showed how the world’s ultra-wealthy, including prominent politicians, are hiding their money in various off-shore tax havens around the world. It did not go unnoticed that there were very few Americans who were named, while there was a high number of people who are considered enemies of the US, especially Russians. The benign reason given for this imbalance is that the US itself is now a tax haven, with the lax laws of states like Delaware, South Dakota, and Nevada making it unnecessary for Americans to send their money abroad.

But there is a less benign possibility and that it that the source of the leaked documents is the CIA. After all, hacking into systems and releasing damaging information on perceived enemies is all in a day’s work for that agency..
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Homicidal squirrel

I blogged recently about rats that have appeared in toilets in the UK. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there is this video of a squirrel that launched what looked like an entirely unprovoked attack on a man who was working in his garage. (Warning: When attacked, the man utters a homophobic slur.)

Are we witnessing the beginning of some kind of concerted effort by the rodent population to terrorize humans?

Getting vaccinated is not just a matter of personal choice

The demand by some states and companies that people must be vaccinated in certain situations is playing out in an interesting manner in the National Basketball League. Two prominent players Andrew Wiggins and Kyrie Irving had both refused to say whether they were vaccinated and had told people to respect their personal choice. That could have resulted in them not being allowed to play in states that require vaccinations and this would mean that Irving would be prohibited from playing in all home games in New York and Wiggins in San Francisco.
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Seeing the beautiful but invisible world around us

I love watching videos of animals and plants that use camera technology to reveal what is invisible to the naked eye, either by using time-lapse techniques to speed up the extremely slow or high speed cameras to slow down the incredibly quick.

In this video, biologist Adrian Smith films seven species of moths with high-speed cameras to show how beautiful and graceful they are. Films such as these remind me how limited is the range of our senses. There is an incredibly beautiful world that is all around us that we just do not see. Thanks to this technology, we now can.

You might think of moths primarily as the pesky creatures that get drawn to your lamplight and love nothing more than gnawing through your well-worn knitwear. However, as this video from the Evolutionary Biology and Behavior Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and North Carolina State University shows, they can also be quite majestic – especially when captured on ‘fancy science cameras’. Shooting seven different moth species at a whopping 6,000 frames per second (fps) – compared with the standard 24 fps for film and television – the biologist Adrian Smith, who heads the research lab, guides viewers through the incredible biophysics of moth flight.

The other vaccine we need

The WHO has rolled out the world’s first malaria vaccine to all children in Africa. The vaccine was developed way back in 1987. It is only 30% effective and administering it is cumbersome because it requires four doses and protection fades after four months. But given that there are more that 200 million cases and 400,000 deaths per year due to malaria, the impact could still be large.

Because of the heat and poverty, many children in Africa sleep out in the open without protective nets covering them, making them highly vulnerable to mosquito bites.

Malaria is a major scourge and the world needs a much better malaria vaccine. Maybe the new vaccine-making techniques developed to deal with the coronaviruses can be adapted to find one for malaria.

Is going to the extreme a winning strategy?

I have been wondering whether taking ever more extreme stands on major issues was a winning strategy for Republicans. There is no doubt that it fires up the most passionate and Trump-supporting faction in the party and also seeks a petty goal of ‘triggering the libs’, as the kids say. But against that is the possibility that it alienates everyone else, including other Republicans. While such a strategy would likely be a plus in the primaries where more loyal party members tend to vote, it would succeed in a general election only if the electorate is so solidly Republican that there are enough people for whom just the identifier (R) after a candidate’s name is sufficient to make their voting decision.
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Sri Lankan power couple named in Pandora Papers

Among the kleptocrats revealed in the recent Pandora Papers leak is a Sri Lankan couple, the wife of whom is a cousin to the president and prime minister (who are brothers) who have managed to amass a huge amount of wealth and sent it overseas.

In early 2018, workers in a London warehouse carefully loaded an oil painting of Lakshmi, the Hindu deity of wealth, onto a van bound for Switzerland.

The painting, by 19th-century Indian master Raja Ravi Varma, depicts the four-armed goddess clad in a red sari with gold ornaments and standing atop a lotus flower. It was one of 31 works of art, altogether worth nearly $1 million, that were being shipped to the Geneva Freeport in Switzerland. That vast, ultra-secure warehouse complex, larger than 20 soccer fields, stores among its many treasures what the BBC once called “the greatest art collection no one can see.”

The owner of “Goddess Lakshmi,” and the artworks in transit with it, as recorded on the packing slip, was a Samoan-registered shell company with an unremarkable name, Pacific Commodities Ltd. But a cache of leaked documents from Asiaciti Trust, a Singapore-based financial services provider, indicates that a politically connected Sri Lankan, Thirukumar Nadesan, secretly controls the company and thus is the true owner of the 31 pieces of art. His wife, Nirupama Rajapaksa, is a former member of Sri Lanka’s Parliament and a scion of the powerful Rajapaksa clan, which has dominated the Indian Ocean island nation’s politics for decades.
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