Tuesday, March 21, 2023

Xi In Moscow

Call me anytime: Zelenskyy plays the long game with Xi Jinping Ukraine is conspicuously diplomatic in its dealings with Vladimir Putin’s top ally.
What Zelenskyy should know before he talks with Xi
Russia and China want to disrupt the world order, NSC spokesperson says “They’d like to rewrite the rules of the game globally,” John Kirby said.
Xi Jinping visits Moscow to meet Putin (March 20)
Blinken slams Xi for providing ‘diplomatic cover’ to Putin during Moscow visit
Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin meet in Moscow, discuss Chinese peace plan for Ukraine Washington and its allies are skeptical that Xi can be an honest broker; US urges China and Russia to ‘respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity’ ....... The two leaders meet for 4.5 hours, and Russian media reports that Putin ‘went out into the street’ to see Xi off as they parted, a rare move for him .
Xi Jinping says China ready to ‘stand guard over world order’ on Moscow visit Chinese leader expected to position himself as peacemaker but US condemns Xi for providing ‘diplomatic cover’ for atrocities in Ukraine .
Putin rips West as trying to stifle Russia, China's 'development,’ while Xi arrives in Moscow
Putin and Xi prepare for second day of talks in Moscow as Japanese PM heads to Ukraine Chinese and Russian leaders to discuss Ukraine in formal talks after friendly dinner, while Fumio Kishida meets Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv .
China bills itself as a Ukraine peacemaker but US says Xi’s talks with Putin provide ‘diplomatic cover’ for war
Xi: China's proposal on Ukraine reflects unity of global views Xi has been seeking to present China as a global peacemaker and project it as a responsible great power.



20 years on, George W. Bush’s promise of democracy in Iraq and Middle East falls short the main arguments for the invasion: that there were weapons of mass destruction. ....... “it turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and in some cases deliberately misleading.” ........ “The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution,” Bush said in November 2003. He also said that the U.S. would be pursuing a “forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East.” ........ In 2003, there was indeed, as Bush noted, a “freedom deficit” in the Middle East, where repressive authoritarian regimes dominated the region. Yet, in spite of tremendous upheaval in the Middle East over the past two decades, many authoritarian regimes remain deeply entrenched. ......... The non-profit group Freedom House evaluates countries in terms of democratic institutions and whether they have free and fair elections, as well as people’s civil rights and liberties, such as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and a free press. Freedom House rates each country and its level of democracy on a scale from 2 to 14, from “mostly free” to “least free.” ............ In 2003, the average Freedom House score for an Arab League member was 11.45 – far more authoritarian than the global average of 6.75 at the time. ......... the Freedom House report in 2003 classified a little over 46% of all countries as “free,” but no country in the Arab League met that threshold. ......... The fall of Hussein’s regime in April 2003 produced a nominally more democratic Iraq. But after fighting a series of sectarian insurgencies in Iraq over an eight-year period, the U.S. ultimately left behind a weak and deeply divided government. .......... Rivalry between Iraq’s three main groups – the Sunni and Shiite Muslims as well as the Kurds, the largest ethnic minority in the country – paralyzed early attempts at political reorganization. ........

in 2023, Freedom House continues to score Iraq as “Not Free” in its measure of democracy.

........ In 2014, widespread protest movements associated with the Arab Spring toppled dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya. In other countries, such as Morocco and Jordan, monarchs were able to offer concessions to people and remain in control by delaying public spending cuts, for example, and replacing government ministers. ........ In Egypt, the military has reasserted itself and the country has slid steadily back to authoritarianism. In Yemen, the political vaccum created by the protests marked the start of a devastating civil war. ........ The average Freedom House democracy score for members of the Arab League is today 11.45 — the same as it was on the eve of the Iraq invasion. ........... It is hard to know if a different approach might have yielded better results. ...... the vision of an Iraq as an inspiration for a democratic transformation of the Middle East has not come to pass. .

The collapse of major US banks leads to bills calling for more regulation bipartisan-backed deregulation in 2018 led to the banks’ collapse ......... lax government policy that included overspending – which Barr says, fueled inflation, as well as long-term low interest rates – not deregulation, was behind the banks’ failures. ........ banks with US$50 billion in assets be subject to strict standards ....... But the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act of 2018 loosened the standards, raising the asset threshold to $250 billion, meaning fewer banks were under strict controls. ........ During 2022, Silvergate’s deposit base grew dramatically, almost doubling its assets to $210 billion. But the bank did not have either the administrative capacity or market demand to lend out all of the money, as banks normally do. So, it invested the excess deposits in Treasury bonds and mortgage investment products. ......... Industry leaders, among them Greg Becker, CEO of Silicon Valley Bank, lobbied Congress in 2015 to roll back some of the Dodd-Frank Act provisions. ........ These standards were arguably designed to specifically prevent and address the type of circumstances that triggered these recent bank failures: multiple failures and contagion in the financial system, market panic, deposit runs and liquidity crisis. .

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Sunday, March 19, 2023

19: Russia

Is the United States Creating a ‘Legion of Doom’? The emerging China-Russia-Iran axis may force the United States to choose between some unappealing options.
Paul Krugman: Three and a half myths about bank bailouts The fallout from banking problems has made a murky economic situation even murkier.
SAY GOODBYE TO CODING: MICROSOFT LAUNCHES POWER PLATFORM COPILOT

The forgotten maths genius who laid the foundations for Isaac Newton A new play explores the short life of Jeremiah Horrocks, whose astonishing discoveries ‘changed the way we see the universe’

The Lessons of the Great Depression Are Being Ignored FDR would have hated the fix to today’s banking crisis.
Opinion: ICC arrest warrant for Putin is a stunning statement

How AI could upend the world even more than electricity or the internet AGI -- defined as artificial intelligence with human cognitive abilities, as opposed to more narrow artificial intelligence, such as the headline-grabbing ChatGPT -- could free people from menial tasks and usher in a new era of creativity....... OpenAI, the company behind the generative software that churns out essays, poems and computing code on command, this week released an even more powerful version of the tech that operates it -- GPT-4. ....... Already, AI-infused digital assistants from Microsoft and Google can summarize meetings, draft emails, create websites, craft ad campaigns and more -- giving us a glimpse of what AGI will be capable of in the future. ...... With artificial intelligence Spataro wants to "rediscover the soul of work" ..... he used GPT-4 for a coding project, which a "very good" developer had told him would cost 5,000 pounds ($6,000) and take two weeks. ..... "GPT-4 delivered the same in 3 hours, for $0.11"



Devs can talk to GPT and describe the app they want to create. Copilot can then build it in seconds and suggest tips to improve it. ...... With Power Platform Copilot, all devs need to do is describe the app using simple natural language. Once that is done, Power Apps will build the app. By this, we mean that it will not only write code for the UI but also create the data table and business logic. ........ For instance, if a user tells Power Apps to “create a worker onboarding app, get new worker data and share training content and learning modules,” Copilot can create the app in one breach. ........ With Power Automate Copilot, processes can be created using natural language no matter what complexity the requirements have. Also, Copilot can optimize and update the process in a dialogue-based manner. ........ users can also use the GPT model to generate text content on the Power Automate Desktop. The new Azure OpenAI service in AI Builder can now be used in Power Automate Desktop.

His work proved, for the first time, that Earth is not at the centre of the universe, but revolves around the sun, refuting contemporary religious beliefs and laying the foundations for Isaac Newton’s groundbreaking work on gravity. ....... “Nobody understood the significance of Horrocks’s work until Newton picked it up” ...... In 1687, Newton acknowledged the importance of Horrocks’s observations in his Principia: “Newton wouldn’t have been able to complete his work on gravity, if Horrocks hadn’t done these observations at the time he did,” said Sear. “Newton relied on this earlier work.” ......... “At the age of 14 or 15 – no one’s quite sure – he walked to Cambridge from Lancashire, to study the stars.” ....... The son of a watchmaker, who was largely self-taught, Horrocks worked as a sizar while studying at Cambridge, serving his fellow students and even emptying their bedpans to pay his way. “He begged and borrowed books from the various Cambridge colleges, and left without a degree, probably because he’d run out of things to read,” said Sear. “We would be looking at him as some kind of child phenomenon today. At his age, understanding the maths he did, making these amazing observations on rudimentary telescopes and then drawing conclusions that overturned established religious and scientific beliefs about the nature of the universe – he was a genius and 400 years ahead of his time.” ....... “he committed the sin of dying young”. ...... and so was not publicly lauded for his discoveries the way Kepler and Galileo were. .

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the ICC’s move “outrageous and unacceptable,” dismissing the warrants as “null and void” for Russia. ........ When the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced on Friday that it had issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and another key Russian official for charges related to an alleged scheme to forcibly deport thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia, it also effectively placed Putin’s name on a short list alongside some of the most brutal leaders the world has seen since the end of World War II. With that, it branded him before the entire world — including the Russian people — as an international pariah, potentially guilty of historically egregious crimes......... Only three sitting heads of state have faced ICC charges while in office. The other two were the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and Sudan’s former President Omar al-Bashir, both accused of horrifying crimes against their own people. ....... Putin is now an accused — not convicted — war criminal. ....... By most accounts, he enjoys the support of most Russians. Perhaps this will give some of them reason to reconsider. But one day, the Russian people will look beyond the propaganda they’ve been fed, and they will understand the horror of what’s been perpetrated in their name. ........ There’s almost no chance that Putin will face an ICC tribunal in The Hague anytime soon. As Peskov reiterated in his statement, Russia does not recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction, and as long as Putin is president, he’s likely to remain free. But, unless he faces the court and then somehow manages to clear his name — an outcome that is doubly unlikely — he will forever bear the branding of an accused war criminal. ......... Putin, along with Maria Lvova-Belova, his “Commissioner for Children’s Rights,” are now formally accused of violating the laws of war by forcibly removing Ukrainian children and deporting them to Russia. In the ICC’s words, they are “allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine.” The arrest warrant states that there are “reasonable grounds to believe Mr. Putin bears individual criminal responsibility for the aforementioned crimes.” ........ Russia has allegedly been removing children from Ukraine and placing them in relocation camps inside Russia and in Russian homes. Lvova-Belova has been instrumental in carrying out the policy, which is not being conducted in secret. In fact, she publicly thanked Putin for making it possible for her, personally, to adopt a child from Donbas, a Russian-occupied area of Ukraine. ........ The Russian government claims it’s all practically a humanitarian move, aimed at saving Ukrainian children in a war zone. The ICC says it’s a violation of the Geneva Conventions. ICC prosecutors, Ukrainian authorities and groups focusing on locating the children say it’s part of Putin’s concerted effort to erase Ukraine’s nationhood. US and European officials say the children spend time in a network of dozens of camps where they undergo political reeducation, an effort to turn them into Russian citizens. ...... Ukrainian parents are desperately trying to get their children back. ....... These are just the first two arrest warrants over only one aspect of Russia’s assault on Ukraine ....... Putin’s ability to travel is now severely restricted, as more than 120 signatory countries to the Rome Statute creating the ICC are now required to arrest him if he sets foot in their territory. ....... a small rogue’s gallery of 20th century war-mongers, monsters to many of their people and their neighbors, went from feeling perfectly secure in their palaces to facing a tribunal in The Hague after they lost power at home. .

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