UK Labour's Keir Starmer picks 'Stronger Together' slogan used by Hillary Clinton to rebrand

Keir Starmer has picked the election slogan of US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, “Stronger Together”, to badge the wide-ranging policy review that will lay the groundwork for Labour’s next manifesto.

Party chair Anneliese Dodds said the “Stronger Together” overhaul, which she will oversee, would focus on channelling the solidarity shown by the British public during the pandemic.

Clinton reportedly looked at 84 other slogans before adopting Stronger Together, alongside I’m With Her. A Labour aide pointed out that the full title of Dodds’s review is “Stronger Together: A Better Future for Britain”.

Dodds’s policy “roadmap,” which is expected to take more than 18 months to carry out, will cover six broad areas, including “a green and digital future,” “Britain in the world,” and “public services that work from the start”.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jun/16/keir-starmer-picks-stonger-together-slogan-used-by-hillary-clinton-to-rebrand?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_gu&utm_medium&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1623879768

U.S. GDP is 20.93 trillion. Russian GDP is 1.7 trillion. Why are we messing around w/ Putin at all?

Is it the nuclear weapons? We give him way too much attention and he loves it. He basks in it. The press can't stop talking about him.


Interesting exchange between Michael McCaul and Gary Kasparov.


https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/1404778763603349507?s=20


Should the Russian president opt instead to continue invading countries, mounting hacking and disinformation campaigns, and arresting innocent Russians and Americans, it will be clear that he, not Biden, is responsible for confrontation with the United States. 2/

Biden is also right to try to work with the Kremlin on a limited agenda of mutual interest, particularly on arms control. Even during tense moments of the Cold War, U.S. presidents saw the wisdom in cooperating with their Soviet counterparts to reduce the risk of nuclear war. 3/

https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/1404810738443636742?s=20

Thread:

Mike, is this tweet from 2007?! This is what the West has been saying for 14 years. "If Putin keeps doing all these terrible things, THEN.." and he keeps doing them. It's 2021, everyone knows what Putin is.

Every new US administration doesn't press the reset button, they press the snooze button. Putin doesn't reset, he doesn't change, and he won't until someone stands up to him

Putin goes through the same motions with every new democratic leader. They get to act tough for a moment; he gets to stay in power and keep looting Russia, attacking the world order, and his mafia pals live like tsars--in the free world of course.

What are these "democratic forces" to protect in Putin's Russia, in 2021? You can't support democracy and empower the dictator killing it at the same time. Meet Zelensky & Tsikhanouskaya. Meet Nemtsov & Navalny's families. Not their assailant.




I'm not an expert in foreign policy and I suppose there are reasons but I really hate that we're meeting with Putin at all.

Looks like McAuliffe won the Virginia primary for Governor. AP called it.

Why does the press keep forever harping about Kamala making a trip to the border?

What will one trip solve? What will it fix? They won't shut up about it. I 'm watching her press conference now.

Off topic but Kamala has pretty eyes.

Facebook to end special treatment for politicians after Trump ban

Facebook plans to end its controversial policy that mostly shields politicians from the content moderation rules that apply to other users, a sharp reversal that could have global ramifications for how elected officials use the social network.

The change, which Facebook is set to announce as soon as Friday, comes after the Oversight Board — an independent group funded by Facebook to review its thorniest content rulings — affirmed its decision to suspend former President Donald Trump but critiqued the special treatment it gives politicians, stating that the “same rules should apply to all users.” The board gave Facebook till June 5th to respond to its policy recommendations.

Facebook also plans to shed light on the secretive system of strikes it gives accounts for breaking its content rules, according to two people familiar with the changes. That will include letting users know when they’ve received a strike for violating its rules that could lead to suspension. BuzzFeed News and other outlets have previously reported on instances when Facebook employees intervened to keep political pages from being subject to harsh penalties under the strikes policy.

Facebook is also set to begin disclosing when it uses a special newsworthiness exemption to keep up content from politicians and others that would otherwise violate its rules.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/3/22474738/facebook-ending-political-figure-exemption-moderation-policy


I think they're going to re-instate Trump. They never deleted his account. All of his old posts are still there open to comments, he just can't post anything new.

A pandemic upside: The flu virus became less diverse, simplifying the task of making flu shots

In the eight years leading up to the Covid-19 pandemic, one of the subtypes of influenza A viruses started acting bizarrely. Flu viruses continuously evolve, to evade the immune defenses humans develop to fend them off. But after 2012, H3N2 started to behave differently.

It was almost as if there was a falling out within a family. The viruses formed into factions — clades, in virologists’ language — drifting further and further apart with each passing year and making the process of choosing the version of H3N2 to include in flu shots an increasingly challenging task.

The greater the genetic distance between the clades, the bigger the cost of making the wrong choice. Vaccine that protects reasonably well against one might perform poorly if the other turned out to be the dominant strain in a given winter. In fact, that’s precisely what happened in the 2017-18 season, when the flu shot failed to protect three-quarters of vaccinated people in the U.S. against the H3N2 strain in circulation.

But an unexpected upside of the Covid-19 pandemic may have solved this problem for us — or at least made flu’s diversity more manageable. With Covid suppression measures like mask wearing, school closures, and travel restrictions driving flu transmission rates to historically low levels around the world, it appears that one of the H3N2 clades may have disappeared — gone extinct. The same phenomenon may also have occurred with one of the two lineages of influenza B viruses, known as B/Yamagata.

https://www.statnews.com/2021/06/02/pandemic-upside-flu-virus-became-less-diverse-simplifying-task-of-making-flu-shots/

LOL RNC Threatens to Stop Putting Candidates Forward for Presidential Debates

The Republican National Committee has threatened to stop putting presidential candidates forward for TV debates unless organizers give in to a long list of their demands. According to CNN, RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel sent a furious letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates on Tuesday, laying out what changes need to be made for her to advise future Republican nominees to take part in the debates. “Our sincere hope is that the CPD accepts this criticism and works to correct its mistakes,” she wrote. “If not, the RNC will have no choice but to advise future Republican candidates against participating in CPD-hosted debates, and the RNC will look for other options for its candidates to debate the issues before the American people in a neutral and nonpartisan forum.” McDaniel’s list of complaints included the timing of the debates, the political allegiances of some CPD board members, and its choice of hosts. They echo the relentless complaints from Donald Trump during the 2020 campaign.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/republican-national-committee-threatens-to-stop-putting-candidates-forward-for-presidential-debates?utm_source=web_push


The debate commission, once a largely anonymous organization, has hosted presidential and vice presidential general election debates since 1988, acting as the nonpartisan organization that works with the major-party presidential campaigns to put the events on. While the commission has drawn some controversy in the past, it drew considerable ire from Trump during the 2020 campaign. He and his campaign aides often railed on a number of perceived issues with the commission, including the selected moderators, the commission's decision to hold the second debate virtually and the choice to mute each candidate's mic during the final debate after the first contest included considerable interruptions from the then-President.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/01/politics/rnc-letter-presidential-debate-commission/index.html


I still miss when the League of Women Voters held the debates.

The 'culture wars' are a symptom, not the cause, of Britain's malaise

It’s often said that Conservatives and the rightwing press are good at stoking divisions. What’s perhaps less acknowledged is that they do so mostly by inventing them: those who campaign for more inclusive policies become “the woke mob” and “the looney left”; those who want students to learn about the darker parts of Britain’s history become “people who hate Britain”; judges and politicians who want to follow basic parliamentary procedures become “enemies of the people”, “saboteurs”, and “traitors”, and so on.


In every case, we’re told that the future of the nation is at stake. The relentlessness of this “culture war” narrative leaves us with the image of an irreconcilable rift at the heart of British society: between liberals obsessed with identity politics who live, literally or spiritually, in “north London”, and sidelined social conservatives who live – or rather, are “left behind” – everywhere else (most emotively in “the red wall”). These fantasy constructions are now the twin pillars of Conservative rhetoric.

But this image of an irreconcilably divided nation is just that: an image. A spate of polls have shown that we are not as divided as many would have us think. Views in the so-called red wall are largely consistent with the rest of the country and, nationwide, few people know what either the “culture war” or “wokeness” even mean. Yet the right still pushes this narrative relentlessly, railing against a lefty elite that somehow manages to both wield a hegemonic control over Britain’s culture and be hopelessly out of touch with it. The new rightwing television channel, GB News – one of many new ventures to pitch itself as an urgent corrective – will host a segment called Wokewatch, to illuminate and amplify examples of the loony left’s looniness.

It’s no surprise that Boris Johnson thrives in this environment: a journalist by trade, a liar by nature, he is all too familiar with the energising power of some well-placed hyperbole. As the Daily Telegraph’s Europe correspondent in the 1990s, Johnson wrote all kinds of wild and made-up provocations about the EU’s regulatory overreach: before Wokewatch there was Brusselswatch. The aim of Johnson’s exaggerations wasn’t any particular political agenda, but rather to stoke animosity. “Everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory party,” Johnson recalled in his Desert Island Discs interview for Radio 4 in 2005, “and it really gave me this rather weird sense of power.” As prime minister Johnson pursues the same approach, but his plaything is now the nation at large.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/31/culture-wars-symptom-not-cause-britains-malaise

Culture wars are also a favorite tactic of authoritarian strongmen from Mussolini to the present.

Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad won a 4th term with 95.1% of the vote

Wow, what a popular guy!

Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad won a fourth term in office with 95.1% of votes in an election that will extend his rule over a country ruined by war but which opponents and the West say was marked by fraud.


Head of parliament Hammouda Sabbagh announced the result in a news conference on Thursday, saying voter turn out was at around 78%.

The election went ahead despite a U.N.-led peace process that had called for voting under international supervision that would help pave the way for a new constitution and a political settlement.

The win delivers Assad seven more years in power and lengthens his family's rule to nearly six decades. His father Hafez al-Assad led Syria for 30 years until his death in 2000.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/syrias-president-bashar-al-assad-wins-fourth-term-office-with-951-votes-live-2021-05-27/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=twitter

Immunity to the Coronavirus May Persist for Years, Scientists Find

Immunity to the coronavirus lasts at least a year, possibly a lifetime, improving over time especially after vaccination, according to two new studies. The findings may help put to rest lingering fears that protection against the virus will be short-lived.

Together, the studies suggest that most people who have recovered from Covid-19 and who were later immunized will not need boosters. Vaccinated people who were never infected most likely will need the shots, however, as will a minority who were infected but did not produce a robust immune response.

Both reports looked at people who had been exposed to the coronavirus about a year earlier. Cells that retain a memory of the virus persist in the bone marrow and may churn out antibodies whenever needed, according to one of the studies, published on Monday in the journal Nature.

The other study, which is also under review for publication in Nature, found that these so-called memory B cells continue to mature and strengthen for at least 12 months after the initial infection. “The papers are consistent with the growing body of literature that suggests that immunity elicited by infection and vaccination for SARS-CoV-2 appears to be long-lived,” said Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the research.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/health/coronavirus-immunity-vaccines.html