Tuesday, November 03, 2020

Coronavirus News (308)

LinkedIn Top Startups 2020: The 10 Indian companies on the rise

5 takeaways from Xi Jinping’s speech during 40th anniversary visit to Shenzhen Chinese president full of praise for people of southern tech hub on visit to mark 40th anniversary of it becoming China’s first special economic zone ‘This is a global development miracle that the Chinese people have created together,’ he says

President Xi calls on more young Hongkongers to work, study, live in mainland China in speech holding up Shenzhen as model city Xi gives Shenzhen a mission to revitalise ‘one country, two systems’ as he launches new era of integration for southern China President appeals to Hong Kong’s youth to experience life on the mainland to ‘bring their hearts closer to the motherland’

Progressives don’t love Joe Biden, but they’re learning to love his agenda “The most transformative presidents in our nation’s history — Lincoln, FDR, LBJ — were not ideologues.”

Barrett, Declining to Detail Legal Views, Says She Will Not Be ‘a Pawn’ of Trump President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee refused to weigh in on critical matters that could come before the court, including health care, abortion rights and a possible election dispute.

China Got Better. We Got Sicker. Thanks, Trump. With a different leader, the United States could have contained the coronavirus. ......... the out-of-control antics of an incoherent American president, a man clearly desperate to stay in office because losing could mean his prosecution, humiliation and liquidation all at the same time. ............. Alas, we aren’t who we think we are. Covid-19 was supposed to be China’s Chernobyl. It’s ended up looking more like the West’s Waterloo. .......... Some of China’s facial recognition technology is so good, you don’t even have to take off your face mask. Your eyes and upper nose will do. ............. we have a uniquely individualistic culture, a highly fragmented local-state-federal power-sharing system, a frail public health system, a divided body politic, a Republican Party whose business model has long been to cripple Washington, and so many people getting their news from social networks that amplify conspiracy theories and destroy truth and trust. ............. we now have a president whose political strategy for re-election is to divide us, to destroy trust — and to destroy truth — and to declare any news hostile to his goals as “fake.” And without truth and trust in a pandemic, you’re lost. .............  a strategy of “total harm minimization” that would have protected the elderly and most vulnerable, while gradually feeding back into the work force the young and healthy most likely to experience the coronavirus either asymptomatically or mildly — and let them keep the economy humming and build up some natural herd immunity as we awaited a vaccine. ............. what ails us today is something that cannot be cured by a Covid-19 vaccine. We have lost the trust in each other and in our institutions and a basic sense of what is true — all necessary to navigate a health crisis together. We had them in previous wars, but not today’s.  


Don't Ignore the Good News On Covid-19 From Asia There’s light at the end of the lockdown tunnel, provided the right lessons are learnt. ........... The U.S. looks to have given up on controlling the pandemic until a vaccine arrives. ........... The strategies pursued by South Korea, Vietnam, China and others do still seem to be paying off. While the total Covid-19 death toll is between 500-700 per million people in France, the U.K., Spain and the U.S., in China and South Korea it is below 10 per million. Cases are a less perfect measure, but there’s a similar observable gap. Wuhan, once the epicenter of Covid-19, is welcoming tourists again. .................   If the key to avoiding more lockdowns is finding a way to “live with the virus” — through widespread testing, tracing of contacts and isolating positive cases to slow transmission — Western countries have made structural, not cultural, errors. ..............  Even the famously organized Germans failed to halt the second wave. ...............  South Korea tested early, and often, using walk-in centers and drive-throughs. In Wuhan, the authorities tested 11 million people over 2 weeks. The share of tests coming back positive in South Korea and Vietnam is below 1%; in France and Spain it has risen to 10%.   



Jack Ma's Blunt Words Just Cost Him $35 Billion China just showed the billionaire who’s boss in derailing fintech giant Ant Group’s monster IPO. Regulators might do better to heed his words instead. ...........   In that speech, apart from labeling the global banking Basel Accords as an “old people’s club,” Ma said “systemic risk” is not the issue in China. Rather, China’s biggest risk is that it “lacks a financial ecosystem.” Chinese banks are like “pawn shops”, where collateral and guarantees are the hard currencies. As a result, some decided to go so big they are not allowed to fail. “As the Chinese like to say, if you borrow 100,000 yuan from the bank, you are a bit scared; if you borrow a million yuan, both you and the bank are a little nervous; but if you take a 1 billion yuan loan, you are not scared at all, the bank is,” Ma said.


Sunday, November 01, 2020

Coronavirus News (307)

Biden’s space policy: One giant leap for climate change Biden’s pledge to rededicate the U.S. to combating climate change would mean a greater role for NASA’s Earth science research. ..........  the “sheer amount of experience, background, and temperament that Joe Biden possesses in dealing with international coalition and partnership arrangements.”  

Biden makes late push to flip the Senate The Democratic nominee is hitting Georgia and Iowa this week, while Jill Biden campaigned with the Democratic Senate candidate in Maine. ......... “If we win both of these Senate seats in Georgia, it's almost mathematically impossible for Mitch McConnell to remain majority leader.”  


Poll: Donald Trump set to win US presidency by electoral college landslide DONALD TRUMP is on course to win four more years in the White House with a one point lead in the popular win, the final Democracy Institute poll for the Sunday Express has found. ..........  The Democracy Institute/Sunday Express poll has throughout the campaign been one of the few to predict a Trump victory since March. This is because unlike other polls it only looks at people identifying as likely voters instead of just registered to vote and it has tried to identify the shy Trump vote. According to this latest poll almost eight in ten (79 percent) of Trump supporters would not admit it to friends and family compared to 21 percent of Biden supporters.


In the wilds of Arizona, a hunt for bipartisanship While their parties stage an epic clash, these Republicans and Democrats are joining together to promote deal-making through bonhomie. .........  in all spending nearly a full day getting to know each other out of sight of the cameras and the raucous debates back in Phoenix. .......... Democrats have a shot at taking control of the statehouse for the first time in more than half a century while sending two U.S. senators to Washington for the first time since the 1950s. ........... Arizona is on a path toward becoming another Colorado, which went from solidly red to solidly blue in a few election cycles. .........  "We don't have time to be ideological." ........ There is more goodwill in the hearts of individual politicians than in the collective atmosphere in which they operate. ..........  “As the inner suburbs turn purple and newer families are moving in, families who are more conservative are relocating out to the farther suburbs,” Archer explained. “Those areas are swiftly becoming more Republican.”  ........... “Sometimes it means a change in tone and a change in the way that you address an issue with the same principles. Some folks are here for show. You can sit here for a day or two and you can pick out who's trying to get recorded, or get their viral video, so they can make that a plank of their next campaign.” ..........  The challenge now, he said, is to find new ways to join forces with Democrats to overcome the extreme elements in both parties.  .........  Chávez credited bipartisanship with birthing some of the most far-reaching policies to benefit his constituents. He said Democrats and Republican worked together on the legislation that transformed his own life — the federal Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. It was passed by a Democratic House and signed by Republican President Ronald Reagan. It gave his family a path to citizenship. .............  As for George Floyd, who died in police custody and set off nationwide protests, he said, “No one should die that way." “But we are sending a message to young black kids that that is a hero?" he asked. "It is not a hero. He had at least seven drug offenses. He held a gun to a pregnant woman's stomach. George Floyd died a long time ago because the system killed him. A lot of that was the community. A lot of that was his own decisions that he made. How about if we would have taken care of George Floyd when he started in the criminal justice system, making sure that he had the drug treatment?” ............. Alma, who at 14 was brutally attacked by police officers, worked with Ducey, the Republican governor, to secure $1 million for training police officers in deescalation tactics. .............  We've got 10 percent fringe right, we’ve got 10 percent fringe left. The 80 percent in the middle probably aren't that far apart on 90 percent of the things we are trying to solve.