EU:https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/27/eu-agrees-total-ban-on-bee-harming-pesticides
EU agrees total ban on bee-harming pesticides
This article is more than 2 years old

The world’s most widely used insecticides will be banned from all fields within six months, to protect both wild and honeybees that are vital to crop pollination

The ban on neonicotinoids, approved by member nations on Friday, is expected to come into force by the end of 2018 and will mean they can only be used in closed greenhouses.

Bees and other insects are vital for global food production as they pollinate three-quarters of all crops. The plummeting numbers of pollinators in recent years has been blamed, in part, on the widespread use of pesticides. The EU banned the use of neonicotinoids on flowering crops that attract bees, such as oil seed rape, in 2013.

But in February, a major report from the European Union’s scientific risk assessors (Efsa) concluded that the high risk to both honeybees and wild bees resulted from any outdoor use, because the pesticides contaminate soil and water. This leads to the pesticides appearing in wildflowers or succeeding crops. A recent study of honey samples revealed global contamination by neonicotinoids.

From an article written before Judge Preska ordered Giuffre’s lawyers to destroy the files.

Of note to me, was a “John Doe client.” I’ve never heard of such a thing.

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link:https://www.courthousenews.com/sealed-jeffrey-epstein-files-potentially-implicate-hundreds/

….Shortly before Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in federal prison, a federal court unsealed a vast trove of files implicating heads of state, elected officials and other elite figures in the wealthy financier’s sex-trafficking web. This list could radically expand should the remainder of sealed files become public, a federal judge heard Wednesday….
…Giuffre claims that Epstein passed her off to powerful figures, including Britain’s Prince Andrew, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, financier Glenn Dubin, model scout Jean-Luc Brunel and former Senator George Mitchell. Those men have denied the allegations.

Although Giuffre’s original lawsuit settled years ago with a vast trove of files under seal, the open-records battle it inspired still rages, and an unknown number of other people may still be pulled into the sex-trafficking saga…..
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…Preska instead pressed the lawyers on the specific procedures for releasing files “expeditiously.” She appeared frustrated that the attorneys arrived at today’s hearing without any agreement on any files that could be immediately unsealed.

“It sounds like there is some disagreement, your honor,” Giuffre’s attorney Sigrid McCawley told the judge.

“No kidding,” Preska deadpanned.

The day before the hearing, attorneys for an anonymous third party submitted a 7-page letter arguing against throwing new names into what they called a media “frenzy.”

“Unsealing references to non-parties would throw those non-parties into the middle of this frenzy, and unfairly do irreparable harm to their privacy and reputational interests,” attorneys Nicholas Lewin and Paul Krieger wrote for their John Doe client. “Indeed, a vast number of these articles have published unsubstantiated allegations as fact. The careless regurgitation of allegations made under the litigation privilege, and not elsewhere, has the potential to permanently and unjustifiably harm non-parties and their families.”

Since the time of Epstein’s arrest, there have been tens of thousands of news stories written about his case, and more than 230,000 references to his case broadcast on television, the attorneys noted.

Preska ordered the parties to submit written briefings on possible procedures for releasing the files that would gives those named in the documents the opportunity to contest their release.

“Stalin had higher positives and lower negatives than Yeltsin….”

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“….Secondly, in terms of finances, they might as well have had unlimited refills. Forget fundraising dinners and appealing to donors, never mind Russia’s electoral law that supposedly capped campaign spending at $3 million for each presidential candidate (as an interesting aside, the communists did, in fact, abide by this rule, although that likely had more to do with their empty coffers as opposed to, say, actually feeling morally obligated to adhere to said provision than anything else), for as was the case with a great deal of the members within the fourth estate, the fear of a communist victory was such that the Oligarchs, as to who, at the bare minimum, likely stood to face both jail time and the loss of their considerable wealth in the wake of a triumph by Zyuganov #DroppingRhymes, did everything in their power so as to ensure a Yeltsin victory, putting up somewhere between $700 million and $2 billion, according to estimates, to finance the campaign. Yeah…

Finally, Gorton, Dresner, Shumate, and, obviously, Yeltsin, by extension, greatly benefited from the contributions that were made by many of the latter’s minions, as to who pulled out all the stops — legal or otherwise — in order to deliver a w for the president. Among the favorite tactics employed by these goons included “[the] cancellation of hotel reservations made by the Zyuganov campaign, issuing false invitations to Zyuganov press conferences with the wrong times, and the publication and distribution of fake extremist Communist programs.” Even better, “The Communist candidate’s speeches and position papers were blacked out in the major media, and voters could learn about Zyuganov’s program only if they happened upon a rally or leaflet.” Noice.

At the same time, however, all of the dirrty money and political black ops in the world could do nothing to remove Yeltsin from his precarious political predicament, for as the team soon discovered upon conducting their own analysis primarily by, you know, asking questions of actual substance, it wasn’t just that the majority of the Russian people didn’t like the guy #DoubleNegative — it was that they justifiably saw him as “a friend who had betrayed them, a populist who had become imperial[,]” to further borrow from Kramer’s article, and there was more bad news. According to Dresner, “Stalin had higher positives and lower negatives than Yeltsin. We actually tested the two in polls and focus groups. More than 60% of the electorate believed Yeltsin was corrupt; more than 65% believed he had wrecked the economy. We were in a deep, deep hole.”

Still, it didn’t exactly take an experienced pollster to recognize that the issue that had the entire country — mobsters and oligarchs, etc., notwithstanding, of course — understandably seething was of the economic variety (even those same Russian newspapers with the empty statistical findings were on top of the matter). More specifically, Russkies were all up in arms over the dire financial straits #MoneyForNothing that had beset government workers as to who hadn’t seen a paycheck in MONTHS despite Yeltsin promising to remedy the situation in a development that might as well have induced a Dresner facepalm but nevertheless provided the team with a teachable, if not also as to what one would think should have made for a classic “Captain Obvious”, moment. As Dresner explained to Dyachenko, “You can’t just promise these things. You have to do them. And then you have to make sure the people know what you’ve done.”

In order to accomplish this relative to the criminal economic deprivation that was facing the aforementioned members of the proletariat (sorry, it’s just too easy), the triad advised Yeltsin to, in the political equivalent of flogging someone in a public square/Village Green, chastise those officials as to who had failed to apportion the money that had been earmarked for said salary arrears as per his instructions — a proposal that both Yeltsin and the press were all too happy to implement and cover, respectively.

Yet even so, while such a feel-good PR exercise might have looked great for the cameras and bought the president some desperately needed political capital, without the money that was needed to actually alleviate said financial suffering the entire undertaking would have been seen as yet another empty gesture, and it was at this pivotal point wherein the Clinton connection paid crucial dividends (no pun intended), although you wouldn’t know it from reading Time’s featured report, which is rather curious given that the whole lipstick on a pig scenario was certainly not lost on other reputable news outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, never mind esteemed Kremlinologist Lilia Shevtsova.

Strong-armed by the administration, and in a move that was aptly characterized by Michael Dobbs in The WaPo as “an expression of political support by Western governments for Russian leader Boris Yeltsin in advance of presidential elections in June[,]” the normally, or at least outwardly, politically neutral International Monetary Fund became, with a single transaction, Boris’ single largest donor by approving a loan for $10.2 billion (the second largest loan of its kind in IMF history to that point, by the way, that was only superseded by the one that was given to Mexico in 1995 for $17.8 billion), with a crucial installment of more than $4 billion being made available during that first year, thereby enabling Yeltsin to repay $2.8 billion in back wages as well as giving him the ability to follow through on his promise to increase spending on social programs. Sidebar — there were social programs in Russia during the ‘90s?

Even at the time, the sentiment that was expressed by many Russian political experts and as to which has subsequently been substantiated by history was that without the sudden infusion of Das Kapital #SorryNotSorry, Yeltsin almost assuredly would have lost — possibly in the first round — and the West went still further to influence the outcome of the election. While privately the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Thomas Pickering, unsuccessfully attempted to persuade Grigory Yavlinsky, a democratic candidate as to who presented a considerable threat to Yeltsin, to back out of the first round so as to increase the odds of success for Boris Nikolayevich, the then-managing director of the IMF, Michel Camdessus, went out of his way to state that not only was the aforesaid loan hardly a blank check, but also, and more importantly, that should “a new Government” come to power that would fail to adhere to “the commitments of Russia established in these documents,” that their “support would be interrupted[,]” thereby essentially blackmailing the Russian populace into voting for Yeltsin, and the results spoke for themselves in the opinion polls that were conducted by ROMIR (Russian Opinion and Market Research) in which the amount of support for the president more than doubled from a paltry 8% on February 18 to 17% on March 17, and suddenly the campaign had traction.

From there, and in order to capitalize on their newfound momentum, the team knew that it needed to …see link
Link:https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/from-russia-with-revenge-536b25921ca6

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Trump has a point about the polls

Some pollsters are still grappling with the same problems that plagued battleground state surveys four years ago.
link:https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/17/trump-polls-biden-324210
“….
……..But some pollsters, especially the relatively few who conduct surveys in battleground states, are still grappling with the problems that plagued those polls four years ago. In fact, most pollsters believe that, on balance, state polls are overstating the scale of Biden’s advantage.

That was precisely the problem in 2016: The national polls were largely accurate, to within the margin of error. But there were too few state polls, and many of those that were conducted failed to collect accurate data, especially from white voters without college degrees in key swing states.

And those issues haven’t been fixed.

“I would say that most, if not all, of the concerns that we expressed still hold — some to a lesser degree,” said Courtney Kennedy, director of research at the Pew Research Center and lead author of the polling industry’s post-2016 autopsy. “But I think some of the fundamental, structural challenges that came to a head in 2016 are still in place in 2020.”

Polling errors are not uncommon in presidential elections. But pollsters see a real risk this year that the mistakes of 2016 will be repeated. Their colleagues still are not accounting for the fact that voters with greater educational attainment are more likely to complete surveys — and more likely to vote for Democratic candidates.

“There’s still a number of state polls, in particular, that are not fixing this issue,” said Kennedy.
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…….. — the problem that pollsters identified in 2016 remains. Not enough surveys are being conducted in the battleground states, and those that exist are failing to account for a key political dynamic of modern politics, especially in the Trump era: the rapid movement of lower-income white voters to Republicans and upscale whites to Democrats.

Pollsters are looking for answers. One of the major takeaways of the American Association for Public Opinion Research’s post-2016 autopsy was that state polls that didn’t weight, or adjust, their samples to include more white voters who hadn’t graduated college missed a key element of Trump’s coalition. In previous elections, the differences in white voters’ preferences along educational lines were smaller, but they began to grow during the past decade and accelerated with Trump on the ballot in 2016.

“Before 2014, it wasn’t that big of a deal because the reality is non-college white voters and college-educated white voters — the distinction between the two wasn’t as dramatic,” said Democratic pollster Jefrey Pollock. “But starting with 2014, that began to cleave a lot and is now obviously humongous.”

GOP pollster Glen Bolger said he believes a combination of pollsters’ inability to get the right educational mix and to persuade potential Trump voters to respond and answer truthfully to phone polls is pointing their surveys in a slightly Democratic direction.

“I don’t know how big the effect is. I also don’t know what the ratio is between it being ‘shy Trump’ voters and interviewing too many college graduates and not enough non-college grads,” Bolger said. “But I do think those are factors in some of the polls that show a particularly wide lead for Biden at this point in time. And I do think that things will be closer in the states than the polls indicate right now.”
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At last week’s annual convention of the American Association of Public Opinion Research — held online because of the coronavirus pandemic — Nate Cohn, the New York Times data journalist who has worked with Siena College on their multimillion-dollar polling partnership, observed that the state polls leaned way too far toward Democrats in 2014 and 2016. In 2018, he said, the polls were more accurate but still showed a Democratic slant, especially “in a number of white, working-class states,” like Indiana and Ohio.

And, Cohn noted in his presentation, it might be happening again this year.

“So far in 2020, it sure seems like Joe Biden is faring particularly well in the states where the polls were most biased toward Hillary Clinton four years ago,” Cohn told the virtual attendees.

As if on cue, a new poll was released in Michigan on Tuesday: It showed Biden ahead by a whopping 16 points.

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link:https://swarajyamag.com/insta/russian-interference-in-us-elections-maybe-but-the-us-did-help-boris-yeltsin-get-elected
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“….According to political analyst and former Hillary Clinton confidant Dick Morris, in 1996 the then US President Bill Clinton meddled in Russian affairs, helping Yeltsin get elected to a second term. Morris said:

When I worked for Clinton, Clinton called me and said, ‘I want to get Yeltsin elected as president of Russia against Gennady Zyuganov, who was the communist who was running against him. Putin was Zyuganov’s major backer… It became public that Clinton would meet with me every week. We would review the polling that was being done for Yeltsin that was being done by a colleague of mine, who was sending it to me every week. We, Clinton and I, would go through it and Bill would pick up the hotline and talk to Yeltsin and tell him what commercials to run, where to campaign, what positions to take. He basically became Yeltsin’s political consultant….

Morris believes that Putin resented the intervention at the time by Bill Clinton and took his revenge out on Hillary Clinton. Although there is no indication of this belief from Putin himself, it seems like 2016 was karmic payback for 1996…
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