Over Easy: Around the World
Welcome to Thursday’s Over Easy, a continuation of Southern Dragon’s Lakeside Diner and its tradition of giving an overview of news our everyday media doesn’t cover, issues that we ought to consider outside the U.S. scene.
In an effect that might have been anticipated, the side effect/peripheral damage of our first world big crackdown on human trafficking is producing abandoned cargo folks. The European Union asked for U.N. approval for a plan to board and destroy human trafficking boats in Libyan and international waters.
Federica Mogherini, the EU’s foreign policy chief, said that its primary responsibility was “saving migrants’ lives” and that to accomplish that, countries need to work together to root out human trafficking networks in Libya and neighboring countries.
“Saving lives on one side and dismantling the criminal organizations that are organizing smuggling and trafficking — the two things have to go hand in hand,” she said at a press conference at the U.N. headquarters in New York.
“It is not only a humanitarian emergency but also a security crisis, since smuggling networks are linked to and in some cases finance terrorist activities, which contributes to instability in a region that is already unstable enough,” she told the U.N. Security Council members earlier in a briefing.
Two boats of migrants were turned away by Malaysia in recent days, with an announcement by Malaysian Deputy Home Minister Wan Junaidi ; ‘”We have to send the right message that they are not welcome here.”‘ Indonesia had turned away a boatload earlier in the week.
Rohingya are now being held on boats at sea, Lewa said, estimating that 7,000 to 8,000 Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants are currently parked in the Malacca Straits, unable to disembark because of crackdowns on trafficking networks in Thailand and Malaysia, their primary destinations.
After working to bring jobs and prosperity to Nova Scotia with shipbuilding work, union leaders are under attack by owners of the docks and building facilities.
In the past week, Unifor Marine Workers Federation Local 1 president Ed Hatch was given three citations by the company, and vice-president David Ladouceur has been suspended for “insubordination.”
A main issue has been the employer trying to amend their collective agreement that ends in 2016, Ladouceur said.
They’re also talking about eliminating trades or subcontracting work outside of Halifax, Ladouceur said, which “we all should have issues with” because the union fought alongside Irving for the shipbuilding contract to land jobs for Atlantic Canadians.
“They didn’t get this contract on their own. Our collective agreement went with that contract up to Ottawa to prove that they had a stable workforce,” Ladouceur said.
In a deal reached yesterday a special deal was given shipyard owners; ‘It’s also undeniable that the taxpayers are funding the Irvings on both ends: taxpayers are paying for the ship contract, and they’re paying in terms of reduced tax receipts.’
With a deadline approaching to arrive at ‘reforms’ demanded by creditors, Greek’s finance minister warned that the nation is at the end of measures that it can use to shore up the nation’s economy.
Yanis Varoufakis gave the warning after eurozone finance ministers met in Brussels to discuss the final €7.2bn tranche of Greece’s €240bn EU/IMF bailout.
Ministers said Greece had made “progress” but more work was needed.
(snip)
Earlier, Greece began the transfer of €750m (£544m, $834m) in debt interest to the International Monetary Fund – a day ahead of a payment deadline….Its finances are running so low that it has had to ask public bodies for help.
Never.Give.Up.
53 Comments
morning, pups, had a touch of the frozen tundra this a.m., but just for an instant when the thermometer dropped just for a minute or so to 32F. Glad the garden didn’t get smacked.
Good morning Ruth and pups yet to arrive.
Thank you for the post Ruth and I love your egg picture. Probably going to have to go out to breakfast this morning.
42 degrees here in N. Illinois. Is this May?
Good morning all,
Low of 45 here but chilly for May.
hi, this return to the cold is supposed to be good for peonies, though, so I can’t be unhappy with that. The egg picture has its detractors, but it is the real thing. I had my own, also, this morning, with some cheese, my special. With many grain toast, of course.
Good Morning All!
If you think the refugee’s looking for jobs is a crisis, wait until climate change induced drought sends people fleeing for water.
We own that mess in Libya as much or more than the EU does. We ought to be offering to take some of those immigrants. It ain’t like they’re scary brown Muslims…wait, never mind.
Greece is out of options. They will either have to knuckle under the Germans or leave the EU. If I had to bet, I’d bet the latter. Hooray for austerity!
39 degrees this morning and I left without my jacket. It’s supposed to reach 60 and be a nice day, if cool.
Boxturtle (The day will come when we sink refugee boats as soon as they leave international waters)
My only gripe is that it makes me hungry.
Boxturtle (Oh, and there’s no bacon)
The neighbor on the other street was walking his dog past the house so I put my jacket on and walked down to the Cul-de-Sac with him. I froze by butt off as the wind and the cold temperature make for a cold morning.
yep, and I am hearing that farther out it’s truly frosted over, nearby.
Water woes; the drought in CA gets all the attention, but our west is generally pretty stressed. All the flooding that’s been going on where I lived for many years in Central Texas hasn’t brought the lakes up to their usual level, yet.
that’s when you share the jacket, isn’t it?
We are busily making private prisons the answer to illegal entry, and investors like the Cheney family are showing they don’t mind leaking borders as long as they can scrimp on care inside the wire once they’re here and caught.
Good morning, pups. Today we have Blow, Collins and Kristof. In “The President, Fox News and the Poor” Mr. Blow says Obama was right to call out the media’s poverty narratives. There are people who want something for nothing — but they cut across the income spectrum. Mr. Kristof, in “Crisis at Sea,” says American and Asian officials seem determined to avert their eyes as the toll climbs in the Rohingya refugee crisis. Ms. Collins states the obvious when she writes “Wow, Jeb Bush is Awful.” She says as a presidential hopeful, Jeb’s most attractive feature used to be an aura of competence, but that changed this week.
Let me try an experiment to see if I can get a proper link… HERE they are, and
HERE’s Krugman’s blog.
The coffee and tea are ready, and I’ve got your favorite omelet this morning. I won’t know until I mash the “post as” button, but I hope those links work. For what it’s worth, Raw Story has it configured somehow so that links you put up (they use Disqus too) are colored red. Maybe the powers that be at FDL can figure out how to do that too. I’ve got to head out and fill bird feeders. Have a great day.
Oh, if anyone wants to know how to code the links (which did seem to work) HERE is where I found out how to do it. (That time I tried from memory…)
thanks, Marion, in taking on the media narrative about poor = shiftless no-goods, Blow is making his invitations shrink, no doubt, something we need more of. The amount of welfare our corporate no-goods need and demand is the real killer of prosperity.
I wish. IMO we are making death the answer to illegal entry. Or rape.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/29/mexico-immigration-crackdown-fewer-child-migrants-central-america
And it’s going to get uglier. ObamaLLP denies having Mexico crackdown, yet it started right after an Obama visit. I guess Obama figures he can avoid a personal backlash by having Mexico do his dirty work.
I wonder how long it will be before Texas and Arizona launch official “shoot to kill” programs.
Boxturtle (As opposed to their current unofficial programs)
once more, Obama did it!
what is going on in our neighbor to the south is gang warfare to a great extent, and the government there is about as responsible for what is going on outisde the capitol as Somalia’s ‘government’.
The maps CS has been posting show pretty clearly that stress. Calif and Texas are the only states impacted that have access to the ocean and thus desal. New Mexico, Arizona, etc, can only drill deeper and hope. It’s going to be interesting when the inland states have to come to the coastal states to buy water. They’re not going to be offered a competitive price and I predict lawsuits about who is depleting whose aquifer.
Boxturtle (Given the choice of invading Calif or raising taxes, what would Texas do?)
The Keystone pipeline threatens the Ogalalla Aquifer and the dumb a**es cannot figure out that if the pipeline goes in any where around it, that source of water will not be available to future generations.
Maybe, just maybe people are waking up to this coming water shortage and realizing that conservation is not just a word in the dictionary.
Kristof is correct. And the MSM will help them.
Boxturtle (Remember that fairy tale about “Give me your tired, your poor…”)
It makes me nauseous.
oh, my, you might want to choose a click direct to comments, and escape my eggs. They taste wonderful.
I dunno. The government there seems pretty joined at the wallet to the gangs and they may well be responsible for more than we know. But check the link I posted (if it works) and see what the Mexican crackdown on refugees from further south is doing for us. They’ve really stopped (or caused to be stopped) a lot of people.
To my mind, someone mentally and physically able to hike hundreds of miles for a change at a better life is someone we want as a citizen. That person will do more for our economy than a lot of our own people.
Boxturtle (I love watching the GOP trying to have it both ways on immigration)
Malaysia and Indonesia may want to hang on to those immigrants. Gonna need lots of cheap labor once TPP passes to fill all those American jobs that will flood their countries. oldhippiejan
No doubt Mexico has its Cheney families too, and yes, there is a lot of ‘eading them off at the border – the line from old westerns. The government in Mexico has tried to crack down on gangs as reports from there talk about – but it’s long tradition in that part of the world, not a large part of the population trusts or works with them.
Not a bad suggestion. I suspect there are lots of locals who’d fill the bill though.
Well said oldhippiejan, well said.
Well the locals probably have a couple nickels to rub together and they might want 25 cents an hour, whereas the boat people have nothing and would work for may 15 cents an hour. And kids even cheaper! oldhippiejan
Thanks Canyon 2. I read that it got a little chilly in your neighborhood last night. I just finished setting out all my flowers last night about 7:30. I really hope it doesn’t frost anymore. oldhippiejan
Sad to say, that may be part of the governments’ thinking too.
Good Morning All and Thanks, Ruth. The page still seems weird to me, but more accessible. We have rain predictions for most of the next week….off & on. A very dreary morning with rain in the forecast. Seems like a very unusual spring.
Disqus has some difficulties, but of course I’ve been working with it for awhile at eschatonblog, so no surprises hopefully.
I am watching the spillway at Lake Texoma, even with flooding from OK it’s not going over, been drought emptying the lakes for awhile. So endure, it’s good for the crops.
It is downright cold this morning and the wind is not helping either. Good for you on the flowers as that means Spring is coming…sometime.
Yes! They call it Americans competing with global “Dred Scotts.”
Corporate only plays ball on pitched pitches. This is why money has been deemed “SPEECH” by a SCOTUS. This is no different from “Dred Scott” being deemed “inferior and property” by the SCOTUS!
It gives those with money, corporations an advantage under the color of law as the Scott decision benefited those who owned “Human Beings,” under the color of law.
Albert Einstein would call this a time space wormhole connecting the intellectually grotesque “Citizens United” with America’s Original Sin, “Scott v Sanford,” grotesque in consequence and legacy to this republic. Seems we need a constitutional amendment to address Corptocracy’s power now rather than after the fact, to address Slavocracy’s realized threat to the republic.
I miss the strike function. I leave it as is….
Jefferson and Madison already wrote it, a long time ago!!!!
here it looks like winter is over. Last gasp was early this a.m.
Hopefully.
Yes it is. Seems like we went from 40 to 80 degrees practically overnight. My cats started shedding all at once. Having 2 out 3 long haired cats, all I do is pick up handfuls of cat hair – and that’s before I vacuum. oldhippiejan
Good morning all. Alice here.
33* here overnight. Brrrrrrrr…
Got up late not ready to face the political facts so I’ll be the little bird today.
Actually getting back to the constitution, which Citizens United and the decision to require an employee to know what other employees are paid and seek redress (Ledbetter) violate, would be a huge step forward.
glad to see you, and we nearly froze here, but the future is predicted to be spring.
Muslim-Bashing Can Be Very Lucrative
Why does this not surprise me. Ah capitalism, you got to love it.
I’ll bet bashing black people is even more lucrative.
replaces classical racism, sorta.
The KKK used hate, but its instigators were about financial control.
To bad I can’t make money from detesting republicans, which I do voluntarily now.
Humm…maybe by doing it for free, I’m ruining the market.
sigh
the problem with actually having motivations of actual worth is that you can do it openly. It’s the disgraceful sort that folks hide and use a front group for, so they have to pay up.
Worker claims she was fired for deleting creepy GPS app that tracked her 24 hours a day
Oh wonderful. A new kind of cyber voyeurism by ones boss. Amazed he did not have an app that activates the camera as well. Actually…maybe he did.
nuts are good for you!
(sorry)
Promoting cholesterol rich diets could be Darwinist in intention, imho.
Paleo diet ignores basic evolutionary biology
Apparently the health nutz don’t like science any more than the religious conservatives do when It doesn’t fit their agenda.
[hope this is not a double post. fist one seemed to disappear]
yep- disqus does act silly sometimes.
good morning! also
Good morning to you Ruth
Good morning.
Chris, if you are here, how did you manage to do the
links? I got an e-mail from Molly saying: disqus prepends
“disqus.com/embed/comments” to the embedded comment string, which makes
it not work…and said she could not delete it. In fact, the line
“disqus.com/embed/comments” was underscored in the e-mail so i clicked
it and got the error window. Now I see you have managed to delete it or some other workaround. Care to share? Her links didn’t work.
You can be sure Cheney and Co will stop that cold.
For “humanitarian” reasons.
Went out to visit the garden, and don’t see big damage, maybe a bit of burn on the outer leaves of some plants, but mostly all looking well preserved, of course we’ll see.
Me too. I just close my eyes and scroll quickly. Those are really unappetizing eggs. But to each his own, I guess.
I was considering sending her a lot of much better egg pictures. I’m sure we could find lots of them on the internet if we looked. Scrolling quickly is also my coping strategy along with not looking as soon as I realize – once again – what I am looking at.
I wonder how many people it drives away from the website. More than a few I bet.