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Showing posts with label EU. Show all posts
Showing posts with label EU. Show all posts

Wednesday 7 September 2022

Liz Truss takes over a Britain in decline and in severe crisis: Martin Jacques

 

Liz Truss delivers a speech at an event to announce the winner of the Conservative Party leadership contest in central London on September 5,2022. Photo: AFP



Liz Truss is the new British Prime Minister. She beat her Conservative rival Rishi Sunak by tacking strongly to the right. No doubt the fact that she is white, and Sunak is brown, was also a major factor for the 170,000 overwhelmingly white Conservative Party members who voted. If Truss is to be taken at her word, she will be the most right-wing prime minister since Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.

Each of the last four Conservative prime ministers has been more right-wing than their predecessor: in chronological order, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss. Truss wants to cut taxes, doesn't like the state, is hostile to redistribution, believes in trickle-down economics (that feathering the nests of the rich will ultimately help the poor), and is an anti-China hawk.

In being true to her beliefs, however, she faces a gargantuan problem. She is confronted with the worst economic crisis of any British prime minister since 1945. It is impossible to find any good news on the economic front. As a result of the war in Ukraine, the price of natural gas, which is the main source of domestic heating, is five times what it was a year ago and is predicted to carry on rising steeply. Without state intervention to hold down energy prices, around half the population will this winter be impoverished.

Inflation, which for most of this century has been at around 2 percent, is already at 11 percent, and is predicted to rise to 20 percent. Interest rates, which have similarly been very low, are rising rapidly, meaning much higher mortgage payments for homeowners. The Bank of England forecasts that the country will go into recession towards the end of this year, and some believe that it will continue until 2024.

With inflation now in double figures, workers are finding they are facing wage increases that are less than half the increase in prices: as a result, they are confronted with the prospect of sharply declining real wages over the next several years. There is growing industrial unrest which is likely to become increasingly widespread over the next year.

This is not just a short-term problem. Real wages are now just below the level they were in 2007, on the eve of the Western financial crisis. In other words, the British economy has been stagnating for the last 15 years and in the process has been falling behind its near neighbours Germany and France. One major think-tank is predicting that over the next two years Britain will experience the largest fall in average real incomes for over one hundred years.

It is inconceivable that Truss can tackle this nightmare scenario by cutting taxes, rolling back the state, and turning a blind eye to the poorest sections of the community. This will require state intervention and redistribution on the scale of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, otherwise the Conservative Party will surely lose the next general election in 2024. Truss faces a major dilemma: take the right-wing ideological route and court electoral disaster or follow a pragmatic road and swallow her ideological principles.

Even before the coming economic tsunami, there was a mood of frustration and dislocation, a feeling that the country no longer worked properly. Far from ushering in a new era of prosperity and efficiency, Brexit has become synonymous with labour shortages in many parts of the economy. This has been accentuated by the impact of COVID-19 which continues to disrupt the economy, most obviously in the form of chronic labour shortages in many sectors. Britain's most-loved institution, the National Health Service, is now on life-support, a result of being starved of money for many years and an increasingly chronic shortage of staff.

It is important to emphasise that Britain is now in a much inferior position than it was in 1979 when Thatcher first came to power. This is a weakness it shares more generally with the West and especially Western Europe. The Soviet bloc aside, the West for the most part dominated the world during the 1980s. Its influence and hinterland, however, are now much reduced because of the rise of China together with that of the developing world. A topical example will suffice to illustrate the point. Is the present spike in oil and gas prices, which are costing Western Europe dearly, a permanent or temporary phenomenon? It looks very likely that it will be the former, that Western Europe will be permanently disadvantaged, because Russia has found new markets, notably India and China, for its oil. Western Europe enjoys less economic power in the world and its room for manoeuvre has contracted. This is what being part of the declining part of the world means.

Finally, what will Truss mean for Britain's relations with China? There is no reason for optimism. Truss thinks of herself as a cold war warrior. She has strongly hinted that China will be designated a "threat" to national security and treated in the same way as Russia. The golden age in the relationship between Britain and China came to an end around five years ago and there is precious little chance of it returning for a long time to come. 

By Martin Jacques


Born1945 (age 73–74)
Coventry, England, Great Britain, U.K
NationalityBritish
EducationKing Henry VIII School, Coventry
Alma materUniversity of Manchester (B.A.)
University of Cambridge (PhD)
OccupationEditor, academic, author
WebsiteMartinJacques.com
By Martin Jacques@martjacques

The author was until recently a senior fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge University. He is a visiting professor at the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University and a senior fellow at the China Institute, Fudan University. Follow him on twitter @martjacques. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn 

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While sowing discord around China, the US is heading to be a 'failing state' OTHER


China state-affiliated media 
#Taiwan island is a province of #China. What does the #US mean by “defense” ? : China will firmly strike back against acts undermining China's sovereignty and security: Chinese FM commented after US claimed the arms sale to Taiwan was for defensive purposes.

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Wednesday 16 March 2022

My father endured secret brainwashing experiment by CIA's MK Ultra project; he came back a totally different person

 

Photo: VCG

Life-long trauma: CIA mind control program victims speak out

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Julie Tanny's father Charles Tanny Photo: Courtesy of Julie Tanny

Julie Tanny's father Charles Tanny Photo: Courtesy of Julie Tanny

Editor's Note:
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Among the victims of the CIA's MK Ultra project is the family of Julie Tanny (Tanny), whose father was coercively brainwashed as part of the Montreal Experiments in Canada back in the 1950s. The experiments were funded by the Canadian government and covertly in part by the CIA. She is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed against five defendants - the US government, the Canadian government, the McGill University health center, the Royal Victoria Hospital, and McGill University, as her family was irreparably destroyed by the program. She shared her story with the Global Times (GT) in a recent interview.
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GT: You father underwent brainwashing treatment for three months in 1957 by Dr. Ewen Cameron. Why did he go?
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Tanny: My father had what's called trigeminal neuralgia, which is a pain in the side of the face that goes into the jaw. Apparently, it's excruciating because I actually know somebody who has it and just recovered from it.
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They believed at the time that it was psychosomatic. So they sent him to a psychiatrist. My father was very against it, but he did whatever he had to do to get rid of the pain because he just couldn't function.
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The doctor that he went to see was working with Dr. Cameron on this program in the hospital, which we didn't know. He put my father into the programs. We don't know what they wanted to do with him, but we do know that his treatment was different in that my father was not a psychiatric patient. That's what made him different from all the other ones.
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GT: What "treatment" did he undergo?
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Tanny: What they did was as soon as he was admitted to the hospital, they immediately put him on insulin. My father was not a diabetic. I know that the insulin put him in a coma. It was part of the sleep treatment where they put him to sleep, and after it he was interviewed by the psychiatrist, then they would take clips of some of the things he said and run them on a tape, 24-7 under his pillow. It would be going around nonstop in his head, brainwashing him basically. But what they would do was they would give him shock treatments, but not the regular shock treatments they give today. These are called Page-Russells. It was a machine invented by a Mr. Page and Mr. Russell. It was about 75 times the strength of a regular shock treatment. It was designed to wipe out the brain. And the tape was to replace it with different thoughts.
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I don't really know what they were trying to do, but I know in my father's case, they said they had written notes like "this is as far as we can take him" or "we have to put him back in because he still has ties to his former life." It's hard to know, but whatever they were trying to do, it wasn't good.
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GT: How did you know these details? Did your father share what they did to him with you or did you acquire the information through other means?
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Tanny: No. What happened was I was about 5 years old at the time, so I definitely remember what he was like before and what he was like after - it was two different people. My father was very engaged and very hands-on with us. All his free time was spent with his children. And after he came home, he didn't even know who we were. When we were at my mother's for dinner in 1978, when it came on the news that Mrs. Orlikow, who was the wife of a member of parliament in Winnipeg, was suing the CIA and we were all sitting around watching the news and my mother turned to my brother and said, go to the hospital and get dad's records tomorrow.
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And I was like, what are you talking about? Because no one ever told us what happened to my father or why he changed so much. The problem with that was my father had a massive stroke in 1977 and was left unable to communicate. He couldn't speak, he couldn't write, he couldn't read.
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And once I had found out about really what happened to him in 1978, it was too late to have that conversation with him. So it was never talked about. Never. Even after we found out.
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GT: How severely did this affect you and your family?
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Tanny: I think that we started off as a very happy family with the father who was always busy, building a skating rink in the backyard and taking us to the ice rink in the park across the street, and taking us to the amusement park every now and then.
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And all that, everything ended when he came back from the hospital. He came back very angry - physically violent. I asked my brother, what was it like to grow up in our house? And he said empty.
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GT: What prompted your fight for justice?
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Tanny: A lot of things happened to push us to do this. First of all, when my father had his stroke, the doctors couldn't find a reason; he didn't have a blood clot or high blood pressure. What happened to him was he had an artery that collapsed. And recent studies or pretty recent studies have shown that these particular shock treatments that my father had create heart attacks and stroke.
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My mother had to work till the day she died to support herself. And when my mother passed away, there was nothing. She was diagnosed with terminal cancer very shortly after my father died. I don't know what she would have lived on had she lived longer. And I guess it's also what we should have inherited and didn't. So there are a lot of factors.
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I know that in 1992, my mother received $100,000 from the federal government, but it cost, we figured out, my mother over $2 million in cash to have helped to take care of my father.
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So what was $100,000? When a temporary short-term head of the CIA read about what had happened, he insisted that the CIA found all the victims and compensated them properly and told them this twice. And the CIA both times admitted that they should and they will, but of course they never did. And then there's just the justice of it. It's amazing to me that they've never compensated people. They've never bothered to look at the damage [such experiment] did to families.
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GT: You and the other victims formed the group Survivors Allies Against Government Abuse in 2017. How many families are involved in the group?
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Tanny: I've never counted how many families are members, but I can tell you, as far as family members are concerned, it's got to be over 500. But there's also a lot I believe that have not come forward yet, because I'm always meeting more people.
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GT: You are the lead plaintiff in the class action lawsuit. Do you think a class action lawsuit can exert more pressure than individual lawsuits?
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Tanny: Definitely. First of all, I always believe their strength and numbers. But also to do this, there are very few lawyers, if any, who were willing to take on the work for one client. There's so much work to be done. We were very lucky to get the lawyers that we got.
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GT: What difficulties have you met during the process of executing your lawsuit?
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Tanny: I think the first thing is the government. When Justin Trudeau came into office, one of the first things he did was create these privacy acts so that nobody could get access to any kind of information, so that nobody could sue the government.
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So, when people are trying to find medical records, he makes it very difficult because they found 1 million different ways to deny people records under really ridiculous circumstances.
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Like we know it wasn't just Dr. Cameron, it was everybody who worked at the hospital - the nurses, all the doctors. So the idea that he would have to be the lead doctor on all these cases is ridiculous. We used to go to McGill University and do research and we found out a lot of information through that research. But once we filed, they hid everything. We would get mountains of files before we filed. And once we filed the lawsuit, you go and you get a file about this thick (1 cm). It's just their way of protecting themselves, I guess.
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So for me, we've had the records for a very long time. I wouldn't read them, but we had them. But there are a lot of people who have not yet been given that information. It's difficult for them.
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GT: Are there still such experiments in Canada or the US, as far as you know?
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Tanny: We have a website and we've done things. So people have seen what we're doing. I get so many emails from people who say they're being experimented on. I guess today there're different ways of mind control that are a lot more progressive than what they did in the past. It's hard to know. I wouldn't be at all surprised. Governments are governments. I don't think all that much has changed. Our world has become all about power and control.
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So do I think there's that going on? Sure, but not anything like the primitive way they tried in the 50s. But I do get a lot of emails. 

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US covertly experiments mind control on people across continents for decades; no official apology

 Project CIA 

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"They've taken away enough from me. I don't remember my birth name. I am not in contact with my children. It's a very degrading, devastating reality," said 72-year-old Maryam Ruhullah, an MK Ultra victim who now lives in Grand Prairie, Texas.
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MK Ultra is the code name of a human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the US and its notorious spy agency the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It started on April 13, 1953 and lasted for 20 years.
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It was the height of the Cold War, and the US designed covert operation, among which was MK Ultra, aimed at developing tools that could be used against Soviet bloc enemies to control human behavior with drugs and other psychological manipulators.
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Psychedelic drugs, paralytics, and electroshock therapy, all heinous and inhumane techniques, were clandestinely but routinely used on humans. They included citizens from the US and other countries who were unwitting test subjects, an encapsulation of immense human rights violations.
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Many experiments were conducted in Fort Detrick as a key base of operations. Many people died as a result of these experiments. Those who survived had their memories forcibly erased, forgetting their names and having their personalities irrevocably altered, and faced threats to their lives, living in fear for the remainder of their days. More than 40 years on, the physical, mental, emotional, social horrors, and injuries are still with her, Ruhullah told the Global Times.
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US mind control scheme
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The psychosis induction of Ruhullah started when she was 5 or 6 while attending a parade in London. She was then brought to the US where CIA operatives would continuously use a recording played over tape recorder to embed in her mind what they wanted her to become in her own memory.
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"I remember one time I had been given electric shock treatments and was returned to a room. When I regained a little bit of consciousness, I heard one of the hospital staff say something to the effect of: Why do they do this to her? Why are they giving her so many shock treatments?" said Ruhullah.
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Ruhullah believed that what happened to her was political because of her Iranian heritage. She was then relocated, taken away, and lived and was educated in Russia afterward. At 19, she married an American and moved to the US. Seven years later, a member of US law enforcement agency entered her house and told her she had to be put in protective custody. Although she greatly protested, she was forced to go. She was not able to contact her husband or her son who was about 6 years old at that time. It was the second time that she would be an unwilling participant in a mind control program.
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Ruhullah said she has been living somebody else's lie.
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"You remain physically drained, because there's something that drains your spirit. You cannot hold a conversation with anyone regarding a situation, because everyone that is allowed in your life goes along with the lie, either out of total indifference and complacency, or because they build an allegiance to the government that they have to continue this lie or something would happen to them."
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The CIA mind control schemes did not just remain on US soil but were extended to US allied countries including Denmark, Australia, and Canada.
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In December 2021, a Danish documentary titled The Search for Myself was released, leveling claims against the CIA that in the early 1960s it had financially aided experiments on 311 Danish children, a good number of whom were orphans or adopted. The filmmaker, Per Wennick, himself was one of them.
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Wennick told Radio Denmark that as one of the kids forced to participate in the experiment, he had electrodes placed on his arms, legs, and chest around his heart. The children were also subjected to loud and high-pitched sounds, which was "very uncomfortable."
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According to Australian media reports, the US once took the experiments to Australia in the 1960s that involved Sydney University psychology students.
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What took place in the Danish documentary and Australian media reports was just the tip of the iceberg. Between 1950 and 1964, experiments funded by the Canadian government and covertly in part by the CIA as part of MK Ultra were conducted at the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University in Canada and were led by Scottish psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron.
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None of the Canadian patients provided consent or knew that they were being used for clandestine research purposes. So far, neither the CIA nor the Canadian government has apologized for either's role in these experiments which ruined hundreds of families.
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Julie Tanny's family is one of them. In 1957 when she was 5 years old, her father went to see a doctor as he had trigeminal neuralgia, while the doctor, who worked in cahoots with Dr. Cameron, put him into one of the many brainwashing programs.
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Tanny told the Global Times that her father was put to sleep first, then he was forced to listen to clips of some of the things he had said on a continual 24-hour loop underneath his pillow while he slept as part of the brainwashing process. Then he would be subjected to shock treatments administered using a machine called the Page-Russells, which emitted voltages about 75 times the strength of a regular shock treatment, and the aim was to wipe out his memory.
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Such experiments were administered on Tanny's father for three months, and he was discharged because he "still has ties to his former life." He returned home, but the happy family was soon destroyed.
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Photo: VCG
Photo: VCG
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Typical US democracy style
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Colin A. Ross, a US-based psychiatrist, wrote a book titled The C.I.A. Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists, after reading a collection of 15,000-page files from the CIA reading room. As a psychiatrist, he believes the CIA mind control programs were very abusive to innate human nature.
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Moreover, Ross calls into question the medical ethics of said CIA doctors.
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"You have to create psychiatric disorder on purpose, which is completely the opposite of the purpose of psychiatry. And the patient, the subject doesn't give informed consent. They don't have legal representation. So it completely violates all medical ethics," said Ross.
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Despite mounting public backlash and condemnation, the CIA is yet to officially apologize for the actions it took during the Cold War and after. The CIA's mind control projects are still relevant today because they provide a horrific historical narrative of intelligence misconduct in a country that keeps touting human rights and freedom.
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"The problem I have with the United States, while I'm a US citizen, is that they tend to point the finger; accuse other countries around the world of human rights violations, but they don't take responsibility for their own. So I think it's hypocritical and it's all part of geopolitical maneuvering and so on," said Ross.
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"This is the typical style of US democracy - violating human rights and committing crimes at will and then being forced to acknowledge it decades later," Aleksandr Kolpakidi, a Russian intelligence historian, told the Global Times.
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Tanny said she gets many emails from people who say they are currently being experimented on, and she believes mind control experiments are still ongoing, albeit not quite as primitive as those performed in the 1950s.
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"I guess today there're different ways of mind control that are a lot more progressive than what they did in the past. It's hard to know. I wouldn't be at all surprised. Governments are governments. I don't think all that much has changed. Our world has become all about power and control," said Tanny.
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CIA mind control myth. Graphic: Deng Zijun/GT
`CIA mind control myth. Graphic: Deng Zijun/GT
CIA mind control myth. Graphic: Deng Zijun/GT
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Seeking justice
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The CIA MK Ultra program was brought to the public's attention in 1975, and victims and their families in Canada started to fight for the responsible parties to be brought to justice and be held accountable for the lifelong pain and suffering.
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A 1980 lawsuit which dragged on for eight years made nine Canadians receive only $67,000 each from the US Department of Justice.
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Tanny's father died in 1992, the same day his wife, Tanny's mother, received compensation worth $100,000 by the Canadian government. He was among the 77 victims who received such compensation.
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But for Tanny, this was just a drop in the bucket in comparison to the whooping $2 million it took her mother to take care of her father. And her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer very shortly after the death of her father.
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In 2017, she and other victims formed the group Survivors Allies Against Government Abuse to exert more pressure on the defendants, and she keeps meeting new people who are victims of such mind control programs. Tanny has filed a request for a class-action lawsuit against the US and Canadian governments, the McGill University health center, the McGill University, and the Allan Memorial Institute, hoping this will extend compensation to family members and other victims.
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Tanny told the Global Times that they will be in court against the US government on April 26.
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Ruhullah said that she hopes the world will remember the immense suffering of MK Ultra victims by setting aside a special day.
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"I know after apartheid, they had a reconciliation council. We don't have anything like that, be it MK Ultra, be it slavery, be it the genocide of the Native Americans, in order for the individuals and the country to heal. There needs to be acknowledgment, there needs to be apologies, there needs to be compensation, and there needs to be a genuine reconciliation," said Ruhullah. 

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China showed truth about Xinjiang, but Western media chose to be blind as US practises ‘double standards’

Truths about Xinjiang the Western media won't tell 

 

Human right violators: USA,Canada, Australia, UK, EU - Racism against Asians: Forever foreigner, alien or pendatang

 

Tuesday 2 February 2021

Why Europe gravitates away from US to Eastern power center: Martin Jacques

 


What will happen to Europe? Will it continue with a broadly pro-American orientation, or will it pursue an increasingly independent position?

Either way, the consequences will be far-reaching. At the heart of the West lie the US and Europe. If Europe seeks a more autonomous role, then the West will be seriously weakened.

The end of the Cold War marked a major moment in US-Europe relations. Europe was no longer dependent on the US for its defense and ever since, slowly but remorselessly, a growing distance has opened up between them. This was accelerated by two key events ̶ the US invasion of Iraq, opposed by most Europeans, and the Donald Trump phenomenon, which most Europeans found beyond the pale.

President Joe Biden wants to mend the fences and return to something closer to the pre-Trump relationship. He may have some success because, unlike Trump, Biden will seek to befriend rather than castigate Europe. But there will be no simple return to the pre-Trump era: too much has happened, too much has changed.

A recent opinion poll by the European Council on Foreign Relations across 11 European countries reveals what can only be described as a sea-change in European attitudes in the post-Trump era. Six in 10 Europeans believe that the US political system is broken and that China will become a stronger power than the US in the next10 years. A majority now want their country to remain neutral in any conflict between the US and China.

A majority of Germans believe that, after voting for Trump in 2016, Americans can no longer be trusted; across Europe likewise more people agreed than disagreed with this statement. The survey grouped the respondents into four categories. The smallest, 9 percent of the total, believed that the EU was broken and the US would bounce back. A second group, around 20 percent of the total, believed that both the US and the EU would continue to thrive. A third group, 29 percent of the total, thought that both the US and the EU were broken and declining. A fourth group, 35 percent of the total, believed that the EU was healthy, but the US was broken. The latter two groups, almost two-thirds of the total, expected that the US would soon be displaced by China.

There has clearly been a profound shift in European attitudes consequent upon the decline of the West since the 2008 financial crisis, the Trump presidency and the rise of China. These, we must remind ourselves, are very recent developments which have happened with remarkable speed. Far from reinforcing the Atlantic alliance and the relationship with the US, their main impact on Europeans has been to weaken those bonds, elicit a growing acknowledgement that the world has changed profoundly and foster a belief that Europe needs to be more independent. Of course, these trends are still young and fluid. Many conflicting forces are at work with attitudes ebbing and flowing both within and between countries. Criticism of China has grown apace in the recent period in Europe, as it has in the US. But there is one fundamental difference. While the US is bent on defending its global primacy, Europe long ago abandoned any such pretensions, thereby greatly reducing the sources of friction and animosity between it and China in comparison with the US.

The survey reveals that by far the dominant trend is toward a more independent-minded Europe, a growing skepticism about the US and a sign of recognition that China will soon become the dominant power in the world. The European leader who most symbolizes this outlook, and has pioneered this way of thinking, is German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The recently agreed EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, very much in Merkel's image, is a powerful demonstration of the EU's willingness to pursue its own independent relationship with China rather than following the Americans.

The trend toward a growing distance between Europe and the US will be slow, tortuous, conflict-riddled, and painful. Europe has looked westward across the Atlantic ever since Christopher Columbus. It was European settlers who colonized Northeast America and subsequently established the US. The latter was a European creation which over time was to outperform its ancestral continent. If Europe colonized much of the world, the post-1945 world order was a Western creation, with the US the dominant partner and Europe very much a junior partner. In sum, an enormous historical, intellectual, political and cultural hinterland binds the US and Europe together. But we are now in new territory. American decline means that it has increasingly less to offer Europe.

The gravitational pull of China, and Asia more generally, is drawing Europe eastward. Nothing illustrates this phenomenon better than the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative. Slowly but surely, bit by bit, Europe is becoming more and more involved ̶ first the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, then Portugal, Greece and Italy, and others over time will in all likelihood follow. What drew Europe westward is now drawing it eastward: the centre of gravity of the global economy, once in the west, is now in the east.

The author was until recently a Senior Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge University. He is a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University and a Senior Fellow at the China Institute, Fudan University. Follow him on twitter @martjacques. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn

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How this US-China trade war will remake the world

 

Martin Jacques: China's rise to power  

 

Thursday 28 January 2021

China needs to lead global vaccinations


 
COVID-19 pandemic: From 1 to 100 million
 


https://youtu.be/_D4d9OXz8V8


As of Wednesday Beijing time, over 100 million people around the world have been infected with COVID-19, with over 2.15 million deaths. The severest pandemic since the beginning of the 21st century has brought great sufferings to the people and incurred huge losses. It has provided lessons.

As World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote on Twitter, "Numbers can make us numb to what they represent: every death is someone's parent, someone's partner, someone's child, someone's friend." After all, humanity shouldn't be numb. We must keep the thirst for humanitarianism and always spare no efforts. Humanity must not connive in the growing number of deaths - it is a shame of the modern civilization.

Many lessons can be drawn from the COVID-19 pandemic that manages to rage across the globe. The biggest one is that we humans should have made full use of the capabilities to contain the pandemic, but the interference of politics with science and the resulting disunity among major countries have allowed the coronavirus to take advantage. What was supposed to be a unified war against the epidemic has become separate wars within different countries and regions. The problem is clear for all to see, but we have not yet been able to mend the fold quickly enough to build the collective human solidarity that was so badly needed.

Within many countries, too, it has been difficult to forge consensus and solidarity around the pandemic prevention routes. How to coordinate the fight against the epidemic and to boost economic recovery has become a common question. In this process, the opinions of scientists are often marginalized, and some influential politicians put non-scientific considerations first at the critical moment, leading the fight against the pandemic to go astray.

The ravaging epidemic has also exposed the fragility of economic activity and the way human society is organized. Most societies in general are poor in vigilance to disasters with a lack of mobilization, and dependent too much on fair weather for prosperity. The pandemic this time showed the destructive power of a public health crisis at a time when the world's population is growing and more socially intense. Human society must increase its investment in public safety.

After a terrible year, we are now at a new stage of the pandemic. Vaccines at this stage have the potential to revolutionize the fight against the pandemic and reshape the global structure.

China is a large populous country. It has achieved outstanding success in the last round of the epidemic fight, laying a sound foundation for the next stage of the war against the coronavirus. The country is also at the forefront of vaccine research and development. Next, we must create the fastest vaccination rate and stand at the front ranks on the herd immunity list. This is a new test for China.

We contained the epidemic without vaccines in the last round of the virus fight. We cannot continue such an advantage. The speed of vaccine promotion will greatly affect the opening-up of all societies in the future. The US and European societies suffered heavy losses last year, but at the same time they have developed relatively strong endurance toward the pandemic. If their vaccination is fast, this will promote mutual opening-up among them, which will exert pressure on countries which are slow in vaccination.

Only by getting vaccination rates in China roughly on par with the rates in the US and European countries, along with keeping the social distancing capabilities we already have, can China continue to lead in being open in the future and further provide the greatest impetus for the recovery of the global economy.

Before the next winter comes, China needs to strive to get the majority of the vulnerable and high-risk groups vaccinated and to expand the vaccination coverage to the general population. We need to guarantee the total number of people vaccinated in China several times higher than the number in the US.

China also needs to provide large quantities of vaccines to developing countries, and the total number of vaccines exported should be the largest. This is the role China should play as a major manufacturing country, and this is what is expected of China.

To accomplish these tasks at the same time, China's vaccine production must speed up as soon as possible. We don't have time to celebrate our past achievements. We need to move forward and focus on the future

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Regardless of whether Europeans use Chinese vaccines, it is evident that Chinese vaccines have played an important role to protect their interests.

 

Malaysia ranked 29th for number of Covid-19 cases ... -

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Thursday 13 August 2020

Health experts doubt Russia vaccine, as China likely to take lead along Russia in accelerated global vaccine race: experts

https://youtu.be/SHi2RjWP_zo

https://youtu.be/-XW9_1fXmKE

A handout photo provided by the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) shows samples of a vaccine against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) developed by the Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology, in Moscow, Russia August 6, 2020. Picture taken August 6, 2020.

PETALING JAYA: The announcement of a Covid-19 vaccine in Russia – dubbed Sputnik V – that will help end the pandemic soon is still a “distant reality”, say local public health experts.

Russia announced on Tuesday it will approve a Covid-19 vaccine after less than two months of human testing and hopes to begin production in September with plans to vaccinate its medical staff immediately afterwards.

The approval was made before a phase three trial which would involve thousands of participants and considered essential before regulatory approval is made.

Public health expert Datuk Dr Zainal Ariffin Omar criticised the approval of the Covid-19 vaccine in Russia as non-ethical for its lack of full clinical trials and scientific data.

“The scientific community is worried as basically, a vaccine will need to undergo full clinical trials to identify its efficacy and side effects.

“So, it is premature for Russia to be releasing the vaccine now without conducting large-scale trials that would produce data to show whether it works, ” he said.

Public health medicine specialist of Universiti Malaya Medical Centre, Associate Professor Dr Rafdzah Ahmad Zaki said for any available vaccines, the effectiveness of the vaccine needs to be evaluated before it can be considered.

“With any new vaccine, there will be a committee to discuss and decide on the evidence of whether the vaccine works or not, ” she said.

The head of the Centre for Epidemiology and Evidence-Based Practice noted that any risk or benefit will be balanced before a vaccine is approved, such as whether the tested population is similar to Malaysia’s community and the kind of resources needed to implement the vaccine.

Dr Zainal, who is Malaysian Public Health Physicians’ Association president, cited an example of a dengue vaccination which was approved by the World Health Organisation (WHO). But even then, it was later found to have caused a lot of deaths and />complications.

“Luckily after evaluation, we did not implement the use of the dengue vaccination for our country.

“That is why the scientific and medical community is very cautious of approving a vaccine for the community because we don’t want to be wrong for using a premature product, ” he said.

Dr Zainal expects a vaccine to be made available in the country only by the middle or end of 2021.

“Any vaccine will help the situation later on. But at the moment, we don’t have the capability of developing new vaccines. But we can be involved in any trials or collaborate with international agencies for trial purposes, ” he said.

Indonesia said on Tuesday it would launch a Phase 3 human trials of a vaccine candidate from China’s Sinovac Biotech.

According to the WHO, there are currently 139 vaccines in development and 26 have been undergoing human trials since July 31. Out of the 165 vaccines, six are reaching Phase 3, which is the last step before regulatory approval and will involve large numbers of human testing.

Sinovac’s vaccine, named CoronaVac, is already being tested on 9,000 Brazilian health workers.

Malaysian Medical Association president Dr N. Ganabaskaran said the Covid-19 pandemic will go on for years even if vaccines are readily available.

“Even if vaccines are available, what about poor countries? Not all countries can afford the vaccine.

“There are vaccines being developed, but available vaccines will go to the rich countries first and it may take many years before we can overcome Covid-19, ” he said.

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 Related:


China likely to take lead along Russia in accelerated global vaccine race: experts

The battlefield of a global vaccine race has seemingly transferred from research and development to the market after Russia announced its approval of the world's first COVID-19 vaccine on Tuesday, soon after which the US announced to purchase another 100 million doses of a domestic candidate, revealing the Trump administration's anxiety over Russia's move.

Covid'19 Vaccine for the world started mass produced in China on 8/8/20

8月8日!中国传来大喜讯!疫苗开始大规模生产,准备9月份分发全世界,拟定第一批名单,不是开玩笑,特朗普最怕的事发生!

https://youtu.be/JoXhQIGmtBs


Putin hails 'Sputnik vaccine'

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that Russia had become the first country to grant regulatory approval to a COVID-19 vaccine after less than two months of human testing, a move Moscow likened to its success in the Cold War-era space race.

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 China's Covid-19 vaccine will be available for all, could be ready for public use early next year

China will make its Covid-19 vaccine a global public good when it is ready for application after successful research and clinical trials, a senior Chinese official said.

 

China leads in coronavirus vaccine clinicals to combat Covid-19

Friday 21 June 2019

US hypocritical in accusing China of tech theft

Photo: IC
https://youtu.be/tGD072hQGP8

 

The US has no lack of a “criminal record” in terms of technology theft.


 The US has repeatedly ignored China's innovative breakthroughs through self-reliance and hard work but accuses China of "stealing" US technology and intellectual property rights. These arguments do not hold water.

These absurd accusations imply that the US must be the absolute leader in technological innovation - only the US is qualified to make major breakthroughs while others should merely follow its lead and import its technology, otherwise they are "stealing." Such logic is ridiculous.

A country's technological innovation capability is closely related to its scientific research resources, such as talents, capital, and scientific experimental devices. Leading scientific research resources have determined the US leading position in various science and technology fields. Nonetheless, economies including the EU, China, Japan, Russia and India have also mastered considerable scientific research resources and developed technological innovation capabilities with their own characteristics and advantages.

It is due to such relatively scattered distribution of global research resources that the US can never be an "all-round champion" of technological innovation. It is natural that other countries will catch up with the US in certain fields.

Historically, the US made a great fortune during WWII, and out-competed the Soviet Union in terms of comprehensive national strength during the Cold War. Even so, the US failed to gain absolute dominance over the Soviet Union in technological innovation.

As a major technological innovator keeping pace with the US, the Soviet Union set multiple world records in its golden age. The world's first nuclear power plant, artificial earth satellite, manned spacecraft, space station and intercontinental missiles were all built by the Soviet Union. As far as weapons and equipment are concerned, both the Soviet Union and the US had something in which they excelled. Even now, Russia, the successor state to the Soviet Union, surpasses the US in some respects.

The US made its first nuclear power plant, artificial satellite, manned spacecraft, and intercontinental missiles after the Soviet Union's success. Based on its current logic, should these US cutting-edge technologies be regarded as something stolen from the Soviet Union?

There are more examples. China led the US in the processing power of supercomputers for many years. In June 2018, the US retook the world's lead thanks to its machine "Summit" which could process 200,000 trillion calculations per second. By following US logic, should we say the US surpassed China by stealing China's supercomputing technology?

Some have already noted that the US is actually the guilty party that files the suit first. The country has no lack of a "criminal record" in terms of technology theft. In the first decades after its founding, the US tried hard to "steal" advanced industrial technology from the UK to develop its own industries.

During WWII, prior to Germany's surrender, the US established the Alsos Mission. The team was sent to Germany not to fight, but to capture top German scientists and their technologies ahead of the Soviet Union. It is said that Wernher von Braun, one of the founders of the US space program, was a leading figure in Nazi Germany's rocket development program.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the US took the opportunity to obtain advanced military technology that the Soviet Union had accumulated for years and to lure away many top technical talents.

After that, plenty of US weapons benefited from the Soviet Union's technology to varying degrees, which saved the US time and money. The US technology theft from the Soviet Union has produced generous returns.

However, the US is not ashamed of such records. Many Hollywood blockbusters have molded American spies conducting such theft into the embodiment of justice, and molded theft into a just act. Perhaps it is precisely because of this that the US is now judging others by itself.

In recent years, China has continued to increase investment in science and technology. In 2018, the country's research and development funds amounted to nearly 2 trillion yuan ($290 billion), second only to the US. The efforts will naturally pay off.

Nevertheless, the US deliberately turned a blind eye to China's efforts to promote independent innovation and contain China's development. The past actions and current absurd logic of the US are being seen through.

Source link 


Innovation is a driving force within China's economy today. Yet behind that innovation, what's the role of research and development?


https://youtu.be/xo_OLlL7XqI
https://youtu.be/xo_OLlL7XqI?t=199



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Sunday 30 September 2018

Trump's tariffs won't restore U.S. jobs

The sewing lines at Bernhard Furniture Company which where skilled craft jobs are growing without the help of tariffs, and company officials

 Related image https://youtu.be/OCk4VkAKKFc

Trump's tariffs won't restore U.S. furniture jobs : https://www.reuters.tv/v/PvWi/2018/09/27/trump-s-tariffs-won-t-restore-u-s-furniture-jobs

In a town where a 30-feet tall chair is the chief landmark, and which is synonymous with a U.S. furniture industry decimated over the years by imports from China, many greet the possibility of tariffs on Chinese goods with a shrug.

No wonder. Of three once bustling Thomasville furniture plants in the city limits, one is being demolished and cleared for parkland, another may become the site of a new police station, and a third is being converted into apartments.

President Donald Trump is threatening to levy tariffs of up to 25 percent on $500 billion of goods imported from China each year, including roughly $20 billion of furniture, as a way to bring back hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs lost to China and other low-cost competitors.

Yet, the transformation of U.S. industries since China’s emergence as the world’s low-cost producer almost two decades ago means many no longer directly compete with Chinese imports, so tariffs may not translate so easily into more U.S. jobs.

At family-owned Bernhardt Furniture in Lenoir, some 90 miles west of Thomasville, executives say it would take about $30 million in capital investment - some 10 percent of annual sales - to resurrect standard wood furniture lines now mainly made in countries like China and Vietnam.

That is too much to commit based on a policy that a future administration could reverse.

"The theory is you turn (imports) off, the jobs come back. That's not really true... The buildings don't exist. The people don't exist. The machinery does not exist," to make the sorts of furniture that now gets imported, said Alex Bernhardt Jr., chief executive and the company founder's great grandson.

What the company needs now, executives say, is the open markets and steady economy that have allowed it to grow its workforce from below 800 at the end of the 2007-2009 recession to almost 1,500 today - partly on the basis of exports to China.

DIFFERENT COMPANY

That growth has been largely driven by demand for more customized, higher end furniture. In expanding, the 129-year-old company has been hiring not only factory workers, but also designers, marketing experts and other professionals.

In all, it is a different firm from what it was three decades ago when it first began dividing product lines between the United States and Asia.

Economists say the same is true across much of U.S. manufacturing. To invest and hire more workers, executives would need certainty, for example, that consumers would prefer U.S.-made products at a potentially higher price. They would need confidence that tariffs would last beyond the Trump administration and that production could not be shifted to other more cost-competitive countries.

Even then, there may be little incentive to go back to old product lines for industries that have changed dramatically because of globalization.

Across the Rust Belt and the former factory towns of the south, the transformation is apparent. In Buffalo, an old steel mill is now a solar panel factory, and a retail goods manufacturer now houses an office and restaurant park. Near Dayton, Ohio, a shuttered GM plant has reopened as a Chinese-owned auto glass company. Abandoned factories throughout North Carolina have landed on the Environmental Protection Agency's list of "brownfield" sites that need cleanup.

Some companies are considering moving production from China as a result of the tariffs, but the jobs are unlikely to head home.

Illinois-based CCTY Bearing, for example, said it planned to move U.S.-bound production from Zhenjiang, China, to a new plant near Mumbai in India to keep labor costs down.

JLab Audio's China-made Bluetooth products are not being taxed yet, but its chief executive Win Cramer had been scouting for suppliers in Vietnam and Mexico.

"I would love to build products onshore, but consumers have proven time and time again that "Made in America" isn't as valuable a statement as it once was," Cramer said. "They make decisions based on the cost."

The price of, say, its Bluetooth earbud would jump from $20 to as much as $50 if it was made in the United States, Cramer said, far more than what tariffs would add to the cost of imports.

To be sure, early reactions suggest that foreign companies that make U.S.-bound goods in China may move some of that production to the United States. Still, countries such as Vietnam may ultimately benefit the most from Trump's tariffs.

Japanese construction and mining equipment maker Komatsu Ltd < 6301.T > has said it has already shifted some of its production of parts for U.S.-built excavators from China. Part of that production moved to the United States, but some also went to Mexico and Japan.

In South Korea, LG Electronics <066570 .ks=""> and its rival Samsung Electronics <005930 .ks=""> are considering moving parts of U.S.-bound refrigerator and air conditioner production to Mexico, Vietnam or back home, but not to the United States, according to company sources and local media.

STEADY RECOVERY

The responses to Trump's tariffs on steel and aluminum show how such steps create both winners and losers.

Producers such as U.S. Steel and Century Aluminum have said they will add at least several hundred jobs as a result of the higher prices they can charge.

Mid-Continental Nail, however, laid off 130 workers because of those higher steel prices, and furniture parts maker Leggett & Platt has warned that rising metal prices would prompt it to shift production abroad.

So far, Washington has imposed duties on $250 billion of Chinese imports and Trump has threatened to slap tariffs on all Chinese goods.

Many economists project new tariffs would on balance either slow down hiring or cause job losses in a manufacturing sector where employment has grown by 10 percent over the past eight years without special protection.

(Graphic: https://tmsnrt.rs/2Q1AFUW)

The furniture industry, among the hardest hit by Chinese imports, has added 43,000 jobs since its employment hit a low of 350,000 in 2011, helped by the recovering housing market and strong consumer demand.

Industry officials say skilled upholsterers and other workers are hard to find, echoing the Federal Reserve's concern about the impact of worker shortages on the U.S. economy.

In Thomasville, few expect that tariffs will bring furniture manufacturing back to its heyday, nor does the community need it, says city manager Kelly Craver, whose parents worked in the furniture and textile industries.

Since the recession, Thomasville has become a residential hub for growing nearby cities such as Greensboro and Charlotte. It also has its own mix of manufacturing and white collar jobs.

Mohawk Industries recently expanded its Thomasville laminate flooring facility while the Old Dominion Freight Line transportation firm and the fast-growing Cook Out burger chain have corporate headquarters there.

"We, for the very first time in this city's existence, are going to have a diversified economy," Craver said.

By Howard Schneider, Reuters

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