7:27PM - All-american boy Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Mongolia has announced plans to restore the use of its traditional alphabet by 2025, replacing the Cyrillic script adopted under the Sovietperiod as it moves away from Russian influence.
Since the Soviet Union collapsed Mongolia has been returning to its linguistic roots. A generation has grown up without learning Russian, and in 2003 it was replaced by English as the mandatory foreign language in schools.
https://news.mn/en/791396/
All over Asia and Africa human beings encounter horseshoe bats, any one of which could be carrying a virus that could start an epidemic if amplified in a market or similar setting. Bats have supplied most of the dangerous new diseases of the past two decades. The natural reservoir of rabies is in bats, especially in the Americas. Ebola, Marburg and other highly dangerous viruses come from bats, mainly in Africa. The Hendra and Nipah viruses are caught from fruit bats and have caused lethal but small outbreaks in south Asia and Australia. And most coronaviruses seem to originate in bats, including SARS and MERS, a frequently fatal illness that people in the Middle East began catching from camels in 2012, the camels having picked it up from bats.
In a paper published in February last year, Patrick Woo and colleagues at Hong Kong University surveyed the coronaviruses found in bats and came to a prescient conclusion: “Bat–animal and bat–human interactions, such as the presence of live bats in wildlife wet markets and restaurants in Southern China, are important for interspecies transmission of [coronaviruses] and may lead to devastating global outbreaks.”
We had fair warning with Ebola, Hendra, Nipah, MERS and SARS, and the Yunnan cave discovery in 2013 should have sounded a loud alarm. Even when this pandemic is over, others are possible.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/ba
Finland [Naf-nafs], ‘Prepper Nation of the Nordics,’ Isn’t Worried About Masks
“We [Sweden] expected with the free market we would always be able to purchase what we needed,” Mr. Melander [Nuf-nufs] said by phone.
“It’s not really a great plan,” Mr. Melander noted. “It’s like saying: ‘I don’t have to have a fire extinguisher. I can run out and buy a fire extinguisher when the fire starts.’ It shows that this free market is only free when everything is fine.”( ... tālāk ... )
This is a first: Soldiers with China's People's Liberation Army are training alongside Bundeswehr soldiers in the Bavarian town of Feldkirchen. Medical orderlies are participating in an exercise called Combined Aid 2019.
https://www.dw.com/en/chinese-soldi
Ret. US Navy Capt James Fanell, former director of intelligence for @USPacificFleet:
China’s Navy Will Be Double the Size of U.S. Navy by 2030
https://youtu.be/sMyoCIAO9YQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LOnVsZ
"AECOB, approved in 1950, was a vehicle for foreign intelligence (FI) operations into and within Soviet Latvia and involved infiltration and exfiltration of black agents and the recruitment of legally resident agents in the USSR, especially Latvia. ZRLYNCH was approved in 1950 for use of the Latvian Resistance Movement, which had been formed in 1944, as a vehicle for clandestine activities within the USSR. ZRLYNCH was renewed in 1952 as a part of AECOB, which then provided both FI and political and psychological (PP) activities. AECOB / ZRLYNCH PP project was terminated in 1955. AECOB FI project was terminated in 1959."
The REDBIRD / REDSOX operations involved the illegal return of defectors and emigres to USSR as agents. The REDSOX program against the Soviet Union adopted agent infiltration by parachute as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had practiced it in Europe during World War II. CIA then modified - one might say diluted - it, in deference to the impossibility of arranging the ground reception parties used by the OSS, in order to apply it against the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea. In this way, the covert infiltration of intelligence and covert action teams, mostly by air although occasionally overland or by sea, became an endurinq facet of the Clandestine Service's approach to the problem of penetrating closed societies.
As applied by the OSS, the practice later known as "black entry" enjoyed its most notable success with the Jedburgh operation, which after D-Day inserted teams of American and indigenous nationality to mobilize local resistance movements against the Nazis. They armed French resistance fighters, including over 20,000 combatants in Brittany alone, and these cut rail lines, derailed trains, ambushed German road convoys, and cut telephone and electric power lines.
AEBALCONY (1960-62) was designed to use U.S. citizens with Baltic language fluency in "mounted" and "piggy-back" legal traveler operations into Soviet-occupied Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
AEFREEMAN (1953-64), which included AEBASIN/AEROOT (1953-60), AEFLAG (1955-62), and AEPOLE (formerly AECHAMP (1949-59)), was designed to strengthen resistance to communism and harrass the Soviet regime in the Baltic countries. AEBASIN/AEROOT supported Estonian emigres and émigré activities aganist the Estonian SSR. AEFLAG was aimed at people of the Latvian SSR. AEPOLE (formerly AECHAMP (formerly BGLAPIN)) targeted the Lithuanian SSR. These projects provided intelligence and operational data from Baltic countries through radio broadcasts, mailing operations, liaison with emigre organizations, political and psychological (PP) briefings for legal travelers and exploitation of other media such as demonstrations.
AECOB, approved in 1950, was a vehicle for foreign intelligence (FI) operations into and within Soviet Latvia and involved infiltration and exfiltration of black agents and the recruitment of legally resident agents in the USSR, especially Latvia. ZRLYNCH was approved in 1950 for use of the Latvian Resistance Movement, which had been formed in 1944, as a vehicle for clandestine activities within the USSR. ZRLYNCH was renewed in 1952 as a part of AECOB, which then provided both FI and political and psychological (PP) activities. AECOB / ZRLYNCH PP project was terminated in 1955. AECOB FI project was terminated in 1959.
https://archive.org/stream/AECOBZRL
https://archive.org/stream/AECOBZRL
https://archive.org/stream/AECOBZRL
https://archive.org/stream/AECOBZRL
https://archive.org/stream/AECOBZRL
https://www.cia.gov/library/reading
"In a rare peek at official thinking, James Bullard, president of the St. Louis Fed, told Bloomberg last week that the jobless rate could climb to 30% next quarter and that the economy could contract by 50%. That was not counting for the impact of hundreds of billions of dollars thrown at companies by Congress as support to hold on to their workers. But even so, private estimates after the legislation are similar — Goldman Sachs forecasts a 34% economic contraction and 13.2% unemployment in the second quarter, and Deutsche Bank 33% and 12%.
Although no one placed the forecasts in historical context, if we reach anywhere near those numbers, it will be far worse than the Great Recession, and nearly the magnitude of the Great Depression.
[..] In a recent piece in Foreign Affairs, Branko Milanovic, an economist at the City University of New York, describes a new global order characterized by such economic aloneness. It would be “a different world — deglobalization,” Milanovic said in an interview. In what he calls self-sufficient “natural economies,” countries would try to take care of all their needs themselves, and do business as little as possible with other countries. Milanovic foresees the potential for this future to cascade catastrophically: Economies would shrink, living standards would drop, and social glues could consequently break down, leading to the risk that those left jobless turn violent against people who are better off."
https://marker.medium.com/this-looks-li
“The foundations of world peace are strengthening among all the civilised countries of the world,” Churchill said, “but there is one country that is outside these considerations, and that is Russia. Russia is incalculable, aloof and malignant.
All that line of small new States from the Baltic to the Black Sea are in lively apprehension of Russia. Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Rumania – every one is in great fear and anxiety about its neighbour.
All are strongly anti-Communist. They have gone through great internal stress and tension, and they have built themselves up on a Radical, democratic antithesis to Communism.
https://winstonchurchill.org/publicatio
These weak small [Baltic] States, this long thin line, this cordon sanitaire, as it was called in France, was four or five months ago a, subject of the deepest anxiety to all who were concerned with the general problems of European policy, because when you see how weak they were, how short of food, how short of money, how deprived of permanent and well-established institutions or disciplined armies, or organised finances, it seemed almost impossible that, subverted as they were themselves to no inconsiderable extent by the general progress of Bolshevism going on just over their borders, they should withstand any fierce, general, organised attack coming from Russia, and that it would be necessary for the Allies to aid them powerfully, if not indeed with men, at any rate with large supplies of munitions and of money, and in every other way that was possible. These small States have stood. They are intact to-day. They have maintained their existence precariously. Quivering and shaking, but still standing, they have held back not only the Bolshevik armies but the more devastating Bolshevik propaganda which, applied to people in the depths of misery, just recovering from the convulsions of the War, without any of the resources of a civilised State, offers every temptation to internal disorder and anarchy.
Churchill's Secret War With Lenin: British and Commonwealth Military Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1918-20
"Swedbank Estonia and Swedbank Latvia actively pursued these high risk customers as a business strategy.
[..] Swedbank Latvia customers used an online banking platform to initiate 522 outgoing Subject Transactions, totaling approximately $4.43 million, of which 507 such outgoing Subject Transactions between 30 December 2014 and 30 December 2016, amounting to approximately $4.26 million, involved three shipping customers domiciled in offshore jurisdictions that had accounts at Swedbank Latvia but whose owner appeared to operate these companies from Crimea. The remaining 15 outgoing Subject Transactions from accounts at Swedbank Latvia appeared to involve non-sanctioned customers who were temporarily located in Crimea or Iran or payments by non-sanctioned customers to counterparties in Crimea. We also identified one incoming Subject Transaction for $5,970 to an individual customer of Swedbank Latvia who had a residency address in Crimea.
Apparent OFAC-Sanctioned Customers of Swedbank Latvia:
One non-SDN company wholly-owned by an SDN under the Russia/Ukraine-related sanctions
Five individuals who appeared to reside in Crimea during a relevant time period
One individual who appeared to reside in Iran during a relevant time period
Two individuals who appeared to reside in Syria during a relevant time period
This report further explained that the majority of the beneficial owners for the corporate non-resident customers in Estonia and Latvia were of Russian and Commonwealth of Independent States (“CIS”) origin; these Russian and CIS customers favored Hansabank since the 1990s “[d]ue to geographical proximity, political situation and volatile economic situation in Russia[,] and high standards of banking services in [the] Baltics. According to this report, these Russian and CIS companies associated with a proxy network, and payments between 2010 and 2013 to offshore companies allegedly linked to payments to associates of a former Ukrainian President.
A manager within Swedbank Latvia’s GSI unit reported that Swedbank Latvia maintained relationships with these customers despite inadequate KYC information. Swedbank Latvia also attributed the growth of its HRNR business to a Latvian “residence permit program” that, until 2016, gave foreigners temporary residency permits if they invested in Latvian real estate.
Contemporaneous exchanges between an AML officer and employees from Swedbank Latvia’s Non-Resident Banking Unit—at that time, a unit comprised of about ten full-time employees (including RMs) housed within Private Banking—reflect an effort to build a “short list” of existing customers to present for authorization under the Decree’s exception provision. The latest identified version of the “short list,” dated 25 September 2007, identified 36 customers for review. The Investigation has identified that of these 36 customers, five were closed in 2007, an additional three were closed in 2008 and Swedbank Latvia continued its relationships with the remaining 28 customers until their accounts were closed by the end of 2016.( ... tālāk ... )
"A 2008 systematic review, published in BMJ, found medical masks halted the spread of respiratory viruses from likely infected patients. In particular, studies on the 2003 outbreak of SARS — a cousin to the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 — found that masks alone were 68 percent effective at preventing the virus. By comparison, washing hands more than 10 times a day was 55 percent effective. A combination of measures — hand-washing, masks, gloves, and gowns — was 91 percent effective."
https://shouldiwearafacemask.com/
"The Stock Market is Modestly Overvalued. Based on historical ratio of total market cap over GDP (currently at 106.2%), it is likely to return 2.2% a year from this level of valuation, including dividends."
https://www.gurufocus.com/stock-mar
"By replacing copper and silver in common use (door-knobs, hand rails, cutlery), we've inadvertently exposed our populations to increased viral and bacterial infection."
The Time To Buy Is When There's Blood In the Streets.
Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy and Greedy When Others Are Fearful.
"ZEIT ONLINE has evaluated data on each of the approximated 6 million moves between eastern Germany and western Germany that took place from 1991, the first full year after the German unification, to 2017. The data tells one of the least documented stories of German post-war history, showing that after reunification, nearly a quarter of the original population of East Germany moved to the West."
https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutsch
In 1990, the country’s population peaked at 23.2 million but at the beginning of 2019 it was 19.4 million. So, since the fall of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989, the country’s resident population has declined by 16.4 per cent or 3.8 million people.
And the projections do not look good: according to the Romanian National Institute of Statistics, by 2050 the country’s population could shrink to 15 million or 35 per cent less than in 1990. (A UN projection is less gloomy, foreseeing population at 16.39 million in 2050, a fall of just over 30 per cent.)
During the Ceausescu era, few Romanians could leave the country, with two distinct exceptions: Jews and ethnic Germans. Large numbers of them were in effect ransomed by Israel and West Germany which, under various guises, bought exit visas for them.
By 1990, there were relatively few Jews left and some 200,000 of the remaining ethnic Germans then left rapidly for Germany.
[S]ome one million to 1.2 million left for Italy while another million went to Spain.
The situation was so dramatic, he says, that virtually whole towns in the hardest-affected regions emptied.
This period came to an end because of the economic crisis that hit Italy and Spain hard and because Romania joined the EU at the beginning of 2007.
Since then, says Anghel, approximately one million have left.
Initially nine of the then 26 EU countries imposed transitional labour restrictions but these have since been lifted.
Britain lifted restrictions in 2014, for example, leading to a huge leap in the country’s Romanian population, which hit 415,000 in 2018 compared with 19,000 in 2007.
According to the World Bank, 20.6 per cent of the country’s working age population was abroad in 2017.
https://balkaninsight.com/2019/11/28/ro
According to Bosnjak, emigration from the country peaked last year and an increased number of births in 2018 heralded some really good news.
In 2020, Croatia’s demographic decline will stabilise and from then on, government policies will lead to an increase in population, he said.
Croatian women have an average of 1.44 children, which is not only below the 2.1 needed for replacing a country’s population, but the second-lowest of all the seven post-Yugoslav states.
A Demographic Revival Council was founded in 2017 to coordinate ministerial policies. A new strategy for halting and reversing Croatian decline is being prepared to replace a national population policy from 2006.
Bosnjak said huge sums were being invested in everything from kindergartens to agriculture, especially in areas that have been depopulating over the last quarter of a century, such as the east of the country.
The numbers who have gone abroad permanently since Croatia joined the EU represent five per cent of its population. A large proportion of them are young, of child-bearing and of working age. Increasingly whole families have departed.
The government hopes that measures such as making pension contributions for mothers on maternity leave will help push the fertility rate back up to 1.6 in the next couple of years. But a big problem is the nature of women’s employment.
A UN study predicts that Croatia’s population will fall to 3.46 million by 2050.
https://balkaninsight.com/2019/10/31/cr
Serbia is set to lose almost a quarter of its population by 2050 as the young and the skilled emigrate in search of work.
Today, Serbian women give birth to an average of 1.48 children, well below the 2.1 needed just to maintain a country’s population.
Officially there were 7.82 million people in Serbia minus Kosovo in 1991.
In fact, that figure was boosted by 283,000 people who were not there. By this time, about 1 million Yugoslav citizens lived abroad as so-called gastarbeiters or their family so the population census for Yugoslavia and its constituent parts overstated population figures.
In 2002, Serbia reverted to the international norm of only counting those who actually lived in the country.
Taking all this into account, Serbia’s population has shrunk by 8.42 per cent since the demise of Yugoslavia.
Serbia’s authorities are well aware of the demographic crisis, the labour shortages it is beginning to create and the ongoing problem an ever older population creates for the pension system.
In 2021, according to the Statistical Office, Serbia will have more pensioners than working age people.
https://balkaninsight.com/2019/10/24/to
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