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    O istorie emotionanta care ar trebui sa ne puna pe ganduri:

    How a Wolf Named Romeo Won Hearts in an Alaska Suburb

    http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2...ka-ngbooktalk/

    http://detonate.com/my-my-that-is-on...ts-a-wolf-2/1/
    "The minority is sometimes right, the majority always wrong." - A Progres...sive Thinker

    "If you support a team that fails to win the league for years, it does feel like a kind of cult'." - Salman Rushdie

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    How Britain let Russia hide its dirty money

    https://www.theguardian.com/news/201...ts-dirty-money
    "The minority is sometimes right, the majority always wrong." - A Progres...sive Thinker

    "If you support a team that fails to win the league for years, it does feel like a kind of cult'." - Salman Rushdie

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    Brexit: 10 key questions about the futures of Britain and Europe

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/n...rope-85xnszs55
    "The minority is sometimes right, the majority always wrong." - A Progres...sive Thinker

    "If you support a team that fails to win the league for years, it does feel like a kind of cult'." - Salman Rushdie

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    Revealed: Brexit backer Arron Banks’s golden Kremlin connection

    The hidden scale of Kremlin links to the biggest donor to the Brexit campaign are revealed today.

    Arron Banks, the millionaire businessman who helped fund Brexit, was offered a business deal involving six Russian goldmines.

    He also had undisclosed meetings with the Russian ambassador to Britain — set up by a suspected Russian spy — and paid a previously unknown visit to Moscow at the height of the campaign.

    The revelations raise explosive questions about attempts by Moscow to influence the referendum result.

    Emails by Banks and his sidekick, Andy Wigmore, shown to The Sunday Times, reveal the men made repeated contact with Russian officials to discuss business opportunities and issues of mutual interest during the referendum campaign and its aftermath.

    In his book on the referendum, The Bad Boys of Brexit, and in another public statement, Banks claimed to have had only one meeting with Putin’s envoy, Alexander Yakovenko, in September 2015.

    But today The Sunday Times can reveal the pair also had lunch with the ambassador three days after they and Nigel Farage, then acting Ukip leader, visited US president-elect Donald Trump in New York in November 2016. Last night, Banks admitted he handed over phone numbers for members of Trump’s transition team to Russian officials.

    Trump, whose campaign staff are under investigation by a special prosecutor over whether they colluded with Moscow, called this weekend for Russia to be readmitted to the G7 group of nations.

    The leaked emails reveal an extensive web of links between the Leave.EU campaign, led by Farage, and Russian officials. They show:

    ● Banks and Wigmore were introduced to Yakovenko by Alexander Udod, a suspected Russian intelligence officer who was kicked out of the UK after the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury

    ● Yakovenko proposed a business deal that would have seen Banks and Wigmore involved in the consolidation into one company of six Russian goldmines

    ● The two Brexiteers in turn sought to involve Lord Guthrie, the former chief of the defence staff, and Peter Hambro, an Old Etonian dealer in precious metals known as “Goldfinger”

    ● Banks and Wigmore exchanged further messages with Russian officials, including invitations to parties and discussion of a possible trip to Moscow

    ● Banks admitted visiting Moscow in February 2016, as the referendum campaign raged

    ● On referendum day in June 2016 they invited Yakovenko and Udod to a drinks party hosted by Banks in Notting Hill, west London, and also asked the ambassador to attend their results party in Westminster

    ● The pair also claim they briefed the CIA on their contacts with the Russians.

    The emails were passed to The Sunday Times by the journalist Isabel Oakeshott, Banks’s ghostwriter on The Bad Boys of Brexit, who is now writing a book with the Tory peer Lord Ashcroft on Russia’s use of “hybrid warfare” to influence British politics.

    She came forward after she said her email accounts were “hacked”.

    The Sunday Times has also seen a 2,000-word account of the meetings by Wigmore and conducted several interviews with Banks.

    Asked about the controversy last night, Theresa May said: “I am sure if there are any allegations that need investigation the proper authorities will do that.”

    In another twist, Oakeshott criticised her former collaborators, saying she was “very surprised” to find that the links between Banks and Wigmore and Russia “conflicted with the public accounts” they had given.

    Writing in The Sunday Times, she says the Russians “struck gold” when they found such “surprisingly willing tools” of the Kremlin.

    “Banks and Wigmore were shamelessly used by the Russians,” she writes. “Perhaps, the Englishmen did not mind. Banks and Wigmore genuinely sympathised — and continue to sympathise — with some of Putin’s political views. Banks, after all, is married to a Russian. During the referendum campaign, he and Wigmore were happy to disseminate those views both via Leave.EU and less openly. The Kremlin must have been delighted.”

    Confronted about the discrepancies in his public statements, Banks said: “I had two boozy lunches with the Russian ambassador and another cup of tea with him. Bite me. It’s a convenient political witch-hunt, both over Brexit and Trump.”

    At the time of the contacts, Banks and Farage were locked in battle with Vote Leave — the Brexit campaign led by Dominic Cummings — for the right to be designated the official “leave” campaign, a battle Vote Leave won.

    But even after that, Leave.EU was credited with using Trump-style tactics, including creating deliberately shocking advertisements on immigration, to drum up support for Brexit in white working-class communities.

    Banks was invited to meet Yakovenko in an email from Udod on October 10, 2015.

    On November 6, they had what Banks described as “a six-hour boozy lunch”.

    Wigmore said: “We never offered any information to him or any Russian any details of our [Brexit] campaign. We did discuss Trump and [the ambassador] dismissed him immediately, ‘Not a chance he would win’. I remember clearly him stating this.”

    The emails show that on November 17, Banks and Wigmore had a cup of tea with Yakovenko and the mining magnate Siman Povarenkin to discuss the prospect of a deal to consolidate six goldmines.

    Banks, who has a financial interest in South African diamond mines, confirms in an email to Povarenkin: “I’m very bullish on gold so keen to have a look! Very nice to meet yesterday with the Russian ambassador.”

    After that meeting, Wigmore says the pair were invited to three cultural events hosted by the Russian embassy. Banks went to none while Wigmore attended two.

    By November 24, Wigmore was emailing Udod asking if he and Banks could “have a chat with you face to face about our plans to go to Moscow in the next few weeks”.

    They then claim Guthrie put them in touch with Hambro, chairman of the largest Russian goldmining group on the London Stock Exchange, before deciding the deal was not for them and calling off the trip to Moscow. “We didn’t profit from any business deals because I never pursued anything,” Banks said.

    However, two more emails, from Wigmore to Sky News and the BBC in February 2016 suggest Banks was “delayed in Russia”. Banks explained: “My wife is Russian and we went on a family trip to Moscow, no meetings were had with anyone, we visited the Hermitage Museum and went on a river cruise.” The Hermitage is in St Petersburg.

    Another lunch between Banks and Yakovenko was scheduled for August 2016 but Wigmore says it did not go ahead. However, after Banks and Wigmore joined Farage to became the first Britons to visit the new president-elect, Donald Trump, Yakovenko called them in again. That meeting took place on November 15, 2016. Wigmore said: “The ambassador was obviously keen to know how our meeting [with Trump] went.”

    Last night, Banks downplayed the significance of the meetings, denied that Russian officials sought to influence his referendum campaign and claimed that he revealed the details of his contacts to American spies.

    “We actually saw the suits from the American embassy who introduced us to the State Department to explain what had happened and then we briefed the Americans on our meetings with the Russians,” he said.

    Banks and Wigmore were due to give evidence to MPs on the culture committee on Tuesday. However, on Friday they pulled out, accusing it of pursuing a “witch-hunt” against the leave campaigns.

    Last night, Banks said he would give evidence after all.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/r...7aa82426b5daa9
    "The minority is sometimes right, the majority always wrong." - A Progres...sive Thinker

    "If you support a team that fails to win the league for years, it does feel like a kind of cult'." - Salman Rushdie

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    Islamists have fled the battlefield . . . to plot mass murder with a dirty bomb

    The arrest in Germany of a suspect linked to the toxin ricin is a sign that jihadists, while defeated in Iraq and Syria, may be planning an attack more devastating than 9/11


    A significant change is beginning in the threat from militant Islamist terrorism. Last year’s Manchester bombing and attacks on the Continent, though they may well be repeated, are a misleading guide to the main future threat. A better guide is the recent discovery in Germany (little reported in Britain) of the first militant Islamist preparations for ricin-based biological warfare.

    German federal prosecutors announced on June 14 that they had arrested in Cologne a Tunisian, Sief Allah H (whose surname has been withheld in accordance with German privacy laws), who had created the deadly toxin ricin from castor bean seeds. According to the prosecutors’ spokesman, he planned to use the toxin in a “biological weapon” attack.

    Grasping the longer-term significance of this so far isolated episode requires an effort of the imagination that was notably absent in America before the 2001 al-Qaeda suicide attacks that destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, part of the Pentagon and four passenger aircraft, killing almost 3,000 people. The 9/11 inquiry blamed the failure to foresee the attacks less on specific intelligence errors than on a general “failure of imagination”.

    This failure was epitomised only five days after 9/11 by President George W Bush’s excruciatingly inept invitation to Muslims to join in a “crusade” against international terrorism. Even after Bush’s advisers thought he had grasped the offence he had caused, he repeated his call for a “crusade” in a speech to US troops.

    “Failure of imagination” today, if on a less heroic scale than Bush’s, makes it difficult to grasp the coming step-change in militant Islamist terrorism.


    When Islamist terrorism began a generation ago, western intelligence agencies were handicapped, though they failed to realise it, by their lack of theologians. During the Second World War and the Cold War, they had been well versed in Nazi and communist ideology. But the secularised late 20th-century West found it far more difficult to comprehend Islamic fundamentalism.

    Western incomprehension of the political power of religious extremism was vividly displayed during the crisis in Iran that led early in 1979 to the fall of the Shah and the rise of the 78-year-old Shi’ite Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Washington was baffled. The senior White House adviser on Iran, Gary Sick, complained: “The notion of a po****r revolution leading to the establishment of a theocratic state seemed so unlikely as to be absurd.”

    A decade after being baffled by Khomeini’s Shi’ite theocracy in Iran, the West found it equally difficult to grasp the growing terrorist threat from Sunni jihadists. The founding in 1988 of the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda (“the Base”), led by Osama bin Laden, passed almost unnoticed by western intelligence.

    MI5 found it far easier to understand the secular IRA than the Islamist al-Qaeda. It told police Special Branch units dismissively in 1995: “Suggestions in the press of a worldwide Islamic extremist network poised to launch terrorist attacks against the West are greatly exaggerated.”

    The cultural problems of comprehending bin Laden were compounded by his frequent use of poems, some composed by himself, some going back to early Islam. Like other leading jihadists, he expressed some of his most passionate convictions in verse that was often ignored by counter-terrorist experts accustomed only to prose. Most western intelligence analysts failed to realise that bin Laden was the world’s most homicidal poet (or, as he preferred to call himself, “warrior poet”).

    The chief target of bin Laden’s now famous “fatwa” of August 1996, usually called his “Declaration of War against the Americans”, was, in reality, Saudi Arabia rather than America. But most of the 15 poetry excerpts that denounced the Saudi regime in the fatwa were omitted from a majority of western translations as irrelevant.

    Four years later, bin Laden celebrated an attack by al-Qaeda suicide bombers on the guided-missile destroyer USS Cole in Aden harbour by writing a poem that he recited at his son’s wedding. Shouts of “Allahu Akbar!” by the wedding guests greeted his exultant description of the American ship of “arrogance and haughtiness . . . sailing to its doom”.

    Because 9/11 was both the deadliest atrocity in the history of terrorism and the most devastating attack on America since Pearl Harbor, it is often forgotten that bin Laden intended to follow it by an even more cataclysmic terrorist onslaught. In 1998 he had declared it “a religious duty” to obtain weapons of mass destruction (WMD) for use against the monstrous conspiracy of “Jews and crusaders” that had supposedly threatened Islam for the past thousand years and was now led by the US.

    A year before 9/11, MI5 — without realising it at the time — succeeded in disrupting a first attempt by al-Qaeda to develop biological weapons. In September 2000 Rauf Ahmad, a Pakistani microbiologist, attended a scientific conference in Britain on dangerous pathogens, where he sought samples from other delegates. A secret search of his luggage revealed contacts with UK companies, who broke them off after being briefed by MI5.

    For the rest of his life bin Laden, as well as promoting conventional terrorism, continued to regard a WMD attack on America as “a religious duty”. After 9/11 a British agent in al-Qaeda, Aimen Dean, provided intelligence on plans for a poison-gas attack on the New York subway, which were put on hold after the plans were compromised.

    The WMD most likely to be used by future militant Islamist terrorists are “dirty bombs”, constructed from a combination of radioactive material and conventional explosive. According to a US official report: “It would not require a team of nuclear physicists or even a particularly sophisticated criminal network to turn [radioactive] raw material into a deadly weapon . . . A determined lone wolf or a disgruntled insider is all it might take.” The explosion of a dirty bomb in the centre of New York or London would make it uninhabitable.

    The first al-Qaeda plan to explode a dirty bomb in Britain was prepared as long ago as 2004, by Dhiren Barot. MI5 believed he had been “personally selected and groomed for operational deployment by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the [al-Qaeda] planner behind 9/11”, who reported personally to bin Laden. Though Barot was able to plan other attacks that he claimed would “cause pandemonium, what with the explosions, flooding, drowning, etc that would occur/result”, he reported that, “for the time being”, he had failed to acquire “the necessary contacts” to obtain radioactive material for a dirty bomb. He would have found it easier today.

    On May 1, 2011, in Operation Neptune Spear, watched on a video link by President Barack Obama and his national security team in the White House, US special forces burst into bin Laden’s secret Pakistani HQ at Abbottabad and shot him dead. Among the documents discovered in the HQ was a copy of a letter from bin Laden to a trusted lieutenant in August 2010, asking him to recommend a leader for “a big operation inside America”, for which he probably intended to use WMD.

    In the midst of planning this new attack on America, bin Laden continued to be preoccupied by his poetry. The very next sentence in his letter of August 2010 asks its recipient to inform him of “any brothers with you who know about poetic metres” and to send him “books on the science of classical prosody”.

    Al-Qaeda’s passion for poetry has survived bin Laden. Elisabeth Kendall’s research on its most active current segment, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, reveals that its main regular internet publication includes poems (or extracts) on one-fifth of its pages. Isis also uses jihadist poetry for its recruiting drives. Unlike al-Qaeda, one of its leading poets is a woman who uses the pseudonym Ahlam al-Nasr (“Dreams of Victory”).

    While home secretary, Theresa May issued a public warning that Isis aimed to “acquire chemical, biological, or even nuclear weapons to attack us”. After Isis over-ran Mosul, the second city of Iraq, in June 2014, western intelligence agencies feared that it had acquired the main ingredient required to construct dirty bombs. Mosul University campus contained a large cache of cobalt-60, used in radiotherapy machines to treat cancer. With the capacity to deliver a fatal dose of radiation in less than three minutes, cobalt-60, combined with conventional explosive, can also be used to make a dirty bomb.

    Immediately after Isis had been driven from Mosul last July, anxious Iraqi government officials entered the bullet-scarred university campus and headed for the storage room containing the cobalt-60 cache. To their immense relief, they found the cache intact. Isis, said one health ministry official, “are not that smart”.

    Isis failed to produce dirty bombs during its occupation of Mosul mainly because of the scientific ignorance of its leaders. Isis officials removed 40kg of uranium compounds from the university but failed to realise that, unlike cobalt-60, they were low-grade and would require a complex process of enrichment to be weaponised.

    Isis has yet to mount a terrorist offensive as technically sophisticated as the first al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center 25 years ago, which ripped a hole through several storeys of one of the twin towers. Isis statistics for its jihadist operations in the past Islamic calendar year (October 3, 2016, to September 21, 2017) show that all its weapons were conventional: 24% involved bombs and grenades, 21% stabbing, 19% firearms, 18% suicide missions, 13% ramming by vehicles and 5% arson.

    The terrorist attack of which Isis was most proud last year was directed not against the West but, for the first time, against what it denounces as the heretical Shi’ite regime in Iran. On June 7, 2017, Isis terrorists in Tehran struck both the national parliament and the sacred mausoleum of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Khomeini. Video released by the semi-official Isis news agency, Amaq, showed attackers firing from room to room as they moved through the parliament building.

    Isis also claimed credit last year for the deadliest mass shooting in US history. In Las Vegas on October 1, a high-stakes gambler, Stephen Paddock, killed 58 people and wounded more than 500. Despite FBI scepticism, Isis claims that Paddock was a “soldier of the Islamic State”.

    Though Isis has been virtually driven out of Iraq and Syria, some of its fighters returning to former homes in the West are potential terrorists. According to MI5: “Western countries and their interests overseas remain prime targets for international terrorist groups like the Islamic State.” Though 25 “Islamist terror plots” in Britain have been successfully disrupted since 2013, the current official threat level for international terrorism in the UK is “severe”. In my view, the construction of dirty bombs by Islamist terrorists has merely been postponed.

    Realisation of the lost opportunity by Isis to use cobalt-60 to manufacture dirty bombs during its three years in control of Mosul makes it less likely that the next generation of Islamist terrorists will miss such an opportunity.

    “The major offensive cyber- campaign” against Isis by GCHQ and its allies, revealed recently by its director, Jeremy Fleming, and reiterated a few days ago in his speech to Nato, will be of critical importance in countering such future threats. According to Fleming, as well as helping to disrupt Isis attacks, the success of cyber-warfare “meant that in 2017 there were times when Daesh [Isis] found it almost impossible to spread their hate online, to use their normal channels to spread their rhetoric, or trust their own publications”.

    The looming threat of jihadist WMD operations, however, will not disappear. During his last year as president, Obama warned the international nuclear security summit in Washington: “There is no doubt that if these madmen ever got their hands on a nuclear bomb or nuclear material, they most certainly would use it to kill as many innocent people as possible.”

    The global proliferation (once slow, now rapid) of all human inventions has been one of the great constants of the past few thousand years. WMD will not be the first exception to this iron law of history. As the official US report reminds us, “A determined lone wolf or a disgruntled insider is all it might take” to add dirty bombs to the arsenal of international terrorism.

    Christopher Andrew is the author of The Secret World: A History of Intelligence, to be published by Allen Lane on June 28

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/n...bomb-8qtfsww82
    "The minority is sometimes right, the majority always wrong." - A Progres...sive Thinker

    "If you support a team that fails to win the league for years, it does feel like a kind of cult'." - Salman Rushdie

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    ‘Socialism for the rich’: the evils of bad economics

    John Kenneth Galbraith: “One of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy … is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. It is an exercise which always involves a certain number of internal contradictions and even a few absurdities. The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character-building value of privation for the poor.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/inequali...-bad-economics
    "The minority is sometimes right, the majority always wrong." - A Progres...sive Thinker

    "If you support a team that fails to win the league for years, it does feel like a kind of cult'." - Salman Rushdie

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    Romanian immigrant elected German mayor after anti-AfD alliance

    "The minority is sometimes right, the majority always wrong." - A Progres...sive Thinker

    "If you support a team that fails to win the league for years, it does feel like a kind of cult'." - Salman Rushdie

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    Regalitatea ne-ar fi putut readuce demnitatea de popor inapoi.

    Funeralii regale la Curtea de Argeš

    https://www.cotidianul.ro/funeralii-...rtea-de-arges/
    "The minority is sometimes right, the majority always wrong." - A Progres...sive Thinker

    "If you support a team that fails to win the league for years, it does feel like a kind of cult'." - Salman Rushdie

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    Bill Gates: ‘This pandemic is like a world war, except we’re all on the same side'

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/n...ates-nvjqtt5fv


    “The only thing that keeps me awake at night is the thought of a pandemic,” Bill Gates, the second richest man in the world, told us in an interview last February. “It’s been 100 years since we had a huge flu epidemic. People travel more today, so the speed of spread would be faster. If you had a respiratory transmitted disease, the numbers could be horrific.”

    Not kidnapping, terrorism or losing his wealth but a virus. Now he kindly doesn’t say “I told you so” but admits: “My worst nightmare has come true.”

    The £75 billion man who created Microsoft is also expert on vaccines, testing and treatments, having led the way, with his wife, in trying to “eradicate diseases” — first polio, then malaria and HIV — with their Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

    He is obsessed with saving millions of lives and has always been highly aware of the dangers of another disease terrorising the world.

    For the past three months, Mr Gates has been desperately trying to find a solution to Covid-19, his new nemesis. Unlike President Trump, who has suggested using disinfectant to conquer the virus, Mr Gates has always preferred facts, data and briefings from experts. He can reel off the po****tion figures for every country in the world and he has prime ministers, epidemiologists, pharmaceutical CEOs and Nobel winners on speed dial.

    In normal times, he criss-crosses the world, often travelling to Africa, China and India in a month, in his attempts to save lives from diseases. Now he is stuck in Seattle but is still wearing his trademark V-neck jumper, chinos, loafers and $10 watch. Unlike billionaires such as Jeff Bezos who has benefited from Amazon’s role in the world’s lockdown, or Sir Richard Branson, who has demanded a bailout for his business, Mr Gates’ sole mission is to take on the virus and win. “Anything else is a distraction. I don’t like to multi-task.” He doesn’t want gratitude, he wants annihilation.

    The global fight against the virus is, he says, like a world war, “except in this case we’re all on the same side”. Everybody is reassessing their priorities and expectations. “In terms of shaping your view of government and life and what’s important, really jarring you . . . I think this generation will be forever marked by what goes on in this pandemic.”

    Boris Johnson has had his own very personal experience of Covid-19. Does Mr Gates, who struggles to be charitable about Mr Trump, think that the politicians are up to the challenge? “You go to war with the leaders you have,” he replies. “In retrospect you get to judge how well that went. I do think the fact that the world was moving towards nationalism and countries taking care of themselves, that framing is not helpful. We all wish we had raised the rallying cry more quickly. Very few people get an A in terms of what they’ve done in this situation.”

    He doesn’t think governments have over-reacted by imposing lockdowns. “Certainly the economic impacts are unbelievable — electricity use in some places is down 10 per cent, the unemployment numbers are mind-blowing — but human behaviour is not a totally flexible thing that leaders can turn on and off. As soon as the epidemic was well known some of the public was going to choose not to get on a plane, not to go into work, not to have their kids go into school, whatever their government said.”

    There would, he argues, have been a devastating impact on businesses in many countries in any case. “You could have had the worst of both worlds” with “both a terrible economy and growing disease numbers”. That would have had a cumulative effect. “If you got up to the millions of deaths then more and more people would change their behaviour so you would get to an extreme situation.

    “The idea that a hotel with a 30 per cent flow, or a restaurant that is 30 per cent full would stay in business doesn’t show an understanding of the economy. People act like if we just went for herd immunity and let it rip the economy would have been fine but that counterfactual does not exist. The economy in these rich countries that are experiencing the epidemic was going to be really terrible.”

    Failure is not a word with which the Microsoft founder feels comfortable. He is determined that the world will get back on track, but he says that science, not politics, holds the key to solving the crisis and preventing future pandemics, with rapid innovations in testing, treatment and vaccines. His Gates Foundation will help to mobilise the money needed to fund the building of factories that will be ready to manufacture billions of doses of several different vaccine candidates even before one of those inoculations has been approved in order to speed up the process. He is in touch with all the most innovative programmes. Sarah Gilbert, head of the Jenner Institute’s influenza vaccine and emerging pathogens programme at the University of Oxford, is “wonderful”, he says, and that is “one of the great efforts going on”.

    At the moment the government has given enough funding to ensure the research in the UK can go “full steam ahead” but Mr Gates is already speaking to pharmaceutical companies about scaling up production of the Oxford vaccine if it looks like it could work. “They are going to put it in humans fairly soon . . . if their antibody results are one of the ones that are promising then we and others in a consortium will help make sure that massive manufacturing gets done.”

    He says the aim must be to produce vaccine for the entire world. He is determined western governments cannot hoard vaccines and treatments that will also be desperately needed by developing countries and he is hoping that the online Coronavirus Global Response Summit next month will raise more than £6.5 billion from governments and organisations for research, development, production and distribution.

    “Fortunately nobody doing the vaccines expects they’re going to make money on them,” he says. “They know this is a public good — partly because they will need indemnification as part of the regulatory approval, which will have to be expedited. Three months after you dose the humans you will see those responses and you will know at that point. Maybe there will be four or five that we will build factories for even though in the end we may only use one or two of them. That compresses the time.”

    He doesn’t like being thought of as a do-gooder, but he worries that poorer nations will suffer most. The Gates Foundation’s other trials for HIV treatments and polio campaigns have been put on hold to focus on the coronavirus pandemic. “Whenever something bad happens it’s worse for the developing countries than the developed countries . . . Even though the numbers right now are pretty small out of the developing countries, unless there’s some factor we are not aware of it’s likely that the vast majority of the suffering and deaths will be there, particularly in the urban slums. Even in developed countries the suffering of the low-income there is disproportionate and tragic. This is a huge blow against the quest for greater equity in the world.”

    Mr Gates has spent the past two decades trying to mitigate his wealth, preferring whiteboards to superyachts and Diet Coke to champagne. Other billionaires have retreated to their bunkers, or snapped up land in New Zealand with an airstrip for their private jets as “apocalypse insurance”. Mr Gates says: “We aren’t all best friends.” He has paid more than £10 billion in taxes personally and, with Melinda, has pledged to give away the majority of his wealth rather than pass it down to his three children. In the lockdown it is not his private jet that he misses but going for a drive-through burger. He refuses to cut himself off from the outside world. “My days are talking to biotech people. People send me ideas for therapeutics on email, we dig into those, a few are promising.”

    He won’t criticise other members of the super-rich elite but he says that he has had a rise of interest in The Giving Pledge, the scheme he founded with Warren Buffet which encourages billionaires to give away half their wealth. “Some people are stepping up philanthropically to help out, we are having lots of calls.”

    He may be working from a $100 million home with his wife and their children, Jennifer, Rory and Phoebe, aged 23, 20 and 17, but he has always done the washing up and the children lay the table. “It’s weird, nobody has been into the foundation offices now for over a month. Even though this is a terrible situation I’m actually surprised we are able to get a lot of our work done.” He and Melinda meditate every day and read voraciously. “You are with your kids a lot. That’s nice in a way, but college-aged kids didn’t expect to be with their parents as much. I don’t think our situation is different from most. We’re not crowded in because we have space but our lives are utterly changed.”

    He would love to think that this will be a moment in which the world’s priorities can also be reset. However, the 21st century missionary and disease hunter is not starry-eyed about the chances of global redemption. “I do see a lot of people, taking whatever ideas they had before the epidemic and saying, ‘Now that money is free, fund my thing.’ I hope in terms of countries working together on tough problems, including climate change, this is helpful, but here in the thick of it it’s very difficult to predict.”

    Last year he said he was a natural optimist and seemed convinced that in the end humans could crack everything from Alzheimer’s and HIV to obesity and diabetes. “There’s no way to view this as net positive, this is a terrible thing that’s happened,” he says. “Maybe we will get some insights into ourselves and the benefit of co-operation but I’m not at the point of trying to figure that out.”

    William Henry Gates

    Curriculum vitae
    Born October 28, 1955
    Educaton Lakeside School and Harvard College
    Career In 1975 he dropped out of Harvard and created Microsoft. He stood down as chief executive officer in 2000 but remained chairman and became chief software architect. He stepped down as chairman of Microsoft in 2014 to focus on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which had been created in 2000. In 2009 he founded The Giving Pledge with Warren Buffett and encouraged other billionaires to follow him in giving half their wealth to good causes
    Family Married to Melinda with three children
    "The minority is sometimes right, the majority always wrong." - A Progres...sive Thinker

    "If you support a team that fails to win the league for years, it does feel like a kind of cult'." - Salman Rushdie

  10. #3412
    k r a p u l a x
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    buna ziua, sunt kra****x. cum e cu modelul suedez de pandemie?

  11. #3413
    arogant,de mic cip's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by kra****x View Post
    buna ziua, sunt kra****x. cum e cu modelul suedez de pandemie?
    salut,eu zic sa-ti schimbi nick-ul in Krapoolax,altfel n-o sa mai stim cu cine stam de vorba...
    granita la Orsova!

  12. #3414
    Pro Memoria miril's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by kra****x View Post
    buna ziua, sunt kra****x. cum e cu modelul suedez de pandemie?
    E greu de spus in faza asta dar mie mi se pare rational modelul. Avantajul cu acest model, care se potriveste Suediei, zic eu, este ca suedezii, sunt si exceptii, au incredere in autoritati si aici nu ma refer la primul ministru ci la expertii epidemiologi si de boli infectioase, printre altii. Un alt avantaj al acestui model este ca Suedia este o tara cu o densitate a po****tiei scazuta. Se are incredere in statistica care arata ca cei mai in varsta sunt cei mai afectati, ei trebuie protejati in primul rand, plus ca se vrea ca Suedia nu doar sa scape de o pandemie cu procent de decedati comparativ mai ridicat in raport cu alte boli contagioase ci sa scape cu...mainile curate de o criza economica si mai dezvastatoare de aceea se merge la scoala pentru elevii de clase mici si mijlocii, se merge la servici si in alte zone de interes public si national, sanatate, aparare si transport, spre ex, desi unde se poate se lucreaza de acasa, spre ex contact telefonic cu pacientii in ambulatoriu, samd. Cu alte cuvinte, pui frana cand trebuie dar nu trebuie sa neglijezi pedala de acceleratie la momentul potrivit, respectand, bineinteles, regimul de viteza conform legislatiei in vigoare. Cam asa e pe aici. Deocamdata. Ai tai de acasa, Stefan si alti prieteni si cunoscuti apropiati ce fac, cum se simt, cum va simtiti? Toate cele bune din partea mea si sa auzim si de bine. Si... Hai Progresul!
    "The minority is sometimes right, the majority always wrong." - A Progres...sive Thinker

    "If you support a team that fails to win the league for years, it does feel like a kind of cult'." - Salman Rushdie

  13. #3415
    Pro Memoria miril's Avatar
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    Un celebru etolog a spus acum cateva decenii ca specia umana este singura specie in stare sa se extermine si implicit sa puna in mare pericol si existenta altor specii si chiar si a Terrei in sine. Mai jos, un articol interesant despre riscurile naturale si riscurile anthropogenice la care risca sa fie expusa planeta.

    What if Covid-19 isn't our biggest threat?

    https://www.theguardian.com/science/...biggest-threat
    Last edited by miril; 28th April 2020 at 20:05.
    "The minority is sometimes right, the majority always wrong." - A Progres...sive Thinker

    "If you support a team that fails to win the league for years, it does feel like a kind of cult'." - Salman Rushdie

  14. #3416
    k r a p u l a x
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    Quote Originally Posted by miril View Post
    Hai Progresul!
    ok toata lumea. sa auzim de bine!

  15. #3417
    Pro Memoria miril's Avatar
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    The whole system is rotten: life inside Europen's meat industry

    Unions are calling for a Europe-wide ban on the use of subcontracted workers, kept on lower pay and condition.
    Read more: exploitation of meat plant workers rife across UK and Europe

    https://www.theguardian.com/environm...-meat-industry
    "The minority is sometimes right, the majority always wrong." - A Progres...sive Thinker

    "If you support a team that fails to win the league for years, it does feel like a kind of cult'." - Salman Rushdie

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