What's in the News? 2.0

[Beorning]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_States_presidential_elections

I overestimated - it hover around 50-55% EVT (Eligible Voter Turnout), but according to this estimate, the only time we've seen less than 50% was the 1996 election. The decline from 60%+ range started in 1948. How do those figures differ from yours?

50% is about what we usually get here, too. But if the May 10th elections do happen, they will get 30% or even less. 30% is nearly half of 50% - and it'd be not because people are disinterested in voting, but because people definitely *do not want* to vote. Couple that with much reduced campaign posibilities of the opposition candidates, severe legal and organizational issues - and I think that there's ground for other countries to oppose the result...

[Orval Wintermute]

The Minister for Trade Conor Burns has just been forced to resign.

Turns out that Conor's father had loaned someone money and was having a hard time getting the loan back. So Conor wrote to the loanee, using official Parliamentary notepaper, and threatened to name and shame the person in Parliament. As the naming would be done under Parliamentary privilege the person Burns outed wouldn't be able to sue for defamation of character etc.

[ShadowFox89]

Shit, in the US that'd hardly be news.

[gaggedLouise]

The Minister for Trade Conor Burns has just been forced to resign.

Turns out that Conor's father had loaned someone money and was having a hard time getting the loan back. So Conor wrote to the loanee, using official Parliamentary notepaper, and threatened to name and shame the person in Parliament. As the naming would be done under Parliamentary privilege the person Burns outed wouldn't be able to sue for defamation of character etc.

"Now tell me do you.
do you have any money?
I wanna spend all your money
at the Gay Bar, Gay Bar...
WOW!!"



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sJqROHxjDA

[Callie Del Noire]

The Minister for Trade Conor Burns has just been forced to resign.

Turns out that Conor's father had loaned someone money and was having a hard time getting the loan back. So Conor wrote to the loanee, using official Parliamentary notepaper, and threatened to name and shame the person in Parliament. As the naming would be done under Parliamentary privilege the person Burns outed wouldn't be able to sue for defamation of character etc.

Wow.. just..wow. He actually sent a letter that the person could show?  Didn’t think it thru huh?

[Mechelle]

Wow.. just..wow. He actually sent a letter that the person could show?  Didn’t think it thru huh?

In the old days of a few years ago, government ministers would resign if they made a bad mistake or did something disreputable.

That doesn't seem to happen now, so Conor Burns, who was unknown to me before this, has performed a public service in showing just what it takes to get a minister to resign.:)

[Skynet]

The Navajo Nation and Hopi Reservations of Arizona have been hard hit by the coronavirus.

Donations flooded in from Ireland to help the relief effort. This spans back to when various Native American tribes in the mid-1800s did similar donations to Ireland during the Potato Famine.

[gaggedLouise]

Five year old kid stopped by patrolmen, driving his parents' car on the freeway.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52548236

Only in America. 

[clonkertink]

Man, that kid is gonna be grounded until he is old enough to drive.

[Callie Del Noire]

Still not getting a Lamborghini though.  Might want to start a go fund me page kid.

[Beguile's Mistress]

And he wanted a Lamborghini.  He has good taste but no common sense.

[Beorning]

Absurdly funny as the situation was, I think we should all be grateful the kid didn't get into a car crash...

[Lexandria]

Kid probably saw some YouTube star with one: there's a ton of kid-oriented channels with people with stars who do videos on getting their Lamborghini repainted or whatever that never let on that it's not normal to have that car or the means to acquire one. They treat them like novel toys. Kid's in the right age range for those shows and young enough to want what they see on tv/in videos and not old enough to realize those people have a ton of money to just throw at stuff like that. The kid obeyed traffic laws as well as he could: probably didn't know that the reason kids don't drive isn't because it's dangerous, not because patents are mean and won't let them.

Doesn't excuse the kid managing to get the keys and drive away, and everyone's real lucky no one got hurt.

[Deamonbane]

A medical researcher said to be on the "verge of making very significant" coronavirus findings was found shot to death over the weekend in Pennsylvania, officials said.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/researcher-verge-making-very-significant-coronavirus-findings-shot-death-n1200896

I don't know what to make of this. My brain is screaming conspiracy and a double tap to the head and neck does seem very thorough, smelling of an execution.

[gaggedLouise]

And he wanted a Lamborghini.  He has good taste but no common sense.

- recalls the pop star from here who sang (not entirely seriously): girl, you can have anything I own but don't try to take my Mercedes Benz. In the same verse, he mentioned a Lamborghini... :)

[Beorning]

Never understood the obsession with cars, to be honest...

[Humble Scribe]

The crappiest, cheapest, lamest coup attempt for some time has just gone down in Venezuela.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-52543033

Apparently the bros were live tweeting during the operation, @-ing Donald Trump and posting hashtags like #activeshooter

In deference to 'Stupid Watergate', someone has already called it 'Stupid Bay of Pigs'.

[gaggedLouise]

Not news strictly speaking, but since it's 75 years since the end of the war in Europe and no one will get to celebrate it in public because of the corona thing, here goes...

These are three batches of colour footage of Berlin and Germany (in the first one) in the summer of '45, immediately after the war ended. Ruins, endless rubble, refugees pulling carts, foreign troops, Red Army girls directing traffic in Berlin and efforts to begin rebuilding the town. The first one is quite newly released, it came up in my Youtube feed this afternoon, and it was shot all over Germany, but mostly in and around Berlin, by Hollywood director George Stevens. The second one has been around on Youtube for a while, and the third is a collection of astonishing footage of bombed out ruins. All three are great quality, clear and with vibrant colours, and incredibly moving.

George Stevens footage (including some around the Potsdam conference):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hwy8SzVmWGc

Berlin, July 1945:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5i9k7s9X_A

Berlin and Potsdam, summer 1945 - ruins and more ruins:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhyifvjSHbU

[Orval Wintermute]

Bletchley Park have revealed the last message it intercepted from the Germans 75 years ago.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52583322

[Regina Minx]

In deference to 'Stupid Watergate', someone has already called it 'Stupid Bay of Pigs'.

Which itself was also indescribably stupid.

[Hades]

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/little-richard-founding-father-rock-133000796.html

Little Richard died today (Saturday May 9th) at the age of 87, from cancer.

[ShadowFox89]

Well, great balls of fire :/

[Beorning]

If anybody is interested what's going on with the presidential elections in Poland that are scheduled for tomorrow, well...

... they will not happen!

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/world/europe/poland-presidential-election-coronavirus.html

The details: as I wrote here earlier, the ruling party (PiS) was pushing for the elections to happen by mail. The bill that would allow that was supposed to be voted on in the parliament on Thursday. The problem was that a micro-party named Porozumienie, a member of the ruling right-wing coalition, opposed the bill and there was a strong possibility that their MPs would vote against it. Which would cause the bill to be rejected and would blow up the whole PiS-headed government.

On Wednesday, the PiS leader Kaczyński and the Porozumienie leader Gowin reached an accord. Porozumienie agreed not to leave the government and to vote in favour of the mail-in vote bill. At the same time, the two leaders decided that the elections will not be happening on May 10th. Or 17th, or 23rd. The current plan is to say that the elections are impossible to be held at all. The two leaders declared that in this case, the Supreme Court will surely declared the whole elections as invalid. Which will allow for a whole new elections to be called - with the voting taking place sometime in June, probably.

A few problems with it are raised by the opposition and some lawyers:

1. The government cannot just decline to organize the elections that have already been called. To do so might actually be prosecutable (or would be - if the Polish justice system wasn't controlled by PiS...). Currently, Kaczyński and Gowin claim that the government cannot organize the elections due to objective problems, but that's a blatant lie: they failed to do so, because they started messing with the voting law and created an insane mess they couldn't handle.

2. The whole Kaczyński - Gowin accord includes the open declaration that the leaders are sure the Supreme Court will declare the elections invalid. Some lawyers say that it might actually not be possible, because the SC cannot declare the invalidity of elections that didn't take place. Also, there's this thing with two party leaders publicly expressing what they expect the SC to do and building a whole strategy on that. Meanwhile... the SC is supposedly independent from the government, right? So, the government officials cannot say beforehand that the SC will issue a specific verdict...

3. Even if the elections happen in June, they will still be held by mail. Porozumienie declared they plan on improving the law to make the mail-in voting transparent, but who knows what how that will work out...

4. It seems that there's currently *zero* trust between Kaczyński and Gowin. An example: earlier today, these two (and their parties' leaderships) had yet another emergency meeting. Even though an accord was reached on Wednesday, the PiS people suddenly started pushing to make the voting happen on May 23rd anyway... because they started panicking that the SC will not issue the verdict they want. According to what the news services are saying right now, the meeting ended with a peaceful resolution... but, according to some leaks, the government nearly collapsed today. Even the Prime Minister supposedly threatened to resign...

So, to summarize: no elections tomorrow. Nobody actually knows when the new elections are going to happen and what kind of voting laws will be in place - currently, the whole voting system is completely dismantled by the crazy bills introduced by PiS. The whole plan that is supposed to take us toward the new elections is based on the government's illegal decision not to organize the currently-scheduled elections. And Poland's ruling coalition currently consists of people who seem to hate each other, so the whole government might collapse any time now.

This is pure chaos! And not of the good, spikey-tentacley kind...

[Sara Nilsson]

Holy crapballs that is just .. insane! I can't think of any other word for it.

And is the media all ok with it or?

[Beorning]

Depends which media you ask. The non-government-aligned media are criticizing the situation. But there are also some media that are closely in cahoots with PiS and they keep claiming that all of this is the opposition's fault etc. Also, there's the so-called public TV... which PiS transformed into its propaganda mouthpiece. And it is singing constant praises to PiS and promoting outright lies... which has its effect, as there are portions of the population that are watching *only* this one TV station.

The activities of "public TV" (Telewizja Polska, TVP) is one of the reasons why so many people are saying that holding elections right now would be a fraud. Basically, every candidate aside from the current (PiS-aligned) president had to stop their campaign. Meanwhile, the president is not only effectively campaigning (because everything he does as a president is his campaign), but TVP is really, really supporting him. His screen time in TVP's news is a few times longer than that of other candidates. Also, TVP reporters keep praising him and bash everyone else. Heck, not too long TVP's CEO openly stated that the president it the station's candidate!