The incident took place at the Toranomon intersection between the Akasaka Palace and the Diet of Japan in downtown Tokyo, Japan. Crown Prince and Regent Hirohito was on his way to the opening of the 48th Session of the Imperial Diet when the young son of a member of the Diet, Daisuke Namba, fired a small pistol at his carriage. The bullet shattered a window on the carriage, injuring a chamberlain, but Hirohito was unharmed.

This weekend’s holiday read, a tale of two super powers. One a rising dictatorship. The other a fading democracy split in half 50:50.

One with a coronavirus crisis seemingly under control. The other with a coronavirus crisis seemingly out of control.

U.S. jobless benefit cut-off pushes millions to financial cliff-edge

December 27, 2020 5:13 AM By Simon Lewis

(Reuters) - When the U.S. Congress passed a pandemic aid bill on Monday, Meghan Meyer, a single mom from Lincoln, Nebraska, thought she would get some respite from the daily struggle to feed and house her two kids during an unprecedented health and economic crisis.

But the next day President Donald Trump declared the long-awaited relief package “a disgrace” and said he would not sign it into law, decrying some of its spending measures while also demanding it include bigger stimulus checks for most Americans.

By the weekend, he had refused to budge.

That leaves Meyer, who has been on unpaid medical leave from her customer service job at retailer TJ Maxx since May because she is at risk of severe COVID, facing a financial cliff edge. She is one of roughly 14 million Americans whose emergency unemployment benefits, introduced by Congress when the pandemic took hold in March, ended on Saturday.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Meyer, 39, told Reuters in a phone interview. To make it through 2020, Meyer said she has had to lean on friends and charities to help put food on the table, pay her rent, cover the family dog’s medical expenses, and buy Christmas presents for her kids.

“I have held out and held out,” she said.

The new relief bill would extend through mid-March programs that support self-employed workers and those unemployed for more than half a year. It also gives an additional $300 a week through mid-March to all those receiving jobless benefits, some 20.3 million people. And it extends through January a moratorium on evictions due to expire on Dec. 31 and provides $25 billion in emergency rental assistance.

Many economists agree that the aid is insufficient and more will be needed after Democratic President-elect Joe Biden takes office on Jan. 20. Biden has called the bill a “downpayment.”

Negotiated by Trump’s own Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and the Republican Party’s congressional leaders, the bill has been flown to the president’s Florida beach resort where he is staying for the holiday, awaiting his possible signature. In tweets on Saturday, Trump signaled he was still unwilling to sign the bill, despite pleas from lawmakers to show goodwill at Christmas time.

“I simply want to get our great people $2000, rather than the measly $600,” he tweeted Saturday, referring to the bill’s stimulus checks, while he also continued to rail about the November election as he made baseless claims about election fraud.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/usa-trump-jobless/u-s-jobless-benefit-cut-off-pushes-millions-to-financial-cliff-edge-idUKKBN291050

Biden urges Trump to sign COVID-19 relief bill to save unemployment benefits

Dec. 26, 2020 / 1:34 PM / Updated Dec. 26, 2020 at 3:39 PM

Dec. 26 (UPI) -- President-Elect Joe Biden urged President Donald Trump Saturday to sign a pandemic relief package to save unemployment benefits.

Unemployment benefits for 14 million people out of work amid the pandemic are set to lapse Saturday.

Congress approved Monday a $900 billion COVID-19 pandemic relief bill in its $2.3 trillion funding package. In the bill was a plan to extend unemployment benefits to 14 million people using two pandemic unemployment programs until mid-March. As unemployment benefits run out Saturday, it's still unclear if Trump will sign the bill and his delay makes at least a temporary lapse in expanding unemployment benefits unavoidable, The New York Times reported.

Michele Evermore of the National Employment Law Project said that if Trump does sign the bill into law Saturday, unemployed workers will be able to still claim benefits, but states will need time to reprogram computer systems to account for the new law.

"It's the day after Christmas, and millions of families don't know if they'll be able to make ends meet because of President Donald Trump's refusal to sign an economic relief bill approved by Congress with an overwhelming and bipartisan majority," Biden said in a statement Saturday.

"This abdication of responsibility has devastating consequences," he added, referring to millions who will lose unemployment insurance benefits.

Since states cannot payout benefits for weeks that begin before the bill is signed, if Trump doesn't sign the bill Saturday, benefits will not restart until the first week of January, but will still end in mid-March.

Along with the enhanced federal unemployment benefits, the $900 billion pandemic relief package also includes stimulus payments for individuals of $600 to $700; more than $80 billion for schools; $330 billion for small business loans and several billions of dollars to cover costs of distributing COVID-19 vaccines.

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2020/12/26/Biden-urges-Trump-to-sign-COVID-19-relief-bill-to-save-unemployment-benefits/9161609001819/

China's industrial profits grow robustly, seventh straight rise

December 27, 2020 2:06 AM By Reuters Staff

BEIJING (Reuters) - Profits at China’s industrial firms grew robustly in November for a seventh month of gains, supported by strong industrial production and sales, as manufacturers continue their recovery from the COVID-19 downturn.

Profits at Chinese industrial firms rose 15.5% from a year earlier to 729.32 billion yuan ($111.50 billion), easing from October’s three-year high 28.2%, data from National Bureau of Statistics showed on Sunday.

China’s industrial sector has seen a strong rebound from the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, aided by a stunning export comeback as factories ramp up to meet demand overseas. Factory-gate prices, a gauge for profitability, fell less than expected last month.

The pullback of growth in November was mainly due to a higher base a year earlier, said Zhu Hong, a senior statistician at the statistics bureau.

“Profits at some traditional industries have showed improvement. With the approach of heating season, demand for thermal coal has risen and prices have increased, leading to an accelerated recovery in the coal sector,” Zhu said in a statement.

Coal industry profits rose 9.1% in November, the first increase this year.

“Industrial profits are expected to maintain double-digit growth over the next few months, driven by low base effects, domestic economic recovery, improvements in overseas demand and the rebound in commodity prices benefiting the upstream sector,” said analyst Zhou Maohua at China Everbright Bank.

For the January-November period, industrial firms’ profits rose 2.4% from a year earlier, accelerating from the 0.7% gain recorded for the first 10 months.

Earnings at China’s state-owned industrial firms were down 4.9% for January-November, narrowing from the 7.5% decline in the first 10 months.

Private sector profits grew 1.8% in the January-November period, up from 1.1% in January-October.

The industrial profit data covers large firms with annual revenue of over 20 million yuan from their main operations.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-industrial-profits/chinas-industrial-profits-grow-robustly-seventh-straight-rise-idUKKBN291020

China to leapfrog U.S. as world's biggest economy by 2028: think tank

December 26, 2020 1:20 AM

LONDON (Reuters) - China will overtake the United States to become the world’s biggest economy in 2028, five years earlier than previously estimated due to the contrasting recoveries of the two countries from the COVID-19 pandemic, a think tank said.

“For some time, an overarching theme of global economics has been the economic and soft power struggle between the United States and China,” the Centre for Economics and Business Research said in an annual report published on Saturday.

“The COVID-19 pandemic and corresponding economic fallout have certainly tipped this rivalry in China’s favour.”

The CEBR said China’s “skilful management of the pandemic”, with its strict early lockdown, and hits to long-term growth in the West meant China’s relative economic performance had improved.

China looked set for average economic growth of 5.7% a year from 2021-25 before slowing to 4.5% a year from 2026-30.

While the United States was likely to have a strong post-pandemic rebound in 2021, its growth would slow to 1.9% a year between 2022 and 2024, and then to 1.6% after that.

Japan would remain the world’s third-biggest economy, in dollar terms, until the early 2030s when it would be overtaken by India, pushing Germany down from fourth to fifth.

The United Kingdom, currently the fifth-biggest economy by the CEBR’s measure, would slip to sixth place from 2024.

However, despite a hit in 2021 from its exit from the European Union’s single market, British GDP in dollars was forecast to be 23% higher than France’s by 2035, helped by Britain’s lead in the increasingly important digital economy.

Europe accounted for 19% of output in the top 10 global economies in 2020 but that will fall to 12% by 2035, or lower if there is an acrimonious split between the EU and Britain, the CEBR said.

It also said the pandemic’s impact on the global economy was likely to show up in higher inflation, not slower growth.

“We see an economic cycle with rising interest rates in the mid-2020s,” it said, posing a challenge for governments which have borrowed massively to fund their response to the COVID-19 crisis.

“But the underlying trends that have been accelerated by this point to a greener and more tech-based world as we move into the 2030s.”

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-china-economy/china-to-leapfrog-u-s-as-worlds-biggest-economy-by-2028-think-tank-idUKKBN290004?il=0

Centre for Economics and Business Research

https://cebr.com/browse-releases/

Covid-19 Corner

This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.

EU launches vaccine rollout, historic day in virus fight

By VANESSA GERA an hour ago

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Medical workers, nursing home residents and politicians are set to be vaccinated against the coronavirus across the European Union on Sunday, part of an effort by the bloc’s 27 nations to roll out shots in a coordinated and equitable fashion.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen released a video celebrating the vaccine rollout, calling it “a touching moment of unity” in the battle to protect the bloc’s nearly 450 million people from the worst public health crisis in a century.

As it turned out, some EU immunizations began a day early in Germany, Hungary and Slovakia. The operator of a German nursing home where dozens of people were vaccinated Saturday, including a 101-year-old woman, said “every day that we wait is one day too many.”

The rollout marks a moment of hope for a region that includes some of the world’s earliest and worst-hit virus hot spots — Italy and Spain — and others like the Czech Republic, which were spared earlier in the year only to see their health care systems near collapse in the fall. It also should ease frustrations that were building up, especially in Germany, as Britain, Canada and the United States kicked off their inoculation programs with the same vaccine weeks earlier.

Altogether, the EU’s 27 nations have recorded at least 16 million coronavirus infections and more than 336,000 deaths — huge numbers that experts still agree understate the true toll of the pandemic due to missed cases and limited testing.

The first shipments of the vaccine developed by Germany’s BioNTech and American drugmaker Pfizer were limited to just under 10,000 doses in most EU countries, with its mass vaccination programs expected to begin only in January.

Each country is deciding on its own who will get the first shots. Spain, France and Germany, among others, are vowing to put the elderly and residents in nursing homes first.

https://apnews.com/article/pandemics-public-health-europe-immunizations-nursing-homes-2e41320c0535bfcec58f3b1066620458

Ivermectin - A Game Changer for COVID-19?

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

New Virus Strain’s Transmissibility to Cause More Deaths: Study

By Corinne Gretler

December 24, 2020, 9:25 AM GMT

The mutated coronavirus strain that’s been spreading in the U.K. appears to be more contagious and will likely lead to higher levels of hospitalizations and deaths next year, a new study showed.

The variant is 56% more transmissible than other strains, according to the study by the Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. There’s no clear evidence that it results in more or less severe disease.

The U.K. government had previously said the mutated variant appears to be as much as 70% more transmissible than other circulating strains. Additionally, it has almost two dozen mutations that may affect proteins made by the coronavirus, Patrick Vallance, the U.K.’s chief scientific adviser, said on Dec. 19.

That has raised concern that tests, treatments and vaccines that just started rolling out might be less effective, though Europe’s health regulator said the variant probably isn’t different enough from earlier ones to elude Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE’s shot. Countries including Australia, Denmark and Singapore have also discovered the strain.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-24/new-virus-strain-s-transmissibility-to-cause-more-deaths-study?srnd=premium-europe

Britain, Swiss firm Roche say COVID-19 tests can detect mutant virus

December 23, 20203:12 PM

(Reuters) - Britain and drugmaker Roche on Wednesday offered reassurances that the accuracy of diagnostic tests used to detect COVID-19 was unlikely to be affected by a fast-spreading mutant strain of the virus.

Public Health England said that rapid lateral flow tests being deployed in the country’s mass-testing programme can identify the variant.

Separately, Roche said neither its molecular test for COVID-19 nor a combination COVID-19/Influenza molecular test used on its high-throughput diagnostic machines was likely to be impacted by the mutations.

The reason, the Swiss company said, was that the mutations occurred on different regions of the new coronavirus than the regions that are targeted for the tests.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-britain-testing-ne/britain-swiss-firm-roche-say-covid-19-tests-can-detect-mutant-virus-idUKKBN28X1VE

But, from earlier last week.

SARS-CoV-2 UK variant: Does it matter?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC8ObD2W4Rk&t=1s

Next, some very useful vaccine links kindly sent along from a LIR reader in Canada. The links come from a most informative update from Stanford Hospital in California.

World Health Organization - Landscape of COVID-19 candidate vaccines. https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/draft-landscape-of-covid-19-candidate-vaccines

NY Times Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker.html

Stanford Website. https://racetoacure.stanford.edu/clinical-trials/132

FDA information. https://www.fda.gov/media/139638/download

Regulatory Focus COVID-19 vaccine tracker. https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/covid-19-vaccine-tracker

Some more useful Covid links.

Johns Hopkins Coronavirus resource centre

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

Rt Covid-19

https://rt.live/

Covid19info.live

https://wuflu.live/

**The Spectator Covid-19 data tracker (UK)**

https://data.spectator.co.uk/city/national

Winter Watch.

The Arctic winter sea-ice expansion and northern hemisphere snow cover. From around mid-October, the northern hemisphere snow cover usually rapidly expands, while the Arctic ice gradually expands back towards its winter maximum.

Update: we seem to have started new sunspot cycle 25 this month, though it’s unlikely to affect 2020-2021s coming winter.

Northern Eur-Asia turned snowy fast in mid-October. The Arctic sea ice expansion was slow, and from a very low level at the end of September, but with the vastly expanded snow cover, sea ice formation sped up.

The Laptev Sea ice was back to normal at the end of November. But the failure of the Kara Sea ice still to return to normal, leads me to bet on a warmer western European winter.

US National Ice Center.

https://www.natice.noaa.gov

Technology Update.

With events happening fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section. Updates as they get reported. Is converting sunlight to usable cheap AC or DC energy mankind’s future from the 21^st century onwards.

A bad idea gets worse. Do we really want hundreds, or thousands of small modular nuclear reactors all over the place, ready for terrorists?

Small Modular Reactors Explained - Nuclear Power's Future? (Approx. 13 minutes.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbrT3m89Y3M

This Christmas musical diversion. (Approx. 5 minutes.)

Albinoni Oboe Concerto in D minor op 9 no 2 (2nd Movement)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9xfJDftEUA

This Christmas great chess games. (Approx. 11 minutes.)

The Trappiest Opening in Chess? | Win Quickly with the Stafford Gambit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH_fiqlLp2U

This Christmas maths update. (Approx. 9 minutes.)

What are Differential Equations and how do they work?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Em339AlejIs

Laws of Burgos 1512

The Laws of Burgos (Leyes de Burgos), promulgated on 27 December 1512 in Burgos, Crown of Castile (Spain), was the first codified set of laws governing the behavior of Spaniards in the Americas, particularly with regard to the Indigenous people of the Americas ('native Caribbean Indians'). They forbade the maltreatment of the indigenous people and endorsed their conversion to Catholicism. The laws were created following the conquest and Spanish colonization of the Americas in the West Indies, where the common law of Castile was not fully applicable.

The scope of the laws was originally restricted to the island of Hispaniola but was later extended to Puerto Rico and Jamaica. These laws authorized and legalized the colonial practice of creating Encomiendas, where Indians were grouped together to work under a colonial head of the estate for a salary, and limited the size of these establishments to between 40 and 150 people. They also established a minutely regulated regime of work, pay, provisioning, living quarters, and diet.^[1] Women more than four months pregnant were exempted from heavy labor.^[2]

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

London Irvine Report

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Sunday, 27 December 2020

Special Update 27/12/2020 China’s Century? Dec 27s in History.

U.S. jobless benefit cut-off pushes millions to financial cliff-edge