Sunday: Hili dialogue

45 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

1. “National Anthem Day (this un-singable song became the official American anthem on this day in 1931)”

   Imma let you finish but Whitney Houston sang the best National Anthem of all time.

   /Kanye

   Whitney Houston
   Super Bowl XXV
   Tampa, FL
   27 Jan 1991
   https://youtu.be/uAYKTMQl7MQ?si=PJ02RQa1kjLKuJqn

   1. Ya she could really belt it out.

      My wife is American, so we used to make the kids sing the anthem with us after driving across the border. Everybody looked forward to singing TSSB a lot more than Oh Canada on the return trip (no story line, too much standing on guard).

      1. Listen carefully to the arrangement too – W in the H is going on in that?!? Amazing arrangement. Houston (in Tampa, in fact) was the perfect complement.

         /Quincy Jones

   2. Whitney’s amazing, but I also rather like this 1814 version. It moves along at a pretty good clip. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lvVtFD9Na0I

      1. +1

         … such an interesting feel – and I love the harpsichord flourishes – a few were straight outta Amadeus … i.e. that period.

         /Wolfgang

2. On this day:
   1857 – Second Opium War: France and the United Kingdom declare war on China.

   1859 – The two-day Great Slave Auction, the largest such auction in United States history, concludes.

   1861 – Alexander II of Russia signs the Emancipation Manifesto, freeing serfs.

   1873 – Censorship in the United States: The U.S. Congress enacts the Comstock Law, making it illegal to send any “obscene literature and articles of immoral use” through the mail.

   1875 – The first ever organized indoor game of ice hockey is played in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

   1891 – Shoshone National Forest is established as the first national forest in the US and world.

   1910 – Rockefeller Foundation: John D. Rockefeller Jr. announces his retirement from managing his businesses so that he can devote all his time to philanthropy.

   1913 – Thousands of women march in the Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington, D.C.

   1918 – Russia signs the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, agreeing to withdraw from World War I, and conceding German control of the Baltic States, Belarus and Ukraine. It also conceded Turkish control of Ardahan, Kars and Batumi.

   1923 – Time publishes its first issue.

   1924 – The 407-year-old Islamic caliphate is abolished, when Caliph Abdülmecid II of the Ottoman Caliphate is deposed. The last remnant of the old regime gives way to the reformed Turkey of Kemal Atatürk.

   1931 – The United States adopts The Star-Spangled Banner as its national anthem.

   1938 – Oil is discovered in Saudi Arabia.

   1939 – In Bombay, Mohandas Gandhi begins a hunger strike in protest at the autocratic rule in British India.

   1942 – World War II: Ten Japanese warplanes raid Broome, Western Australia, killing more than 100 people.

   1943 – World War II: In London, 173 people are killed in a crush while trying to enter an air-raid shelter at Bethnal Green tube station.

   1945 – World War II: In poor visibility, the RAF mistakenly bombs the Bezuidenhout area of The Hague, Netherlands, killing 511 people.

   1969 – Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 9 to test the lunar module. [I never cease to be amazed by the pace at which the project moved forward.]

   1985 – Arthur Scargill declares that the National Union of Mineworkers’ national executive voted to end the longest-running industrial dispute in Great Britain without any peace deal over pit closures.

   1986 – The Australia Act 1986 commences, causing Australia to become fully independent from the United Kingdom.

   1991 – An amateur video captures the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers.

   2005 – James Roszko murders four Royal Canadian Mounted Police constables during a drug bust at his property in Rochfort Bridge, Alberta, then commits suicide. This is the deadliest peace-time incident for the RCMP since 1885 and the North-West Rebellion.

   2005 – Steve Fossett becomes the first person to fly an airplane non-stop around the world solo without refueling.

   2005 – Margaret Wilson is elected as Speaker of the New Zealand House of Representatives. [Until August 23, 2006, all the highest political offices (including Elizabeth II as Head of State), were occupied by women, making New Zealand the first country for this to occur.]

   2017 – The Nintendo Switch releases worldwide.

   Births:
   1678 – Madeleine de Verchères, Canadian rebel leader (d. 1747).

   1803 – Thomas Field Gibson, English manufacturer who aided the welfare of the Spitalfields silk weavers (d. 1889).

   1831 – George Pullman, American engineer and businessman, founded the Pullman Company (d. 1897).

   1839 – Jamsetji Tata, Indian businessman, founded Tata Group (d. 1904).

   1841 – John Murray, Canadian-Scottish oceanographer and biologist (d. 1914).

   1847 – Alexander Graham Bell, Scottish-American engineer and academic, invented the telephone (d. 1922).

   1869 – Henry Wood, English conductor (d. 1944). [Conducted the Proms for nearly half a century, introducing hundreds of new works to British audiences.]

   1880 – Florence Auer, American actress and screenwriter (d. 1962).

   1882 – Elisabeth Abegg, German anti-Nazi resistance fighter (d. 1974). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

   1882 – Charles Ponzi, Italian businessman (d. 1949).

   1883 – Cyril Burt, English psychologist and geneticist (d. 1971).

   1893 – Beatrice Wood, American illustrator and potter (d. 1998).

   1902 – Ruby Dandridge, African-American film and radio actress (d. 1987).

   1911 – Jean Harlow, American actress (d. 1937). [The “Blonde Bombshell” was just 26 when she died.]

   1913 – Margaret Bonds, American pianist and composer (d. 1972).

   1917 – Sameera Moussa, Egyptian physicist and academic (d. 1952). [The first female Egyptian nuclear physicist, she held a doctorate in atomic radiation and hoped her work would one day lead to affordable medical treatments and the peaceful use of atomic energy. She organized the Atomic Energy for Peace Conference and sponsored a call that set an international conference under the banner “Atoms for Peace.” She was the first woman to work at Cairo University.]

   1920 – Ronald Searle, English-French soldier and illustrator (d. 2011).

   1923 – Doc Watson, American bluegrass singer-songwriter and musician (d. 2012).

   1941 – Mike Pender, English singer-songwriter and guitarist.

   1948 – Snowy White, English guitarist.

   1949 – Bonnie J. Dunbar, American engineer, academic, and astronaut.

   1953 – Robyn Hitchcock, English singer-songwriter and guitarist.

   1958 – Miranda Richardson, English actress.

   1961 – Fatima Whitbread, English javelin thrower.

   1968 – Brian Cox, English keyboard player and physicist.

   1971 – Charlie Brooker, English journalist, producer, and author.

   You’ve never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive. (Jean Cocteau):
   1703 – Robert Hooke, English architect and philosopher (b. 1635). [A member of the Royal Society, and its curator of experiments from 1662, Hooke built his own compound microscope and discovered microorganisms in 1665, as, independently, did Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. An impoverished scientific inquirer, Hooke later found wealth and esteem by performing over half of the architectural surveys after London’s great fire of 1666.]

   1929 – Katharine Wright, American educator (b. 1874).

   1959 – Lou Costello, American actor and comedian (b. 1906).

   1961 – Paul Wittgenstein, Austrian-American pianist (b. 1887). [After losing his right arm during WWI, he devised novel techniques that allowed him to play chords previously regarded as impossible for a five-fingered pianist. He commissioned new piano concerti for the left hand alone from famous composers including Britten, Prokofiev, and Ravel.]

   1981 – Rebecca Lancefield, American microbiologist and researcher (b. 1895).

   1983 – Hergé, Belgian author and illustrator (b. 1907).

   1987 – Danny Kaye, American actor, singer, and dancer (b. 1911).

   1988 – Sewall Wright, American biologist and geneticist (b. 1889).

   1990 – Charlotte Moore Sitterly, American astronomer (b. 1898).

   1993 – Carlos Montoya, Spanish guitarist and composer (b. 1903).

   1999 – Gerhard Herzberg, German-Canadian chemist and astronomer, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1904).

   2006 – Ivor Cutler, Scottish poet and songwriter (b. 1923).

   2010 – Michael Foot, English journalist and politician, Secretary of State for Employment (b. 1913). [Leader of the UK’s Labour Party (1980-83), his tragedy was to be too erudite and decent for the political age he found himself in.]

   2016 – Berta Cáceres, Honduran environmentalist (b. 1973). [She won the Goldman Environmental Prize, one of the most prestigious awards for environmental activism, in 2015 for “a grassroots campaign that successfully pressured the world’s largest dam builder to pull out of the Agua Zarca Dam” at the Río Gualcarque. She was one of three environmental campaigners who were assassinated in Honduras in March 2016 alone.]

   2018 – Roger Bannister, English middle-distance athlete, first man to run a four-minute mile (b. 1929).

   1. Woman of the Day:
      [Text from Wikipedia]

      Luise Wilhelmine Elisabeth Abegg (German: [eˈliːzabɛt ˈaːbɛk], born on this day in 1882, died 8 August 1974) was a German educator and resistance fighter against Nazism. She provided shelter to around 80 Jews during the Holocaust and was consequently recognised as Righteous Among the Nations.

      Abegg was born in 1882 in Strasbourg, then a part of Germany, to Johann Friedrich Abegg, a jurist, and Marie Caroline Elisabeth (Rähm) Abegg. In 1912, she enrolled at Leipzig University, where she studied history, classical philology and Romance studies, and graduated with a doctorate in 1916.[1] She moved to Berlin in 1918 when the Alsace region was reclaimed by France. In Berlin, she became involved in postwar relief work organised by the Quaker community.[2] She became a teacher at the Luisengymnasium Berlin [de] in Berlin-Mitte in 1924 and was an active member of the German Democratic Party.[1]

      Abegg openly criticised the Nazi regime after Adolf Hitler assumed power in 1933. She was transferred to another school as punishment for her criticism[2] and was questioned by the Gestapo in 1938. In 1941, she was forced to retire from teaching and officially converted to Quakerism in 1941. She began to help persecuted Jews find safe shelter in 1942. She established an extensive network of rescuers—including her Quaker friends and her former students—to provide accommodation to Jews in hiding. Abegg temporarily housed dozens of Jews in her Tempelhof apartment, which she shared with her mother and disabled sister, and vacant neighbouring apartments, and secured permanent accommodation for them across Berlin, East Prussia and Alsace. She sold her jewelry to pay for some Jews’ escape to Switzerland and tutored hiding Jewish children at her apartment. In total, she sheltered around 80 Jews between 1942 and 1945.

      After the Second World War, Abegg resumed teaching in Berlin. She became a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and was active in Quaker groups. In 1957, a group of Jews whom Abegg had rescued during the Holocaust published a book, titled And a Light Shined in the Darkness, in dedication to her. She died in Berlin on 8 August, 1974.

      Abegg received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (Verdienstkreuz am Bande) in 1957. In 1967, she was recognised as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. A memorial plaque was mounted in her Tempelhof neighbourhood in 1991 and a street in Berlin’s Mitte, Elisabeth-Abegg-Straße, was named after her in 2006.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_Abegg

   2. 1969 Apollo Program (I never cease to be amazed by the pace at which that project moved forward) – A few comments. Yes, Jez, it was amazing. I grew up in an NACA/NASA family. (NACA was the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics established by Congress in 1915 much like your old Royal Aircraft Establishment/RAE). My father worked at the Langley Research Center from 1938 until his death in 1970. He was a PI (principal investigator on Project Surveyor). I was 10 years old in 1958. Langley was one of the NACA laboratories that became a NASA lab when the NACA was subsumed in the new agency NASA by the U.S. Space Act of 1958. And that was more than simply an administrative change. The labs went to what I would describe as a wartime footing. Langley was home to the Space Task Group, a collection of aeronautical engineers who were looking early on into the dynamics of getting through the atmosphere to space and back again. I first learned about politics when about 500 Langley families associated with the Space Task Group were moved to the new Manned Space Center being built in Houston. Many of my high school friends moved away breaking the culture of neighborhood stability I had known for all of my young life. My father said it was because the vice president wanted a NASA presence in his state of Texas. In the NACA days, my father and his colleagues had always worked a stable 8-4:30 shift and because civil servant engineers received reasonable pay for a middle class lifestyle in the US of the 1950’s, most families had only one car so car pooling was the norm so wives could have the car for taking children to school, shopping, etc the other days of the week; and we could count on dinner every night like clockwork at 5:15. But as the space program developed NASA engineers had meetings at all hours, had to travel to other labs, and had to purchase second cars to meet these demands. But their salaries increased also and new hires were suddenly available with large budget increases. In our house, my father always had homework and would be up many nights working equations at the kitchen table, as witnessed by the number of dead cigar butts in the ashtray and the pall of blue smoke hanging beneath the kitchen ceiling the next morning. Looking back the work mission had suddenly become a priority.

      From a budgetary point of view NASA ran what were six main projects in PARALELL: Projects mercury and Gemini to learn how to get humans into low earth orbit and doing operations there, Project Ranger to navigate to and hit the moon (also to get some closer photos), Project Lunar Orbiter to achieve a stable lunar orbit, understand the moon’s gravitational field in detail, and get good low altitude photos for eventual Apollo landing sites, Project Surveyor to soft land a robot to understand guidance, navigation, and control for a soft landing, get photos on the surface, and, importantly at that time, understand lunar soil mechanics (the highly respected Tommy Gold hypothesized that the lunar surface was loose soil that would not support the weight of a spacecraft); and finally, of course, Project Apollo to put men on the moon, AND bring them safely back to Earth. Remember, the best picture we had of the moon’s surface at that time were from Earth-based telescopes.

      Yes, it was amazing. An American priority agreed to by the presidents and congress, supported by a majority of the American people and media, in a time of post WW2 optimism. (Btw, I agree with Paul Offit that the sequencing of the SARS COV2 virus and development of the approved mRNA vaccine in 11 months (with $11B project warp speed funding) was a similar technological high point for humanity).

      1. Thanks, Jim – fascinating!

         1. Yep. And it certainly was NOT about the science. It was about the real cold war between the US open democratic capitalism against USSR closed society communism to get the respect of the rest of the world through a great technological achievement. President Kennedy had to remind the NASA administrator of this real priority a couple of times! We HAVE to be first. Nobody cares about or remembers who is second Kennedy said.

      2. “My father worked at the Langley Research Center from 1938 until his death in 1970.” I’m hoping that your father could watch and appreciate the success of Apollo 11. Was he able to?

         Given the difficulty of landing on the Moon — as highlighted by recent attempts and partial successes — NASA’s Surveyor program has been shown to be even more extraordinary than has been appreciated, myself included. Kudos to your father for being part of that program’s success.

         “the highly respected Tommy Gold hypothesized that the lunar surface was loose soil that would not support the weight of a spacecraft”

         Do you know what Tommy Gold (or your father) thought of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1961 science-fiction novel “A Fall of Moondust,” which hypothesized that some areas of the Moon had small seas of liquid-like dust that could be navigated by tourist “boats”?
         https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fall_of_Moondust

         1. No Jon I do not know the answer to the arthur c clarke question. Gold was also in the jpl control room for the missions though. My father did get to see the ultimate success and I watched it with him and with our high energy physics group who broke away from an experiment to come to our house and watch together. Very emotional.

            1. I’m glad to learn about your father witnessing the success of Apollo 11. Did he get a chance to see the iconic photos of Apollo 12 astronauts Al Bean & Pete Conrad on the lunar surface next to Surveyor 3?
               https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/38475/which-apollo-12-astronaut-is-shown-examining-the-surveyor-3-lander-in-this-photo

               Given Tommy Gold’s name (Thomas Gold), a Google search led me to a fascinating 1978 interview conducted by the American Institute of Physics at Cornell University in which Gold does mention Arthur C. Clarke in an interesting context. (It’s toward the end of the interview.)
               https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/4627

            2. Jon, i was away at school in nov 1969 and thus not in daily contact with my father when that photo was taken, but he was still alive (he would die a few months later in march of 1970 from a chronic heart condition driven heart attack that was no doubt exacerbated by the constant coast to coast travel and pressure of the Surveyor Program). And I vaguely seem to recall him talking about the astronauts rendezvousing with a Surveyor. So good question and I would say yes and that it must have been very gratifying.

            3. Hi Jim — I just watched an interesting, updated, 17-minute review of the Surveyor program by Scott Manley: “The Surprising Success of NASA’s First Moon Landings – The Surveyor Program 1966-1968.”

               Even though I’m fairly well-informed about the program, there are quite interesting details in the video:

      3. Great insight. Did the space science benefit from perhaps a lion’s share of resources back then? Consider, life science like now was in it’s germinal stage back then – in forms like pure chemistry, or microbiology.

         Without looking it up on the spot, I think Vannevar Bush gave a talk titled The Endless Frontier – I think NASA was a major impetus (if I recall!).

         1. Vannevar Bush’s Endless Frontier gave rise to what became the National Science Foundation supporting basic research. NASA came directly out of redirecting the NACA aeronautics mission toward aerospace which while it included some basic research, was really centered around applied research and development. Actual space science, the exploration of the planets, the sun, and astrophysics became a key component of Nasa’s mission, now equal in funding to human spaceflight, but I do not know when. There was always a space science group in the 70’s supporting Voyager and similar missions.

            1. I’m reviewing Bush’s Wikipedia page – Shannon was a student… looks like Bush more-or-less drew from the tech developed during WWII to make the case… but NACA was way back in 1915…

               Random thought : there’s a Veritasium video on some sort of guided automation … I’ll try to find it… ah – the one on how analog computing developed into digital : at about 14 min, World War II directives, and ENIAC are noted :

               https://youtu.be/IgF3OX8nT0w?si=SW3LMzt-W7sJunN4

               I love that video – fascinating developments – Cheers

   3. If permitted, I nominate Sameera Moussa for woman of the day next year. Very interesting.

   4. Ah, Robyn Hitchcock.. one of my favorite male vocalists

3. I have no idea why we are delivering aid to Gaza. It makes it seem like we’re at cross purposes with our Israeli ally. The Biden administration is staffed by people who, to put it charitably, are naive about the Israel-Palestinian conflict IMO. Hamas is not simply a terrorist organization, it is the government of Gaza, and it has popular support. We should not seemingly prioritize the needs of a hostile population at war with a key ally over other considerations, such as helping Israel meet its war aims.

   1. With you 100%

   2. The hazard of dropping pallets of relief supplies into Gaza is that they will create food frenzies around each one. The resulting bloodshed will be blamed on Israel. Maybe that is the plan.

   3. Hard to say what the motivation is. (1) Maybe the U.S. is doing it as a symbolic gesture to give the appearance that we’re doing something other than merely carping about the lack of aid. It does seem symbolic to me, as the amount is so small. (2) Maybe the U.S. is trying to embarrass Israel into doing more by showing how easy it can be to get aid into Gaza. (Underscoring my point that the aim is symbolic.) (3) Maybe the MRE’s are approaching their expiration date and the U.S. is simply trying to dispose of them, while garnering a kudo or two for trying. And of course there remains the question of whether U.S. airdrops are aiding the enemy, as you point out. The goal of the airdrops seems to be a mystery.

   4. I think that it’s a purely political attempt by Biden to mollify the woke parts of his base. The amount of food delivered in negligible in term of the number of people on the ground.

4. “There are more serious problems of starvation due to fighting in Yemen and Somalia, but nobody talks about aid to those countries. Nor did we drop humanitarian aid on Dresden or Berlin (I’m excepting the postwar Berlin airlift, of course.) I approve of the U.S. relieving starvation, of course, but how are they going to keep the food out of the hands of Hamas?”
   We, the USA did not drop humanitarian aid on Tokyo either, much much worse than either Berlin or Dresden, the most efficient fire bombing ever but rarely mentioned.
   We, the UK RAF were bombing Yemen in 1967, nothing improves or changes. War is about winning regardless and the food dropped in Gaza will inevitably end up with Hamas and the moronic EU funding the antisemitic UN is just another slap in the face of Israel. The population of Gaza hates Israel. The population of Gaza have done nothing to help release Israeli hostages, the reverse in fact.
   The EU does not give two hoots for Gaza but is frightened sh++less of its imported muslim mob, just look at London UK streets given over to the rabble weekly without redress.
   The idiot Arizona students calling for death to colonials must mean themselves? Do they have any rights to Arizona? Unlikely.
   Very sad about Ukrainian poet and his cat. Did the poor cat die as well?
   Apologies for the rant.

   1. The Latino students forgot to call for death to the conquistador. Although they actually seem to only really care about international socialism-
      https://cosmonaut.blog/2019/06/11/latino-radicals-and-the-communist-party-in-the-new-communist-movement-a-case-study-of-two-oral-histories/

5. Not your fault, but Baskin-Robbins always promoted 31 flavors, not 33.

   Source: Former BR Scooper.

6. That was a good throw to the Orang.

   1. And a good catch.

      1. Accomplished so casually, as one would expect of a philosopher.

7. The two pictures of Presidents now and past, President Biden and Mr Trump are one of the most recent and pleasant pictures and quite flattering particularly for Mr Trump who is often presented not at his most favourable image.
   The coming election is going to be quite an event watched with interest especially for those, like me, not part of the USA but especially interested in the USA and its position in the Global Arena. What happens in the USA affects many countries.

   1. I’ve been told by “Snowbirds” that they’ll sell their Winter vacation home in the southern US, if the burger dumpster becomes POTUS again.

      I think he will lose.

      1. Sure they will. They were all going to move to Canada, too.

         Why would they even do that, and risk losses from panic mass selling?
         Life in red states will go on much as it does now. It’s the blue states who will suffer the Wrath of Don. If they already own property they should just move to Florida and stay there, I should think.

   2. Given Biden’s many successes, he should always wear his aviator glasses just to win over those people who are concerned about “optics.”

      I now have a 3×5-foot flag version of the sign I made for the last presidential election.
      https://x.com/Jon_Alexandr/status/1747086086936076342

8. Simply decriminalizing hard drugs, but not spending any money on the very necessary supports to help addicts, as was done in Portugal, is a very bad plan. Portugal went from having the worst heroin problem in Europe to a much reduced problem when they legalized, and put into place a large education, medical, and support system. You have to have a comprehensive plan in place. More silver bullet thinking is what failed here.

   1. Exactly, very well said. Yes, just decriminalizing drugs does not solve the problem of drug consumption, but when coupled with the scores of other programs put in place in Portugal, definitely has the potential to reduce crime and drug overdoses. Just think of the societal problems that the ban on alcohol sales had during prohibition.
      By the way, NPR recently had a nice little article about drug laws/use in Portugal with some comparisons to the situation in the US in general and Oregon in particular.
      One interesting point in that article:
      “Portugal has roughly the same population as the state of New Jersey. But while New Jersey alone sees nearly 3,000 fatal drug overdoses a year, Portugal averages around 80.”
      https://www.npr.org/2024/02/24/1230188789/portugal-drug-overdose-opioid-treatment

9. Crows are so freaking smart! Fooey with your bird spikes, you humans!

10. Girls’ Day is fantastic in Japan. All the young ladies get dressed up and celebrate the power and beauty of their gender proudly.
    No religion, no iron age fairy tales of hell or genderwang nonsense: just a celebration of young womanhood and getting all gussied up.

    It is a big deal – noticeable as soon as you walk outside your apartment, a once a year day for kimono rentals.

    D.A.
    NYC (formerly of Shinjuku, Tokyo)

    1. “GenderWANG” just has to be a riff on Mitchell and Webb’s NumberWANG skits. Am I right?

       (For those who haven’t seen the skits, here’s a link:
       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY_zcHjARgc You won’t be sorry)

       1. Excellent! I read it first from Jon Kay at Quilette.
          (and stole the term for an article of my own!)
          D.A.
          NYC

       2. NumberWANG seems perfect for present times. Imagine Trump and Biden playing NumberWANG instead of debating!

          It’s what we need now— confident nonsense.

11. I’m no expert on this maneuver legally, but can’t Israel just not issue work visas, or deny transit/entry to those seeking to use those visas in “Palestine” to slowly bleed the foreigners out of UNRWA? (I doubt Egypt would let them pass). Many workers seem to be Europeans and Americans.

    Aren’t local teachers there, local citizens, promoting terrorism by their teaching?
    They make jails for that kind of “teacher”.

    I’m a NY atty though and know nothing about Israeli law.
    D.A.
    NYC

12. RIP, Maksym Kryvtsov.

13. With regard to UNRWA, not that Nicaragua has recently filed charges against Germany for suspending payments, claiming that Germany is complicit in genocide:

    https://www.timesofisrael.com/nicaragua-files-case-at-world-court-accusing-germany-of-aiding-israels-genocide/

    I remember when Daniel Ortega was a guerilla fighting what really was a corrupt government. Now that he is president, with regard to corruption and so on he is essentially indistinguishable from those he was fighting back in the day.

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