A number of schools in Hunan, Anhui and Zhejiang provinces in China have recently started implementing a new policy of 2-day off week for high schoolers, and have sparked quite a debate among parents and netizens in China.

• High schoolers in Grade 10 and 11 will now get 2 days off per week, and Grade 12 students get to have 1 day off every week.
• Currently, there is no weekend for many high schoolers in China (the “higher ranking” a school, the tougher the routine), you get half a day off per week (~2 days off per month).
• A typical high school day looks like this: wakes up at 6am, arrives at class room at 7am, starts morning self-study routine, sits through the classes, stays for the evening self-study session, gets home at around 10pm, and if you’re lucky, gets to bed at around 12am. Rinse and repeat every day.
• As anticipated, many parents are not happy with the new policy: the gaokao (national unified exam) is so competitive that even a 1-point difference in scoring can make or break your chances of getting into university. Some parents in Hangzhou are worried that their kids might be disadvantaged if kids from the other cities don’t have as many days off.
• This has led to an explosive demand for private tuition on the weekends as parents send their kids to tuition classes instead. Previously, tuition was part of the school program and parents pay ~1000 yuan per semester. Now they have to pay an additional 1000-2000 yuan per month.
• Some private tuition companies have seen the business opportunity and have begun advertising “weekend packages” for parents, with such slogans as “you can go to work with a peace of mind. we will take over the duty of the school to take care of your kids instead.”
• One such “weekend package” as reported by the news which includes tuition for 6 subjects + physical education costs 3680 yuan per month, which is 47% of the monthly income for an average household.
• Some parents are now petitioning for the schools to keep their libraries open on the weekend and crowdfunding to pay for the teachers’ “weekend overtime fee”.
• Even more absurdity ensued, as some schools received “letters to volunteer to return to school on the weekends” by “very concerned” students.

China can be a magical place sometimes. The level of extreme competition has intensified in recent years to such an extent that it is taking a toll on everyone’s daily lives, and I don’t blame the people who want to emigrate to Western countries at all. I know many Chinese immigrants overseas who don’t want to put their kids through this.

China announces plans for major renewable projects to tackle climate change

BEIJING, March 5 (Reuters) - China said on Wednesday it would develop a package of major projects to tackle climate change as it moves to bring its carbon dioxide emissions to a peak before 2030 and become carbon neutral by 2060.

The world’s largest producer of climate-warming greenhouse gas said it would develop new offshore wind farms and accelerate the construction of “new energy bases” across its vast desert areas, the National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s economic planner, said in an official report published on Wednesday.

“China will actively and prudently work towards peaking carbon emissions and achieving carbon neutrality,” the report read.

Among the proposed projects cited in the report by the state planning agency was a controversial hydropower facility on the Yarlung Tsangpo river in Tibet, which has raised concerns in India about its potential impact on downstream water flows.

It also said it would develop a direct power transmission route connecting Tibet with Hong Kong, Macao and Guangdong in the southeast.

However, coal will remain a key fuel, with the NDRC report saying the country will continue to increase coal production and supply this year even as it plans for trials of low-carbon technology at its coal-fired power plants and to promote initiatives aimed at substituting fossil fuels with renewables.

China has been struggling to strike a balance between fostering economic growth and meeting its environmental goals.

The NDRC said the 3.4% reduction in the amount of carbon emissions per unit of economic growth last year “fell short of expectations”, blaming rapid growth in energy consumption as well as extreme weather.

China is not expected to meet its five-year goal to bring carbon intensity down by 18% by the end of this year, and it has not yet announced an annual target for 2025.

It will also struggle to meet a separate target to cut the amount of energy consumed per unit of growth by 13.5% by the end of this year, despite exceeding expectations with a 3.8% reduction last year, analysts said.

“Despite the world record expansion of renewables, an inconvenient truth is that China’s economy hasn’t become much more energy efficient in recent years,” said Yao Zhe, global policy advisor with Greenpeace in Beijing.

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Italy: Pope Francis’ health condition showed a slight improvement, although his diagnosis requires him to continue to rest.

• Telesur English

God damn look at this:

“The Economist’s country of the year for 2024”

The Economist,[1] a journal that speaks for the British millionaires, is pursuing a very instructive line in relation to the war. Representatives of advanced capital in the oldest and richest capitalist country, are shedding tears over the war and incessantly voicing a wish for peace. Those Social-Democrats who, together with the opportunists and Kautsky, think that a socialist programme consists in the propaganda of peace, will find proof of their error if they read The Economist. Their programme is not socialist, but bourgeois-pacifist. Dreams of peace, without propaganda of revolutionary action, express only a horror of war, but have nothing in common with socialism.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/may/01c.htm

South Korea air force jets accidentally drop bombs on homes, injuring 15

POCHEON, South Korea, March 6 (Reuters) - Fifteen people were injured in South Korea on Thursday after bombs dropped by fighter jets landed in a civilian district, damaging houses and a church during military exercises in Pocheon, the Air Force and the fire department said. The Gyeonggi-do Bukbu Fire Services said in a statement that 15 people were wounded, out of which two were seriously hurt. Pocheon is about 40 kilometres (25 miles) northeast of Seoul, near the heavily militarised border with North Korea. South Korea’s Air Force said eight 500-pound (225kg) Mk82 bombs from KF-16 jets fell outside the shooting range during joint live-fire exercises. “We are sorry for the damage caused by the abnormal drop accident, and we wish the injured a speedy recovery,” the Air Force said in a statement. Residents in the area have protested about the disturbance and potential danger from nearby training grounds for years. Residents were evacuated around midday as authorities checked whether there were any unexploded bombs, Yonhap news agency said. Reuters’ photographs from the scene showed shattered windows and a church building strewn with debris. The defence ministry said earlier on Thursday that South Korea and U.S. forces were holding their first joint live-fire exercises in Pocheon, linked to annual military drills due to start next week.

South Korea and the United States will kick off their annual Freedom Shield exercise on Monday, said Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). The joint drills, which will run until March 20, aim to strengthen the readiness of the alliance for threats such as North Korea, the JCS said. This year’s drills will reflect “lessons learned from recent armed conflicts” and North Korea’s growing partnership with Russia, it added. “Our planners look across the globe and identify the trends that are changing and we look at how we can incorporate that into our exercises,” Ryan Donald, a spokesperson for the United States Forces Korea (USFK), told a media briefing on Thursday. About 70 combined field training sessions are scheduled for this year’s exercise, said Lee Sung-jun, a spokesperson for Seoul’s JCS.

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The probable future coalition partners of the CDU and SPD just announced their basic understanding to proceed with an absolutely INSANE militarization programme.

The outline is at least 500 billion €s for military hardware and investments in military-relevant infrastructure, with no theoretical limit - over the past couple of days, politicians have thrown around numbers like 800 billion and even higher. That’s basically the entire Pentagon budget for Germany to spend over like 5 years or so.

Early statements call for “an army of 100,000 drones, 2,000 Patriot missiles, at least 800 tanks and 1,000 Taurus cruise missiles”, with more to come.

This gigantic defense programme will be financed entirely by debt, and they plan to suspend the “debt brake” - but just for defense stuff, pointless social spending like schools and hospitals will not be exempt from the austerity program.

Just insane. All the German MSMs I’m looking at are celebrating. It will be interesting if any leftist organization can mobilize against this monstrosity, this really can’t be true.

Really feels like Europe is going completely off the rails this week. Maybe I’m a little out of whack too since I’ve basically listened to 5 hours of Mercouris et al. every day for some days now and this was to be expected, sort of…but I can’t see any good come of this.

Oh well, maybe they’ll fix some of the shittier roads at least so that tanks can drive over, or they’ll run out of money, or they just find that throwing money at a problem doesn’t magically create tanks. There’s this adage of “Germany is the country that spends the most on its military and basically gets nothing out of it”, and that was still very true over the last couple of years. As far as I know, virtually none of the hardware that the first 100 billions dollars were supposed to buy actually arrived in the depots, it’s all still mostly on order lol.

Source: The Krautwave

The work report of the government from Third Session of the 14th National People’s Congress is out on March 5th, summarized below:

Looking back at 2024

• 5% GDP growth
• Food production reached 1.4 trillion pound for the first time
• New employment in the urban area: 12.56 million
• Alternative energy vehicle production breached 13 million annually

Target for 2025

• GDP growth at ~5%
• New employment in the urban area: >12 million jobs
• CPI to reach 2%
• Food production at ~1.4 trillion pound
• Energy consumption per unit GDP to fall ~3%

Important work for 2025

• Budget: deficit spending to reach ~4% (from 3%, or +1.6T yuan from previous year)
• Government investment: to arrange new local government bonds at 4.4T yuan (+500B yuan), combined government debt to reach 11.86T yuan (+2.9T yuan)
• Special debt: to issue special extra long term government bonds at 1.3T yuan (+300B yuan), and new special government bond at 500B yuan
• Consumption: to implement targeted policies to raise consumption, to arrange extra long term bond at 300B yuan to support consumption (subsidies to trade in older goods with new goods)
• Nascent industries: to further propel the development of nascent industries e.g. commercial airliners, low attitude airspace economy. To cultivate biotech production, quantum technology, embodied AI, 6G and other nascent industries. To accelerate the digital transformation of manufacturing sector. To develop AI networked EV, AI-powered phones and computers, AI-powered robots etc.
• Education: to increase the number of higher and middle education degrees, to gradually implement free pre-school education
• Market environment: to implement long term mechanisms to resolve problems with outstanding payments by corporations/companies, to increase law enforcement actions against corporate crimes
• Opening up: to push for the orderly opening up of internet and cultural spaces, to further the opening up of telecommunications, healthcare, education and various sectors
• Housing: to continue implement strong policies to slow the plunging real estate prices and stabilize the market. implement the redevelopment of provincial towns and aging residential housing units. to encourage purchase of stock houses (oversupplied units). to continue the good work on settlement/closing for housing purchases.
• Rural development: to revitalize the rural industries, to activate the central government coordinated inter-provincial food production compensatory policy, to increase support for food producing provinces, to expand on channels to improve farmers’ income.
• Urbanization: to push for guaranteed housing system for qualified citizens who are turning from farmers into urban workers. to continue the revitalization of urban and redevelopment of old neighborhoods in cities.
• Ecology: mechanisms to encourage healthy and green consumption, to encourage new green, low carbon production and lifestyles
• Employment: to enlarge the employment opportunities for high school graduates, to strengthen the welfare guarantee for gig workers and new hires. to improve benefits for tech talents.
• Healthcare: to optimize the drug procurement policy and strengthen the regulation and evaluation of drug quality (note: this was a huge scandal in China last year when many hospitals procured fake drugs to lower costs), to increase the per capita subsidies of citizens health insurance and basic public healthcare service by 30 yuan and 5 yuan, respectively
• Social welfare: to raise the minimum amount of urban citizen pension by 20 yuan, to formulate policies to encourage birth, to provide childcare subsidies

Overall, not that different from last year’s budget, with the exception on the new emphasis on AI. The budget deficit is still on the conservative side, breaking from the usual 3% to 4% this year. It may or may not be enough to boost the slumping consumption, but time will tell. Other than that, nothing indicates fundamental change from the usual policies.

A story of success

Massive blackout in Buenos Aires leaves more than half a million without power

More than 600,000 people were left without electricity Wednesday as massive power outage hits Buenos Aires and its southern suburbs – event the Casa Rosada was affected.

A massive blackout affected neighbourhoods in Buenos Aires City (CABA) and the southern suburbs of the capital on Wednesday amid sweltering temperatures. Several power on Wednesday left some 620,000 users without electricity in Greater Buenos Aires – including the Casa Rosada.

Meanwhile temperatures soared above 35 degrees Celsius, with the famous ‘sensación térmica’ heat index touching 44°C, with a yellow alert issued for “extreme temperatures.” Electricity firm Edesur, which serves the southern part of Buenos Aires, stated on X that “a failure occurred in a high-voltage line,” affecting multiple substations. The blackout followed another massive one recorded in the early hours of Wednesday.

By mid-afternoon, service had been restored to 70 percent of those affected, while around 200,000 customers remained without power, a spokesperson from the Energy Secretariat told the AFP news agency. At the peak of the outage, some 622,000 users had experienced the cut, said the spokesperson.

The blackout, which even affected the Casa Rosada presidential palace, hit more than a dozen neighbourhoods in the city’s centre and south. Disruption was observed at dozens of intersections as traffic lights failed and traffic jams developed. Subte metro services were suspended, with some travellers left in carriages between tunnels.

A large part of the Barracas neighbourhood, in the south of the city, spent hours without electricity amid the sweltering heat. People stepped outside to cool off or sought shade on the street. Some shopkeepers set up petrol-powered generators at the entrances to their businesses. Petrol stations saw queues of people lining up with jerrycans to fill up. Gilda Ávila, an employee at a laundrette in Barracas, lamented that she couldn’t use the washing machines.

“I have a ton of clothes to deliver. And in this heat, it’s unbearable. Prices keep rising, and nothing gets better,” said the 39-year-old woman. In 2024, electricity rates in Buenos Aires rose by 268 percent while inflation reached 117.8 percent, according to a report from the University of Buenos Aires and the scientific institute CONICET – the impact of the removal of large subsidies for public utilities. “This morning, we had to throw away a lot of merchandise,” 35-year-old butcher Eduardo Marecos. “We pay nearly a million [pesos a month] for electricity, so going through this is awful.”

milei promised we’ll be “like Germany” in about 35 years or so, uh… guys…, is he pulling another scam?

Two companies are responsible for energy distribution in Buenos Aires and it’s surroundings: Edenor and Edesur, both are born out of the “Shock Therapy” of the early 90s, part of the massive wave of privatizations carried out at the orders of the IMF. Therefore, the entire grid is privatized and there is little to no incentive to invest because money line goes down.

Privatization will be considered a crime against humanity in the future and all who carried out privatizations will be executed by firing squad.

Derek Chauvin: Ben Shapiro launches effort to pardon Derek Chauvin - CNN

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro has publicly called for the president to pardon former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for federal crimes related to George Floyd’s 2020 death – drawing derision from the Minnesota attorney general who helped put Chauvin in prison but amplification from one of Trump’s most powerful advisers.

Shapiro’s proposal could spring to mind several questions, including: “Could a president do that?” (Answer: Yes); and, “What would it matter, since Chauvin also is in prison on state charges?” (Answer: It’s complicated).

Shapiro’s effort to solicit a pardon for Chauvin, a White man convicted of murdering a Black man in a case that sparked massive nationwide protests over the way police treat people of color, comes amid the Trump administration’s efforts to push back on diversity, equity and inclusion programs and what some see as gains made toward racial justice since Floyd’s death.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump touted his administration’s forceful crackdown on DEI programs, and vowed “our country will be woke no longer.” And a congressman recently introduced a bill that would withhold some federal funding in Washington, DC, if the mayor does not remove the district’s Black Lives Matter mural and rename the eponymous plaza located near the White House.

In an interview with CNN Thursday, one of Floyd’s brothers, Terrence, said the call to pardon Chauvin has been hard for his relatives who have slowly begun to heal five years after George’s death. “We were supposed to see progress,” Terrence Floyd said. “So many people promised things, especially if we (are) going to go with the DEI, so many things was promised to us as a people – not just to Black and brown people – as a people. And they’re backpedaling.”

Here’s what Shapiro has called for, how some have reacted, and what experts say could come of it: Shapiro casts Chauvin’s conviction as an injustice

At the end of Tuesday’s episode of his video podcast “The Ben Shapiro Show,” Shapiro called for Trump to pardon Chauvin of his federal conviction, essentially arguing, counter to what a state jury found, that Chauvin wasn’t responsible for Floyd’s death.

The roughly three-minute segment, which Shapiro also posted on X, urges viewers to sign a petition asking Trump to consider a federal pardon. Elon Musk, the billionaire helping lead Trump’s government efficiency initiatives, later reposted Shapiro’s segment, writing it’s “something to think about.”

Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck and back for more than nine minutes on May 25, 2020, after officers responded to reports suspecting Floyd used a counterfeit $20 at a Minneapolis corner store. Floyd, 46, was handcuffed and lying face down on a street as he repeatedly pleaded, “I can’t breathe.” He was eventually taken away by an ambulance and declared dead at a hospital, authorities said.

A county medical examiner ruled Floyd’s death a homicide and identified the cause as “cardiopulmonary arrest” that occurred during “law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression” – findings he stood by at Chauvin’s trial. Heart disease and fentanyl use were contributing factors but not the direct cause, the medical examiner testified.

In April 2021, a Minnesota jury found Chauvin guilty on state charges of unintentional murder, third-degree murder and manslaughter. He was sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison on those state charges, and the US Supreme Court later rejected his appeal of the state conviction.

In June 2021, Chauvin was sentenced to 21 years in federal prison after he pleaded guilty to federal charges of depriving Floyd of his civil rights, and also depriving a 14-year-old of his civil rights by using excessive force in a separate 2017 case. Chauvin is now serving both terms concurrently.

When Shapiro addressed the case in Tuesday’s podcast, he conceded at the outset that pardoning Chauvin would be “incredibly controversial.” “But I think it’s absolutely necessary,” he said.

Chauvin shouldn’t have been convicted of murder, Shapiro argued, in part asserting some of what Chauvin’s defense attorney had claimed at trial: that Floyd died of factors other than Chauvin’s intervention, including preexisting health conditions.

Shapiro also argued “there was massive overt pressure on the jury to return a guilty verdict regardless of the evidence.” Floyd’s death and Chauvin’s conviction, Shapiro said, “led to vast chaos and it led to the destruction of racial comity in the United States.”

The White House declined to comment Thursday on whether Trump is considering a pardon for Chauvin.

Response to an older comment made on one of my posts: Yes Taiwan has a powerful lobby in poorer countries that tend to be borderline if not outright US vassals. Guatemala is one of them. Think AIPAC but on a much smaller scale. It’s still enough to make Guatemala submit. China does not have much of a foothold here and doesn’t really do much to bribe us, if at all. Taiwan is known to have an aggressive lobby in the Pacific Island countries too.

jdpon chuck joins the crusade against the dollar