Good news for Sweden.

I doubt these rights experts have any F16s and tanks at the ready.

This is the synagogue in question: https://historicsynagogueseurope.org/browser.php?mode=set&id=15909

The report summary says that they expect a further fall in trade with sanctioning countries that will however be offset by a rise in trade with non-sanctioning countries.

Developments like this are relevant I suppose: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/york-gorging-fuel-made-illicit-173455649.html

Russia itself still expects a 0.8 percent decline in 2023.

> That false information was further used to accuse Sweden of bias and hypocrisy.

Yeah, that was quite irresponsible from Israeli authorities. I understand why they wanted it to be perceived as them having more clout with the Swedish government than Erdogan and also they wanted to get all the praise for preventing that event from taking place, but those statements from Israeli Foreign Ministry and ambassador painted a completely wrong picture of how it went down.

The only way the Swedish government was involved is that the Swedish Prime Minister apparently got into direct contact with the organizer and asked him to rethink his plan, but it ultimately was the organizer's own decision.

> The [Israeli] Foreign Ministry announced on Thursday that it was able to cancel a planned demonstration in Sweden in front of the Israeli embassy in Stockholm, which was supposed to include the burning of a Torah scroll. Yet in a conversation with The Jerusalem Post, a Swedish-Israeli rabbi shared that it was actually leadership from the local Swedish Muslim community that assisted in persuading the organizer to cancel the provocative act.

> According to Swedish media, an Egyptian writer who lives in Sweden recently submitted a request for this demonstration to the local police.

> He told DN that he was advised against carrying out his plans by representatives from the Islamic League in Stockholm's mosque, and was quoted saying that “they [the Islamic League] say it is against Islam and I wouldn’t be representing Muslims when burning a copy of the Torah outside the Israeli embassy.”

> According to the report, he was also approached by Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, who asked him to “tone it down.” According to Rabbi HaCohen, a further meeting with the author and Muslim leadership took place, through the mediation of Amanah, in which he decided to cancel the request entirely.

> The 34-year-old explained to DN that he is “tired of his tax money going towards protecting right-wing extremist Rasmus Paludan's repeated Quran burnings,” most recently outside the Turkish embassy. His actions are intended to claim that Swedish law is hypocritical.

> But without the upgrades it will shut down, driving the cost up for consumers.

That's a good thing though. It makes alternatives more competitive.

No need to subsidize fossil fuels for that. Just give people a transport premium or a heating premium and let them decide for themselves how they want to use it. Forcing people to buy fossil fuels so they can benefit is exactly the wrong way to go about it.

Phasing out government subsidies for fossil fuels should be completely non-controversial.

It's crazy that we still subsidize climate-damaging actions.

It's already taken 9 years. It could easily take another decade.

Only by about 7 percent compared to 2019, the last pre-pandemic year.

> While Switzerland and Austria were the main export destinations, in a notable shift Germany exported more to France than it imported as the nuclear-reliant country grappled with technical problems at its reactors that curtailed production.

> Germany's export surplus grew to 27.5 terawatt hours (TWh) compared with 20.8 TWh a year earlier, according to utility industry association BDEW - in tune with a handful of other recent comments.

If a new variant emerges, it will find its way. Selective travel bans never had any effect. Not for the original strain, not for the Delta variant coming from India, not for the Alpha variant coming from the UK, not for the Omicron variant coming from South Africa.

Besides, new variants can emerge everywhere.

At the moment, it's more likely that immune-evasive variants emerge elsewhere than in China. If you don't understand why that is, read this:

> However, with the virus given relative free reign to spread in an immune naive population, the pressure for it to develop evasive qualities – the sort which could bypass our body’s protective defences – does not really exist.

> “A variant borne of high transmission in a naive population will not be immune evasive,” said Meaghan Kall, an epidemiologist at the UK Health Security Agency, on Twitter. “It does not need to be. It will not succeed in a population with lots of immunity of different flavours.

> She pointed out that an immune-evasive variant could realistically emerge over time from any country with high levels of transmission and the presence of immunosuppressed individuals, who are capable of maintaining an infection for months on end.

From https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/why-imposing-travel-restrictions-against-china-waste-time/

Do you close all the gates or only one gate?

Estimates are that about 10 percent of the UK population currently has COVID. There are of course a lot more flights between the UK and Canada than between China and Canada, since China still has a lot of restrictions in place, so the total number of infected arriving from the UK is likely higher than the total number of infected arriving from China. Also, the ones arriving from the UK are carrying a newer variant while the ones from China are carrying one of two older variants a lot of Canadians already have immunity for.

Pointless unless you ban flights from everywhere. The virus is still circulating everywhere and a potential new variant with an evolutionary advantage will also be everywhere in no time unless everyone bans flights from China.

The virus variants circulating in China (BF.7 and BA.5.2) are actually not as problematic for us as the ones circulating in the US and Europe for example (BQ.1 and XXB) because we've all been exposed to them in summer already..

"Come on, guys. Now's our last chance. Those infection surges and health care system collapses looked so much fun when the others had it. We cannot let that opportunity to fuck up our citizens' lives slip by."

Daily Mail is the NY Post equivalent. The Torygraph has a right-wing bias, but isn't yellow press. It's more like the Wall Street Journal.

This is a good in-depth article on whether it makes sense to impose travel restrictions or not:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/why-imposing-travel-restrictions-against-china-waste-time/

Lays out the arguments of both sides.

Last I heard the CCP said they estimate 80% of Beijing residents are infected and there are millions of new infections across the country every day. They don’t give any exact numbers because they've lost track and have given up on testing everyone.

They're never gonna be 100% transparent, but they do share a bit more now when it comes to the most important data: genetic sequences

Financial Times: China steps up Covid variant monitoring as countries impose entry curbs - Genomic data-sharing on winter wave increases while fears mount over Beijing’s transparency

> The agency has asked Chinese officials to share more genetic sequencing data, as well as data on hospitalizations, deaths and vaccinations.

They have stepped up when it comes to sharing of geneting sequencing data:

> National, provincial and private health-care authorities in China have provided nearly 1,000 genetic sequences from infected patients to GISAID in the past five days, said Chief Executive Officer Peter Bogner.

> China is also ramping up efforts to track mutations, with the recent upload of sequencing data comparing with just 25 samples submitted in the previous month, he said.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-30/china-has-no-new-covid-variants-as-sequencing-efforts-strengthen

Sure it could, but just by meeting Putin? Others have done that this year without much controversy, for example Kazakhstan's President and Armenia's PM.

Xi is already responsible for a currently ongoing genocide. How much worse could his reputation get by meeting Putin?