Majorityrights News > Category: Globalisation

Prior to his arrest in 2003 Khodorkovsky (in photo with first Russian President Boris Yeltsin) funded several Russian parties, including the Communist Party, most of which were in competition with each other. Voltairenet.org

EURACTIV.com with Reuters, 18 Feb 2020:

A Dutch appeals court on Tuesday (18 February) overturned the annulment of a $50 billion award to shareholders in the now defunct Russian oil giant Yukos, a surprise ruling 13 years after the assets came under control of the Kremlin.

Yukos Oil went bankrupt in 2006 after its former chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky fell out with Russian leader Vladimir Putin and the government began demanding billions of dollars in back taxes that ultimately resulted in its being expropriated by the state.

Tuesday’s verdict reinstates a decision by The Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) ordering the Russian state to compensate shareholders in the company once headed by fallen oligarch Khodorkovsky. That decision had been overturned in April 2016 by The Hague District Court.

Russia’s Justice Ministry has said it will challenge the appeals court ruling at the Dutch Supreme Court.

“The (lower) court ruled in favour of the Russian Federation, but the court of appeal in The Hague today ruled that the court’s verdict is incorrect. This means that the arbitral award is again in force,” the appeals court said in a statement.

Most of Yukos’ assets were absorbed by the Kremlin’s flagship oil producer Rosneft, and its former owners have for years been trying to recover their possessions.

Legal proceedings seeking damages have been brought by GML, formerly known as Group Menatep Ltd., which held around 70% of shares in Yukos.

Rule of law

Tim Osborne, GML’s chief executive, said the latest ruling was “a victory for the rule of law.”

“The independent courts of a democracy have shown their integrity and served justice. A brutal kleptocracy has been held to account,” he said.

The PCA had ruled in July 2014 that four plaintiffs – not including Khodorkovsky – were entitled to compensation for the loss of their holdings, enabling them to go after Russian state assets.

France, Belgium seize Russian assets to compensate Yukos shareholders

Russian government assets in France and Belgium including bank accounts have been frozen in a row over compensation for shareholders of defunct oil giant Yukos, officials and a claimant representative said yesterday (18 June).

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DAILYKENN.com—Had a 29-year-old black woman been shot to death by her white boyfriend, it would likely be national news. Had the victim been white and the suspect black, the story would be limited to local media and race would not be mentioned.

Cassia Renee Duval, 29, was seven months pregnant when she was found shot to death. Her unborn baby was also killed. Arrested is James Isaac Jones Jr. 33. Jones and Duval lived together, reports say.

Why was she killed? We can only speculate. Is it because she mated with an individual with low impulse control, low intelligence, low affective empathy, and psychopathic tendencies? We can’t say for certain.

Why do you think she was killed?

Read more here.

Visegrad24@visegrad24

Yesterday, Hungarian PM Viktor #Orban and Slovak PM Peter #Pellegrini inspected the Hungary’s border fence with Serbia

Orban spoke about a sharp rise in illegal border crossings and told Pellegrini:

“It’s forbidden to say so in Europe, but this is an organised invasion”

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The Corporation – Feature, Documentary

The civet, a mammal in the mongoose family, was a carrier of another coronavirus — SARS. But it turned out in that instance that bats were the original source of the virus.

New Coronavirus ‘Won’t Be The Last’ Outbreak To Move From Animal To Human

NPR, 5 Feb 2020:

The new strain of coronavirus that has killed hundreds of people in China and caused a travel lockdown of some 56 million people has been classified as a “zoonosis” because of the way it spreads from animals to humans.

Science writer David Quammen says the virus, which the World Health Organization last week declared a global health emergency, is just the latest example of how pathogens that start in animals are migrating to humans with increasing frequency — and with deadly consequences.

“When there’s an animal host, then it becomes much, much more difficult to eradicate or even control an infectious virus,” Quammen says. “This novel coronavirus — whether or not it turns out to be a huge catastrophe, or something we can control — one thing we know is that it won’t be the last.”

As China’s Coronavirus Cases Rise, U.S. Agencies Map Out Domestic Containment Plans

Quammen’s 2012 book, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, traces the rise of different zoonoses around the world, including AIDS, Ebola and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). He says that one of the first questions that arise with any zoonosis pertains to the animal host: How is it being transmitted?

In the case of the new coronavirus, researchers believe that the virus may have originated with horseshoe bats in China and then could have possibly spread to other animals — which people then ate.

In Quarantined Wuhan, Hospital Beds For Coronavirus Patients Are Scarce

Quammen notes that humans are the common link in all zoonoses: “We humans are so abundant and so disruptive on this planet. ... We’re cutting the tropical forests. We’re building work camps in those forests and villages. We’re eating the wildlife,” he says. “You go into a forest and you shake the trees — literally and figuratively — and viruses fall out.”

Quammen says that the new coronavirus should be taken seriously. But he also warns against panic: “Being educated and understanding it and being ready to respond and support government response is very useful. Panicking and putting on your surgical mask every time you go on a subway ride, an airplane, is not nearly as useful.”

Interview highlights

On wild animal “wet” markets where viruses can mix

Spillover

When I was in southern China researching [Spillover], only briefly, I got to see some of these markets where all forms of wild animals were on sale. ... By the time I got there, [these sorts of markets] had gone underground ... suppressed after the SARS outbreak. But then [the markets] gradually came back ... allowed to continue again and proliferate when this new virus began.

If you go into a live market, you see cages containing bats stacked upon cages containing porcupines, stacked upon cages containing palm civets, stacked upon cages containing chickens. And hygiene is not great, and the animals are defecating on one another. It’s just a natural mixing-bowl situation for viruses. It’s a very, very dangerous situation. And one of the things that it allows is ... the occurrence of “amplifying hosts” [a species that rapidly replicates copies of the virus and spreads them].

On the theory that palm civets were “amplifier hosts” for the 2003 SARS outbreak

From Vector To Zoonotic: A Glossary For Infectious Diseases

The civet is a type of mammal that belongs to the family of mongooses. But it’s a medium-sized animal, and it is both captured from the wild for food and captive-bred and raised for food, and it was the first big suspect in the SARS outbreak. It was found that some of the people who got sick very early on had eaten butchered civet. And they tested some civets, and they found evidence of the virus. They found antibodies or fragments of DNA or RNA in these civets, suggesting that they had been infected with the virus. And that didn’t prove they were the reservoir host, but it made them the No. 1 suspect, until a couple of Chinese scientists did further work and they established that, in fact, the virus was not living permanently in the civet population in the wild or in captivity. It [had] a different reservoir host. It was living in bats and had passed, presumably, at a market somewhere. It had passed from a bat into one or more civets, and they became the amplifier host. ...

Thousands of civets in captivity were butchered and electrocuted and smothered and drowned in this first, panicked blind reaction in China to the SARS outbreak.

On why bats are often hosts for viruses

Bats are implicated in what seems to be more than their share [of zoonoses]. There are a lot of different species of bats. One-quarter of all mammal species are bats. But there are other things [special] about them — including aspects of their immune system. There have been some discoveries lately that bat immune systems are “downregulated” in a certain way that allows for the metabolic stresses of being a mammal that flies. And the downregulating of the immune system to avoid overreaction to those stresses seems, perhaps, also to create an environment in which viruses are more tolerated in bats than in other mammals.

On how coronaviruses have evolved through different species

How Hong Kong Beat SARS: Lessons Learned

One of the reasons SARS could adapt from bat to civet to human is the fact that it is a coronavirus, which is a group of viruses that are very readily adaptable. Experts call that intrinsic evolvability. Their rate of mutation is very high when they copy themselves. Their genome contains a lot of mistakes, and that represents mutations that are sort of the random raw material for Darwinian evolution. So viruses that have high mutation rates are able to evolve quickly and adapt quickly. And coronaviruses ... have that characteristic.

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