Bolivia's New Puppet Regime Wastes No Time Aligning With US Foreign Policy.

Australia's official war historians, including the one appointed to publish an honest official history of Australia's participation in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, call on the government to permit the publication of that work.

"We have spent most of this year writing about the death of people on our streets [in the UK]. This crisis has simple, practical solutions, and everyone cares about it. Why isn’t it an election priority?"

In the long term, the main reason people die while homeless is that they can't afford a place to live. The Labour Party has made that an election priority. Likewise providing everyone with enough food, and increasing wages and working conditions.

Tory cruelty (including trickle-down policies) makes a small fraction of people homeless, but it causes suffering and even death to a much larger part of the people. I think Labour is wise to prioritize the broader injustice rather than its worst-case symptom, especially since success in these goals will as a natural result save most people from ever being homeless.

The UK government has privatized handling of some visa applications, which gives the company a chance to gouge people for the extra price of "premium" service, simply by making the regular service faulty or unbearable.

No modern company would bid to run a privatized service and neglect such opportunities. If its executives failed to figure them into the business plan, they would be dismissed for neglecting the interests of the shareholders.

Which is one of the reasons why no government service should ever be privatized.

The biometric residency permits raise other issues of oppression and tracking, but that is independent of privatization.

Senator Warren proposes to take a partial step towards Medicare for All first, rather than push to make it universal all at once.

This is a question of strategy. Taking universal Medicare for All as the goal, is Warren's strategy likely to achieve more of it or less of it? I am not sure.

The arguments in the article are valid, but there can be an advantage on the other side, too. If each American opts to switch to Medicare for All after the option becomes available, the other medical plans could wither and cease to oppose universal Medicare for All, so the second step could be a walkover.

However, whether that can occur would depend on details, and on court cases, and the private plans would fight to shape that terrain so that they could hold on.

Ultimately my conclusion is that Warren made a bad choice. It might make sense in 2000 or 2001 to take this partial step as a sort of deal with the adversary, but it is a mistake to compromise with the adversary's demands other than as part of a deal that gets you an advance. Whatever compromise you make in that way will be used by them to shift the starting point of the negotiations, to your disadvantage.