5: What Young New Zealanders Would Spend Their Free Money On
The Opportunities Party wants to give all 18 to 23-year-olds $200 a week, no questions asked.
In the pre-election scramble for media oxygen, New Zealand’s political parties are dropping policies all over the place. The Opportunities Party’s (TOP) announcement that it intended to provide young adults aged between 18 and 23 with $200 every week did exactly what it was intended to do: cut through and get the country talking about a different economic model.
TOP, and leader Gareth Morgan, are proponents of the Unconditional Basic Income (UBI), and this was the third announcement pertaining to it, following earlier policies aimed at babies and the elderly. The weekly $200 would replace existing benefits, including the student allowance, which currently tops out at $177.03 after tax. It would mean an extra $10,000 a year for those eligible, and would cost the country $3.39 billion per annum, which Morgan says he would fund by cancelling National’s tax cuts. “This is a revolution,” Morgan says. “We are saying that people in an affluent society are owed the ability to live their life with dignity.”
VICE wanted to know what those affected by the policy made of it, so we hit the streets of Auckland to find out.
Vice News
4: Trump’s son-in-law Kushner denies Russia collusion
Senior White House adviser Jared Kushner has said he had four contacts with Russian officials, but denied any collusion to help his father-in-law Donald Trump to win the US presidency.
In a statement released on Monday, Kushner described contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and other Russian officials as normal in his former role as the campaign liaison to foreign governments.
“I did not collude, nor know of anyone else in the campaign who colluded, with any foreign government,” he said in the statement.“I had no improper contacts. I have not relied on Russian funds to finance my business activities in the private sector.”
Aljazeera
Here’s what Scaramucci said about Citizens United, himself, and Cooperman:
Scaramucci, the organizer of the dinner, told me the next day that the guests had witnessed the “activation” of a “sleeper cell” of hedge-fund managers against Obama. “That’s what you see happening in the hedge-fund community, because they now have the power, because of Citizens United, to aggregate capital into political-action committees and to influence the debate,” he said. “The president has a philosophy of disdain toward wealth creation. That’s just obvious, O.K.? We talked about it all night.” He later said, “If there’s a pope of this movement, it’s Lee Cooperman.”
The Intercept
2: Criminologist Phil Stinson: Police Shoot & Kill About 1,000 People Every Year in U.S.
As outrage grows in Minneapolis over the killing of an unarmed white Australian woman, we look at the staggering number of fatal police shootings in the United States. For more, we speak with Philip Stinson, criminologist and associate professor at the Criminal Justice Program at Bowling Green State University.Democracy Now
1: Newly Declassified Documents Confirm U.S. Backed 1953 Coup in Iran Over Oil Contracts
Newly declassified State Department documents show oil contracts played a key role in the U.S.-backed 1953 coup in Iran that led to the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. “What the documents show is actually the importance of oil in the coup,” says Professor Ervand Abrahamian. “The conventional wisdom is, oh, it was all the Cold War scare, communism. But here you see, actually, very occasionally, when Eisenhower intervenes in a discussion, it’s about question of oil contracts and so on and how nationalization would disrupt the whole international framework and would be a threat to U.S. interests, oil interests, elsewhere.”Democracy Now
