Okay, well thank you Patrick for that presentation. Thank you everyone for coming out. I am just now coming back, I think many of you have probably heard of Jordan Peterson. He has what's called the ARC. So he, well first of all, there's the World Economic Forum and with Klaus Schwab who looks like a James Bond villain if you haven't seen him and he really does. If you don't know who I'm talking about, go look it up. I'm not exaggerating for hyperbole here. And so he, so the World Economic Forum has been like this villain for several years now in terms of like people who are on the right are conservative or libertarian in terms of trying to like centralize financial and political power and so forth. And so Jordan Peterson's event, it was called the ARC, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. And I was just over in London for that and then came here. So my point is that we really do appreciate you folks coming out here. It's to say, oh yeah, what are you gonna do on Saturday? Oh, I'm gonna go to someplace and watch for several hours of people putting up graphs here of financial things. That's not what a lot of people wanna do on a Saturday. So we do appreciate you coming out here. And again, what they were doing over there in London is a similar thing that they were realizing, for a lot of long time people were saying, somebody ought to do something. And so that's partly what they were trying to do over there. I will say like, partly what we're doing here is like the future and the case for optimism or pessimism. It was interesting over there because they were trying to build it as, hey, we're building alternative institutions and things like instead of us just complaining, let's go do something. And yet, Jordan and the opening talk, they picked that acronym ARC for obvious illusion to NOAA. And so I was thinking, yes, you're gonna survive but they seem to be conceding that everything's gonna get wiped out but maybe enough of us will survive to rebuild. So I don't know if that's supposed to be optimistic or pessimistic. Last thing I'll mention is, and this is true, so I was tweaking my slides last night in the hotel room and then I just went to go, so what I'm speaking about is the Fed and the fate of the US dollar and I'll go ahead and advance. So I'm gonna be speaking, I think Murray talked a little about the inverted yield curve a bit. So I am going to, as one of the things discussed briefly as part of what I'm gonna talk to you guys about, about what I think's coming in 2024 if there's gonna be a recession. And so then when I saw that, oh, wait a minute, Patrick's going right before me and his topic is explicitly, are we headed for a recession in 2024? And I didn't know what his answer was gonna be, right? And so I thought it's gonna be awkward if he gets up here and says one thing to you guys and then I come up and say thanks and I say the exact opposite. And so I was thinking, should I text him in court? But then I thought, no, even if that does happen, no matter what happens in 2024, we can go and selectively pull video for our ads to show Mises Fellow predicted what happened in 2024. So as we'll see, fortunately it actually happened like, because this is what a common, like if you had two astronomers and they said, hey, where is this comet gonna be in the sky next year on this date? Clearly like there's a fact of the matter, whereas with, as you see with economists that's more, we don't just say yes or no, it's more, well, if this thing happens, then this is what will happen. Whereas if this happened, and partly that's because economists are slippery, we're intelligent, we know how job security is. No, no matter what happens, I can say, I said that. That's what I said. But the other thing too though, just joking aside, is that in the social sciences as opposed to like saying, where's a comet gonna be if it comes to a recession, it in the Austrian school incorporates this, I think better than other schools have thought people have free will, like systems are very complex when you involve millions of human beings. And so that's partly why you can't treat the economy like just as this mechanism that can be controlled by a few smart people, twist and dials and such. Okay, so having said all that though, I will try to give you more than just generalities in terms of what I think is coming in store. All right, so this is an outline of what we're going over and I don't have too much time, so let me just jump right into it here. Okay, so the inverted yield curve, Jonathan mentioned, the first Newman mentioned when he gave his talk, I have a book, I think there's some copies out there called Understanding Money Mechanics. If you don't want to get the physical book, everything from the Mises Institute is available, the PDF is for free online. But I go through this more specifically with, I'm gonna have to go fast here for you folks, just because I got so much I want to cover. But I think this is a pretty important issue and if you want to understand more, I do cover it in detail in one of the chapters in that book. So the, unfortunately, just in case you guys don't really, we have a little issue that a lot of these charts, one thing is, many of you might be wondering, who is this guy Fred and why are they stealing all of his charts? All right, so this guy, it stands for the St. Louis Federal Reserve, that that's where Fred comes from. And the reason we economists tend to use this a lot is because they have a lot of the official data sets, like from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Bureau of Labor Statistics, so forth, all kinds of data in their archives, and then they have a very convenient charting tools. And one of the things that they do with their charts and the reason economists like them is they have vertical strips showing when the recessions occurred. So what this is the inverted yield curve and what that means, I don't want to, I know some of you might not have a finance background, it looks at the difference in the yield on certain maturities of government bonds. So the one that I'm using here is the difference between the 10 year yield, so meaning if you lend money to the federal government and you buy a US Treasury that's 10 years in maturity length, what's the annual interest rate that you're getting on that for lending them the money for 10 years? So that's the 10 year yield and then compared to the three month yield, right? So you're just lending money to the government for three months, then they're giving you your principal back plus the interest they pay along the way. So the difference in those rates is what the spread is and normally at least since World War II that has been upward sloping, right? So in normal times, the yield on a 10 year bond is higher than on a three month bill, okay?  You're gonna have to be promised a higher interest rate even per year to give your money to the government for 10 years as opposed to just three months. And so typically the yield is higher than 10 years but there are occasions when that flips the yield curve inverts and the yield on the three month is actually higher than the 10 year. And so in this chart, this black line is the zero point. So that's showing when these things go negative that means the yield on the three month is higher than the 10 year. And every time that happens where the yield, the spread is negative, soon thereafter there's a recession, okay? And now it's not merely just looking at correlations here. This actually, that's partly what I do in the book, Understanding Money Mechanics or the chapter on this topic is I explain why I think this dovetails very nicely. This relationship, like why should that be? It dovetails nicely with Ludwig van Mies's explanation of why the boom bus cycle occurs, okay? So specifically, in the Massassian story, I'm gonna be real quick here, of course, the idea is that the central bank, if there is a central bank, because his theory even worked before central banks, but when there is a central bank, it kind of leads the pack, it inflates, it floods the market with new liquidity that's not backed up by genuine saving that pushes down interest rates below what you might call the natural level. So they're artificially low interest rates and then that causes a boom. And so in that kind of framework, and also a critical thing is that the central bank has more control over short rates than long rates. So when we say the Fed cuts rates, really we have in mind like short term rates. And so in that kind of environment, that's gonna push the three month yield low. So the spread is normal, that's positive. And that's a boom period. But then prices start rising, the central bank gets nervous, they slam on the brakes, they tighten and they hike rates. But again, that's short rates. And so there's the three month zooms above the 10 year and then there's a crash. Okay, so I'm explaining how like, so Mises wasn't talking about yield curve spreads per se, but I'm just explaining if you believed in Mises's story, but then decomposes it will actually, there's multiple interest rates, what would that look like in terms of the yield curve? It actually fits this pattern. Okay, and so if you've bought that story, one major line of evidence as to why I do think there's gonna be a recession in 2024 is that you can see like, you know, going negative. So here, this is a very negative spread and it's starting to bounce back.  Okay, so again, assuming this thing pops back up, you would expect there to be a recession pretty soon after. So for that reason, if you put a gun to my head, there's gonna be a recession in 2024, I think there would be. Also, as Murray said though, that doesn't mean in real time they're gonna say, oh, there's a recession, that there's always a lag with that stuff. So like it's after the fact, when they look back and say, when did this recession occur? I think they're gonna say it happened in the first or second quarter of 2024. Okay, one thing I'll be real quick on because this is more of an inside baseball one that I'll move on to the more general stuff, but for those who are curious, this is a well-known, this inverted yield curve predicting a recession. That's a well-known phenomenon. It's not that Austrians have a lock on that, but what is interesting is when mainstream economists explain why this is, they give a totally different explanation than what you just heard from me. So Paul Krugman writing about the yield curve says, oh, the reason it inverts before a recession is because investors know a recession's coming because they have access to the real world on the ground data, the people in the markets with their own money at risk are gonna know this stuff more than Joe Schmoe. And so they see a recession coming. They forecast, oh, during the recession, the Fed's gonna cut rates. And so that's why long rates through arbitrage get pushed below short rates.  But if that were true, when the yield curve inverts, it would be because the 10 year goes below the three month. But here I'm decomposing it. I'm showing you the red line is the three month and the blue is the 10. You can see when there's that mismatch, it's because the red shoots above. That's why the yield curve inverts. It's not that the 10 year plummets, it's that the three month shoots way up. So again, consistent with the Austrian story that it's the Fed tightening that causes the business cycle to tip over. Okay, so again, we have some repetition, but that's good at showing that we actually are independent scholars here coming to the same types of conclusions. I think Jonathan and maybe one other speaker had the same slide. This is showing remittances from the Federal Reserve to the Treasury. Okay, so it's a nice little relationship. The federal government gave the statutory authority to create the central bank back in 1913. They also, the year that they had the income tax, not a good year for many of us in this audience. And part of the way that system worked is the Federal Reserve, yes, it can create money out of thin air as we say. It can buy bonds, they earn interest on that. And so in normal times, the Fed earns a profit, right? It shouldn't be hard to do when you can create money electronically. You should be able, but actually, the Fed recently messed that up. The Fed is literally losing money. So normally just to finish the train of thought, the Fed after it pays its bills and it does give dividends to its owners. So the private banks literally own the Fed. Some of you may not know that, but some people think that's weird where they hear it. It'd be like if Pfizer literally owned the FDA. And so yes, that's true. So once the Fed pays its official creditors, there's dividend payments and such, it usually it has money left over and then it remits that to the Treasury. And so that's what this lineup here was, for all these going back, so I think this, I know you can't see it, this starts in 2011. That's what that is, first quarter of 2011. So you can see how that was the norm with all the QE and everything. When the Fed expanded its balance sheet, it's sitting on all these bonds, generating interest, and then the Fed would pocket that, again, pay for the electricity, pay the staff economists and everything, say how great the Fed is, and then remit the balance to the Treasury. So in a sense, federal spending was a little bit, was that much higher without having to raise taxes or borrow more money to that amount. And then in recent years, it's plummeted. And so why is that happening? Again, some earlier speakers alluded to it is because the Fed has effectively been borrowing short and lending long. And so when you're in a situation like that, and then short-term interest rates zoom up, whereas long-term rates don't respond as much, you get caught. And so the Fed has effectively been paying a lot more for its funds in terms of what it's earning on its assets or its liabilities in terms of what compared to what's earning on its assets. Okay, and so that fundamental mismatch is what's happened here. So don't worry, the Fed's not gonna close up shop. They're not gonna say, oh, it was a good run and thanks everybody, we'll see our way out. That's not what they're doing. Again, they can create money electronically.  But what's interesting is they saw this coming. And so Jonathan and I on a recent Human Action podcast episode, if you go to mises.org in the podcast section, Jonathan and I have a podcast there where I should be clear, I have a podcast, I let him join me sometimes, just to be clear. And but fairly recently, you can go through and it was within like the last six or seven episodes talking about the Fed's trillion dollar loss, something like that, you go and click on it. And we go through a lot of the specifics there, but we mentioned that one QE started, right? So after 2008, I forget the exact year off the top of my head, it was like 2010, 2011. They made an announcement, like they buried it in the footnotes of one of their press releases where the Fed said, oh, from now on, we're gonna handle the accounting this way in terms of how we report stuff. And effectively, I'm getting to the punchline here, what they said was that if we owe the treasury, if it turns out that instead of us having a surplus that we normally remit to the treasury, which if you think of a balance sheet, would show up as a liability to the treasury. That's the way they would report it. You got your assets, so from your guys point of view, the assets are over here, the liabilities and shareholder equity over here. So the assets are whatever they are.  And then over here, they've got liabilities. And so from the Fed's point of view, like currency and circulation is technically listed as a liability, just going back to gold standard days. And then one of them would be, oh, if we're supposed to remit whatever, 70 billion to the treasury, they would list that for that period as a liability. And then whatever the difference was, would be the shareholder equity or the capital in the Fed. And so they made it a rule change saying if it should turn out that instead of us like having a profit of 70 billion and then listing that as an asset or as a liability that we owe the treasury, if we lost money, what we're gonna do is we're not gonna take that off of our capital. Instead, we're gonna list it as a negative liability owed to the treasury. Okay, so for those of you who like run your own business, that would be a neat trick to have. That if you had a big loss one period that would have wiped out your capital and so you would have been insolvent or loosely some people might say bankrupt, those terms are different technically, but where your liabilities are higher than your assets, that means you're insolvent. That's not a good thing to do if you're a business owner. But the Fed prevented that from happening because they said, no, no, what we're gonna do is, again, if the assets drop 100 billion, you gotta show that somehow over here and the way they were gonna do it is list negative 100 billion owed to the treasury. So that's the way, as opposed to making our capital or shareholder equity go down by 100 billion. So they announced that years ago and it kind of flew under the radar and then like zero hedge, I think, picked it up and said, you know what this means? I think they're realizing all these bonds they're buying under the QE rounds. They realize when they start normalizing and raising interest rates, they're gonna have huge losses, at least, you know, mark to market on those assets and maybe they're getting ready so that, because it would be awkward if the Fed were technically insolvent and had negative equity, right? So maybe just to avoid that awkwardness. So anyway, we speculated at the time, that's why they might be doing it and that's what they're, you know, they are using that mechanism now. And so this just to give you an example, this is from a Mercatus study that came out in, I think early 2023. So I think the numbers have moved a little bit but I think, you know, the spirit's still the same. But what this is showing right there is saying the change in the market valuation of the Fed's assets, right? So when interest rates rise, the value of an existing bond goes down. And so as the Fed has raised interest rates, that's caused lots of problems. Some earlier speakers were showing how like the treasury having to make interest payments on the outstanding debt, you know, as that gets rolled over, the higher rates is a problem. But among other implications, it means that, you know, the Fed sitting on trillions of dollars of bonds, fixed income assets. So as interest rates rise rapidly, the value of those goes down and it's lost about, you know, more than a trillion dollars in terms of that. Now, you might say, if you know how this stuff works, you might say, okay, but isn't that just kind of like a paper loss? If they just hold those bonds to maturity, who cares? It's worse than that. What this is showing is over the next from 2023 to 2032, how much less the Fed is going to remit to the treasury, it's got a present discounted value of $979 billion. Okay, so this is a real mismatch like money coming in and out. And I have to move on because there's more stuff I wanna cover here with you guys and run out of time. But part of what's going on is the Fed actually has to pay to keep its financing options open, right? It really is paying for its liquidity to then go and invest or its deposits. And so specifically the interest on reserves, if you're familiar with that is that the Fed in the fall of 2008 started paying the banks to keep the reserves parked at the Fed. That was a new policy at the time. And so that's why, and that's a very short-term thing. And so when the Fed raises rates, that's one of the main mechanisms that it uses. And so that's the sense in which the Fed basically like is borrowing 100 billion in short-term financing to then go invest in long-term bonds to keep that money parked at the Fed. They gotta raise the interest rate they pay on deposits or reserves, I should say. Okay, so that's what I mean. So it's not merely the Fed back in the day bought a bunch of bonds under QE2 and now the market value went down because they raised rates, but who cares, they're just gonna sit out. It's not like that. No, they actually are actively having to pay for the financing because if they didn't keep those short rates higher, if they let them go down, for example, then people would pull the reserves out and they would lend it out in the private sector and then price inflation would be higher than it is right now. So they kinda painted themselves into a corner. Okay, let me now pivot a little bit and just talk a little bit about the fate of the US dollar. So here's something coming from an IMF data. This is a Federal Reserve study, but we're relying on IMF data looking at of all the officially reported reserve currencies held by various central banks around the world. Ironically, the point of this Fed study was to say, don't worry, the US dollar is in good shape and their point was see, look at the most recent numbers, 58% of global forex reserves consist in US dollars. Well, okay, but their own chart shows that back in 2000, that was at 71%, okay? So again, just from the year 2000 to 2022, if you look globally, the central bank foreign exchange reserves, the percentage that used to be dollars was 71%, and just over that 22 years, that's dropped down to 58%. So it's not that the dollar's gonna crash next Thursday or something, but that is a pretty significant trend, and I think you're just gonna see that continue, especially as the US, whatever you think about Russia and Ukraine, the US was definitely using its status as holding the leading world's reserve currency to punish certain regimes that weren't doing what it wanted by just threatening and saying, okay, well, we're just gonna shut your banks out of the global system, right? And so a lot of countries that maybe aren't even ideological or don't care what they're more on the fence in terms of who we're gonna lie with, I think that's, they're realizing we don't wanna be so dependent on the US dollar because if Washington just decides to turn off our banks, we don't like being in that position. Okay, another element here, just to see how the trends have changed over time. So what I'm showing here is outstanding treasury debt held by the public, okay? So when the US government borrows money, lots of different institutions can buy those bonds, including the Federal Reserve, but also foreigners and also foreign central banks. And so what we're seeing here is the red line, this middle one, that's the total amount of outstanding US treasury debt held by all those various players. And you can see how like in the 2008 crisis, it started rising rapidly. And then here is, when the lockdown's COVID spending happened and it shoots way up. And so the green line is the amount of treasury debt held by foreigners. Okay, so you can see for a while, they kind of moved in lockstep, right? The pattern of that is similar. And it did rise a bit, but then around 2014, they kind of had enough, they threw in the towel and jumped again a little bit over here. But my point is you can see it kind of leveled off even as the treasury just kept issuing like crazy. And so what this blue line is showing is the percentage of total treasury debt held by foreigners. So you can see it piqued back here, which is like 2010. And then it's fallen rapidly. Okay, so up here, is it about 48%? I don't know if you can read that. It was about 48% of the total treasury debt was held by foreigners. And it's fallen pretty rapidly down to here. It's like about 30%, okay? It not that many years. So again, just showing if the treasury continues to borrow lots and lots of money over time, the amount held by foreigners is gonna keep dwindling, or the percentage at least, and more and more of it is just gonna be held domestically. So part of the narrative here, I make the case in more detail in Chronicles magazine, had me write an article that just, it's in this current issue that's out now on the fate of the dollar. Part of what I'm getting across is the US since the end of World War II with the so-called Bretton Woods system had enjoyed a special privilege where they could, the rest of the world was holding dollars instead of gold basically. So we could get away with things that other countries couldn't because we could just kind of run the printing press and other countries would send us cars and TVs and whatever in exchange for the dollars because they were holding the dollars as assets. But that era is coming to an end and that I think we're reaching the tipping point where the more dollars that are created or the more treasury debt that's created, it's not just gonna get absorbed by the rest of the world because they treated basically the same as gold. I think that that is no longer the case. And so no, if we issue more debt, it's gonna have the same consequences that happen when other countries do that, namely yields go way up and that makes their economy crash. Okay, another element just to show again some of these longer term trends that I don't think bode well for the fate of the dollar. So using the official numbers and you can put lots of asterisks here, but according to the official statistics, the US in terms of their gold reserves, back in 2000, they claimed they had 8,100 tons of gold that stayed basically constant through the last official amount they had in 2022, whereas China's official reserves in 2000, they report 395 and you could see those of quintipple to 2000. So officially China still has lower gold reserves than the US, but you can see how much it's gained. And so again, if part of the narrative I'm expressing to you is that I think we're moving away from the US being the lone superpower by a long shot to more of a multipolar world where, I'm not saying China's gonna be the global superpower next week, but I'm saying I think the US is gonna get knocked off of its pedestal and we're gonna have more of like a multipolar globe in the next 10 to 15 years, let's say. All right, so this is part of it. Also, if you listen to Tom Woods' podcast, recently he hit on a guest called Dominic Frisbee based in the UK and he has done the data on this. Frisbee's claim is that for one thing, these numbers are inflated, right? I think lots of you have heard that argument that among other things the Fed has resisted audits of its gold holdings because the claim is that they've been shorting the market and whatever and that they don't actually have that much gold there. As Murray was saying, move to Fort Knox and check to see if the gold is there. They probably wouldn't let him in the door. So that's one issue that maybe this 8,000 figure is not correct, maybe that's too high. And Dominic makes the case, he's looking at like mining data and other things that we have public access to. He thinks this number is way understated. He thinks that China actually has to have at least something like 16,000 tons of gold right now because we have good data on, from this point to this point of how much mining they've done and half of those companies are state owned, right? So that's kind of data, more micro level data to say this number has to be way bigger than that, which would fit like why would China be understating it? Well, if they're sitting on a lot of treasures, they don't want to crash the dollar, they kind of just want to sit in the corner getting stronger and stronger while the US implodes. That's what Dominic's theory is. That makes sense to me too, that the Chinese communists, I mean, they're commies so they don't have everything right, but they kind of like, they have a more long term view of things. They don't have to win elections the way US presidents do in the same way and they can have a longer term view and just be like, no, why don't we just keep, amassing gold and so forth and then we'll just let the US kind of further away its advantage. Okay, so what are my conclusions? That's a Caddyshack reference, I'm sure some of you, this is the theme where he goes, well, we're waiting. So I hesitated, I said, oh, should I put this up here? Because what if it's a younger crowd? No, I'm sure you guys all know what Caddyshack is. So just briefly here, I just got a minute left here. So I think, yeah, absent something major, I do think that, yeah, in line with historical trends, it would be very surprising, put it this way, if there's not a recession that begins in 2024, a lot of things will have to be updated to say, oh, a lot of these normal trends that had almost a perfect track record since World War II, the big asterisk when that totally didn't come through was in the year 2024, right? So again, it could happen just past performance as no indicator of future success, right? So that is possible, I'm not saying it's a guarantee, but to me, it's not just Austrian theory, there's a lot of conventional financial metrics and such in patterns that you can see out in the data that would not hold true if there isn't a recession that starts in 2024. Again, absent something, if Ali showed up and gave us all kinds of things that made free energy or something that could change it, but you get what I'm saying. Normal conventional things, I think, yeah, there's gonna be a recession in 2024. As the treasury, I mean, I didn't have time here to get into it just because I didn't wanna overload you with too many charts and such, but yeah, Jonathan showed some of the things normal, we're not being pessimistic, just normal baseline projections with the increase in Medicare and Social Security spending and things like that, interest on the debt, even if interest rates just kinda normalize a little bit, you're not forecasting catastrophes, the federal government is gonna just have to borrow so much more money going forward. And then as we've seen, I think the rest of the world is calling it quits, that they're not gonna absorb that. So I think all those trends push towards a displacement of the US dollar such that 10 years from now I don't think people are gonna be so casually referred to the dollars, the global reserve currency, I think it's gonna be obvious that it has lost that they sort of squandered that advantage that we had. So with that optimistic take, thanks everybody.


The report is really interesting because it gives a very high level understanding of what's happened in the advertising expenditure scenario in the last year and it gives some reasons, some indications of how things are going to pan out in the next year. So it's very useful for marketers who don't want to get totally immersed and drowned in too many numbers to get a very bird's eye view of what's happened and what is likely to happen. So it's very, very useful. As a marketer, I don't think it's about necessarily increasing spends. It is about increasing spends. But as I was saying in the panel, we are also a retail brand, so we spend a lot of money on the retail side of things and that is also something which is demanding a lot of money. So it's more about reallocation depending on what today's objective is. The marketing objective may have shifted from say two years back to now. A lot of it is today now on the journey of the consumer and spending money where the consumer needs to be reminded and not just about creating awareness. So that has changed and that therefore the marketing budget allocation is also going to change based on that. Very interesting discussion and brought to light some of the challenges of retail and building retail brands. I think there were some interesting and provocative questions on consistency of consumer experience in retail stores, the role of discounting and how does one really curb that beyond a point. So the whole idea of segmentation, does it work in retail consumers etc., very thought provoking discussion. I'm certainly taking back quite a few things for me to think of from this session.


Cwestiynau iswd yn ymgyrchion ymgyrchion 9.594.2 yn y cyfnod yn Gymru, felly mae eu cyfnod yn cyfnod yn 9.594 yn y cyfnod Richard Lochhead o'r Ymgyrchion ymgyrchion ymgyrchion ymgyrchion a'r wych i'r cyfnod yn cyfnod ymgyrchion. Mae cyfnod yn oed. Yr ymgyrchion ymgyrchion 9.594.2 yn y cyfnod yn Gymru, is yes, 32. No, 69. There were 21 abstentions. The amendment is therefore not agreed. The next question is that amendment 9594.1 in the name of Daniel Johnson, which seeks to amend motion 9594 in the name of Richard Lockhead on Scottish innovation strategy be agreed. Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed. Therefore, we'll move to a vote and members should cast their votes now. The vote is closed. The results of the vote on amendment 9594.1 in the name of Daniel Johnson is yes, 20. No, 97. There were three abstentions. The amendment is therefore not agreed. The third question is that motion 9594 in the name of Richard Lockhead on Scottish innovation strategy be agreed. Are we all agreed? The motion is therefore agreed. The final question is that motion 9607 in the name of Liam Kerr on motion of no confidence be agreed. Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed. Therefore, we will move to a vote and members should cast their votes now. The vote is closed. The result of the vote on motion 9607 in the name of Liam Kerr is yes, 55. No, 68. There were no abstentions. The motion is therefore not agreed. That concludes decision time. We will now move on to members' business in the name of Alexander Burnett. I ask members leaving the chamber to do so quietly.


GDE Online Applications for 2019 Admissions Open Joberg Goten Department of Education officially opens 2019 applications and urges parents to act swiftly. The Goten Department of Education has officially opened a 2019 online application system for grade 1 and 8 admissions, and the online application system is expected to close on May 28, 2018 at midnight. The department said the online application system is convenient for parents, as they can apply from their PC, mobile smartphones, or tablet at any time. Using the online system has made the applications process transparent and fair, thus eliminating manipulation and human indiscretions. Parents can check the status of the application by logging on to the system. This means that the department has a statistical view of data of all applications made, said the department. To curb the duplication and multiplication of profiles for one child, the system now recognizes children based on their ID numbers. We appeal to parents to safely keep their SMSES and other communication generated by the online system. That is profiles created to log on online, the list of documents requested, as well as offers of placement. Parents must, therefore, provide their own cell phone number to enable communication with the department. The department appealed to parents to apply online and on time, as placement is expected to start on July 18 and close on October 31 this year. Parents are urged to confirm or decline placement offers within seven days of receiving the offer, as it will fast track placement at the relevant schools. Failure to confirm or decline an offer will result in the offer being withdrawn. We are humbled by the overwhelmingly positive response from parents and promise to do everything possible to make the experience incident free, said the department. Parents are urged to visit www.gdeadmissions.gov.za to apply and follow the detailed step-by-step guideline on the GDE's admissions website. The department said that parents can apply for a maximum of five schools per child. Any parent who lacks access to the internet or requires face-to-face assistance is advised to visit one of the decentralized application centers for a community library. The department said it will operate 65 admissions centers across the 15 education districts.


I feel so lucky to even be here tonight. I feel so lucky to be nominated among these amazing artists shout out to my wife Ariana who is also nominated Thank you so much my incredible team Dave Myers shout out to young thug Thank you so much for being on this record. I love you guys los adoro muchísimas gracias Thank you


Cooper Union, what's happening with human rights around our world on ThinkTech Live, broadcasting from our downtown studio in Honolulu, Hawaii, Moana, New York. Today's episode is focusing on peace and human rights education for all. Humanity's New Year's resolution is Human Rights Education Article 19, Freedom of Expression for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Today I'm joined by two amazing guests and I'm very excited for them to share about the work that they do because peace and human rights education really does serve as one of the most important and imminent New Year's resolutions that must be prioritized and implemented in every school from kindergarten through community centers as well as be at the core of fall form policy for every nation. So human rights education is absolutely crucial as we go forward to ensure a better future for all. Merrill, can you share with us why this issue is so important in international human rights law and how the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, specifically Article 19, is central and core to the global arena? Well, if the children all over the planet as well as the grownups and the elderly people become aware that the EDHR was written and has been around for 75 years and congrats the depth of what that is for everybody conceptually and internally will be a better planet as a result. I think it's a very deep, very deep topic because how often do we individually think of the collective that everybody and the relationship we have to everybody and the equanimity of everybody and it's very critical that we learn to do that and become that could become the foundation for humanity of the counteracts, the divisiveness of many other cultural things. So I think vibrationally and I'm a musician of course so I'm into the vibrational. It's a very important vibration that we can collectively create for the whole for all of humanity and not just humanity. One of the things in my experience that happened was a meeting with a pastor Stephen Hamilton.  You want this to apply to nature as well. And so then we added the line for all creation as a result because we don't just want human rights for human beings. We want human rights for all of creation to honor the nature as well. That's a wonderful point and it's also some of the, it was actually the awarding of the Human Rights Award this year was actually to the coalition on December 10th to the group that organized for the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. So it went to Indigenous Peoples, Youth, Center for International Environmental Law, International New Treaty Council, many NGOs and people's movements that were focusing on the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. And of course we just wrapped up COP 28 and people are mobilizing for COP 29 in Azerbaijan. And another point that really is important with what you raised was how we see the rights of nature being enshrined in national courts and you even see the rights of rivers and Wanganui and Aotearoa and also the rights of mountains being declared and created. So really excellent to create this expansion but to make sure that we understand the interdependence especially when we see the world we live in today. Kirsten, can you expand a bit on that incredible introduction by our dear colleague there? I would love to. I love that we can expand kind of infinitely on the ADHR even with 30 articles which seems like a lot. After 75 years we just understand what an incredibly infinitely mind-able idea this is to continue to look for and explore what it really means to have rights and universally that everyone should have. But coming down to article 19 here, I have a lot of favorites and this is definitely among them where everyone has a right to freedom of opinion and expression. And it's very powerful especially with a lot of the politics that are going on right now. Not just governments who are wanting more and more control and authoritarianism but also businesses and corporations that need to have their idea and their way of expressing things out there in order to survive what we're really talking about is the survival of human beings. And when we come back down to the idea that human beings all have the right to freedom of opinion and expression, that is just the beginning because it asks us to wonder what opinion is and what expression is. We have a lot of people in the world right now who believe that opinions are facts and everybody has a right to their own opinion but not to change the facts. And in terms of expression, it's like who has the right to express their thoughts, their feelings, their ideas. So Merrill and I are both artists which is why we really gravitate to this particular article because that's the work that we do is trying to express things that are more than that are more than someone's agenda. Wonderful. Maybe we can look at first what inspired you Merrill to care about this issue and some of the first campaigns you're involved in around Article 19. Well, I had never heard of the UDHR until I was 33 years old. And fellow, I'll always remember Dr. Carl Schmidhausler called me up one day, he goes, hey, do you have anything for human rights? And I had never heard of it. So I said, I don't. But I have a lot of peace music. Why don't you come over to my house? We can talk about it. I'll show you what I have. We can talk about what you're looking for. And he was in a hurry to get to another meeting when he left. And I said, by the way, what is this human rights thing? And he goes, oh, you know, the right to have food and shelter and education. And I go, I don't know. And I was 33 years old. So what happened later was my dad and I went to the Nutley Public Library and researched and found the document in the somewhere in the library. And he paid 10 cents a page to copy it. And I had this document in my piano bench for several years. And then I put it up on the where you put the sheet music and look at it and think about it. And it was like, how could anybody set this thing to music? It was a big dilemma. It was a real challenge because it's all legalistic things in the writing of it. But I was inspired to write Every Man, Woman and Child because I sort of boiled it down into how do you put this in a simple ballot? We hold these truths only we can make more evident. It's like it's in us and it's up to us to bring it forward, which there you go. If it's in us and we know it innately and only we can make it more evident, that's expression. We can bring it forward from within ourselves. Every living soul is worthy of a deep respect. And that's what I wrote. So it just seemed like very obvious truth and yet not obvious enough. And there wasn't really a blueprint when I was writing the song and going out and teaching it in schools. It wasn't a space anywhere for human rights education. But as a mom, I had to barter for my son's whatever after school or summer camp or I would just offer my services because I couldn't afford the tuition. And so that's kind of where all this involved was the mother of necessity, the mother of invention. Thank you so much. And then getting to Kirsten, what inspired you to care about this issue and some of the first campaigns you were involved in? Well, I have to say that the person who inspired me most was Meryl. Because I had known about human rights. But when I met her, when she walked into my office and asked for help with this, you know, I had never met anyone who had dedicated so much to teaching other people about peace. She's an amazing peace activist and a musical piece activist and she would write songs for children. And I met her about 10 years after she had taken a choir of children from about five Oakland schools to New York to perform her song at the General Assembly of the U.N. I was so moved to see how a young woman could commit herself to educating others through music because it's so difficult to be an artist. It's so difficult to claim your space. It's so difficult to get recognition and respect. It's difficult to perform at a level of excellence. And to see that Meryl, just as a regular person like me, when I educated woman, could take what she, what was inside of her and teach people that to bring out what's inside of them was so inspiring and to really focus on this document and the more that I learned about it, the more inspired I became and the more excited I became to be part of her project. So this is about, it's about 30, 40 years since she created this song, this beautiful song. It was one of, I think it was like the first grassroots musical expression of the UDHR. And so I see Meryl as this pioneer in kind of breaking the way open for so many expressions of the UDHR, so many paraphrasings of it. She was pretty much the, I believe the first person to do that with Elsa Stematopoulou and who took the workshop that she had done with these school children in which they started thinking about human rights and what that meant. And then to align their ideas with the UDHR and to create a song that anybody could perform and engage with all of these texts and all of these articles in their own community through music, which is so emotional. So that's my biggest inspiration. And I'm so honored to work with her on this project. And I'm very excited to be here. Well, and it's also great to hear the name Elsa because we've worked a great deal at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues as we focused on the right of nature and looked at Indigenous Peoples' Rights. We're actually upholding many of those aspects of protecting each other, but also our planet, a concept we know here in Hawaii is Malama Honua. And so it's an honor to be able to see the connections, to see how really the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has brought people together and how we've been able to weave around the world in a way a new voice that allows many people to really share how these articles mean so much to them and how they're able to then take articles and actually actualize them in certain ways. And your creative curriculum through freedom of expression is essential for a new way forward to save our world. And Article 19, but also Article 26, combined together to transform global affairs, inspiring people to protect each other and our island earth. And the UDHR provides that power of ideas to initiate change in many countries and through global civil society. As we look at this, maybe this New Year's resolution must be received as a priority for all of humanity. Can you share with us how you actualize this article and what actions you're involved with, beginning with that song, but then what you're doing today as well? I want to share something about the high school orchestration and the professional orchestration of the song, because one of the things that I've been doing recently is sending orchestrated scores to conductors around the country, around the planet, who perhaps might be interested in having the orchestra perform the piece. And that's my goal for the coming years to share what I have, the materials that I have. So I had sent, well, also there's a link that I've been sharing with people. We had the world premiere of the high school orchestra last spring at a local school where I was working. And the children at the school are multilingual. And I love that you can always, because the document is the most translated of all the documents on the planet. And you can have students in a group who speak Vietnamese and Ethiopian and all kinds of exotic languages that we incorporated into that performance. So I've been happy to share the link to that with the high school orchestra premiere and want to get just more and more high school orchestras. And one of the things that came as a realization of that event was that the social studies teachers were packed with other curriculum. They could not fit it into their classrooms. The administrator who helped me create the world premiere of the orchestration said, no, you cannot go knocking on the doors of my history department, my social studies department, my English department, you can only work with the music department. So I realized that the beauty of the song is if you don't have space in a curricula for an educational institution to add, and it's very sad, I would want that every institution that has social studies or any kind of thing that it's relatable to would incorporate that into their curricula. But if it doesn't happen this year, at least they could sing a song and the musicians out there, hey, musicians, hey artists, hey dancers, come on, take it up. We can express this. We could get it on a program. We could sing it for the PTA. We could go out in the community, sing it at the mayor's office. So there you go. Thank you so much. And Kristen, can you share a bit how you're actualizing this important article and how important it is in our communities these days? Well, sure. I mean, specifically to focus on what you're saying about a New Year's resolution, a New Year's resolution to make human rights education front and center, to bring it around. We're absolutely working on that. We're taking this song and expanding it and doing exactly as Merrill said, is making it a completely accessible piece of music to engage in so that it can sort of build a bridge. The human rights education is really taking a huge leap forward in the world right now, trying to create, to make human rights education part of every school curriculum as it should be. But until we get there, exactly as Merrill says, we need these tools to show the community, to show the world how important it is and how beneficial it is. I wrote a book about bullying, called The Bullying and a Doge, right behind me here. And in that, I discovered, I did a lot of research and found out that the thing that always works in anti-bullying education is to engage the whole community in a discussion of human rights. Because once you have everybody really thinking toward what human rights are and how we give them to each other, you're missing the whole point. You're just working on symptoms instead of causes. So just as Merrill said, the power of the universality of this document where it's in all these different languages, and she used the word exotic, but we don't use that anymore because that means like strange and foreign. But any country, every language is exotic to someone, and even English is exotic to some people. But this song, which is published in English, it creates a space for writing, for reading in all languages. And Merrill invites musicians from around the world to make their own recordings of this song in whatever languages they have. So there's this huge opening in these empty spaces where we can be talking about human rights. I'm putting a link to the page where people can see the resources available. You can teach human rights in a yoga class. I teach them in my Zumba class. There's so many places that music can access that regular curriculum can't. Really good points. And as you described, it reminds me of how I actually spent December 10th on Human Rights Day this year. And it was actually at a concert after a long day of negotiations at the UN Framework Committee on our Climate Change COP. And in the meeting, there was a brief concert, and it was the drummer of guns and roses, which you probably would never think would be the human rights one. But they were singing the song, knocking on heaven's door, talking about a way that we get to a new realm of reality where the world would be better, and you would hold the mic into the audience. And the first voice that came out was a young indigenous woman from the Amazon, because he's working a lot on protecting nature and focusing on our lungs of the planet in the Amazon. So she's saying it in the Yanomami language. And then over 40 different people saying knocking on heaven's door as they handed the mic around the crowd. So it's one of those examples of what you're sharing, though. But as you're saying, the universality of the UDHR, because the UDHR has been translated over 500 languages, even Olaloha Hawaii as well. We worked on that with educators. And as you're saying, having those discussions, discussing what these rights mean, and how we are actually making sure we actualize the articles is so crucial. And there's a great Bob Marley quote as well that says, the greatness of a person is not how much wealth one acquires, but in one's integrity and one's ability to affect those around one positively. And I think that really is what the UDHR is. It's that collective aspect of how we can work together to make sure that all these rights become a reality in everyone's daily living. And many New Year's resolutions receive priority for a brief moment. But peace and human rights education requires a new commitment to the promise for this resolution for more revolution. And I think Article 19 focused on everyone has that right to freedom of opinion, as you've been sharing. Maybe you could share a bit some other NGOs you think that are great champions that you've seen that are very creative in human rights education and around Article 19. Mara, that has that. And then we can move into our final part about our personal visions for the future of this important right. Well, I think we're aware the HREUSA with Christie and Hailey. And they've been very active and it's wonderful to be a part of that group. That's the Human Rights Educators of the United States of America. And also Felicia Tibbetts with the HREA, the Human Rights Educators Association. And I wasn't aware of all these groups until 2003. And just historically as a reference, I was doing this work in 1986. That's when I started working on my song and getting performances of it. And our show at the United Nations on Human Rights Day was 1987. And then after that, I worked with Elsa on the paraphrase chart for about a year. And then we did something in 1988 in San Francisco for Amnesty International. Many years went by where it seemed like there wasn't anybody interested. So I didn't push it. But then in 2003, I came across an event in New York hosted by Amnesty International, which was a gathering. And my dear husband sent me as a supportive gift to New York so I could attend. And there were people there that all were working in this human rights education field that had come up since the time that that I was, you know, sort of giving up on it all. And then I met Felicia Tibbetts and I met a woman I, oh yeah, Nancy Flowers was at that event. Yeah, and people that I've been connected with ever since then that's very exciting to know that there's been these movements that have gotten going and that get into schools as they're capable of and they have workshops and they have trainings and they have all kinds of wonderful opportunities for people to get involved and be part of a bigger community. So anyway, that's just something I'm grateful for. Thank you so much. And really all the people you're mentioning are really the goddesses of good human rights education. You see HRE USA, but Felicia is unbelievable in the work that she does out of Columbia Teachers College. And Nancy Flowers anytime I'm in San Francisco, always go there to meet with her and get inspiration. And definitely we've done a lot of work in San Francisco but also in New York. So covering both coasts to make sure the world is aware of those 30 articles at the UDHR, not just on the 75th but on a daily basis. Moving now to Kirsten, maybe you can share as well some champions you're aware of. I wish I had known you were going to ask this question because there's so many that I can think of and I'm specifically thinking of like a lot of youth powered movements right now and Indigenous rights movements. And you know I'm just I think about the water the water keepers and and the sunshine youth and and I and all of the all the people working in education, there's so many great, I mean I'm in Oakland California and I can't even and the list is as long as my arm about the people who are working to do good here and Segura Tay land trust is getting a lot of mention internationally and I'm so proud to be able to work with them. But I know we're out of time and I just wanted to say that I hope in you know next year or the cop after that people will be singing every man, woman and child all together or every living soul, which is the the non-gendered version of this of this song and check it out. It's just really beautiful and it's just the beginning for what we can start to do and sing about and feel and accomplish together. Thank you so much and that really is important because it actually looks at the important movements such as 350.org and this has the new new Hmong mayor and we just celebrated Hmong New Year. So Hmong culture and rights absolutely crucial but it's great to see a Hmong mayor in Oakland. So it's exciting to see how dynamic and how that Hmong mayor will actually bring human rights to reality to be the voice for people that maybe haven't been heard for a long time and that's why Article Artine is so crucial. It's one of the most important rights in the world. It focuses on everyone who has that right to freedom of opinion and expression includes that freedom to hold opinions without interference and seek received and impart information and ideas through any media especially music which is so powerful and beyond all the frontiers. So I thank you both for joining. This has been Cooper Union on Think Tech Hawaii and it's an honor to host this show. We'll see you again next week and thank you so much for watching and I'm your host Joshua Cooper Aloha and Aolimake Hikiyo. Happy New Year.


Hi, I'm Donna Burbank and I'm Managing Director of Global Data Strategy. We're an international management consulting company. Everyone's heard of management consulting. Instead of do managing consulting for data. I'm the author of the Metadata Management Learning Plan and what we're trying to do in that plan is to show some practical definitions for not only what metadata is, but then how you can use it for some business value in your organization. So what this course tries to look at is not only typical metadata like databases, but video files, Twitter feeds. We really break down each one into what is metadata about Twitter even mean and how you can apply it. The first two courses are a perfect fit for anyone. Both the business person who may have heard the word metadata but doesn't know what it means or why they should care. The rest would probably be better suited for a data architect or someone who's looking to implement the solution. It's a bit of a mix and you can take a portion of the course or the entire course together.


Hello, I'm Paul Merton and thanks to funding from the National Lottery and any excuse for a birthday celebration, the BFI, the British Film Institute, has allocated over £933 million to support the UK film industry over the past 25 years. Amazing! Spanning 120 years of cinema, the fantastic BFI player website contains thousands of hours of beautifully preserved films from the BFI National Archive documenting the history of this great nation, ingeniously called Britain on Film. I'm here to take you through the BFI's top 10 most watched films, films that you've probably never heard of. Milton Keynes and the area has had over 150,000 views online. Pram Emporium just behind them is obviously a sale on prams, maybe this is the main reason why people had children in those days was to get a cheap pram. This clip just goes to show that regardless of what's going on around them, kids will always find ways to play and have fun. Traditional craft of trimming the cauliflower while having a fag at the same time. Man at the back is not wearing a hat, but wishes that he did. Oh, there's a man there on the left who doesn't wear a hat either. Here's a man demanding that he get a hat because he hasn't got one. Number six, the illustrious change in face of Camberwell. Oh my, look at that hair. Wow, it looks like the result of a chemical experiment in a laboratory. At number five, the Chichester Tour, which highlights the best features of the city, has had over 375,000 views since 2015. Next up at number four is Aberdeen, shot in 1970. Here you can see an early version of Google Maps. We are now into the top three. Everybody knows that British people used to move a lot quicker in the old days, probably because they weren't staring down at their mobile phones. This hair-raising tram ride through Nottingham shows us why speed limits needed to be introduced. It may not be your traditional Hollywood Christmas film, but it's an important and popular one, with almost 2 million views, Christmas in Belfast. And finally, number one, with a whopping 2.5 million views, London in the 1950s, the decade before it all started swinging. Before DVDs were invented, market traders in Soho would sell counterfeit fruit and vegetables. Those tomatoes are actually painted rocks. If you fancy watching more, possibly to get your money's worth of playing the National Lottery for the last 25 years, then simply search for Britain on Film, where you'll find hours of beautiful footage illustrating the history of this great nation.


After we've met Katie and what George's mum has said, there has to be way more to this story than we know. BEEP BEEP Last night, we saw the videos from home of George, Bailey and Bobby's mums, which was lovely. Seeing those videos actually opened our eyes a lot. I mean, George's mum mentioned that Bailey is a girl from material and Katie's a lovely girl. I've heard that Katie's out there, hoping not having too much fun. The wonderful, wonderful girl. Always welcoming our family, George. I've heard that Bailey's out there. She is not girlfriend material. Oh, God! So, George, before we even met Katie, obviously told us a little bit about what happened. And it seemed like it was just a fling. Like, they slept together a couple of times and that was it. But after we've met Katie and what George's mum has said, there has to be way more to this story than we know. I mean, she's met his mum, she worked for his mum. They spent a lot more time together than we know. So, George has been a bit quiet about it, so I'm wondering what actually happened. Katie's there. She's absolutely lovely. She is the wifey material. We're sending you lots of love at the time of your life. Since Katie's come into the villa, it's literally been a non-stop drama. It's not up to me.  Do you know what the thing is to her? I didn't expect it from Bailey either. That is a straight-up go-ah.   This is not about me and you. Of course it is. I don't care about you. You care!  I forgot you was there. One after the other, after the other. And some nights, it was just unnecessary. We could have had such good nights if she wasn't there. She's ruined quite a few of them, but after last night, seeing the videos from George, Bailey and Bobby's mum, I think we have kind of changed our opinion on Katie a little bit and she is settling in a little bit more now. I can't look at her. I can't look at her. Hello there, Bob. I hope you're okay, darling. I hope you're treating my Bailey okay. Because otherwise, you know, I've jumped that wall. Regarding Bailey and Bobby's videos, I mean, they both said they wanted them to treat each other right. It's going to be a bit awkward when they see this back because that's not the way that it's been. You know how much we love Bailey? As a family, she'll always be in her heart. Go with your heart as long as you're happy. You know how much we adore Bailey. I love her.  I know for a fact, once you get to know this girl, I love her to bits, mate. So with Bobby and Bailey now, he's kind of explained to me that he is over it. He's not going to dig anymore. He's not going to mug her up. He's just going to leave her and George to it. So I'm hoping that he's going to stick to his word. I mean, I do trust him on one par, but another part of me thinks he can't help himself sometimes. There's a lot of history between him and Bailey, so things can happen. I'm really hoping that he's not going to dig because he's just hurting himself and I think me and him could have something if he doesn't go there with Bailey.


I want to give you a quick example of just an insane use of a graph. And this is, of all places, this is on the Financial Times. This is not some conspiracy theory manipulative trying to have some kind of agenda, anti-vax, whatever thing, right, where you'd expect that. And the thing is that what I'm going to show you now is something that you see all the time when people show you graphic information or you show you statistics.  It's not really lying, they're just manipulating you by not, because you have to now focus to get what's really going on. And this is every way. And I'm showing you this primarily just as a warning to be aware of quickly glancing at a graph and thinking you know what it says and what it means without looking carefully at what's actually you're being told, what actually is going on, all right. So here's a graph. And by the way, this graph relates to the whole dollar declining as a foreign exchange. So this is a foreign exchange reserves in the world in a denominator US dollars. And the graph shows two currencies, the US dollar and the Remini, which is the, oops, sorry, that's it. The Remini, which is the Chinese currency, right? Renminbi, I like to call it Yuan, but Renminbi, something like that. So you can see here and what this graph, you look at the graph and you see the dollar, the light blue graph is coming down, right? It used to be above 70% and now it's around 60%. So yeah, clearly, dollar reserves are going down, they're going down slowly. And then you look at the Renminbi and whoa, look how fast they're going up. It looks like they were like basically zero in 2016. And since then, they're going way up to, I don't know, 50, 55%, right? And you're going, wait a minute, first of all, 50, 55%, plus 60% is more than 100%. So something's wrong. And then, and then you're going, but just look at the, look at the shape of the graph. I mean, obviously, the US dollar is losing dramatically to Renminbi. Yes, I'm buying into the whole idea that the dollar is not going to be the foreign exchange, you know, foreign currency reserve anymore, because look at the Chinese currency, the bricks have something going for them. What's the problem? Well, the problem is you've got two scales here. The scale on the left is for the dollar. That's the 45, 50, 55, 60, 65, 70, 75. And it says US dollar in white blue. And then the dark blue, the scale is on the right. 1, 2, 3, 4, 7. Renminbi has gone from 1% for under, from 1% to 2.5%. Literally from 1% to 2.5%. That's it. That's the threat. And look at the title. The dollar is dominant in FX reserves, but its lead is starting to slip. Really? This doesn't show that. Over what? Because when Renminbi went from 1% to 2.5%. That's a joke.  And this is the financial times. Right? This is the financial times reporting this. Now, this is the real graph. At the top, you see the dollar. That's the blue graph. You can see it's gone from about 70% to about 60%. The red is the euro. It's gone from about just under 20% to just above 20%. So it's increased a little bit over time. The yellow here that you can barely see is the yen. Right? The blue down here is the British pound. And then the green is other. And that will include the Renminbi. And you can see, yeah, it's increasing. It's gone for like 2% to 10%, 9% maybe. But look at the differences. I mean, the Renminbi is insignificant as a reserve currency. Completely insignificant. Why you would ever show a graph like this is mind-boggling.   And it's manipulative. And most people, most people get caught. And most people buy into it. And most people are easily manipulated.  Now, financial times, I read the Financial Times, it's definitely one of the better newspapers in the world today. But this is what you get from one of the better newspapers in the world today. And on some issues, Financial Times is unmatched in terms of coverage.  And it's not like the Financial Times has an agenda. It's not like the Financial Times is anti-dollar in some way. All right. I think they probably did do it innocently. I just think they're unthinking. They're ignorant.  Financial Times doesn't have an agenda to promote the yuan against the dollar. There's no agenda at the Financial Times around that. And it's not trying to do that to the people who read the Financial Times who are relatively sophisticated in their own minds. It's just silly. It's just somebody not thinking and everybody not thinking when looking at that graph. It's just a bunch of not thinking people patting each other on, I don't know, whatever, maybe on the back, maybe on the backside, I don't know.


Thanks for staying with us now. We move to other parts of Africa. Sierra Leone's parliament has voted unanimously on Friday to repeal the death penalty more than two decades after the West African country carried out its last execution. President Julius Madabio is expected to soon sign the bill into law, which will make Sierra Leone the 23rd African country to abolish capital punishment. The bill also gives judges additional discretion when issuing sentences which opponents of capital punishment say is particularly important in cases where the person convicted is a victim of sexual violence. Sierra Leone has observed a meritorium on executions since 1998, but prisoners sentenced to death still live separately from other inmates which activists say is dehumanizing. Having gone through the commencing of the whole house with amendments, I now move and the bill be read at some time and passed into law. Thank you. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Those against say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye.


Good afternoon everybody, I'm Tommy O'Brien, coming to you live from TFN headquarters in St. Petersburg, Florida, one PM Eastern time on Wednesday, three hours left to go on the trading day and we got markets in positive territory. S&Ps up three points trading at $28.93, NASDAQ positive by $26, trading at $79.90 and the DAW up 96 points trading at $26,061, gold struggling a bit, off almost $5 at $12.80-$90, oil up $0.68 trading at $6208, basically flat $97.395 and notes and bonds slightly lower price and higher yield 10-year note, negative 6 ticks, $123.26, 30-year bond, negative 9 ticks, $148.15. We'll start things off, let's jump over to the futures markets. So approaching session highs intraday, we made that high at about 11 a.m. Eastern time in the S&Ps of $28.98 and we're currently at $28.93 in the S&Ps, NASDAQ 100, pretty similar story. We make a high just after 11 a.m. of $76.89, we're now about 15 points away from that level, trading $76.73 in the NASDAQ 100, there's your DAW 30, again inching up towards those intraday highs, $26,050, the high in the DAW, we're about 30, 35 points from that level. Crude oil, so we got our EIA numbers at $10.30 this morning, we saw a draw of three plus million barrels, you trade from about $61.55 prior to that number, you trade up to $62.35 for a high and we're currently trading $61.94 and gold contract, talk about struggling, right? Since about 9 a.m., we're up there at $12.92, gold, a steady decline, dipping down now $12.80105. In terms of what else you have happening, so gold trading lower, jumping over to some of the currencies, checking out the dollar, a little bit of action just in the last hour, having to do with some trade escalation of some rhetoric, you have the dollar index, spiking higher, $97.64, check out that euro, spike lower, $111.87, we get the pound right now trading at $130 on the dot basically and the yen, trading $110.14 and to get over to what's moving and shaking, there we go and it is, there we go, so you have the Chinese Commerce Minister coming back to President Trump saying Wednesday that Beijing will retaliate if they get any tariffs on that $120.01 and they will take necessary countermeasures, interesting to see at $120.02 as that trade tensions ramp up. Stay tuned folks, Steve Rhodes coming up right now, his program from 8 a.m. Dave White live at two, Tom O'Brien live at three.


labor-based systems to smart digital systems. Yes. And these also aid the countries to more effectively and accurately adopt and benefit from the WHO health and data recommendations through the digital systems, which is the last bit. For this particular BIK for the ANP, other requirements are based on systems that provide the functionality of digital tracking and decision support, and include among other components for data elements and decision support logic. And this supplementation will be used in this project with the NIH to include international WHO recommendations for ANC and digital tracker to improve the government health system informing evidence-based policies and other initiatives. So hopefully this will result in other... Sorry for the technical problem. I was saying that we used... You can do interventions and recommendations in the field of health in the different countries where the WHO intervenes. Adapting external care guidelines into DHIS to track the modules for clinical care. And so I'm going to walk through a bit of the process of adapting this DAK that we did into a global generic DHIS to track the modules. So within the DAK, you can see that it has a number of components here. The one that was very helpful for us was this component five of core data elements. Because these are essentially spreadsheets that describe an ideal system for collecting data on antinatal care, expressing the WHO guidelines. And so you can see here that these core data elements are described for something. I'm going to look at the data elements that have been taken into account. Here, we have outlined the age of gestation that has been taken into account during our studies on the field to be able to inform people about the adaptation of the WHO guidelines or the WHO guidelines. Now, what are the steps to take into account when we are calling the WHO guidelines? So there are first of all world-wide guidelines to take into account. In addition, there is a certain specificity of diagnostics. There are also records that we took into account during the work in Uganda and also the tracker. So we have to think about how to make the transition to be able to leave a software to enter the WHO. So we did everything to be able to include, while taking into account the WHO guidelines. We managed to integrate it into the program and the model of the WHO. Now, for those of the WHO's mother program, there have been preliminary metadata where we have tried to do studies for the 17 WHO tracker programs not only to have different types of data elements, but also we have a number of very high programs that we hope to develop to help us to be able to place the WHO of the same kind so that it is in conformity with our needs. Here, there are screen captures concerning what we had to undertake for the rules of the program. Here, in the WHO, you can see here the registration. And then, when you enter, the first thing you have to do before entering any data, you have to quickly do a verification. So you have to try to do the research and make sure there is no danger. You can see that there are different stations, different destroyers and profiles. There are also modules and there are many calculations done. So we try to make this application available so that others can use it too. There are, I don't know, many challenges, many challenges. But first of all, in relation to the tribe, to the tribe, TEI, if we compare them with the data elements, then there is also the comparison between the first visit and the routine visit. There is a quick verification before entering and visiting ANC. There are also technical problems in relation to the terrain map. So that's something we tried to solve. There was also the select multiple option in DHIS2. I'm pointing out that the interpreters have a hard time capturing the orators, so you will excuse us. Here are the different subjects that we have. And so we tried to find solutions. I mentioned that there were ICD-10 codes. You can, is not it, a solar meter. You can find, is not it, other means to use the ICD-10 codes. I mentioned the guide for the directive. There is a complex software with executable codes. So you can try to use it. Another thing that we could not do, if you want to create a world version of the Tracker system, this is really very, very important. So you have to develop the program rules and all the other elements. If you want to put this system in place and try to adapt it to the global level, you have to collaborate. The countries will be able to put in place the program rules, as you can see here. So we try, is not it, to solve this problem with collaboration with the countries. So I'm a little late. Thank you very much for following us. There is a community of practices where you can ask your questions. We will try to answer them during the session. Hello. I am here to represent a program from USAID that works on data. I am here to talk about the digital support supervision. This session concerns the Tracker. And we are very, very interested in the implementation of the Tracker. But it is also important to use the Tracker in clinical areas. It is something very important especially for supervisors. So the plan in my presentation, I will first explain to you a little bit what this is. I will also talk about supervising activities. I will talk about the framework that we have put in place and talk about the digital support supervision. And the future perspectives. So CHISU is a project that focuses on national systems, the system of countries. We try to support countries so that actionable data is available. We have four objectives in its framework, especially the reinforcement of governance and we ensure that there is a favorable environment for health information systems in high countries. Increase availability and interoperability of health data, especially the quality, as well as the information systems and the other objectives. We will try to see how to develop a framework that can help us in this supervision. So we try not to evaluate the different needs. The objective is to develop a global directive for digital support supervision. There is first the evaluation of the environment, the consultation, and we also have to work on a framework and a guide document. We try to see how we can digitalize the components. We are not really developing new applications. We know that countries can create new applications themselves. We want to work together to support interoperability. So we try to create this framework to know what needs to be kept in mind when we need to digitalize such components. So what do we want to say when we talk about the digitalization of support supervision? You all heard about support supervision. First, there is the caretaker, who has the head, who is the supervisor, who is the person to supervise. He is the caretaker who has to supervise, and then there is the manager and the supervisor. So he could have other employees, other caretakers, other people who work in the field of health. So it's not only me, the nurses, it's not only me, the doctors who are supervising. It could be other people who work in the same field. So what is support supervision? It implies a lot of things. There is first the preparation, the planning, the digitization. What are the establishments that need to be supervised? Where is the agent? What are the establishments that are not far away and difficult to access? There is also the reporting. There is direct observation of the patients, the inspection and the interviews. The interviews are conducted in the form of care providers. There is also a collection of information. Then there is training, there is the subject and there is feedback that will help to solve a number of problems. So we must, for example, do the subject of logistics, for example, and follow up on a lot of things. So all these parts, all these elements are really important. They are necessary, they are essential. Next slide. What are the types of individual interventions that can bring this kind of assistance, this kind of support? If you look at the planning, the reporting, what is the preparation process? You try to get data to better understand the situation and you can find these data at the level of the HHS-2. So you will need to give these data when you are going to ensure supervision. So as a supervisor, you also need to take into account the activities of follow-up. And I think it is a very important factor that explains why certain establishments fail when it comes to follow-up. It is also an opportunity to look at the different materials of training and as a supervisor, you must have material resources. So what I would like to say is that what you think of the whole supervision system, there are really a lot of points in it that you can number and I think you need to collaborate to get there. So you have to ask yourself what are the different actions to follow up with. So I would like to give you an example. You will have to order HHS-2 and use it for supervision. It is a tool that has been developed that is currently used. There are components that do not help in the planning of evaluation and in our subjects, which in yellow color concerns what happened in different sciences, to see if the activities that were mentioned, that had been planned, were made. There are a lot of documentation on this particular system and there is a lot of work that is in progress to improve the system. There is a document, a framework that will be developed in this framework. And then next year we will work with the countries that are already ready to develop digital and supervision tools. We will see how less these tools are used. So if you are in a country that already uses this kind of tool, we really like to collaborate. Thank you very much. I have trouble with this slide, so we reaccommodated for this session. So please stick around so we can hear the whole presentation if you are able to. And again, if you have questions, please try to find it on the community. If you have any questions, feel free to go to the practice community to post them there. Hello everyone. I am from Guinea. I am a French speaker. The GHS2 tracker. So what we did, what was the algorithm we did, which step we used to go forward and where we are right now? So we will see how we made the transition from the proper version to the electronic version. We will quickly talk about the program from Tupaculose to Haiti. We will talk about the digital transformation of this program. And we will also talk about challenges and the scale of the program. I hope you understand me. So here is the reality. In 2004, there were more than 12,000 cases of Tupaculose confirmed in Haiti. And the total mortality rate was very high. The national program against Tupaculose tried to control the resistance of the drug. And the Tupaculose Co-Infection made a very close collaboration with the districts and the laboratories at the national level. Now the reality is that the data on Tupaculose is only available for each trimester. And it was not really of good quality. So we tried to collect data to share them. And I would like to share the different objectives. The different objectives, what we have already decided to use is not the digital tool, it was to improve the availability of data in time. We also tried to improve the quality of data on Tupaculose to improve the availability and the quality of the follow-up indicators of the program on Tupaculose for our objective. We have selected a certain number of tools to get there. First of all, the following formula, the identification of the case of Tupaculose. So there is a person who is positive on Tupaculose. We gave him this formula. We also used the record which, is not it, was sensitive to pharmaceutical products. We needed a record, an alienation. And then we also needed a record for, is not it, to record the case of resistance to drugs. So it was very, very difficult to digitize everything you see there. So we needed to understand the norms and protocols. So we had to work with the UEP and the National Programme to fight against Tupaculose. So we have tried to collaborate to understand the norms and protocols. We have configured four records of Tupaculose using the DHS-2 tracker. And the protocols of Tupaculose were used with the DHS-2 tracker to create a link between the different records. So we also needed to create programs rather than indicators of the program, as well as automatic tablets for the performance analysis of Tupaculose. And if you want some resistance to drugs, I can track him and put him on the material resistance registers. So that's the process. It wasn't very easy to make it because we need advocacy. In relation to the use of the DHS-2 tracker for patient management, we also had to form data managers at district level in relation to data analysis. And then we had to provide tablets and computers as well as the internet connection for health and health establishments and districts. Our approach that we adopted was that of continuous evaluation of data quality and the organization of meetings to see together the different sounds taken. In relation to the internet connection, we distributed SIM cards to help the different actors to have access to the internet. I have already indicated that there have been a lot of meetings that we didn't have to see together what was working and what wasn't. In terms of technology, that's what we did. There are TB registers as well as TB patients. There are board tables for the analysis. There were also data for the laboratory entrance and data to predict the medicines to be administered. Data for the computer as well as right away. Now we will see the results that we have been able to record thanks to these efforts. There are now a number of patients who have been followed through the system of 30,000 patients during the second semester from 2019 to 64,000 patients today. All 283 sites are now followed and used in this system. So between 2018 and 2021, you can see the results. Now, in terms of durability, we work in collaboration with different actors to evaluate the data. We also try to make sure that the data is harmonized. Here are the board tables that we created. We used the HIS-2 tracker, but I can't really finish without talking to you about the challenges. The responsibility of the patient is to be able to to to to to be able to to to be able to to to to to to on the country site, So the challenge is the reinforcement of the capacities and the different actors at the level of the establishments. Another problem is the availability of the internet connection. There is also the challenge of maintaining a certain level of data quality and not having access to this data in real time. Another problem is the coordination of the supervision role to improve the quality of data at the level of the health establishments. Now let's talk about the implementation at the level of the program. So there is the capacity of tracking and vaccination against tuberculosis. There is also the ability to track the patients suffering from tuberculosis, but also track their status in terms of vaccination against COVID-19. There is also the integration with the health information system at the level of the community. There is also the inclusion of the board table for the head of the program against tuberculosis at the level of health establishments in order to improve the supervision at the level of these health establishments, to improve the test, but also the availability of these tests and the medication without forgetting their management. There is also the integration of the tracking data at the level of the health establishments. There is also the need to improve the analysis of the tracking data, the visualization and interpretation of the data in order to clarify the decision-making process. I hope that my English has been clear. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, thank you very much. So I pray that all the people who follow the interpretation may excuse us because we have encountered a problem. Even the explorers were far from the microphone and the quality of the sound was not good at all. So please excuse us.


Hey guys, it's Missy. Welcome back.  So that wraps up today's tutorial I had a ton of fun creating this lioness Halloween tutorial for you today So I really hope you enjoyed this video if you're new to my channel or you haven't subscribed yet Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on any future videos You can click my little picture right up here to subscribe Also, if you did enjoy the video make sure to click the thumbs up Thank you so very much for watching as always and I will see you next time