And to some business news, Enigo State Governor Fanyu Uguwai has enjoyed Ministry's Department and Agency's MDAs to raise the performance bar and re-strategize their meeting to meet the revenue targets that contain and approve 2022 budget of the state. The governor, whom it had called during a one-day conference on achieving Enigo State's internally generated revenue IGRO target for 2022 fiscal year, said the importance of the conference was to identify the challenges faced by poorly performing MDAs and deliberate ways to improve on the activities with a view to meeting the 2022 revenue target for funding the budget. Representatives by the secretaries of the government, Prof. Uchenna, the governor also called for the establishment of an annual revenue index of every MDA in this state. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


In a sense, my whole life has been in the field. I've moved around a lot from different countries to different cultures and I've had to learn how to adapt and listen and fit in, try and find ways of fitting in. So being in the field is just immersion. I'm in the music department, which is part of the School of Arts and I love the interdisciplinary nature of SOAS. I love the fact that as someone with a passionate interest in West African music that I can learn about all other aspects of culture in West Africa and connecting cultures from different parts of the world. As an ethnomusicologist or someone who's involved in music I really appreciate being able to use a practical or take a practical approach to the study and presentation of music through film and through recorded albums. Film and recording are better mediums to do that than through the written word. You reach many more people that also the people that you are representing in your work are able to access your work in a way that they probably wouldn't be able to if you were just writing about them from the research point of view. It's absolutely vital to engage with the people that you're researching. How can we best exchange knowledge? It is absolutely vital to have an artistic response from the people that we are researching, from the cultures that we are researching because when we do research and when we publish our research we are producing knowledge. How can you do that ethically and with integrity without involving the artists or the people that you are writing about or presenting? In the process of researching about musical childhood, if you like I came across this wonderful tradition that is unfortunately disappearing which is hand clapping songs which happens primarily in villages in rural Mali and elsewhere in Senegal and Guinea as well. When I began researching this I realised that no one had written about it not even Malians, not great scholars who were working on this music. It's a seminal tradition that feeds into popular music and that explains many things about society because it's the way that little girls comment on society on gender norms and what they think is going to be expected of them when they get married and be mothers and so on. I honestly don't think I could have indulged my love for music from West Africa and also from Cuba anywhere else with the kind of support that I've had from SOAS and the recognition that these are great musical traditions that actually need to be studied alongside popular music western popular music and alongside western classical music so it's just that kind of deep level of understanding of the richness of world cultures that exist at SOAS that's the heart of SOAS.


My name is Michael Verland, I'm on the product team at Altyn, having a last date with DevCon, thanks for showing up for the late talk. I'm super excited to talk about this. I think it's one of the most frustrating things for a lot of smart contract developers and a lot of people building on Ethereum. It seems super simple to be on set, but it's really not the case. So hopefully we'll talk through today. That kind of announces what they are, the problems they cause, and then a few ways we can start to handle them and start to solve those frustrations. Before we get started, as you don't know, no worries if you don't, we've been very quiet. Building things for about 10 years in the blockchain space, with Nokia marketing.  Building developer tools on top of that. For example, we want to help developers focus on the things that matter. They only have their IP growing their user bases. So I've really been working, lucky enough to work with some awesome folks and doing that. Now, let's start from the nonsense. Disclaimer, there will be a lot of nonsense-based funds in this presentation. So what is this nonsense? When we talk about Ethereum nonsense, there are really two things we're talking about. My address, this is the way they win block awards, incrementing this nonsense to win the cryptographic puzzle. It's kind of a proof-or-work concept I'm sure most of you are familiar with. The other thing is for applications for end users, when you're submitting transactions, we need to submit them with an ounce. It's basically a counter of the number of transactions that are confirmed from the address that you're submitting them from. It's basically the way that you're able to send rights to the network, the application side, and the user side. So that's the limit again. So you're going to start with four simple word nonces. If you're starting from scratch, super easy, your nonces zero. That's great, really straightforward. For men, it doesn't get too much more difficult. If you just increment by one, it's a counter. Straightforward, you all know what I'm talking about. So the interesting thing is what happens if things go wrong.  It'll say nonce too low, so you can pretty easily increment or submit. What's interesting is if your nonces too high, your transaction will basically sit around in the men pool. It won't get mined.  Which in a lot of cases is hard to do, because you as a human are not sitting there looking at the nonces that are happening. So your application tends to just stall. The other problem is, sorry, so we have two main purposes for nonces. You know, digging into why they exist in the first place. One is for ordering transactions. The other is to prevent certain kinds of attacks. So on the ordering side, a simple example, let's say you have a smart contract, building out a decentralized social network. You don't be able to do things like create users, have them friend people, decommission accounts people on. On the left is what's intended. The user creates a new account. They friend somebody, sometime later on they delete their account. On the right is kind of what can happen if you don't have proper ordering. And really, nonces are the way that this is ensured in the Ethereum world. And as you imagine, the right side, everything's going to fail. You're going to end up with outright failures for one, two, number three, the user ends up running out. So nonces are really important here. Then there's the attack side. So simple payment example, with nonces, in the Alistratus, sorry, without nonces, if Alistratus came out of one of these, Bob could basically grab that transaction and send it as many times as he wants. Because there's nothing to distinguish the legitimate transaction from the bad one. And so the outcome here is Bob, he has something called a replay attack. He basically just repeat this transaction over and over until Alistratus has more money and Bob is profited massively. With nonces, Alistratus submits that same original transaction with nonces, let's say number seven. And it gets Alistratus's actual transaction and the counterfeit one. It doesn't really matter which one is mine. Both of them will resolve for the same thing, which is that Bob gets money from Alistratus. But when the second one is attempted to be mined, it sees that the nonce is still seven, it expects the nonce to be eight now, so that transaction fails, and you can't repeat this malicious attack over and over. So all these things lead us to whatever it does, the non-secret formula to go with nonces. So you start with the question, is this your first nonce? Okay, so if your nonce is zero, you're going to go, no problems there. If you're keeping track of your nonce, if you know how many transactions you've sent, you're also going to go. So if you send transactions, awesome, your nonce's in. If not, no worries, there's a backup plan. You can call something like getTransactionCountPending, the result is your nonce. Super simple, rinse or repeat, your application is well functioning, you're off and profiting. Let's go in on one of these attack steps. So number two, supposed to be your nonce, that's what it means. So you should have that nonce. Turns out it's not actually going to be that all the time. Probably isn't.  The reason here is that most applications are sending multiple transactions at a time, so they intend for multiple transactions to appear in a single block. When you do that, you're submitting them with incrementing nonces. Let's say from zero to n in this case. So the question is what happens if one of those nonces fails? So the second transaction with nonce1. We got one of those earlier when nonces have, when there's a transaction with a nonce that's too high, it hangs. And since there's no transaction that's succeeded with nonce1 at this point, all of your other transactions are hanging. What do you question by transaction failure? So there are a couple of ways this can happen. Some that are outright failures and some that are not. The most common way this happens is also going to put a bunch of transactions. One won't hide a cast, for instance. So it's not against broadcast. So failure in this case means failure to be properly broadcast combined, or in some cases more outright failures. So as you remember from pending, so no worries. It's failed. We have another plan. Problem is this also fails a huge chunk of the time for a completely different reason. So this is more of an architectural reason. Most apps who are building on Ethereum need to scale beyond a single node. We're running multiple nodes. In the web server world, you use a load balancer nice and straightforward. Turns out when you do that with Ethereum, things start to break pretty quickly. A lot of people we talk to when they're building out their in-house infrastructure, this is exactly what they do. A lot of third-party APIs build things in this way. It makes managing nonces much, much harder. So a quick example here.  There's getting routed to one of the many nodes behind our load balancer, to update my nodes. This also gets routed to only one of the three nodes. And I get three different nonces depending on where exactly my query gets routed to. So there's this kind of inconsistency problem. The one consistent thing here is that none of these nonces are correct. None should be free. So in all of these cases, you're actually failing. This is a bit of a race condition. So eventually these transactions will propagate to the other nodes behind this load balancer. So if you wait, retry, eventually it might work, so that's one way of handling this. But it's not super well functioning for applications that have any kind of likelihood they can see concerns. So then there's another concern here that makes this even more difficult to deal with. Getting parity actually defines handling when they do. It's usually after probably a week of really... So when they talk about pending, it's basically anything you submit a transaction, it hasn't been mined yet, it's considered pending. With parity, there's actually this idea of a virtual pending block. So it's things that the node thinks will be mined in the next block on the network. So it's only a subset of the things that get considered pending. Which means that you might actually end up with the wrong node, the wrong goss, with parity when you would have otherwise gotten the red mark from the gap. So if we look at our example here, if we're parity instead, you get zero in all cases. Okay. There are other things that are going on here that make this, again, more complicated. Things like race conditions. There's no big show on parity where if you submit a transaction and all expanse or get a transaction counter very quickly, you don't actually break it off. So things are constantly happening. It's a pretty complicated problem. So things go apart and eventually get fixed. So we got a few points of contention. A few steps to the theoretical but only sometimes. But actually, this is the one case. The only nonce you can ever be really confident about on a time is with non-zero. You can start out confidently. It's only from there that it gets complicated. But there are a lot of things we talked about already. There's also problems with multiple services managing the same address. When nodes restart, the mempool can get cleared, which can affect nonces. Things have a huge impact on this. So there's a lot to worry about as a developer when it comes to this simple algorithm that seems like it would be really easy to get started with. So what do we do? How do we actually start to handle this problem? One thing is the way for E2.0. I don't think that's the right solution. I'm guessing a lot of people in this room have applications they're building right now. They have users. They need a solution for this in the short term. And waiting for... So let's start on the road to dominance. In terms of infrastructure, it doesn't seem like an API call like this or the traditional ways of handling this should depend on infrastructure, but they actually do. So as you know, is your in-house system load balancing nodes is the API you're using doing that? If it is, you can still make this work. It's just going to be a little bit harder and you need to have this in the back of your mind when you're building things out, considering how to handle nonces. The other thing is, do you have access to pending state? So nonces are effectively the way to see what's pending, what's dropped, all these kind of things. It's going to be really, really helpful. Some services don't like you to do that. If you don't know this, you probably can. So you're in a good shape. Both of them are using Parity. It's a super quick switch that you use Parity next month instead of get transaction pending. The Hayes like you would expect it to. So it will work in the same way that you get a pending transaction tool. So number two is the other transactions. This is basically an understanding of your new space. So depending on what you're doing the number of transactions, ordering might matter, the number of transactions, transaction throughput might matter, latency, all these kinds of things. So you need to understand your new space to know how you're going to approach the nonces. And then one kind of thing I had was consider this kind of thing earlier on. It's more contract development. There are trade-offs in doing this. I knew a lot of people don't end up getting nonce problems until things are deployed. They have users, users start to complain or their own developers do. You do these problems early and you'll have a better time later on. Cool, so as far as actual solutions, number one is maintaining a nonce state is super, super helpful. That way you can minimize your dependency on these API calls that tend to have their own set of problems. New store nonces is a single account on the counter putting in something like Redis. All of your services can access it, increments it. You're doing pretty well. And then if you need to, when you're restoring things, you can use those API calls to kind of see things to begin with. The next is you can use no-op fillers. So this is a way of handling the kind of like hanging transactions problem. So let's say we submit five transactions all at once with incrementing nonces. Things are going well initially. They're getting mined successfully and then eventually one fails. Like we talked about before, the next two would hang. What we can do is basically create what's called a no-op, a zero-e transfer to our own address, submit that to the transaction that failed. That's a really quick way of jump-starting the system. Again, this is pretty use case dependent because it means that your transactions can't be dependent on ordering like we talked about earlier. But if you don't have that requirement, that's a really solid way to keep things kind of well functioning. So other things, just quickly run down the list since this is a 20-minute talk. Meta transactions, I don't have a time to experience with what I've heard. Ordering is really important for you. You can basically batch a bunch of operations into a single transaction and have a smart contract kind of distribute them effectively. Using one transaction per address per block, this is basically the idea of like you submit one transaction and you wait for it to be mined until you submit another transaction. That's not going to work for a lot of people because it is very slow, but as you care about minimizing failures much more than minimizing latency so one of the things that gets complicated here is a bunch of services using the same address which are all connecting nonsense which makes this entire world much more complicated to deal with. If you isolate each service to use its own address you can kind of make life much more much easier for yourself and prevent things from stomping on each other. And along the resets on us we're super, super happy to help. This is something we've helped with on like a use-basic or something basis for a lot of our users. So let us know if you're running into those problems or if you haven't talked through a lot of the best cases we've talked through. And then finally, open source open source. Talk to a lot of people this week that are tackling exactly this problem with some really cool output. Some guys at Bloom gave us a talk about it earlier. Really cool stuff. Intribute, pay attention, and hopefully we can all solve these problems together. Thanks.


My name is Daniela Villa Antonio. I am the team leader for digital agriculture and today's host. Today's special guest in is Nargiza corn. Oh, yeah, Eva. Project support specialist with the Uzbekistan country office, and she will tell us about how to have a hackathon as she recently organized the agriculture hackathon digital Uzbekistan, a competition for young innovators. Hi, Nargiza. Welcome. And thanks for joining us. Hi, colleagues. Hi, Daniela. Thank you for hosting the AgriTech talks and of course having me today. My name is Nargiza Hajjayeva, and I am from Efeel Uzbekistan. Nice seeing you all today. Thanks to you, Nargiza, for joining us today. As usual, I have four questions for you. And now we will launch the timer for 12 minutes as we need to get these questions answered for the timer ends. And in the last minutes, we will take a few questions from the audience. So to all participants, please write down your questions and comments in the chat and my colleague Veronica will monitor it. So, Nargiza, our timer will start running now. Are you ready? Let's do it. Okay, let's start. So, Nargiza, first of all, can you just tell us what is a hackathon and how the idea of organizing this AgriHack came to life? Okay, so a hackathon is an event usually hosted by a company or an organization, and it brings together programmers, IT enthusiasts together for a short time to collaborate on a project and to try to come up with a solution to a problem. And let me give you a short overview of the project that has hosted the hackathon in Uzbekistan. The project is called the peace building project here between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. And it's a UN joint project between FAO and UNFBA, and it aims to have a cross-border, aims to enhance the cross-border cooperation between these two countries, and it also recognizes women and youth as peace building agents. So, one of the project activities we had was to organize an agricultural hackathon, and it would bring together youth interested in IT programmers, coders, and start-upers. The main aim was to upscale very interesting innovative solutions in agriculture, and we wanted to support these young innovators to come up with these solutions. And another interesting point to mention is that currently in Uzbekistan, in Central Asia, there is a lot of support for the agri-tech ecosystem, and there's many other incubator programs, acceleration programs, and development partners also interested in agri-tech technologies. So for now, I think it was a perfect timing to have an agri hackathon here in Uzbekistan. Well, Nargiza, I'm impressed. So it was part of a peace building project with Kyrgyzstan, if I understood well. The project itself was targeted at young innovators, and so you run this event, this hackathon together, innovative ideas to solve the problems that the border in rural communities face. And eventually it was a tool to foster community building. Wow. So I've been talking with many colleagues actually in the past months, some of them had the idea to organize a hackathon, but they were scared about the organizational effort. So I'm sure colleagues might be interested to learn this from you.  Yeah, that's a really good question. And here's a visual representation of the steps, main steps involved in organizing a hackathon. That's how we did it here in the country office. The first and crucial step is to define the core information about your hackathon. It is the initial planning stage, and we want to get all the details right. And this will help us also ensure that we're not missing anything. So for that, we would start by mapping out the project outcomes, putting our targets together, also having stakeholders on our information sheet, and make sure that everything aligns with the project. It's also very crucial to have all of those, all of this core information into some data sheet, because in the future they may be some partners interested in your hackathon. And maybe it's also a possibility that they would want to co-host it together so you can easily share the information about your project and your event, these partners. The second step is after we have all of the information we need, we have to consult. And it's when we approach relevant people, for example, it's our project team, we understand their needs. We look at the potential participants of the hackathon. We look at, we assess their needs. And here, since our project was a joint project between two countries, we had the amazing opportunity to consult with FEO team in Kyrgyzstan. And they had some experience with an agriculture hackathon back in the Bishkek last year. So it was great to know what their experience was so it helped us define the scope for our hackathon. The third step is having your team. First of all, you should understand which organization is responsible for what. For example, for us, it was FEO and the UNFPA, so we divided activities between us. Also, our event was co-hosted by national partners, including the Ministry of Agriculture and Ministry of IT. So we had a split of responsibilities between each other. The second step is to determine who is doing what between each team inside the team. So for example, one person would be responsible for applications, the other one would be responsible for event management. The next step is the event management. And here we determine the venue, the needs of the participants. For example, if there's going to be any participants with special needs, we should always take that into account. We draft out the agenda, invite speakers. And also, one crucial point is not to forget about marketing so that people know that there is this event happening in the state. And the next step is to start the application process and manage the interview.  And we had already an established criteria, which was developed by experts from the digital agriculture team. And we had those short interviews where the candidates introduced each other. And in fact, we received more than 137 applications, so it was a lot of work. And I would say the next step is to do the on-site preparations is when you go to the venue, in our case, we went there one day in advance. It's those activities that you do like reaching out to media people, setting up a banner, and making sure that everyone is on the same page, talking with your team. And the last step is the hackathon. And there you are. You are on the event. And I would say the most crucial step is to follow your agenda and make sure that everyone is informed of the agenda because it happened to us that when the teams get super excited about working together, we often forget to go on coffee breaks or have some breaks. So we always had to make sure that we're informed about the next thing that is happening. So yeah, that's all. The third is I see it takes a big effort.  And then you started preparing for the event itself. There was lots of communication to be done at all stages. So it was a big effort, but if I understood well through partnerships and collaborations, you were able to delegate many activities so eventually was manageable. Okay, but now tell me. So 137th applications, how many of them made it to the hackathon itself. And out of the weekend of, you know, developing their ideas with mentors, how many of them were eventually the winners who won. Yeah, I totally forgot to mention the numbers. Yeah, out of 137 applications. I think let me just pull up figures. It was 21 teams with about 70 participants. And so we had 21 ideas competing against each other. And the winners, we had four winners, and yeah, short mockups of their presentations of their idea. First one was agro data. And it's a simple and flexible comprehensive agro enterprise resource planning system. And the thing that worked out like for us was the wow factor was that this solution is trying to reduce the human factor in the process of planning and exchanging information in agriculture. And the next solution that we have chosen was is called digital agro tech. It's a monitoring system for farms and automation with AI components. And that's just their idea is briefly. The next one is called magic soft agro ecosystem. And it's an agricultural learning and community module where users can teach each other, teach each other. So the cool part that one our hearts was that farmers can take a picture for example of a spoiled tomato crop and send it on a forum to the forum and other farmers small holders or people in the neighborhood could comment and talk about it and advise what to do next. And the next solution that was chosen what is called your stars. And here it's more scientific and it is a vegetation index detection in agriculture, which is also using satellite data. And I, this solution is also very was very interesting for the government as well, because one of the stakeholders was the ministry of agriculture. Yeah, and that's all. It's so refreshing. Actually, we might run a little bit of out of time so let me remind all colleagues to post their questions in the chat but they still have one question for you I think we still have some time. This is my usual provoking question. Yes, it's so refreshing to hear of all these innovative ideas but often hackathons get criticized because what happens after the event, right. So you gather all these young innovators over a weekend, you provide them with mentorship, they are able to develop their ideas eventually you are able to award the most promising ones. And if you are not able to think of the next steps and how to support them to go from idea to a small pilot or rather proof of concept, making it a bigger pilot and eventually validated with the market and then scale up the solution. All these ideas will have the risk that they will die in very soon. So I will thought about that. That's a very interesting question and yes unfortunately there are so many factors that affect the sustainability of startups, and I were recognizing that our approach at the field was to provide a platform first of all for the youth to interact and collaborate with a common agenda to come up with an interesting solution to tackle one of the food systems challenge. And while this platform contributes to the overall objectives of a project. I would say that during the hackathon, the youth were given the opportunity to also network with mentors and have on the side consultation about their ideas about their projects about their team. And they had many opportunities to ask any of the questions they wanted whether it was technical because we had technical coding mentors, or whether it was something like if the solution fits the market because we had digital experts, digital agriculture experts and just agriculture experts that could talk to them and say it's right, wrong, and how to improve it. So, this approach would help the youth to take their idea and go further, because there's plenty of opportunities out there there are many acceleration funds, programs they can apply to. And another thing at FEO what we are trying to do is to connect them to these opportunities, because we have big network of development partners and we know of these programs. We are sending them some information about them and of course they can reach out to us and ask how they can apply or what to do to get their idea heard, because hackathon it's not always about winning it's important that we promote these types of opportunities for things and they are empowered to take the next step. Thanks, Nargiza. We really, really hope that all of these innovations will survive and will make it into available products in the markets to solve the challenges that those Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan face. I can see we are getting some questions in the chat so Veronica can you help me pick one or two. Thank you, Daniela. So, Nargiza, we have two very connected questions. So the first is whether only professional developers should be invited to hackathons or beginners can be invited as well and how to choose right participants. And the second question would be, which channels did you use to invite young innovators to work on agricultural challenges? Did you engage any community leaders to promote the hackathon? Thank you very much for the questions. So I will start with the first one, if a professional developer should be invited to hackathon only. First of all, like mentioned before, it's very important to establish some type of criteria and we had help from our digital agriculture team, we also have this digital agriculture expert national one, whose name is Murad Fasanev, yeah. So we had those consultation moments and we already had some criteria by which we wanted to select our participants. And apart from this criteria, we looked at participants as a team, not individually, because on the hackathon it's important to have a variety of people and a team can consist of, for example, a marketing specialist or a backend developer, a junior developer, a senior developer, so there can be different roles in a team. So of course, like, beginners can apply, more professional coders can apply, anyone can apply as a team and if you have the criteria, if you look at their idea, if you look at their teams, you can always decide like who to choose to participate in your hackathon. Thank you very much for that question. And the second question, just a second I'm reading it. Which channels we use to invite young innovators to work on agricultural challenges. And if we have engaged any community leaders to promote the hackathon. Okay, the channels that we use was, first of all, because we had co hosting of this event. The channel that we use was the channels of our national partners. The event, the hackathon was co financed by the Ministry of IT's regional hub in Antigone, which the project is being piloted in the area of the pilot. And they have their own channels, their own channels through which they could spread information about our hackathon. The other channels we use was through agency of youth affairs, and through our own network of development partners. And if we knew any project that was interested in hackathons or had an innovation component, we just spread a message or sent an email directly to those teams. And so that's how we got the initial, let's say, awareness raising for the hackathon and community leaders to promote the hackathon. Yes, we did. And inside our project, we often visit the pilot areas in Fergana Valley where the project is happening. And we have contacts of some community youth community leaders and we also sent them some message or an announcement that a hackathon is happening so they could apply. And these were the primary channels that we used to communicate the event that was happening. Thank you very much for these questions. They were very interesting. So thanks to you Nergisa for sharing all these experiences with us. It was really great to learn from you how you hacked your hackathon. And it was a pleasure to have you today really thank you so much.


Hello, you are watching NewsClick and today we are going to the United States where yet again Donald Trump, the former president is in the news. Now Donald Trump faces charges 34 counts of felony for concealing information, for potential campaign fraud, for instance related to various expenses he made. Now this has, of course, become a big news, as I said. But how will it really affect Trump? How will it affect the United States? To discuss all this, we have with us former Indian Ambassador M.K. Badrakumar. Thank you so much for joining us. Ambassador, first of all, I'm going to ask you to maybe look at the crystal ball a bit and tell me whether the number one question on everyone's mind is will Donald Trump go to jail? Or is he going to be permanently out of the political spectrum? Do you think that's really on the cards? You see Prashant, I can only begin with what Harold Wilson said once that a week is a long time in politics. I think it is evolving. That's the point I'm trying to say. And there are far too many variables in the situation which we need to account for as time goes. As things stand, there is even a, to illustrate the point, there is even a thinking that Biden has done this because he wants Trump as his opponent. There is a thesis to that effect. It may sound conspiratorial, but it has an in a logic which I don't need to explain to you that he would get a person like Trump, then he might have a greater chance of winning the election himself. And he is facilitating, in fact, that thesis is that he's facilitating the candidacy of the Republican Party to be falling on Trump's lap, which is entirely conceivable, the kind of railing that is taking place on even Mitt Romney and John Bolton and others, they are all flocking together saying that this is outrageous, this should not have happened. So you see, that's one component that the motivations playing. But at the same time, the thing is, Trump is certainly having a comeback in his own rating, his own rating. And there is a groundswell of opinion that something very unfair has been done, and all this is very ugly, politicking. The fact is, this contributions that he has got over exceeding $10 million just in a week's time, far outstripping what any other Democratic candidate could get. It shows that there is a groundswell of opinion. You see, that also we need to see whether, the second variable is that how from this point, he may get easily, his path will be much easier in getting the Republican Party's candidacy, the Florida governor and all these people, they will have a tough time countering him now. But then, if you go by the first thesis, Biden may have a strong opponent also, that is one thing. And secondly, the thing is inherently, these cases are weak. And therefore, there is no surety that he will be sentenced. Absolutely. If he's not sentenced, then he's uncontrollable. Exactly. And it's ironic because there was the January 6th coup attempt in which clearly a lot of involvement of the Trump team was there. He's not facing any major action for that. There is the issue of, I believe, income tax fraud. There is the issue of concealing presidential documents. And there are cases in all of this, but this is the case that he's finally been nailed on at least for now. So many people, I think, suspecting that this is probably the weakest of the cases that they had against Trump. It is. And also, another thing is that normally here, I must point out that this is really about the federal election. And therefore, this should have come within the federal laws. But the Justice Department in Washington DC didn't think that there is sufficient enough case to be made out of it. So it's very strange that a district attorney would come into this like that. So the credibility itself of this process that is unfolding is in doubt. As it is, none of these charges can prevent him from contesting the election, even becoming the President of the United States. There, he can be stopped only if there is one particular count which shows that he tried to organize an insurrection. Now, I don't think we are anywhere near that. With all the attempts that were there, they couldn't pin him down there. And then, another big factor is Trump is a fighter. And he, this is not new for him. The fact is, Obama administration's time, the attorney general and others had kept a surveillance on even his campaign machinery. And then from day one, he was under attack by the deep state. And this Russia collusion now in retrospect, we know that it was a very well-planned orchestrated attempt to paralyze his presidency. You see, this recently I read about Richard Nixon faced the same thing. Eisenhower faced the same thing. So Nixon's also the other one is Nixon's other side of Nixon is that he wanted the thong with Russia. And he wanted to open line with China. It's very staunchly anti-communist though, his mindset. He wanted it as a pragmatist. He thought that the United States needed it. Eisenhower again had the same approach towards Soviet Union. So the deep state immediately got into the action. Trump's was the same thing. Trump had made no bones about it that he intended to improve relations with Russia. So the Russia collusion thing was brought in. And virtually now we know that his four years of his presidency, it was paralyzed because of this Russia collusion thing, anything that he would take in terms of improving relations with Russia so that he can bring back the troops and he can concentrate. He wanted to bring the troops back from Syria, but he was not getting anywhere. And it is the same with Afghanistan. So the man did not, he had also the problem that he was an outsider. The Washington bureaucracy is the permanent establishment is very tough. They disdainfully look at politicians anyway and because they control and they are in league with Wall Street, military-industrial complex, the intelligence establishment, Pentagon interests, all those things. It's very formidable front. So you see his presidency is paralyzed, but this time around I get a feeling that the man knows also he is more experienced in working the system. And hopefully he may not make those kind of mistakes which he made is a very poor judgment he had of human character. He got into his cabinet, people who were guaranteed to undermine his political program. But Ambassador, just to sort of extend the point you were saying, Trump's years were strange. So to put it like on the one hand he escalated the attacks on Cuba and Venezuela on one hand. On Iran, of course, he worsened the situation. In fact, brought to the region very close to a war. He did escalate issues with China, although not as badly as Joe Biden has done. But on the other hand, like you said, they were also sort of attempts to kind of maybe draw back from this state of perennial conflict. So how do you sort of understand this kind of a policy framework where it is not a complete withdrawal from the US of the traditional US policy, but there are nonetheless some bits of trying to be different from the deep states methods? This is a very, very, very interesting question, that contradiction is there. It has been pointed out by a lot of people. But essentially, the thing is the kind of program, the kind of, you may call it vision, foreign policy vision or the national priority, the package that he had, you could not compartmentalize it. It had to go as a package. And then when I analyze it, I feel that an important component of it, like Russia and even China, the point is, if you get people like this Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, none of them, the incumbent officials there, none of them was in sync with his thinking. So you see a number of these situations, Prashant, which you detail, the attitude, the policy, the approach, everything is on the basis of what the underlings prepare. And I don't know to what extent his attention span is notoriously limited. Now, when you have a man like John Bolton, for instance, as your national security advisor, after all, he gets options A, B, C, but it is out of the three that he has to choose. So I don't think he stood a chance. That's why I said that about two, three days ago, there was a very beautiful essay on this, putting together all the evidences that were there in spread over various books, it had been written about, about the Nixon presidency. And it is stunning, the similarity. So it's not a propagandistic thing that this deep state is frightening. And the Eisenhower, in his fable speech, made that famous military industrial complex as a threat to democracy. Now, actually prophetic words when you look at it. So you see coming back to what you said, therefore, I subscribe to the view that if he had, for example, proceeded to improve relations with Russia, and he was confident that he had the capacity to build a working relationship with Vladimir Putin. If he had done it, then, you know, the thing is the alchemy would have been different of the world politics, you know. And there would have been a conversation with Putin. And Putin would have also helped him in a certain way like that. And a number of these situations may have taken a different turn. That didn't happen because there is a log jam there. So on the main plank is a total stalemate and he couldn't, and he was under assault. He was on his back foot. And then these underlings would bring up all these peripheral issues, you know, of Cuban cigars and, you know, flights to Havana and all that kind of things. And it went into a very different kind of a track. Interesting. So I'm going back a bit to the character of Trump itself and the US current political US establishment. There is a sense of complete collapse as far as the US political establishment is concerned. And I think the traditional establishment and one of the signs has been for many years the emergence of Trump, because in some senses, he has defied, he has defied everybody. He's swamped. He has defied all the swamp. He's defied the expectations of what people traditionally thought that what would harm a politician has not harmed him. Like you said, an indictment filed against him against him has actually helped him raise money. And in fact, I think the his team printed t-shirts with him behind the bars or something and raised money that way also. So in that sense, how do you see the phenomenon of Trump itself in the context of how the people in the US feel about the political establishment? You know, what is the constituency of people who are so unhappy with the politics as it is that they support, they support a millionaire, right? A lot of poor people support a millionaire who tells them that the state is a problem. It's a very ironic situation in some senses. So how do you read that? Basically, this is the phenomenon of the uniparty, which has alienated the public. It developed over a length of time. And now we know very well that presidents may come and go, parties may change, the ruling elite may change. But essentially, there is a uniparty ruling the country. And the same policies are continuing. The neocon policies can be identified with Bill Clinton, with George Bush, with Barack Obama, you know, and they came down to Biden now. So you see, this is the kind of thing. And the people really, basically in the democratic process there, the people have no role today, you know, if you explore deeply into it and dig for the truth, what has happened, you know. Now, Trump said yesterday or the day before yesterday, after this arrest and all that, he came back to Florida to his mansion. And there he gave a very interesting speech, you know, and one of the things he mentioned is this, that how we are used to some of these things in the Indian context, you know, he said, you know, that the electoral laws that has been fudging, you know, and there, you know, earlier time when he mentioned these things and he raised a hue and cry over it, that this is unfair, this is not a level playing field. We thought, you know, that he was, you know, getting into a blame game. But now the point is, there is a sense of helplessness and despair. These things are happening in America. So the people's attitude towards these processes is that, you know, that they are now looking at it, that, you know, they are not having any impact on policies. The Uniparty is ruling the country and it's a kind of a musical chairs, you know, it's just going on like that. That is the one part of it. And then the anomalies in the electoral laws, you know, has reached such a point that the outcome of elections can be easily manipulated today in the US, you know. And then, you know, their archaic system is such that, you know, the uniformity is not there in the whole country. Different states have, you know, enacted different laws, you know, and they work differently in the local conditions there. So I think all these things are there. And then there is a very strong economic content to it in the sense that the inequities in the society, it's a well-known fact it has been written about, plenty of data available on that, that, you know, that they say very big and the distance is widening, you know, a small section of the population is arrogating the wealth and the impoverished people and the middle class particularly has been badly squeezed and they are no longer, you know, able to have that kind of middle class way of life frustrations there. Then the kind of deindustrialization which took place in the US as a result of which the working class is alienated also. So then there is a very big powerful component of the religious constituency, the Christian constituency. So all these things came into it and his major attraction in the 2016 election was this, that he was an outsider. Exactly.  The closest to maybe Sanders who came to actually. Sanders is different. The pity of the situation is that this could have been channeled in a creative way and it would have found creative and a positive agenda in the hands of a politician like Sanders. But you know, he's the quality of leadership that Trump could give and can give even if he gets reelected now. He's very poor, you know, because he has very severe limitations for a national leader.  So Sanders would have been, Sanders would have probably been America's salvation if he had been and I think again, the problem there is that again, the deep state and, you know, those entrenched interests, the uniparty would have felt very uncomfortable because, you know, he was, he was, he deserved the candidacy even in 2016, but then he was outmaneuvered and he was persuaded to give up and throw in the towel and walk off, you know. So, Ambassador, finally, I mean, right now for the Democrats, it's a very complicated situation to say the least. Like you said, Joe Biden mainly won the last election because he was not Trump. That was pretty much his campaign plank, however much he sought it and all the promises he made during the campaign, he's pretty much failed to deliver in the huge infrastructure packages. It has been largely curtailed, social spending again hasn't really worked out. He's not even brought his own party together, forget bipartisan support that he had again promised, but there have been maybe some marginal improvements in the economic situation. So does it look like right now the Democrats really have a plan except, like you said at the beginning of the interview, to be the not Trump party? You know the 2016 mood was one. That I think Trump is probably going to be in a position to recreate. Trump has a greater chance in 2024. As far as Biden is concerned, the 2020 mood, he cannot recreate in 2024. I think even within his party, it is palpable that there isn't that sort of enthusiasm for him and that they would have liked it if this man had just walked away from the ring altogether and left the party and that would have been the party's best option. But then the point is an incumbent president, if he wants to make a reelection bid, it's not in their political culture and it is not within the party for anyone to stand up and say, no, you're no good. He's running down and it's suicidal for the party to do that. So you see, it's a catch-22 situation for the Democrats, basically. They're stuck with this man. But I don't think that he will be able to recreate that 2020 juxtaposition that he managed as the winning card for himself. Thank you so much, Ambassador, for taking us through some of these nuances of US politics and we hope to talk to you soon. Thank you. So that's all we have time for today. This is definitely a developing story, a story that will develop this year, it will develop next year, until the elections and we'll see what happens. Until then, keep watching NewsClick.


Like SIGA that was moving pretty aggressively pre-market up today. I thought to myself, you know what? It's been a very long time since we had a sector play. So why don't I try long on this stock? I'm gonna go long on the dip around 1520 and if it breaks the 1490 support, I'm gonna get out. So that's exactly what I did. I went long at 1520. Stock broke support. I got out at 1490 and the stock tanked all the way down to $11. If I didn't do that, I probably lost 10-15 thousand dollars, right? So I made a plan. I followed it. Turns out that I was wrong. That's fine. It happens in trading.


What's up everybody, Jason here for jaspyscasebreak.com. We just sold out 2016 Panini Donner Cigars Series football. It is an eight box case break, inner case breaks hard. Round of teams number one. So again, this is an early bird free spot giveaway break. So if you buy one of the first 16 spots, you can enter the winner free spots. We only sold 31, but there's 32 total spots. Everybody gets a random team in the NFL. And again, the dice roller that we have here is going to be used for the early bird customer chances, the customers in the break itself, and of course, the teams. So here you go, let's roll it. And it's a four and a five nine times. So this is for the early bird customers. Number one gets a free spot. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Nine times. Tom, congratulations, you've got a free spot in the break. We're being an early bird. Now let's go nine times here. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, Jeremy, Donna Martin, nine times, teams. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, Falcons, New England Patriots. So Jeremy, you have the Falcons, Laura with the Packers, Jack with the Chargers, Anthony with the Jaguars, Barry with the Cowboys, Jeff, you have the Steelers, Tom, 49ers, Kyle with the Bills, Travis with the Seahawks, Corey with the Dolphins, Anthony with the Raiders, Chris with the Bengals, Michael with the Cardinals, Nick Anderson with the Bears, Greg with the Broncos, Christian you have the Giants, Barry with the Ravens, Tony you have my Eagles, Tom with the Chiefs, Ricardo with the Titans, Charles with the Panthers, Tony with the Jets, Jack with the Saints, Laura with the Rams, Jack with the Vikings, Browns and Lyons, Philip with the Bucks, Ryan you have Los Palmos, Joe Texans as well as the Redskins, Jack with the Colts and Martin with the Patriots. So there you go. Quick trade window if you guys want to trade. If not, we'll start the break. And in the meantime, I'm gonna turn on Nick Cam and I'm gonna open up the case. This is a master case, so we're gonna choose one of the innards and we'll roll a die and see which case we'll do here. So in the meantime, I'm just gonna open it up and then we'll do a little dry scroll once we close the trailer though. What's going on man? Joseph, I don't actually quite know. I feel like XRCs have only been around for like maybe the last four or five years, but don't quote me. I feel like I've seen XRCs in like 2014, I think I started or 15, but I don't know, it could have been before that. But they do sell well though. Especially like, you know. If it's a pretty hyped up player. Excuse me, you know who used to do XRCs to? Joseph was a portfolio hockey. Those used to sell pretty well. I remember the last year they did portfolio was 15-16, you got to get a Matthews XRCs, is the number one pig, Linay and stuff. And those sold pretty well too. All right, well, Phillip looks like nobody really wants to trade. Let's take a look what you got. No one else to propose a trade. Nice, Aaron. I've got some new goodies that came in today too. I'll send you some picks. All right, so we've got two winners here guys. Left or right, as always, one, two, three for the left side, four, five, six for the right. Two, one, two, three. This one right here would be for a future break. Got some Spectra RPAs in today that I got. I don't even realize I got them. My other green pulsar came in today though. Shocking that, I thought it was gonna come later this week. Oh, it's Eric and Nick.  I think I do remember those, actually. I was a little confused when you put BAP, but to be a player, yeah. Ooh, look at this guy. This guy still wants out. Yannick for the Jaguars. This guy's a good, good player. Just wants to get paid. Jaguars, going to Anthony. Travis, Swanson for the Lions. Elusive Ink to 15 for the Vikings, Chris Dolman. And how about that? Jaylen Ramsey and a Miles Jack dual autograph, number to 100 for the Jaguars. Nice. Three good defensive players in this box for the Jaguars. Chris Jones, Taj J Sharp. We got a 25, DeMarcus Ayers, Steelers for the Jeff, and Trevor Davis, one out of 50 little patch auto. Laura with the Packers. All right, next one. I did not have rubble, was it funny? Speaking of that guy, Chris Jones. There he is again. I don't look at this guys, but 250 points. Some of it will win that at the end of the break. And a 10 for the Redskins. Brian Mitchell and Tyler Higbee. Emmanuel Alba, and again, 400 points. We give that out to another customer there. And ooh, Jared Goff, that's a rookie and it's a one out of 50. Very nice. Randall Laura, all right, next one. Ben Young Barner, from my Eagles, Super Bowl champion, pro duck, Teddy Brusky for the Patriots. Martin with that one. Cameron Hayward, 25, and Steve Tasker for the Bills. Next one. Christian Akoy, the Nigerian nightmare, all right. Like a beast on film. Redemption, Sheldon Rankins, a rookie signature series. I'll have to look that up where that goes to, I forget. Elusive Ink to 25 for the Detroit Lions, some old school player, Dick LeBeau, and Taj J. Sharp. Random Doughty, Elusive Ink, another one there for the Lions. Chris Spillman, Trevor Davis to 15. And Derek Henry, a little Jersey Auto. Titans, going to Ricardo. All right, you guys, last box here. Good luck. We got Houston Texans here. Keith Humphrey, I'm a Mumfrey, sorry. Mikkel Pruitt for the Vikings, another redemption. John Kuhn, Elusive Ink, Hollow Silver, which I believe that should be Packers, but I'll double check those. And Boomer of size, Bang is going to Chris. All right, let's check out these redemptions really quick and then we'll give away those points. 400 goes to number one, number two gets 250. Sheldon Rankins, Cartoucheon will be for the New Orleans Saints, Packers for John Kuhn. All right, sweet. Let's get a new Dice Roller, get a new List Randomizer. Randomize the customer names, number one gets 400 points, number two gets 250. What's going on here? Come on, round.org, load. Round.org, stuck? Oh no, wrap up. All right, guys, I think round.org is a little frozen here. Oh wait, maybe it's just us. There we go, thank God. I didn't want to have to use the other Dice Roller website. All right, here we go. Six and a three, nine times, top two gets something. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine times. Jack, you're gonna get 400 points, and Christian, you're gonna get 250. Appreciate it, guys. This is Donner's signature, his football eight-box intercase break, round of the season number one on jaspyscasebreaks.com. Coming up next on our break schedule is gonna be Chronicles Hanger, number six. Appreciate it, guys.