1/ Happy #SocialistSunday - and welcome to the weekly #SocialistSundayMegaList!

Please sign & widely share my petition for an emergency UBI and alleviate pandemic poverty. https://t.co/dilMlYxCCG

The following list is 100% randomised.

Trevor Chinn has funded various Labour MPs over the years including Owen Smith, Tony Blair, Joan Ryan, Ruth Smeeth, Tom Watson, Ian Austin, Rachel Reeves, Lisa Nandy, David Lammy, Liz Kendall, Dan Jarvis, Tristram Hunt, Jack Dromey, Liam Byrne. #LabourLeaks #StarmerOut #BICOM

Chinn has funded BOTH Labour Friends of Israel and Conservative Friends of Israel . The multi-millionaire pro-Israel lobbyist donated $62,000 to Keir Starmer to win the UK Labour Party’s leadership election. April 2020 #LabourLeaks #StarmerOut #BICOM

Tom Watson, former BICOM staffer Ruth Smeeth and Labour Friends of Israel’s then chair Joan Ryan.

All three played key roles in promoting the smear campaign that Corbyn’s Labour Party was a hotbed of anti-Semitism. BICOM is important to Starmer. #LabourLeaks #Defence #Brexit

Hoping to remove Corbyn as leader. Chinn funded Corbyn’s rival in the resultant leadership election, Owen Smith.

Smith took donations for his campaign from Chinn totaling $33,000, the register shows. #BICOM #LabourLeaks #StarmerOut

The BICOM group arranges for influential figures to take trips to Israel. These have included trips to the Herzliya conference, a major “security” event at which powerful business and political figures discuss how to reinforce Israeli occupation and apartheid. #StarmerOut #BICOM

I've been seeing a lot of discussion around the dosage gaps recommended by government for the Astra/Oxford & Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines. My thoughts on the potential benefits & risks of such an approach, and the need for much greater transparency around these decisions. Thread.

The UK govt announced recently that both the Oxford & BioNTech vaccines would be now administered with a gap of between 4-12 weeks (so prioritise administration of first dose, given limited resources).

What is the basis of this?

The basis that's been discussed seems to be that
1) the first dose is likely to confer some degree of protection against disease, so better to roll this out as fast as possible, and
2) that for Oxford/Astra efficacy may be higher when the gap between doses is greater.

I discuss some of the technical details around the Oxford trial below for those interested in these. If you'd just like a summary of this, please skip to the summary tweet titled 'SUMMARY'.

What does published evidence show? The Astra/Oxford data are a bit messy because of protocol changes during the trial. This is because the trial was originally planned as a single dose trial, but a booster dose was added when developers realised that this would likely help.

#Justin A day before the @MyMDC_T EOC, the party Treasurer General says he is unable to fund travel costs for delegates to congress because the money was allegedly stolen. We share contents of the letter from #ChiefNdlovu

“My office has been inundated with calls from concerned EOC delegates who by now should have received their Provincial transport allocation.
It has come to my attention that some of our members may not be able to travel to the EOC due to lack of funding.”

Equally I have received allegations that the Treasury is refusing to make payments for EOC, nothing could be further from the truth. I would like to take this opportunity as your Deputy Treasurer to inform you that as treasury we are not able to pay due to the fact that...

that funds were withdrawn from the party account on the 18th December 2020, we are still pursuing and trying to get some Standing Committee members who were involved in the unapproved transfer to return the money to the Party.
I was left a bit shocked to learn that the SG expects

Treasury to release money when he is the one who transferred all the money out of the account without my explicit approval. Perhaps the SG must inform members where the money is. I certainly do not have any knowledge of who he sent the money to or what has happened to those funds

Last month PTI government raised base power tariffs by Rs 1.95 per unit. This month NEPRA has determined tariff increases of Rs 1.53 per unit in Fuel Adjustment Charges for December and Rs 0.83 in Quarterly Adjustment for 4th quarter of 2020. 1/17

So your electric bills for February maybe higher by Rs 4.31 per unit. That’s a Tabdeeli we will feel in our monthly budgets.

The PTI govt takes no responsibility for anything and just blames PMLN’s previous govt. 2/17

For instance when the entire country suffered a blackout a minister blamed PMLN. But when asked exactly what happened he said he didn’t know. He just “knew” it was PMLN’s fault. Later it turned out that Einsteins in PTI forgot to carry out routine maintenance last summer.
3/17

So PTI blames increase in basic tariff (Rs 1.95 of Rs 4.31) on PMLN saying that this is due to higher fixed costs incurred as a result of PMLN setting up more power plants. But that is crazy. The higher fixed cost should now divided by an even higher number of units whose 4/17

generating capacity PMLN installed. And the total cost of all PMLN plants is lower than all previously set up plants. Of course we had to set up power plants. In 2013 we had 12 to 18 hours of load shedding in most of Pakistan. 5/17