Trump returns to Washington after 2020 election loss

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Donald Trump returned on Tuesday to Washington for the first time since he left the White House after a failed attempt to overturn his election loss to Joe Biden.

Trump, increasingly teasing a bid to win back the presidency in 2024, is set to address the America First Policy Institute, a think tank run by allies.

He’ll be appearing in a city riveted by weeks of hearings held by a Democratic-run House of Representatives committee on the January 6, 2021 riot where Trump supporters stormed Congress, trying to stop certification of the election result.

The Republican continues repeatedly to push his lie in speeches that he was robbed of victory in 2020, but America First Policy Institute spokesman Marc Lotter said Trump would be looking ahead, rather than back.

“This is a policy speech he will be giving,” he told CNN.

However, Trump is unlikely to deviate too far from his typically incendiary blend of right-wing nationalism, anti-immigrant rhetoric and conspiracy theories about the election.

The Capitol riot hearings, which revealed harrowing details of the assault on Congress and also the attempt by Trump political backers to overturn the election through manipulation of the complicated US electoral system, are believed to have damaged Trump.

Biden, who at the start of his presidency went out of his way to avoid so much as mentioning Trump’s name, launched a blistering broadside Monday on the Republican’s failure to pull back his mob of supporters.

“Brave law enforcement officers were subject to the medieval hell for three hours, dripping in blood, surrounded by carnage, face to face with the crazed mob that believed the lies of the defeated president,” Biden told the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives Conference.

“For three hours, the defeated former president of the United States watched it all happen as he sat in the comfort of the private dining room next to the Oval Office,” he said.

– Trump in pole position –

Trump, 76, remains by far the most recognizable name in Republican politics. He is believed to retain an intensely loyal core of supporters, putting him in pole position if he decides to seek the party nomination.

Potential rivals are gaining ground as the negative publicity piles up.

All eyes are on the progress of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has not declared a bid for the presidency, but has growing stature on the right.

And a recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed that nearly half of Republican primary voters would vote for any Republican other than Trump.

Last week, the right-leaning editorial boards of two newspapers owned by the Murdoch family, the Wall Street Journal and New York Post, issued harsh critiques of Trump’s behavior during the January 6 calamity.

Trump showed he is “unworthy” of becoming president again, the usually friendly Post wrote.

However, both Trump and his portrayal of an America under attack by leftists continues to be boosted by enormously popular commentators on Murdoch-owned Fox News.

“Across American history, our era is easily among the most fraught — and the most alarming,” wrote the leaders of the pro-Trump think tank, including his former economy advisor Larry Kudlow.

AFP

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July 26, 2022

Chainlink Keepers automates impermanent loss return on Armadillo

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Armadillo, a multi-chain impermanent loss (IL) protection solution powered by the Crypto Volatility Index (CVI) from COTI, will be using Chainlink Keepers on Polygon to automate IL protection payout.

CVI operates a basket of volatility products, including Armadillo’s impermanent loss protection.

The CVI team developed a toolbox of decentralized risk management solutions that are applicable and relevant in today’s highly dynamic crypto markets. Armadillo’s impermanent loss protection is just one recent addition to this toolbox and looks to be one of the most promising solutions for liquidity providers.

CVI + Chainlink Keepers

Chainlink Keepers supports secure and cost-efficient automated payouts to liquidity providers (LPs) for their incurred impermanent loss. As a result, the payout of impermanent loss protection can be made in a fully automated way, without any manual action required from LPs.

In order to help automate payouts and further decentralize Armadillo, a dependable solution was needed. Chainlink Keepers is a decentralized service purpose-built to manage tasks on behalf of smart contracts that “wake” up smart contracts when they need to perform critical on-chain functions.

In this case, Chainlink Keepers monitors Armadillo’s impermanent loss protection platform to check if any protection periods have passed. Whenever a user’s protection period has ended, Chainlink Keepers request the payout on behalf of the user, enabling a seamless user experience.

Crypto Volatility Index (CVI)

Using the Black-Scholes option pricing model, the Crypto Volatility Index (CVI) computes the implied volatility of bitcoin and ethereum option prices and then analyzes how markets anticipate future volatility.

CVI is a full-scale decentralized platform that brings the popular “market fear index” to the crypto market, which is created by computing a decentralized volatility index from cryptocurrency option prices and analyzing the market’s expectation of future volatility.

CVI provides a reliable DeFi tool suitable for analyzing volatility, hedging portfolios, and earning from being a liquidity provider.

Armadillo is a protocol that offers:

Multi-Chain Protection — Protects selected pairs staked across any chain, DEX, or platform.
Non-Custodial — The liquidity does not have to be moved in order to purchase the protection.
Customized — Each user sets the pair, amount, and timeframe to protect.
Decentralized On-Chain Protection — On-chain oracles and smart contracts are used to ensure security and manipulation resistance.

Check out Armadillo’s Whitepaper to learn more about the platform.

“We decided to decentralize the payout function of impermanent loss protection using Chainlink Keepers because it is operated by the same pool of time-tested, provably reliable node operators that currently help secure tens of billions of dollars across DeFi, even during record levels of network congestion and extreme volatility. The proven infrastructure of Chainlink helps ensure that every USDC payout for Armadillo’s impermanent loss protection is executed on time in a trust-minimized manner.”
– The CVI Team

Some unique features of Chainlink Keepers include:

Decentralized Execution — Chainlink Keepers provide reliable, trust-minimized automation with no single point of failure, mitigating risks around manual processes and centralized servers.
Increased Efficiency — Projects that use Chainlink Keepers are able to reduce time spent on DevOps, minimize operational overhead, and streamline development workflows.
Enhanced Security — Tamper-proof, Sybil-resistant Chainlink Keepers sign on-chain transactions themselves, enabling automated smart contract execution without exposing private keys.
Easy-To-Use — Developers are able to schedule time-based automation jobs in seconds using the Chainlink Keepers Job Scheduler’s no-code UI.

“We’ve been using Chainlink Keepers to help rebase our volatility tokens, so the smart contract automation solution has already saved us a lot of operational costs and development time. With this new integration, Chainlink Keepers help ensure that payouts in our impermanent loss protection feature are executed autonomously, further establishing a high standard of security and decentralization for our platform.”
– Shahaf Bar-Geffen, CEO, COTI

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July 22, 2022

Africa: Opinion – EU Protection for Indigenous Land Rights Needed to Help Stem Forest Loss

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The European Union is moving towards regulation that will require companies to respect the rights of Indigenous peoples in their value chains, helping curb forest loss

The European Union’s environment committee decided this month to include protections for Indigenous peoples and other forest defenders in a proposed regulation on deforestation.

It voted overwhelmingly to direct companies that seek to place products on the EU market to respect international standards on customary land ownership rights, as well as the right of communities to consent to, or reject, investments that would affect them or their way of life.

If adopted by the European Parliament in September, two of the EU’s three legislative bodies will have voted in favour of creating obligations for companies to respect Indigenous peoples’ rights.

As the EU enters the final stretch of approving landmark legislation to ensure that the bloc only imports deforestation-free products, European leaders should know what the evidence says about the impact on forests of recognising and enforcing the land rights of Indigenous peoples.

Most recently, the IPBES (Intergovernmental Panel for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) released two reports showing unprecedented support for the value of Indigenous and other forest peoples in conserving what remains of the natural world.

The researchers called communities’ non-monetary and reciprocal relationship with nature vital for stopping the environmental destruction fuelling climate change, biodiversity loss and pandemic risk.

In a summary for policy makers released this month, the scientists advocated strongly for national governments to recognise the land tenure claims of Indigenous peoples. They noted that a rights-based approach to conservation “creates enabling conditions” for the sustainable use of wild species, including the forests that are central to the fight against climate change.

In just four Latin America countries – Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Peru – Indigenous lands sequester more than twice as much carbon per hectare than other lands, according to a paper analysing the potential contributions of Indigenous territories to meeting the four nations’ commitments under the Paris climate agreement.

Global hunger for timber, mineral wealth and commodities like beef, soy and palm oil drives deforestation in tropical forest countries. Although their forests suffer less degradation, Indigenous peoples in the forests of Indonesia, Latin America and Central Africa continue to be under siege from these industries.

In Colombia, violence has ramped up in rural areas, with hundreds of community leaders murdered over the past six years. And in the Brazilian Amazon this year, deforestation is up 12.7% compared to the first five months of 2021. Last year, Brazil lost more than 1.5 million hectares of forest, most of it in the Amazon.

If tropical forests are standing today, it is largely because of the Indigenous peoples and local communities who resist illegal invaders and stand up to industrial concessions that overlay their lands.

END IMPUNITY FOR VIOLENCE

The plight of Indigenous and other environmental defenders is far better understood in the wake of the horrifying deaths of journalist Dom Phillips and activist Bruno Pereira in the Brazilian Amazon. The two sought to raise awareness of how the values held by Indigenous peoples ensure the survival of the rainforest. Their murders made visible the political and economic pressures eroding the survival of communities and their traditional knowledge across the Amazon.

It’s not too late for governments of forest countries to end the climate of impunity that is subjecting communities to violence and their ancestral lands to destruction.

This means enforcing existing rights and responding to demands from communities for title to their forests and resources, alongside new technologies to help them monitor and report incursions on their lands. And climate planners in each country must embed in their advisory groups Indigenous experts to help guide them in their decision-making.

Tag: loss