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What We're Watching: Protests in Hong Kong and the World's Toughest Parrot
Hong Kong's Extradition Protests – In one of its largest protests in years, tens of thousands marched through Hong Kong's streets toward parliament over the weekend to oppose a plan they say would make it easier to extradite critics of the Chinese government to the mainland. Since 2014, pro-democracy advocates in Hong Kong have been calling for more autonomy from Beijing—with little to show for their efforts. They view the latest legislation as a thinly veiled ploy by the Chinese-backed government in Hong Kong to help Beijing curb dissent. More broadly, they fear that China is slowly stripping Hong Kong of freedoms guaranteed under the handover agreement signed by China and Britain, which controlled Hong Kong until 1997.
Freddy Krueger the Parrot – Brazil is a resilient country, and an Amazonian parrot named Freddy Krueger has now made his case to become Brazil's national bird. This week, Freddy somehow found his way back to the zoo in the southern city of Cascavel from which he was stolen following a difficult past in which he was bird-napped, bitten by a snake, and wounded during a drug-den shootout between traffickers and police. We're watching to see what Freddy gets into next and hoping for a biopic.
What We're Ignoring: Trump Meets Dems and Austrian Grannies Get Angry
The Don, Chuck, and Nancy Show – Can President Trump and congressional Democrats agree on anything? How about some big spending to upgrade shoddy US infrastructure? Trump has said at various times that he wants to splurge on major improvements to roads, rail, ports, airports and even communications infrastructure. Lead Democratic lawmakers Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer want these things too, though they want tax increases to pay for them along with labor and environmental protections as part of any deal. We're ignoring their meeting tomorrow, because Senate Republicans won't agree to any of this. Even where Trump, Pelosi, and Schumer agree, there's just no deal to be made.
Austria's Angry Grannies – Grannies Against the Right is a movement created to protest Austria's rightward shift under the conservative-nationalist government of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. It's organized by women old enough to remember the terrible aftermath of World War II. This is a fine organization engaged in a noble cause, but we decided to ignore them when we discovered that the group accepts non-grannies as members.