Sweden: Gangs and Explosions

I was talking with a friend who is a native Swede. He hasn't lived in the country for years, however. I decided to ask him if he followed the news about Sweden and what he might know about the increasing grenade attacks. He asked if I was getting my news from right wing news sources. Though some of the news reports I read do come from right wing news sources, not all of it does. Here's a couple articles that would hardly be considered right wing:

BBC has the following to say:

Swedish police are dealing with unprecedented levels of attacks, targeting city centre locations too. The bomb squad was called to deal with 97 explosions in the first nine months of this year.

. . . This category of crime was not even logged prior to 2017. Then, in 2018, there were 162 explosions and in the past two months alone the bomb squad have been called to almost 30.

. . . Police say the criminals involved are part of the same gangs behind an increase in gun crime, often connected to the drugs trade. Sweden saw 45 deadly shootings in 2018, compared with 17 in 2011. 

Los Angeles Homeless: what does $630,000 build?

There was a recent audit of Los Angeles' Proposition HHH that highlighted the high cost of building housing for the homeless. Yahoo wrote this a couple months:

At an average cost of $531,373 per unit – with many apartments costing more than $600,000 each – building costs of many of the homeless units will exceed the median sale price of a market-rate condominium. In the city of Los Angeles, the median price for a condo is $546,000, and a single-family home in Los Angeles County has a median price of $627,690, the study states.

Sweden Gangs: Denmark Putting Up Border Checks

Via The Guardian, we are learning that gang violence is crossing over from Sweden to Denmark. So much so that Denmark has decided to put up border checks between the two nations:

There have been 13 explosions in and around Copenhagen since February, including the bombing in August of the Danish tax agency by what authorities described as “criminals who had crossed the border from Sweden”. Two Swedish nationals are in custody.

. . . Malmö, 25 miles from Copenhagen by the Øresund crossing, has been the scene of many of the gangland bombings and shootings that have recently struck Sweden. On Saturday a 15-year-old boy was shot dead in the city and another teenager critically wounded. Both were known to police.

Los Angeles Homeless Issue: Will Housing Really Change Anything?

I came across this NBC Los Angeles video and report. The video and article are mainly about Heidi Van Tassel, a woman who had a bucket of feces dumped on her head by a homeless person in Hollywood.

The article also shows that reports of crimes by the homeless has increased from 6,528 in 2017 to 9,846 in 2018. 2019 is expected to increase above this level. As of September 2019, reported crime is at 9,173. If you do a straight line calculation, 2019 could hit 12,230.

The article blames mental health and drug problems. It also states that many of those that are homeless are just released back onto the streets where they no doubt will commit similar crimes again.

Guyana: Recommendations from Bloomberg

Yahoo has an opinion piece that has recommendations for how Guyana should deal with its 2020 and beyond oil wealth. Here are some recommendations:

Don’t bring the oil onshore . . . Building a tangle of pipelines and refineries is exorbitant, brings marginal returns and makes the host country a magnet for corruption, [Rice University energy expert Francisco] Monaldi said. One of the headline scandals in Brazil’s Carwash corruption probe was a head-turning case of contract fraud on a grossly overpriced domestic refinery and petrochemical complex launched amid the euphoria over earlier big oil discoveries . . . 

Resist the local content temptation . . . Get the rules straight . . . Forge a political pact . . . Hire globally. 

Algeria: Presidential Candidates Announced for December 12th Elections

Algeria has scheduled elections for December 12th. The presidential candidates were recently announced. Al Jazeera lists those running for president:

1. Former Prime Minister Abdelmadjid Tebboune
2. Former Prime Minister Ali Benflis
3. Former Culture Minister Azzedine Mihoubi
4. Former Tourism Minister Abdelkader Bengrine
5. Abdelaziz Belaid, head of the El Mostakbal Movement party

Some of the facts that Al Jazeera mentions are that all are establishment candidates, 23 candidates initially applied to run, and that each candidate had to get at least 50,000 signatures.

California: Fiscal Audit of Cities

Cal Matters has an article up about an audit that was conducted by State Auditor Elaine Howle. The audit was done to determine the level of fiscal risk for California cities. The audit looked at various factors:

Cash position/liquidity
Debt Burden
Financial Reserves
Revenue Trends
Retirement Obligations

The cities were ranked as red, yellow or green -- which is worst and which is best is self-explanatory.

Eighteen cities ranked as red. The 2 that shocked me the most were Monrovia (10th) and West Covina (17th). I recently did a blog post about the budget issues in Montebello. That city ranks 31st and was listed as yellow.

Libya: Bogged Down

BBC has an Oct 27, 2019 article up that states that there isn't much movement in the battle between the Libyan National Army (Benghazi/Tobruk) and the Government of National Accord (Tripoli).

He [Haftar] heads the self-styled Libyan National Army, and already controls most of the country. But six months on, Tripoli still eludes the moustachioed military strongman, who is backed by the Tobruk-based government. He is stuck on the southern outskirts of the city.

. . . "This conflict is largely sustained by the foreign powers backing Haftar," said Emad Badi, a Libyan non-resident scholar at the US-based Middle East Institute.

. . . "Haftar can't and won't win, but Egypt and the Emiratis can't afford to lose. The Egyptians want to control their Western neighbour, and they don't want terrorism on their border. For them it's existential," he said.