Dying healthcare activist Ady Barkan in an end-of-year video to his supporters Monday called out the one candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination who has refused to meet with him: Joe Biden. 

“I got to sit down and talk about healthcare with every major presidential candidate,” Barkan said. “Except for Joe Biden.”

Barkan, who is dying of ALS, or Lou Gherig’s disease, met with Democrats vying for the 2020 nomination over the year and filmed the conversations.

Climate advocates are calling on fossil fuel companies to pay for the damage caused by Australia’s unprecedented bushfires rather than that country’s taxpayers forking over an additional $2 billion for those affected by the crisis.

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“Regular Australians should not be forced to pay while fossil fuel producers are being let off scot-free,” the Australia Institute’s deputy director Ebony Bennett said in a statement. 

“It’s disappointing that the Australian community will be left to pick up the tab for a climate-fueled disaster,” she added.

Bennett, whose group is pushing for the Australian government to impose a “modest levy” on fossil fuel producing companies to cover the cost of bushfire recovery and first introduced the proposal in December, added that taxing those responsible for the climate crisis to provide the funds for disaster mitigation would “shift the economic burden of these disasters from regular Australians to the coal and gas companies that are fueling the climate crisis.”

Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced Monday that the government would obtain the additional $2 billion from the country’s projected $5 billion surplus for the year. 

“The surplus is of no focus for me,” said Morrison, whose response to the fires has been seen as, at best, insufficient by critics.

Critics of the corporate media as well as supporters and staffers of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign blasted the moderators of the CNN/Des Moines Register Democratic presidential debate Tuesday night for employing centrist talking points and demonstrating a bias against Sanders in how they framed questions.

The debate, which ran over two hours, was moderated by the Register‘s Brianne Pfannenstiel and CNN‘s Wolf Blitzer and Abby Phillip. It featured six of the 12 remaining Democratic candidates: Sanders (I-Vt.), former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, and former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

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As Common Dreams reported, the financial burden of deploying American forces was notably absent during first part of the debate—a lengthy discussion on foreign policy and war—but the moderators did ask candidates about the costs of implementing Medicare for All healthcare, as Sanders has proposed. That contrast, and the presentation of the healthcare questions, sparked swift condemnation from progressives.

Overall, a team of Rolling Stone writers called the debate moderators’ questions “mystifyingly inane.” In a piece titled “CNN Completely Botched the Democratic Presidential Debate,” HuffPost‘s Zach Carter called them “awful.” According to him, the debate on the whole was “tedious, interminable, frivolous… a fiasco of irrelevance held three weeks before the Iowa caucuses.”

“Again and again, CNN anchors substituted centrist talking points for questions―and then followed up predictable responses with further centrist talking points, rarely illuminating any substantive disagreements between the candidates or problems with their policy positions,” he wrote.

Carter pointed to examples such as when Phillip noted that Des Moines is an “insurance town” and asked Sanders what will happen to employees of private insurance companies if the country implements Medicare for All. She also asked Sanders, “How would you keep your plans from bankrupting the country?”

Those critiques and examples, along with others, circulated on social media:

The debate led some critics on Twitter to conclude that #CNNisFox or #CNNisTrash:

The debate came just a day after CNN published what critics called a hit piece involving a private conversation between Sanders and Warren in 2018. Citing four unnamed sources—none of whom were in the room for the conversation—CNN reported that Sanders told Warren “he did not believe a woman could win” the presidential race. While Warren issued a statement after the story ran endorsing the findings of the report, Sanders has repeatedly denied it, including during the debate.

Social justice advocates in the United Kingdom are raising concerns over a trade deal being negotiated with the United States by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, after reports surfaced that American leaders are planning to use leverage provided by Brexit to force a scheme of privavitzation and the stripping of protections from British workers.

“These trade talks are being conducted with excessive levels of secrecy,” Global Justice Now director Nick Dearden said in a statement Sunday. 

After the U.K. left the European Union on Friday through Brexit, Britons were left wondering how the island nation would renegotiate trade deals with its global partners. Johnson is expected to begin formal talks with both the U.S. and E.U. on Monday. 

While the U.K. is now officially out of the E.U., the two sides have eleven months to work out what exactly that separation looks like. 

The deal with the U.S. is slightly more straightforward, in theory, though Johnson and his government have kept negotiations a secret from the public and Parliament. Documents from the talks leaked in November show a push to privatize the National Health Service to make the U.K.’s popular universal system more like the U.S. private insurance scheme.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lashed out at NPR reporter Mary Louise Kelly in a statement Saturday a day after she pressed Pompeo on issues including former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and he reportedly yelled at her with expletives and demanded she identify Ukraine on a map.

In her Friday interview with Pompeo, Kelly asked about the administration’s Iran policy and pressed Pompeo about when—since he said he has “defended every State Department official”—he had done so for Yovanovitch.

He did not point to any such remarks.

NPR reported,

Pompeo then went on to attempt to berate Kelly.

Pompeo, in his statement, accused Kelly of lying about having the follow-up conversation off the record, asserted her conduct was “shameful,” and called the indent “another example of how unhinged the media has become in its quest to hurt President Trump and this administration.”

He also suggested, contrary to Kelly’s account, that she did not point to Ukraine on a map. “It is worth noting that Bangladesh is NOT Ukraine,” he wrote.

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Pompeo’s remarks drew condemnation from journalists including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, who called them “a shameful assault on #PressFreedom. Americans deserve a Secretary of State that is diplomatic, can answer foreign policy questions honestly, upholds our values and respects the press. This one doesn’t.”

Wired also pointed to its reporting from October that “Pompeo seems to particularly bristle under tough questioning from female reporters.”

Pompeo’s Saturday attack on Kelly also sparked five Democratic senators—Robert Menendez (N.J.), Tim Kaine (Va.), Ed Markey (Mass.), Jeff Merkley (Ore.), and Cory Booker (N.J.)—to write to Pompeo, denouncing the secretary of state’s comments as “insulting and contemptuous.”

“Instead of calling journalists ‘liars” and insulting their intelligence when they ask you hard questions you would rather not answer,” the senators wrote, “your oath of office places on you a duty and obligation to engage respectfully and transparently.”