This Week's Must Reads - 1-7 April 2024

A summary of this week's most interesting news, studies, reports and articles

I spend a lot of time each day gathering new information and interesting articles. I then pick the most fascinating topic and write about it but that leaves a lot of information that I’m not sharing.

Below is a summary of all the best articles and information from this week. This weekly summary is a slimmed down version for all subscribers but more comprehensive daily summaries will be for paid subscribers only.

Make sure you sign up!

---

Climate Change

• Net zero now threatens our national security. Energy Security Secretary Claire Coutinho is quite right: Labour’s promise to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030 is “dangerous”. It threatens to plunge UK households and businesses into the dark while boosting the Chinese companies on which we will be mainly reliant for supplying all the cables, batteries and other kit we will need to get anywhere close to achieving the target. But why does she think it will be much different to the Government’s own policy of decarbonising the grid by 2035? Coutinho seems to be asserting that between the years 2030 and 2035 will magically spring up a UK-based steel, copper and battery industry which will somehow undercut the Chinese. Dream on.

• Athletes at Paris Summer Olympics won’t have air conditioning because France wants to ‘combat climate change’. Thousands of athletes at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris will have to make do without air conditioning as the organisers have decided not to install ACs at the athletes’ village as part of their initiative to combat global warming. Rather than having air conditioning, a geothermal cooling system will be used to maintain the temperature of the apartments, where 10,500 Olympians and 4,400 Paralympians will stay. The event is scheduled to take place between July 26 and August 11, a time when extreme temperatures are predicted in the city.

Covid

• A new Covid origin inquiry is bipartisan. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who sparred with top public health officials in heated hearings about Covid-19 and the government’s response to the pandemic, has found a Democrat to join him in investigating the virus’ origins. And it’s not just any Democrat. It’s Gary Peters (D-Mich.), chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on which Paul is the ranking Republican. The duo announced yesterday they are investigating where Covid came from, the high-risk research that Paul believes caused the pandemic, as well as broader “national security threats posed by high-risk biological research and technology.”

• Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance is set to testify at a public hearing on 1 May 2024.

  

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• We will never surrender powers to the World Health Organization. No one is going to tell us how to take care of our citizens, or force us to impose any particular national response in future crises. Our red lines in the negotiations include not agreeing to anything that cedes sovereignty, protecting our ability to make all of our own domestic decisions on national public health measures, including whether to introduce any lockdowns or restrictions, require vaccinations and mask wearing, and decisions on travel into and out of the country.

• Two Weeks to Flatten Became Eight Months to Change the Election. Just 25% of votes in 2020 occurred at the polls on Election Day. Mail-in voting more than doubled. Key swing states eliminated the need to provide a valid reason to cast absentee ballots. The virus and racial justice became justifications to disregard verification methods like signature requirements. It is now clear that the overhaul of our election system was a deliberate initiative from the outset of the pandemic response. In March 2020, when the Government’s official policy was still “two weeks to flatten the curve,” the administrative state began instituting the infrastructure to hijack the November presidential election, more than 30 weeks beyond when the Covid response was supposed to end.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• Russian manufacturing sees fastest growth in nearly 18 years in March, PMI shows. The S&P Global Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) for Russian manufacturing rose to 55.7 in March from 54.7 in February, moving further above the 50 marks that separates expansion from contraction to its highest reading since August 2006. Moscow is spending particularly heavily on manufacturing, pouring cash into the defence sector to ramp up military production. The defence industry spurred sharper than forecast growth in industrial production in February, data showed last week.

• High Oil Prices Force the U.S. to Abandon Its Latest Attempt to Refill the SPR. The Department of Energy has canceled its latest tender for crude oil for the replenishment of the strategic petroleum reserve after oil prices moved higher than the DoE is comfortable with. Last month, the DoE purchased 2.8 million barrels at a price of $81 per barrel, which was higher than its self-imposed ceiling of $79 per barrel. It appears the department is unwilling to keep paying more for SPR oil, saying it was “keeping the taxpayer’s interest at the forefront”, per Bloomberg. West Texas Intermediate topped $85 per barrel this week as Brent crude moved closer to $90 per barrel amid heightened geopolitical tensions in Russia and Ukraine and in the Middle East.

• World gains 141 new billionaires in ‘amazing year for rich people’. There are more billionaires than ever before. The world has 2,781 people with fortunes exceeding $1bn (£800m), an increase of 141 on 2023, according to Forbes’ annual ranking of the world’s richest people. The billionaires are also collectively worth more than ever, with combined assets estimated at $14.2tn – a $2tn increase on 2023 and more than the GDP of every country except the US and China. Their collective wealth has risen by 120% in the past decade, at the same time as billions of people across the world have seen their living standards decrease in the face of inflation and the cost of living crisis.

• A Debt Danger Lurks for the US Economy. According to the latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office, the US federal government debt is on a path from 97% of GDP last year to 116% by 2034. With uncertainty about so many of the variables, Bloomberg Economics has run a million simulations to assess the fragility of the debt outlook. In 88% of the simulations, the results show the debt-to-GDP ratio is on an unsustainable path — defined as an increase over the next decade.

• Oil Extends Gains After Middle East Tensions Push Brent Over $90. Global benchmark Brent rose toward $91, near its highest since October, while West Texas Intermediate was at around $87. Israel has increased preparations for potential retaliation by Tehran after Monday’s strike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria, stoking fears of a wider regional conflict. Earlier this week, OPEC+ chose to stick with supply cuts for the first half of the year, keeping global markets tight and buttressing the case for higher prices.

• UK bankruptcies are still shooting up.

  

• Federal Reserve Refuses to Provide Records of Foreign Gold Holdings. Weeks after Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell evaded a sitting congressman’s questions about the central bank’s foreign gold holdings, the Fed has also declined to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request for records about such holdings. The Federal Reserve’s lack of transparency comes amidst reports that countries are removing their gold and other assets from the U.S. in the wake of the unprecedented Western sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.

Health

• Alzheimer’s May Spread Through Blood Transfusions, Scientists Find. Results from a new study published in the journal Stem Cell Reports suggest that transfusions and transplants of blood, bone marrow, organs and other biological matter from one person with hereditary Alzheimer's to a healthy person can spread the disease. For the study, they bred mice to be carriers of human inheritable Alzheimer's, and specifically a gene that synthesizes amyloid plaques. They then extracted stem cells from their bone marrow and injected this biological tissue into healthy mice that were not carriers. Within nine months, the normal mice were showing signs of cognitive decline, as well as changes in their brains such as the accumulation of amyloid plaques, fibrous deposits that are classic hallmarks of Alzheimer’s.

• More than 250 needless deaths occur each week due to agonising waits in A&E, study suggests - with a million patients waiting 12 hours or more for a bed after being admitted. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) estimates one in 72 of those patients will have died because they were left in A&E waiting rooms or on trolleys before a place on a ward became available. The figures – described as a conservative estimate – do not include the thousands of patients stuck in the back of ambulances who were also at risk of harm, the study says. It comes as hospitals face a bed-blocking crisis, where patients ready to be discharged cannot leave due to a lack of social care in the community or simple bureaucratic hold-ups.

• Chemical drums filled with toxic waste are dug up in New York 'cancer hotspot' - where families have been warning for years they are being poisoned. Construction workers unearthed six barrels of chlorinated solvents and waste oil petroleum, which had been dumped within the Town of Oyster Bay in Long Island. The drums were buried by North Grumman when it operated an aerospace facility in the town from the 1950s to 1990s. Officials fear the waste may have leaked into the soil and is on the way to public drinking supply. The town is home to more than 17,200 people who have long raised concerns about the Grumman Aerospace waste, specifically a four-mile-long carcinogenic plume flowing underground that they claim contributed to a rise in cancer diagnoses.

Middle East

• Why won’t Britain stand up to Israel over aid worker deaths? While Israel officially maintains that the deaths of three British nationals was accidental, what happened is hard to put down to bad luck. A convoy of three vehicles had delivered food to a warehouse in Gaza, and was on its way back — heading south from Deir al-Balah along the Al-Rasheed Road. This route had been agreed with the IDF, was in a de-conflicted zone, and the roofs of all three vehicles prominently displayed “World Central Kitchen” logos. What is more, according to Haaretz, the convoy contacted the IDF after the first vehicle had been hit — and yet the remaining two were struck regardless.

• ‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza. The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties. According to six Israeli intelligence officers, who have all served in the army during the current war on the Gaza Strip and had first-hand involvement with the use of AI to generate targets for assassination, Lavender has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war. In fact, according to the sources, its influence on the military’s operations was such that they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”

• US preparing for significant Iran attack on US or Israeli assets in the region as soon as next week. The US is on high alert and actively preparing for a “significant” attack that could come as soon as within the next week by Iran targeting Israeli or American assets in the region in response to Monday’s Israeli strike in Damascus that killed top Iranian commanders, a senior administration official tells CNN. Senior US officials currently believe that an attack by Iran is “inevitable” – a view shared by their Israeli counterparts, that official said.

Politics

• [2023] How the CIA Controls the Past. The Friday-night news dump is a venerable Washington art form, admired by jaded journos for its sheer cynical efficiency. The White House saves the announcement of some embarrassing, compromised, or dubious deed (a wife-beating nominee, an indicted Cabinet secretary, an eight-digit budget boo-boo) for Friday at dusk, just as reporters and editors are folding up their Macs at home or skedaddling out the door of the newsroom. At the TV networks, The Washington Post, The New York Times, the wire services, and other corporate news organizations in the nation’s capital, the first team flees, and weekend staffers take over running the news desks and updating the home pages. The thrumming capital news cycle downshifts a gear or two for the next 36 hours or so.

• Jeffrey Epstein’s Island Visitors Exposed by Data Broker. Nearly 200 mobile devices of people who visited Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious “pedophile island” in the years prior to his death left an invisible trail of data pointing back to their own homes and offices. Maps of these visitations generated by a troubled international data broker with defense industry ties, discovered last week by WIRED, document the numerous trips of wealthy and influential individuals seemingly undeterred by Epstein’s status as a convicted sex offender. The data amassed by Near Intelligence, a location data broker roiled by allegations of mismanagement and fraud, reveals with high precision the residences of many guests of Little Saint James.

• How Scotland ended up with the Hate Crime Act. The Hate Crime Act creates a new offence of ‘stirring up hatred’ against a long list of ‘protected characteristics’. These are: ‘race, colour, nationality (including citizenship), or ethnic or national origins… age, disability, religion or in the case of a social or cultural group, perceived religious affiliation, sexual orientation, transgender identity [or] variations in sex characteristics’. The law applies to all forms of communication, from spoken conversations to private WhatsApp messages, and since there is no dwelling defence, Scots will be liable for prosecution for things they say in their own homes. Penalties include fines and prison sentences of up to seven years.

• The WHO’s Power Grab - The last thing we need: a new and unaccountable global pandemic czar. The response to Covid was the greatest mistake in the history of the public-health profession, but the officials responsible for it are determined to do even worse. With the support of the Biden administration, the World Health Organization (WHO) is seeking unprecedented powers to impose its policies on the United States and the rest of the world during the next pandemic. It was bad enough that America and other countries voluntarily followed WHO bureaucrats’ disastrous pandemic advice instead of heeding the scientists who had presciently warned, long before 2020, that lockdowns, school closures, and mandates for masks and vaccines would be futile, destructive, and unethical. But now the WHO wants new authority to make its bureaucrats’ whims mandatory—and to censor those who disagree with their version of “the science.”

• The coming civil war on Europe’s Right - The EU will never allow populists to win. With the European Parliamentary elections just two months away, the final result seems all but decided. “A far-Right takeover is underway,” warn the experts of Foreign Policy. “This time, the far-Right threat is real,” add the prophets of Politico. And, give or take their hyperbolic use of “far-Right”, these cautions are warranted. Even though the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) will remain the largest group in the Parliament, the biggest winners are expected to be the two groups to the Right of the EPP: Identity and Democracy (ID) and the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR). According to the latest polls, the latter two groups alone could account for more than 20% of MEPs, and have almost as many seats as the EPP alone.

• No, DEI is not good for business. McKinsey and Company, a management-consulting firm, has been prolific in producing research that makes the ‘business case’ for DEI. Over the past nine years, McKinsey has released four studies claiming to show that increasing racial and ethnic diversity at the executive level can improve a company’s financial performance. Published under titles such as ‘Diversity wins: How inclusion matters’ and ‘Diversity matters even more’, these studies have been held up by diversity practitioners as ‘proof’ that DEI is not only a moral good, as they see it, but also good for business. The problem is, this just isn’t true.

• “It’s an Empty Executive Suite” - An insider explains what has gone disastrously wrong with Boeing. In October 2018, one of Boeing’s new 737 MAX aircraft crashed. Then, a few months later, another. Recent months have seen embarrassing maintenance failures, including a door plug that blew off an Alaska Airlines plane in mid-flight. To help explain what went wrong, the author of this article speaks with a Boeing insider who has direct knowledge of the company’s leadership decisions. He tells a story of elite dysfunction, financial abstraction, and a DEI bureaucracy that has poisoned the culture, creating a sense of profound alienation between the people who occupy the executive suite and those who build the airplanes.

• Britain’s role in ending the slave trade ought to be celebrated. Britain did not invent slavery. Slaves were kept in Egypt since at least the Old Kingdom period and in China from at least the 7th century AD, followed by Japan and Korea. It was part of the Islamic world from its beginnings in the 7th century. Native tribes in North America practised slavery, as did the Aztecs and Incas farther south. African traders supplied slaves to the Roman empire and to the Arab world. Scottish clan chiefs sold their men to traders. The largely successful British effort to eradicate the transatlantic slave trade did not grow out of any kind of self-interest. It was driven by moral imperative and at considerable cost to Britain and the Empire. At its peak, Britain’s battle against the slave trade involved 36 naval ships and cost some 2,000 British lives. In 1845, the Aberdeen Act expanded the Navy’s mission to intercept Brazilian ships suspected of carrying slaves.

Science

• The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’. Perhaps the story to be written about near-death experiences is not that they prove consciousness is radically different from what we thought it was. Instead, it is that the process of dying is far stranger than scientists ever suspected. The spiritualists and parapsychologists are right to insist that something deeply weird is happening to people when they die, but they are wrong to assume it is happening in the next life rather than this one. At least, that is the implication of what Jimo Borjigin found when she investigated the case of Patient One.

• Disabling parts of the brain with magnets can weaken faith in God and change attitudes to immigrants, study finds. The study, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, saw scientists use a metal coil to create strong magnetic fields around certain parts of the brain. The non-invasive practice is called trancranial magnetic stimulation, and has can be used to treat depression. However, researchers have now found that by targeting the part of the brain that deals with threats, they can temporarily change people's beliefs and views.

• Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates. A defining feature of biology is the use of a multiscale architecture, ranging from molecular networks to cells, tissues, organs, whole bodies, and swarms. Crucially however, biology is not only nested structurally, but also functionally: each level is able to solve problems in distinct problem spaces, such as physiological, morphological, and behavioral state space. This paper explores the hypothesis that collective intelligence is not only the province of groups of animals, and that an important symmetry exists between the behavioral science of swarms and the competencies of cells and other biological systems at different scales.

• Modelling our Scientific Crisis - How Models became the Blueprint for Reality. According to Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, the work of physicist Ettore Majorana indicates that one consequence of quantum theory would be a society governed by statistics: as he summarised it in his conclusion to What is Real?, “as soon as we assume that the real state of a system is in itself unknowable, statistical models become essential and cannot but replace reality”. In other words, according to Agamben, Majorana glimpsed how a society based on statistical models would supersede the idea developed by Isaac Newton, of a determinate reality. The core dilemma lies in the fact that these interventions in social statistics are not neutral. Instead, they determine reality.

Technology

• Google to destroy billions of private browsing records to settle lawsuit. Google agreed to destroy billions of records to settle a lawsuit claiming it secretly tracked the internet use of people who thought they were browsing privately in its Chrome browser’s incognito mode. Users alleged that Google’s analytics, cookies and apps let the Alphabet unit improperly track people who set Google’s Chrome browser to “incognito” mode and other browsers to “private” browsing mode. They said this turned Google into an “unaccountable trove of information” by letting it learn about their friends, favorite foods, hobbies, shopping habits and the “most intimate and potentially embarrassing things” they hunt for online.

• Apple has been secretly building home robots that could end up as a new product line, report says. Engineers are looking into developing a robot that could follow users around their houses, Bloomberg reported. They're also exploring a tabletop at-home device that uses robotics to rotate the display, a more advanced project than the mobile robot. The idea behind the smart display robot is to mimic a person's head movement, such as reacting during a FaceTime session. It would also include a feature that zooms in on a particular person in a crowd during a video call.

• Chatbot outperformed physicians in clinical reasoning in head-to-head study. In a research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine, physician-scientists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) compared a large language model's (LLM) reasoning abilities directly against human performance using standards developed to assess physicians. "Early studies suggested AI could makes diagnoses, if all the information was handed to it," Rodman said. "What our study shows is that AI demonstrates real reasoning -- maybe better reasoning than people through multiple steps of the process. We have a unique chance to improve the quality and experience of healthcare for patients."

Ukraine

• Trump-proofing weapons for Ukraine: Allies consider moving arms group into NATO. The U.S. and other Western countries are considering transferring to NATO a U.S.-led multinational group that coordinates the shipment of weapons to Ukraine, one of several new proposals that could help maintain the flow of arms to Kyiv under a second Donald Trump presidency. During the NATO foreign ministerial meeting in Brussels Wednesday and Thursday, officials are expected to discuss a range of options, including gradually moving the organization — called the Ukraine Defense Contact Group — into the alliance’s control, according to three European officials and a U.S. official with knowledge of the internal deliberations.

• Ukraine is at great risk of its front lines collapsing. According to high-ranking Ukrainian officers, the military picture is grim and Russian generals could find success wherever they decide to focus their upcoming offensive. Moreover, thanks to a much greater weight in numbers and the guided aerial bombs that have been smashing Ukrainian positions for weeks now, Russia will likely be able to “penetrate the front line and to crash it in some parts,” they said. “There’s nothing that can help Ukraine now because there are no serious technologies able to compensate Ukraine for the large mass of troops Russia is likely to hurl at us. We don’t have those technologies, and the West doesn’t have them as well in sufficient numbers.”

• Blinken: ‘Ukraine will become a member of NATO’. Secretary of State Antony Blinken reaffirmed the U.S. commitment for Ukraine to eventually join NATO but held back commitments ahead of the alliance’s annual summit, which will take place in Washington in July. “Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Our purpose at the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership,” Blinken told reporters Thursday in Brussels. Ukraine’s supporters are crafting ways to demonstrate robust international support for Kyiv that can be announced at NATO’s Washington summit, marking the 75th anniversary of the alliance.

Vaccines

• [2018] A Thorough Analysis of the Case Against Dr. Andrew Wakefield by Mary Holland, JD. If you’ve heard Dr. Wakefield’s name — and you probably have — you’ve heard two tales. You’ve heard that Dr. Wakefield is a charlatan, an unethical researcher, and a huckster who was “erased” from the British medical registry and whose 1998 article on autism and gastrointestinal disease was “retracted” by a leading medical journal. You’ve also heard a very different story, that Dr. Wakefield is a brilliant and courageous scientist, a compassionate physician beloved by his patients, and a champion for families with autism and vaccine injury. What’s the truth?

• Bombshell Saudi Arabian Study: 27.11% of Study Population Report Cardiac Complications Post COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination. While the authors of this study seem to downplay the magnitude of the response, TrialSite cannot ignore what appears as a staggering number of cardiovascular complications self-reported post COVID-19 vaccination. 27.11% of the total sample found themselves in the hospital with some form of cardiac complication after receiving a mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. Of course, this study isn’t designed to prove that the vaccines were the cause, but the associations are statistically significant and cannot be ignored. Comorbidities are likely a factor.

• BioNTech hit with 'notice of default' from NIH in COVID-19 vaccine royalty dispute. Even as Germany's BioNTech deals with ongoing declines of its revenue and share price, it's facing another serious concern: U.S. officials are pressing the company to pay royalties linked to the commercialization of its lucrative Pfizer-partnered COVID-19 vaccine. In a Monday filing, BioNTech said the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has sent a "notice of default" on funds that BioNTech allegedly owes the U.S. agency under their prior licensing agreement. BioNTech says it "disagrees with the positions being taken by the NIH, and intends to vigorously defend against all allegations of breach."