This Week's Must Reads - 18-24 March 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.

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Climate Change

• CEO steps down after being hit with expensive EV repairs and low resale prices following purchase of 100,000 Teslas. Hertz Global Holdings Inc. is replacing its chief executive officer in the wake of a disastrous bet on electric vehicles that the company began unwinding in recent months. Stephen Scherr, who ran Hertz for just over two years after three decades at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., has decided to step down, the rental-car company said late Friday in a statement. Hertz announced its EV sell-down plans in January, citing lackluster demand, costly depreciation and expensive repairs. The Estero, Florida-based company took a $245 million charge and reported its biggest quarterly loss since the pandemic.

• Largest recorded solar storm was even bigger than we thought. The largest recorded solar storm in history, the Carrington event of 1859, may have been even rarer and more extreme than we thought, according to rediscovered magnetic data gathered at the time. In early September 1859, a massive solar flare was seen and a coronal mass ejection – a bubble of plasma and magnetic field expelled from the sun’s corona – struck Earth’s atmosphere, triggering a powerful geomagnetic storm that produced dazzling auroras and fried telegraph wires for several days. If one of similar magnitude happened today, it could cause havoc, knocking out satellites, communication systems and power grids.

Covid

• Jeffrey Sachs - What Might the US Owe the World for Covid-19? A US-funded laboratory origin of Covid-19 would certainly constitute the most significant case of governmental gross negligence in history. The people of the world deserve transparency and factual answers on vital questions. Moreover, there is a high likelihood that the US Government continues to this day to fund dangerous GoF work as part of its biodefense program. The US owes the full truth, and perhaps ample financial compensation, to the rest of the world, depending on what the facts ultimately reveal.

• After Four Years, 59% in U.S. Say COVID-19 Pandemic Is Over. At the same time, about as many, 57%, report that their lives have not returned to normal, and 43% expect they never will. National worry about contracting COVID-19 is near its lowest point in the trend dating back to the early days of the pandemic -- although, as has been the case throughout the pandemic, Democrats express much more concern about COVID-19 than Republicans do. Republicans (79%) are almost twice as likely as Democrats (41%) to say the pandemic is over, while 63% of independents agree.

  

• Antibiotics can effectively target gut bacteria that harbor COVID-19 virus, study shows. New research indicates that antibiotics can effectively target bacteria in the gut that harbor the virus that causes COVID-19 and produce toxin-like peptides that contribute to COVID-19-related symptoms. In the study, which involved 211 participants and was published in the Journal of Medical Virology, individuals who received early antibiotic treatment after having COVID-19 recovered more quickly than those who did not receive antibiotics.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• UK Government Use of Behavioural Science Strategies in Covid-Event Messaging: Responsibility and Communication Ethics in Times of ‘Crisis’. Throughout the Covid event the UK Government, in keeping with many other countries, drew on behavioural-science interventions – often referred to as ‘nudges’ – to strengthen their publichealth communications, and thereby increase compliance with the pandemic restrictions and subsequent vaccine roll-out. These psychological methods of persuasion often operate below people’s conscious awareness, and frequently rely on inflating emotional discomfort to change behaviour. The implications of these finding for future state-funded public communications during times of ‘crisis’ are discussed.

• Pope Francis denounces ‘anti-vaxxers,’ calls COVID jab refusal an ‘almost suicidal act of denial’. The pontiff rebuked those who did not receive an injection, or who voiced opposition to them publicly, saying: “Deciding whether to get vaccinated is always an ethical choice, but I know that many people signed up to movements opposed to the administration of the medication. This distressed me because in my view, being against the antidote is an almost suicidal act of denial”. Francis also made a thinly-veiled condemnation of Cardinal Raymond Burke, who voiced strong opposition to the injections and who was also hospitalized with COVID-19 and serious health issues.

• Brazil’s Bolsonaro is indicted for 1st time over alleged falsification of his vaccination status. The federal police indictment released by the Supreme Court alleged that Bolsonaro and 16 others inserted false information into a public health database to make it appear as though the then-president, his 12-year-old daughter and several others in his circle had received the COVID-19 vaccine. Police detective Fábio Alvarez Shor, who signed the indictment, said in his report that Bolsonaro and his aides changed their vaccination records in order to “issue their respective (vaccination) certificates and use them to cheat current health restrictions.”

• The Crucifixion of Kulvinder Kaur. Dr. Kaur faces imminent financial ruin at the hands of the Canadian court system, which has imposed a punitive $300,000 ‘cost order’ upon her, due by the end of March 2024. This is in addition to other legal expenses she has incurred since the beginning of the Covid lockdowns. Dr. Kaur’s cardinal sin was speaking out against the harsh lockdowns imposed upon citizens of Ontario, where she practices medicine, treating mostly immigrant families and other poor members of the population.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• How Did American Capitalism Mutate Into American Corporatism? What happens, however, when government itself becomes a main and even dominant customer? The ethos of private enterprise is thereby changed. No longer primarily interested in serving the general public, enterprise turns its attention to serving its powerful masters in the halls of the state, gradually weaving close relationships and forming a ruling class that becomes a conspiracy against the public. This used to go by the name “crony capitalism” which perhaps describes some of the problems on a small scale. This is another level of reality that needs an entirely different name. That name is corporatism, a coinage from the 1930s and a synonym for fascism back before that became a curse word due to wartime alliances.

• China's CNOOC discovers 100 million ton oilfield in Bohai Sea. The discovery was made at the Qinhuangdao 27-3 oilfield located in the north-central waters of the Bohai Sea, the company said in a statement, opens new tab. The field has been tested to produce about 742 barrels of crude oil per day from a single well, it added. Earlier in the month, CNOOC announced the discovery of a new reserve in the South China Sea, which contains over 100 million tons of oil equivalent proved in-place. The oil and gas giant in January raised its 2024 production target by about 8% to a record 700 million to 720 million barrels of oil equivalent, citing higher annual capital spending, with production reaching about 675 million boe in 2023.

• Nikkei 225 ends above 40,000 after Bank of Japan raises interest rates for the first time in 17 years. The Bank of Japan officially ended its negative interest rate policy, hiking rates for the first time in 17 years to 0% to 0.1% from -0.1% . The bank also abolished its yield curve control policy, marking a historic shift in policy. Japan’s Nikkei 225 whipsawed following the news but ended the day 0.66% higher at 40,003.60. The broader Topix closed 1.06% higher at 2,750.97.

• Canadian bankruptcies are shooting up with almost 800 in January alone.

  

• Russia plans to triple LNG production by 2030, says deputy premier. Russia has announced plans to dramatically increase its liquefied natural gas (LNG) production from 33 million tons in 2023 to 110 million tons by the year 2030, according to a report by Russian news agency Tass. The ambitious target that aims at bolstering Russia’s position in the global LNG market and diversifying its gas supplies was revealed by Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak. According to Novak, the major increase in production will be distributed across Russia's key LNG clusters, with a planned increase to 110 million tons per year by 2030, which he said is already secured through projects that are either underway or in the pipeline.

• Corporate defaults at highest rate since global financial crisis, says S&P. More companies have defaulted on their debt in 2024 than in any start to the year since the global financial crisis as inflationary pressures and high interest rates continue to weigh on the world’s riskiest borrowers, according to S&P Global Ratings. This year’s global tally of corporate defaults stands at 29, the highest year-to-date count since the 36 recorded during the same period in 2009, according to the rating agency.

• US personal interest payments now exceed wages for production and nonsupervisory employees.

  

• The looming office-real-estate crash will be worse than the Global Financial Crisis decline, Fitch says. Office values have dropped an estimated 35% so far this cycle. While that's still above the 47% plunge witnessed during the Great Financial Crisis, the latest situation offers no reason to expect the descent to slow. According to Goldman Sachs estimates from late 2023, the share of US workers still working from home is in the range of 20%-25%, significantly slashing the need for office space. These factors could permanently diminish property valuations and spark higher-than-expected losses on commercial mortgage-backed securities backed by loans on office properties.

Health

• Surging nervous system disorders now top cause of illness. Conditions affecting the nervous system -- such as strokes, migraines and dementia -- have surged past heart disease to become the leading cause of ill health worldwide, a major new analysis said on Friday. More than 3.4 billion people -- 43 percent of the global population -- experienced a neurological condition in 2021, far more than had previously been thought, the analysis found. Lead study author Jaimie Steinmetz of the IHME said the results showed that nervous system conditions are now "the world's leading cause of overall disease burden".

• Fentanyl is flooding into Britain. Great Britain is getting ready for fentanyl. The country will soon have an early warning system, the Times reported on Friday, which will allow the Government to track the presence of synthetic drugs using wastewater surveillance and other epidemiological indicators. The UK has one of the world’s highest rates of opioid consumption, thanks especially to high rates in Scotland. That hasn’t translated into US levels of overdose death principally because fentanyl remains rare. But the number of fentanyl-related deaths, while still small, is rising. And increasing the risk is the rising prevalence in the British drug supply of nitazenes, a class of highly potent synthetic opioids that is also starting to spread in the US.

• Germany’s birth rate has dropped to 1.36 per woman, a sharp drop from 1.57 in 2021.

  

• World’s population to fall for first time since the Black Death. Global fertility rates hit an historic tipping point and are unlikely to recover, experts say. The decline in the number of children women are having has started to slow the growth of the global population, which stands at just over eight billion, and could mean it starts to fall within decades. It would be the first time that the number of people on the planet has decreased since the Black Death bubonic plague pandemic killed as many as 50 million people in the mid-1300s, including up to a third of the population in Europe. That is the only time to date that the number of humans on the Earth has fallen, with historians estimating that the global population fell from around 400 million to 350 million.

Politics

• Ireland and the terrible truth about wokeness. Ireland’s latest referendum exposed just how zealous and reckless the elites’ culture war has become. Voters were asked to say Yes or No to two amendments to the constitution of 1937. First they were asked if they wanted to change the meaning of the word ‘family’ so that it would extend beyond marriage to include other ‘durable relationships’. Then they were asked if they’d like to change the constitution’s focus on a woman’s ‘duties’ in the home by adding a new clause acknowledging that all sorts of ‘family members’ provide care in the domestic setting. The political class invested huge amounts of money and energy into encouraging voters to say Yes to these sweeping tweaks, but voters refused to play ball.

• Thomas Piketty’s failed revolution - Ten years on, society is governed for the wealthy. Piketty’s thesis clearly chimed with narratives about inequality that had been developing on the Left since the 2008 financial crisis. The book’s focus upon the rising incomes and wealth of the top “1%” echoed the language of the Occupy movement, language which had itself been borrowed from the study of “top incomes” that Piketty had helped pioneer some years earlier. But Piketty is also a mild-mannered liberal technocrat, an heir to Keynes rather than Marx. Piketty anticipated the anxiety of liberals today, who believe in “hard work” and “enterprise”, but can see quite clearly that this economy rewards neither. In the decade since Capital in the Twenty-First Century was published, that has virtually become an orthodoxy.

• The last days of the Boeing whistleblower. According to lawyer, RobTurkewitz, whistleblower John Barnett told his lawyers, ‘Let’s just get it done. I’ve already been waiting for seven years.’” Shortly after 10 AM, Turkewitz called the Holiday Inn. “I asked if he’d checked out, and they said no,” he recounts. “I asked to be put through to the room, and the phone just kept ringing, so I then asked that they check the room. They Holiday Inn folks said ‘His stuff’s packed up, but he’s not there.’” Turkewitz asked that they look for his car, a “Clemson Orange” Dodge Ram truck. "The manager came back and told me, 'His truck is still there, and we called EMS. I can't tell you anything more.'"

• Barack Obama in Downing Street for surprise meeting with Rishi Sunak. The former US president arrived for an undisclosed meeting with the prime minister to discuss the work of his foundation and the threat of AI to democracy. The trip was described by No 10 as a “courtesy visit”, with the former US president also holding a separate meeting with Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party. The Obama Foundation held a forum at the end of last year to examine “how we can learn from the past and harness the power of AI in a way that benefits, rather than undermines, our democracy”. It marked the first time Sunak and Obama have met. The prime minister only became an MP in 2015, a year before Obama’s last official visits.

• Google helped boost Obama, Clinton presidential runs while censoring Republicans. Google has been putting its thumb on the scale to help Democratic candidates win the presidency in the last four election cycles during which it censored Republicans, according to a right-leaning media watchdog. The Media Research Center published a report alleging 41 instances of “election interference” by the search engine since 2008. The MRC published a report accusing Google of having “utilized its power to help push to electoral victory the most liberal candidates…while targeting their opponents for censorship.”

• The Chinese students policing Britain’s universities. Self-censoring academics live in terror. Professor Michelle Shipworth is not the first to run into trouble. And that’s because the problem is more profound than many realise. Many universities need these students. Were their fees to disappear entirely from Britain, with no other income found to replace them, many institutions would go under within a year or two. Some universities will even accept Chinese students without proper qualifications or basic English-language skills, so great is their desire for the fees.

• Falling birthrate to leave UK reliant on immigration until 2100. Lancet study says decline will lead to ‘staggering social change’ in West amid influx of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa. To maintain public services and economic growth, high-income societies including the UK will have no choice but to rely on an influx of immigration from poorer countries in Africa with higher birthrates, the study concluded. The UK’s fertility rate has fallen from 2.19 in 1950 to 1.85 in 1980 and 1.49 in 2021, one of the lowest rates in western Europe. The study forecasts that this decline will continue, dropping to 1.38 in 2050 and 1.3 in 2100, posing “enormous challenges” in how to care and pay for an ageing population.

• The WHO Wants to Rule the World. The new regime will change the WHO from a technical advisory organisation into a supra-national public health authority exercising quasi-legislative and executive powers over states; change the nature of the relationship between citizens, business enterprises, and governments domestically, and also between governments and other governments and the WHO internationally; and shift the locus of medical practice from the doctor-patient consultation in the clinic to public health bureaucrats in capital cities and WHO headquarters in Geneva and its six regional offices. From net zero to mass immigration and identity politics, the ‘expertocracy’ elite is in alliance with the global technocratic elite against majority national sentiment.

• US embassy in Russia warned Americans about imminent attack by ‘extremists’ weeks ago. In the deadliest attack in Russia since the 2004 Beslan school siege, gunmen sprayed civilians with bullets just before Soviet-era rock group “Picnic” was to perform to a full house at the 6,200-seat the Crocus City Hall just west of the capital. The US embassy on 7 March repeatedly urged all American citizens to leave Russia immediately, giving no further details about the nature of the threat, but said people should avoid concerts and crowds and be aware of their surroundings. “The Embassy is monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts, and US citizens should be advised to avoid large gatherings over the next 48 hours,” the embassy said on its website at that time.

Science

• James Webb telescope confirms there is something seriously wrong with our understanding of the universe. Depending on where we look, the universe is expanding at different rates. Now, scientists using the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes have confirmed that the observation is not down to a measurement error. In other words: the tension at the heart of cosmology is here to stay.

• Physicist Claims Universe Has No Dark Matter And Is 27 Billion Years Old. Sound waves fossilized in the maps of galaxies across the Universe could be interpreted as signs of a Big Bang that took place 13 billion years earlier than current models suggest. Last year, theoretical physicist Rajendra Gupta from the University of Ottawa in Canada published a rather extraordinary proposal that the Universe's currently accepted age is a trick of the light, one that masks its truly ancient state while also ridding us of the need to explain hidden forces. Gupta's latest analysis suggests oscillations from the earliest moments in time preserved in large-scale cosmic structures support his claims.

• The Unjust Retraction of Groundbreaking Research: A Call for Academic Integrity. This article outlines the recent and unfounded retraction of the peer-reviewed paper Geo-archaeological prospecting of Gunung Padang buried prehistoric pyramid in West Java, Indonesia, by Danny Hilman Natawidjaja et al.

  The groundbreaking paper, published in the journal Archaeological Prospection, provides strong evidence that Gunung Padang is home to the most ancient pyramidal edifice yet discovered anywhere in the world, with parts of its man-made interior structure being more than 20,000 years old. This finding shatters established historical timelines and calls for further investigation of the site.

Technology

• Musk's SpaceX is building spy satellite network for US intelligence agency, sources say. The network is being built by SpaceX's Starshield business unit under a $1.8 billion contract signed in 2021 with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), an intelligence agency that manages spy satellites, the sources said. The plans show the extent of SpaceX's involvement in U.S. intelligence and military projects and illustrate a deeper Pentagon investment into vast, low-Earth orbiting satellite systems aimed at supporting ground forces. If successful, the sources said the program would significantly advance the ability of the U.S. government and military to quickly spot potential targets almost anywhere on the globe.

• Google’s Woke AI Wasn’t a Mistake. We Know. We Were There. ‘I walked around every day at work policing my own actions and language.’ Google’s culture is broken, former employees tell The Free Press. Can it be fixed? Shaun Maguire, who was a partner at Google Ventures, the company’s investment wing, from 2016 until 2019, told The Free Press, “When the first Google Gemini photos popped up on my X feed, I thought to myself: Here we go again. And: Of course. Because I know Google well. Google Gemini’s failures revealed how broken Google’s culture is in such a visually obvious way to the world. But what happened was not a one-off incident. It was a symptom of a larger cultural phenomenon that has been taking over the company for years.”

• US warns hackers are carrying out attacks on water systems. In a letter released Tuesday, opens new tab, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan warned that "disabling cyberattacks are striking water and wastewater systems throughout the United States." The letter singled out alleged Iranian and Chinese cybersaboteurs. Sullivan and Regan cited a case in which hackers accused of acting in concert with Iran's Revolutionary Guards had disabled a controller, opens new tab at a water facility in Pennsylvania and called out a Chinese hacking group dubbed "Volt Typhoon" which they said had "compromised information technology of multiple critical infrastructure systems, including drinking water, in the United States and its territories."

Ukraine

• Russian Intelligence Says France Preparing to Deploy 2,000 Troops to Ukraine. In a report carried by the Russian state news agency TASS on Tuesday, March 19 Sergey Naryshkin, Director of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), says that he “has data according to which France is already preparing a military contingent to send to Ukraine.” Naryshkin said the information Russia has received indicates that France is preparing an initial force of 2,000 troops for the operation and that “such a large military unit cannot be transferred and stationed in Ukraine unnoticed. “It will thus become a legitimate priority target for attacks by the Russian armed forces. This means that it will suffer the fate of all the French who have ever come to the Russian world with a sword.”

• US Backs $50 Billion Ukraine Bond Using Frozen Russia Assets. The US proposed to its Group of Seven allies that they create a special purpose vehicle to issue at least $50 billion of bonds backed by the profits generated by frozen Russian sovereign assets and use the proceeds to support Ukraine, according to people familiar with the plan. The proposal would pool the $280 billion of Russian central bank assets that have been immobilized by G-7 countries and the European Union in the SPV, the profits of which would back the so-called freedom bonds, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

• Car industry insists 2,000% increase in sales to Azerbaijan has nothing to do with Russia. Sky News analysis found that over precisely the same period as British car exports to Azerbaijan rose sharply, there was a near-simultaneous rise in car exports from Azerbaijan to Russia. New data from HM Revenue & Customs shows that while direct car exports to Russia remain at zero, where they have been since the imposition of sanctions in 2022, in January £43m worth of cars were sent to Azerbaijan, the former Soviet state neighbouring Russia.

  

• Kremlin says Russia ‘in a state of war’ in Ukraine for first time. Russia has presented its offensive on Ukraine as a “special military operation,” banned media outlets from using the word “war” and prosecuted anti-offensive campaigners for using the word to describe Russia’s military actions. “We are in a state of war. Yes, it started as a special military operation, but as soon as this bunch was formed there, when the collective West became a participant on Ukraine’s side, for us it already became a war,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview to a pro-Kremlin newspaper published on Friday. Asked to elaborate, Peskov told reporters later: “De jure it is a special military operation. But de facto it has turned into a war.”

Vaccines

• Persistent immune imprinting occurs after vaccination with the COVID-19 XBB.1.5 mRNA booster in humans. Immune imprinting describes how the first exposure to a virus shapes immunological outcomes of subsequent exposures to antigenically related strains. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) Omicron breakthrough infections and bivalent COVID-19 vaccination primarily recall cross-reactive memory B cells induced by prior Wuhan-Hu-1 spike mRNA vaccination rather than priming Omicron-specific naive B cells. These findings indicate that immune imprinting occurs after repeated Wuhan-Hu-1 spike exposures, but whether it can be overcome remains unclear. Immune imprinting persists after multiple exposures to Omicron spikes through vaccination and infection, including post XBB.1.5 booster vaccination, which will need to be considered to guide future vaccination.

• Foreign DNA in the mRNA Vaccine. This paper aims to build a bridge between the highly specialized scientific explanations in the specialist literature and the generally understandable descriptions in the media. By conveying detailed knowledge on the topic of „foreign DNA in vaccines”, the goal is to help make complex processes understandable to a broader audience. The debate over DNA contamination in mRNA vaccines, as summarized in this paper, underscores the urgent need for further investigation into the reliability of the technological production process, the standardization of measurement methods and quality assurance thresholds, as well as the assessment of the long-term effects of such therapeutics.

• Will they never learn? Jabs for farm animals could endanger human lives. THERE is a new threat to food safety in the form of injecting mRNA or modRNA (synthetic or ‘modified’ RNA) vaccines into livestock. Merck have developed the mRNA vaccine Sequivity, which has already been licensed for pigs in the USA, and Australia is currently fast-tracking these jabs to prevent several diseases contracted by cattle. Critics say they could make us more susceptible to the diseases they aim to prevent. There is also the concern that mRNA vaccines could cause prion diseases. Prions attack nerve cells and cause neurodegenerative brain disorders, the most common of which is Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), also known as mad cow disease.

• Differential Increases in Excess Mortality in the German Federal States During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Regarding the increase in excess mortality, an increasingly strong positive correlation with the vaccination rate of a federal state is observed, which reaches a value of r = 0.85 in the third pandemic year, indicating that excess mortality increased the stronger the higher the vaccination rate in a federal state was. An analysis of stillbirths showed exactly the same pattern. No other systematic correlation pattern was observed.

  

• Increased Age-adjusted Cancer Mortality after the 3rd mRNA-Lipid Nanoparticle Vaccine Dose during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Japan. Age-adjusted mortality rates decreased from the pre-pandemic period to the pandemic period for stomach, liver, lung, gallbladder/biliary tract, colon, and esophageal cancers, which account for a large proportion of cancer deaths in Japan, but this decreasing trend slowed from 2021 to 2022. Age-adjusted mortality rates for breast, pancreatic, lip/oral/pharyngeal cancers and leukemia increased significantly in 2022 after much of the Japanese population had received the third mRNA-LNP vaccine dose, compared to 2020, the first year of the pandemic when no vaccinations were administered. There were also marginally significant increases for ovarian and uterine cancers between 2020 and 2022. As previously described in a molecular biological study, the increased mortality rates for these cancers might be caused by cell proliferation mediated by binding of spike protein to estrogen receptors, and the spike protein might originate from mRNA-LNP vaccination rather than COVID-19 infection itself.