Today's Must-Reads - 1 May 2024 - Non-Paywalled Free Read

The latest news, studies, reports and articles you need to know!

Welcome to your daily dose of curated news and insights! While I can't cover everything, I've hand-picked the most important stories you should have on your radar.

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Covid

• EcoHealth just raked in another $4M in tax money days before congressional hearing. A WCW investigation has uncovered that USAID shipped $4.1 million to the disgraced EcoHealth Alliance just days before its president is hauled in front of Congress this week. Analysis shows that Wuhan lab funder EHA has raked in nearly $60 million in new taxpayer funding since the pandemic—that it probably started—began for virus-hunting and animal tests around the world.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• The scientists can't bring themselves to admit they were wrong about Covid. While Britons gladly gave up their freedom, Sweden got it right. All the worst lessons are being drawn from Covid. In the event of a future pandemic, we seem set to make the same mistakes, only earlier, more aggressively and more repetitively. Like generals gearing up to lose the last war, the world’s scientific and medical bureaucracies are doubling down on the remedies that failed last time: stricter lockdowns, compulsory vaccination, a bigger role for the World Health Organisation (WHO). It was reported yesterday that, under the WHO’s proposed new pandemic treaty, due to be ratified in two weeks’ time, Britain would be forced to hand over a fifth of its drugs, vaccines and other ‘pandemic-related health products’ to the global bureaucracy.

• WHO Dialed Back Its Pandemic Powers - But Not Enough! The World Health Organisation was late in producing the Pandemic Agreement (formerly known as the WHO Treaty and Pandemic Accord). The WHO was supposed to produce this final draft at least four months in advance yet only published it in mid April leaving little time for government’s to examine the draft. The Agreement is supposed to be voted on next month at the World Health Assembly and will be open for signature from July 2024. While it’s true that major changes have been made in line with some of the feedback and recommendations from the International Health Regulations, there are still areas of concern in this latest power grab from the United Nations WHO.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• ‘Russian fertiliser is the new gas’ for Europe, top producer warns. Europe is “sleep walking” into becoming dependent on Russian fertiliser, just as it did with gas, says one of the largest producers of crop nutrients. Nitrogen fertilisers, which are important to plant growth, are made using natural gas and Russia is exporting more of it to Europe, replacing some of the gas banned by the EU, said Svein Tore Holsether, chief executive of Yara International, one of the world’s largest producers of nitrogen-based mineral fertilisers. “Fertiliser is the new gas,” Holsether said. “It is a paradox that the aim is to reduce Europe’s dependency on Russia, and then now we are sleepwalking into handing over critical food and fertilising power to Russia.”

• Pensioners at risk of snooping by officials under Orwellian new law, warns David Davis. Sir David – one of Parliament’s highest profile campaigners for civil liberties – claims that a proposed new law would “erode financial privacy like never before in our country”. He is concerned that measures intended to combat fraud and avoid errors could be abused by future governments. The proposals would allow banks to look out for warning signs and then pass on information to the Department for Work and Pensions. Sir David agreed there is a “big fraud issue” but cautioned that new powers would “force banks to monitor over 20 million accounts”.

• Binance founder sentenced to 4 months in prison. U.S. officials had scrutinized the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange for years, but finally brought the company and its CEO to account last fall. Changpeng Zhao (CZ), who goes by CZ, pled guilty to one count of violating the Bank Secrecy Act in November, for failing to implement an effective anti-money laundering (AML) program at the exchange.

• Japanese government spent $35bn to prop up yen, BoJ figures suggest. Traders and economists said the data, released on Tuesday evening, all but confirmed that the Japanese authorities had stepped into the markets on Monday shortly after the yen hit a 34-year low of just under ¥160 against the US dollar. The BoJ figures arrived a few hours before the yen began falling sharply again against the dollar during London-hours trading, prompting brokers to predict that the Japanese authorities might step in again. Although official confirmation of the scale of Monday’s intervention is unlikely to come from the Ministry of Finance until the end of the month, analysts said that a good “rough and ready” confirmation could be inferred from the BoJ figures.

Middle East

• Netanyahu vows to invade Rafah ‘with or without‘ truce deal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on 30 April to launch a ground invasion into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where more than a million displaced Palestinians are sheltering from months of brutal Israeli bombing and as ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas are reportedly intensifying. Netanyahu‘s comments came hours before US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Israel to participate in talks meant to reach a ceasefire and prisoner exchange. Netanyahu said Israel would enter Rafah to destroy Hamas‘ battalions there regardless of whether a “truce-for-hostages” deal was struck or not.

• US lawmakers threaten retaliation against UN court over potential Israel arrest warrants. US Congress members from both parties have reportedly warned the International Criminal Court that Washington will retaliate against the court if it issues arrest warrants against top Israeli officials, amid fears that such a move could sink a hostages-for-truce agreement in the works between Israel and Hamas. The Axios news site reported Monday that US legislation on the reported warrants was already being worked on, citing House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, as expecting a bill to sanction ICC officials.

Politics

• Trump rips Israel’s Netanyahu over Oct. 7 Hamas attack: ‘Should have never happened’. In a wide-ranging interview with Time magazine published Tuesday, the 45th president said he believed the assault on southern Israel has had “a profound impact” on Netanyahu, 74. “They have the most sophisticated equipment,” said Trump, 77, of Israeli security forces. “They had — everything was there to stop that. And a lot of people knew about it, you know, thousands and thousands of people knew about it, but Israel didn’t know about it, and I think he’s being blamed for that very strongly, being blamed.”

• Too Big to win. It is painfully apparent to anyone of sound mind and judgment that there’s something gravely wrong with America’s current military capacity and our ability to project power in the world. The WWII-era fighting force composed of fourteen million GIs with a muscular industrial base backing them up is almost unimaginable today. In the last three years, five different US embassies have been hastily evacuated: Sudan, Afghanistan, Belarus, Ukraine, and Niger. Americans are held hostage in Gaza; commercial shipping traffic is blockaded and our ground and naval forces are shot at daily with impunity. How did America go from winning the Cold War and becoming the sole global superpower in the 90s to the state of disarray that we find ourselves in now?

• Does the CIA Run America? We’ve all surely had dark thoughts that the CIA is really running the United States, including many media venues. Maybe that’s been true for decades and we just didn’t know it. If so, let’s just say that it would explain a tremendous amount of what has otherwise been clouded in secrecy. How would this be possible? Knowledge is power while secret knowledge is full control. Even fake knowledge means power and control, such as we found out in the phony Russiagate investigation early in Trump’s term. They hounded the new administration for years under a completely fake scenario in which Russia somehow got Donald Trump elected.

• Government Imposes Blackout On All Information About Israeli Military Planes in Britain. Amidst speculation that the International Criminal Court (ICC) is set to issue arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers, the new blackout could be intended to protect British ministers from possible prosecution for complicity in war crimes, including defence secretary Grant Shapps. Kenny MacAskill, Alba MP for East Lothian, told Declassified that the MoD had also now imposed a block on parliamentarians even asking questions about Israeli military operations involving UK territory.

Science

• Can the known particles and interactions explain consciousness? At a fundamental level, a human being is made of only a small set of quantum particles, bound together through just four fundamental interactions to create all of known reality. That includes some phenomena that are incredibly complex, including those of consciousness, intelligence, and sentiency. How odd is it that these particles and forces fit together so precisely as to enable conscious beings like us to exist? It's a cutting-edge question, but one that we're closer than ever to answering definitively.

Technology

• The Dangerous Rise of GPS Attacks. The disruption to GPS services started getting worse on Christmas Day. Planes and ships moving around southern Sweden and Poland lost connectivity as their radio signals were interfered with. Since then, the region around the Baltic Sea—including neighboring Germany, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—has faced persistent attacks against GPS systems. Tens of thousands of planes flying in the region have reported problems with their navigation systems in recent months amid widespread jamming attacks, which can make GPS inoperable. As the attacks have grown, Russia has increasingly been blamed, with open source researchers tracking the source to Russian regions such as Kaliningrad. In one instance, signals were disrupted for 47 hours continuously.

Ukraine

• Ukraine’s $61 bln lifeline is not enough. Ukraine could run out of weapons again in late 2025. Even if Joe Biden is re-elected as U.S. president this November, he may struggle to get more money out of Congress. And if Donald Trump returns to the White House, American support for Ukraine will be even more precarious given the Republican candidate’s previous lack of commitment to Kyiv’s defence.

Vaccines

• How Skeptical Are Europeans About Vaccinations? 31 percent of people surveyed in Poland as part of Statista’s Consumer Insights survey say they have little confidence in the safety of vaccinations. The low influenza vaccination rate among older individuals in Poland points to the potential practical consequences of such attitudes - although the data does not conclusively demonstrate a causal relationship. As Statista's Anna Fleck shows in the following chart, there is a lack of trust in the safety of immunizations across several countries in Europe.