Today's Must-Reads - 10 April 2024

A selection of the latest news, studies, reports and articles

I spend a lot of time each day gathering together new information and fascinating articles. I then pick one or two of the most interesting topics and write about them. However, that leaves a lot of missed out information that I’m not sharing.

Below is a summary of all the latest articles and information that I’ve found. This is a slimmed down version for all readers but is usually for paid subscribers only.

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Climate Change

• Human Rights Law Could Force European Countries To Pursue Net Zero. Climate extremists look like they scored a major victory in Strasbourg on Tuesday with an announcement from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in favor of a case by four elderly Swiss women claiming that the state was violating their human rights by not sufficiently living up to its climate obligations. Tuesday’s landmark verdict reinterprets Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights around the “right to a family life” by claiming that climate change had an “adverse effect” on women’s human rights, specifically due to their inability to handle hot weather due to their advanced age. The panel of judges decided 16 to 1 in favor of the women in a case that had been rumbling through the Swiss judicial system for several years before being brought to the ECHR.

• ‘The View’ co-host Sunny Hostin claims eclipse caused by climate change. “All those things together would maybe lead one to believe that either climate change exists or something is really going on,” she said Monday. A 4.8-magnitude earthquake was felt across New York and New Jersey on Friday; on Monday, the highly anticipated solar eclipse swept across the continental U.S. Hostin also claimed that her studio makeup artist “put on her coat” and “ran down the hallway” during the earthquake, saying, “Jesus is coming” and “The rapture is here.”

Covid

• The Great COVID Cover-up: Shocking truth about Wuhan and 15 federal agencies. These officials knew that the Chinese lab was proposing to create a COVID 19-like virus and not one of these officials revealed this scheme to the public. In fact, 15 agencies with knowledge of this project have continuously refused to release any information concerning this alarming and dangerous research. Government officials representing at least 15 federal agencies were briefed on a project proposed by Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This project, the DEFUSE project, proposed to insert a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus to create a novel chimeric virus that would have been shockingly similar to the COVID-19 virus.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• Blackstone Making $10 Billion Multifamily Purchase, Going on the Real Estate Offensive. Blackstone has agreed to acquire an owner of upscale apartment buildings for about $10 billion, signaling that one of the world’s largest real-estate investors is ramping up investments again after a period of moving more cautiously. Blackstone is taking private Apartment Income REIT, known as AIR Communities, which owns 76 rental housing communities that are primarily in coastal markets, including Miami, Los Angeles, and Boston, the companies confirmed Monday. Blackstone plans to invest another $400 million to improve these properties, the firm said.

• UBS on the brink of Switzerland's 'too big to fail' reckoning. Since UBS rescued its stricken rival Credit Suisse a year ago, it has been waiting to hear how authorities will protect Switzerland from the risk of the country's only remaining big bank also imploding. It is about to find out. The Swiss government is this month due to publish its recommendations for policing banks that are "too big to fail", which could saddle UBS with tougher business rules. In what is expected to be a several hundred-page report, the capital requirement section will be particularly scrutinised, with UBS potentially having to find tens of billions of extra dollars to safeguard against a Credit Suisse-style meltdown.

• China shakes wheat market with cancelled shipments from U.S., Australia. The global wheat market has been hit by Chinese buyers cancelling major shipments, seemingly in an attempt to secure better prices and bolster the country's food security. The U.S. Department of Agriculture last month said 504,000 tonnes of wheat sales to China had been cancelled. The figure is equivalent to about half the total U.S. wheat shipments to China in 2022 and the largest cancellation on record going back to 1999. About 1 million tonnes of Australian wheat exports to China have either been cancelled or postponed as well, Reuters reports.

• A Great Wealth Transfer is Underway: How the West Lost Control of the Gold Market. Pricing power in a market long dominated by Western institutional money is moving East and the implications are profound. The gold price has risen to a series of new all-time highs of late, a development that has received only cursory attention in the mainstream financial media. But as is the case with so much else these days, there is much more going on than meets the eye. In fact, the rise in the dollar price of gold is almost the least interesting aspect to this story. For thousands of years, gold was the ultimate store of value and was synonymous with the concept of ‘money’. Trade was often settled either in gold itself or in bank notes backed by gold and directly exchangeable for it. Currencies backed by nothing but government decree – called ‘fiat’ currencies – have tended to eventually fail.

Health

• PFAS: 'Forever chemicals' linked to cancer found in over half of UK fruit and vegetables. The Pesticide Action Network (PAN) analysed statistics from the Government’s residue testing programme. It found that at least 10 PFAS chemicals were present in food destined for UK supermarket shelves. Among the alarming findings, at least 95 per cent of UK strawberry samples tested contained PFAS pesticides. PFAS pesticides were similarly found in over half of grape and cherry samples collected for the Government testing programme.

• Cancer rates rising in young people due to ‘accelerated aging,’ according to ‘highly troubling’ new study. The researchers analyzed data from 148,724 people using the UK Biobank database. They estimated each person’s biological age using nine biomarkers in the blood — then compared that to their chronological age. Those with a higher biological age had a 42% increased risk of early-onset lung cancer, were 22% more prone to early-onset gastrointestinal cancer, and had a 36% higher risk for early-onset uterine cancer. The researchers also determined that people born after 1965 were 17% more likely to experience accelerated aging than those born in earlier decades.

Politics

• Government and the WHO Quietly Shake Hands. In addition to being given virtually no information about the WHO’s IHR amendments, the British public will not get a say in whether or not our nation is signed up to the changed agreements. Regardless of your opinion on the matter, the Government and the WHO will decide for you. This is despite increasing numbers of credible voices, including Members of Parliament, expressing grave concerns about what this could mean for our individual freedom, our health choices, our economy, and for our hard-won British democracy.

• Why John Lewis has turned to retail experience as it replaces Dame Sharon White. When the John Lewis Partnership appointed Dame Sharon White as its sixth chairman in 2019, it admitted that the former Ofcom chief and civil servant was not “the conventional retail choice”. Today, as John Lewis names its seventh chairman, it is clear innovation and change are no longer at the top of the agenda. The partnership has turned to Jason Tarry, a grocery veteran with more than 30 years experience at Tesco, to steer its operations.

  

Technology

• How facial recognition technology has changed policing. The first year of live facial recognition technology has been the biggest ­breakthrough for crime detection since DNA, the Metropolitan Police chief leading its introduction has said. In an exclusive interview with The Times, the Met’s director of ­intelligence, Lindsey Chiswick, said that the tool had been a “game-changer”, triggering an arrest every two hours of alleged criminals including rapists, burglars and robbers since it was introduced last April. Government insiders are hopeful that the successful use of the technology will pave the way for it to be introduced across England and Wales.

Vaccines

• Australian Journal of General Practice on Long Covid. Recipients of two or more injections of the mRNA vaccines display a class switch to IgG4 antibodies. Abnormally high levels of IgG4 might cause autoimmune diseases, promote cancer growth, autoimmune myocarditis and other IgG 4-related diseases (IgG4-RD) in susceptible individuals. There are clear implications for vaccine boosting where these and similar observations relating to COVID-19 vaccination and the incidence of long COVID-like symptoms are substantiated, adding further to public health officials’ concerns. Understanding the persistence of viral mRNA and viral protein and their cellular pathological effects after vaccination with and without infection is clearly required. Because COVID-19 vaccines were approved without long-term safety data and might cause immune dysfunction, it is perhaps premature to assume that past SARS-CoV-2 infection is the sole common factor in long COVID.