Today's Must-Reads - 2 June 2023

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

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

Below is a summary of all the latest articles and information that I’ve found. Today, this is a slimmed down version for all subscribers but on other days will be for only paid subscribers.

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Climate Change

• 200,000 cows to be culled in order to meet climate targets. Internal documents reveal that a €200m budget is needed to cull 65,000 cows every year for three years to meet climate goals.

Covid

• The Journal of Antibiotics - Prophylactic administration of ivermectin attenuates SARS-CoV-2 induced disease in a Syrian Hamster Model. Therefore, we believe that ivermectin and its derivatives exhibit therapeutic potential as candidates for treating COVID-19. Although multiple clinical trials on ivermectin against human COVID-19 have been conducted globally, several studies deny the effect of this compound.

• Top Chinese scientist says don’t rule out lab leak. As head of China's Centre for Disease Control (CDC), Prof George Gao played a key role in the pandemic response and efforts to trace its origins. Prof Gao says: "You can always suspect anything. That's science. Don't rule out anything."

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• The British Cabinet Office really don’t want the Covid inquiry to read Boris Johnson’s messages. Cabinet Office to take the Covid inquiry to court. The Cabinet Office has tonight launched a last-ditch legal effort to avoid handing over Boris Johnson’s unredacted WhatsApps to the official Covid public inquiry. Officials released a strongly-worded statement confirming the department has requested a judicial review of the inquiry’s demands for material, having missed the revised 4 p.m deadline to pass on Johnson’s messages.

• Karol Sikora fears we are witnessing a Covid cover-up. Politicians are desperate to save their own skin, brandishing their anti-lockdown credentials at every possible opportunity. That should tell us which way the political winds are blowing. Many are toast already, so why do they care?

Economy/Energy/Finance

• British households will have to cut energy use again, says National Grid. Preparations for second winter without Russian gas signal energy crisis is not yet over. John Pettigrew, chief executive of National Grid, said he expected the so-called demand flexibility service would return in the coming heating season, in a sign that the energy crisis has not fully abated yet. Under the flexibility system - trialled for the first time last winter - households receive payments of up to £10 a day to cut the amount of electricity they use at certain times.

• US year on year growth in investors purchasing homes has seen a 49% decline.

  

• Money supply in Europe is contracting like never before.

  

Health

• Rising number of HIV cases alarming, health advocates say. Based on the 2022 Global AIDS Monitoring Report, the Philippines has shown a 327% increase in new infections, and a 401% increase in AIDS related deaths from 2010-2021 across all age groups.

• A similar thing is happening around the world. There is an HIV epidemic in Finland’s capital region. Hivpoint informs that there is an HIV epidemic in the capital region among intravenous drug users. In the years 2020–2023, several dozen HIV infections have been found in people who use injecting substances.

  During the previous seven years, only six similar infections were found. Finding infections at an early stage suggests that the epidemic is currently underway.

• UK sees massive uptick in excess deaths: Experts refuse to admit possible link to COVID vaccines. The misuse of mechanical ventilators created the appearance that COVID was exceptionally deadly, which in turn helped promote acceptance of the experimental COVID shots, which are now a leading cause of frequent sickness, chronic disability, and excess deaths.

• Ireland becomes first nation to require cancer warning labels on alcohol. Health Minister Stephen Donnelly signed the Public Health Alcohol Labeling Regulations on Monday, which will require labels that show calorie content, grams of alcohol, risks of cancer and liver disease and the dangers of drinking while pregnant.

Politics

• RFK Jr. and the Populist Wave. Why are Kennedy and Marianne Williamson polling so highly against Biden? Says one Democratic backer: ‘There’s a reckoning coming.’

• Suspected Chinese spies, disguised as tourists, tried to infiltrate Alaskan military bases. Chinese citizens posing as tourists but suspected of being spies have made several attempts in recent years to gain access to military facilities in this vast state studded with sensitive bases, according to U.S. officials. In one incident, a vehicle with Chinese citizens blew past a security checkpoint at Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks, several soldiers told USA TODAY. The vehicle was eventually stopped, and a search found a drone inside the vehicle. The occupants claimed they were tourists who had gotten lost.

• NATO is creating another battlefield on European continent. As the Russia-Ukraine crisis drags on, NATO has become the pronoun of destabilizer of regional security. The situation in the Balkans is now at an explosive point. KFOR, the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo, clashed with Serb protesters on Monday. The tension arose after ethnic Albanian mayors took office in northern Kosovo's Serb majority area after April elections that the Serbs boycotted.

Technology

• If we’re going to label AI an ‘extinction risk’, we need to clarify how it could happen. Except for weaponisation, it is unclear how the other – still awful – risks could lead to the extinction of our species, and the burden of spelling it out is on those who claim it.

• Large Language Models as Tool Makers. Tool-making enables an LLM to continually generate tools that can be applied to different requests so that future requests can call the corresponding APIs when beneficial for solving the tasks. Furthermore, the division of labor among LLMs for tool-making and tool-using phases introduces the opportunity to achieve cost effectiveness without degrading the quality of generated tools and problem solutions.

Ukraine

• Ukraine could join ranks of ‘frozen’ conflicts, U.S. officials say. U.S. officials are planning for the growing possibility that the Russia-Ukraine war will turn into a frozen conflict that lasts many years — perhaps decades — and joins the ranks of similar lengthy face-offs in the Korean peninsula, South Asia and beyond.

Vaccines

• Even if you refuse to believe the mRNA vaccines have any negative impacts, you must struggle to see the positives? Fully boosted Australia had record Covid and Influenza deaths in 2022 and 2023 isn’t looking great either.

  

• How many lives were actually saved by the Covid-19 vaccines? This continuation of PanData’s inquiry into the drivers of excess deaths digs a little deeper into the vaccination data to see how many lives the Covid vaccines saved.

• Pfizer, the EU, and disappearing ink. The European Commission has systematically blocked scrutiny of its COVID-19 vaccine deal with Pfizer. This week’s update to the contract is no different. For a while now controversy has raged around the text messages supposedly exchanged between Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Pfizer Chief Executive Albert Bourla in the run-up to the April 2021 deal for 1.1 billion doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine. The content and even existence of the messages has been shrouded in secrecy, with requests for clarification met with a fat "no comment."