Today's Must-Reads - 20 March 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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Covid

• 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.

  

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• 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.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• UK Government pushes for financial surveillance bill. Amendments to the largely under-scrutinised Data Protection and Digital Information Bill were announced in November of last year, giving banks powers to monitor the accounts of private citizens under the premise of searching for fraud and error in the welfare system. Banks would then be compelled to flag individuals who meet unspecified criteria to the Government. Given the outrageous scale of the proposals, there is good reason why Conservative legislators would hope that they might fall under the radar.

• 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.

Health

• [The word ‘may’ is the clue - keep eating your Coco Pops 24/7] The intermittent fasting trend may pose risks to your heart. Intermittent fasting — when people only eat at certain times of day — has exploded in popularity in recent years. But now a surprising new study suggests that there might be reason to be cautious: It found that some intermittent fasters were more likely to die of heart disease. The findings were presented Monday at an American Heart Association meeting in Chicago and focused on a popular version of intermittent fasting that involves eating all your meals in just eight hours or less — resulting in at least a 16-hour daily fast, commonly known as “time-restricted” eating.

Politics

• ‘We need to tear up the idea of BAME’. When it comes to racial equality, Britain has made huge strides over the past few decades. A 2021 UK government report, produced by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, found little evidence that black, Asian and ethnic-minority (BAME) Britons are still being held back due to their race. Racism certainly exists in modern Britain, it noted, but it is no longer the major social force it once was. Yet for stating these facts plainly, the commission’s chair, Tony Sewell, was confronted with an almighty backlash. He and his fellow commissioners were branded ‘Uncle Toms’ and racial heretics. To the UK’s race lobby, Sewell’s positive message was intolerable. It posed a fundamental challenge to the all-too-familiar narrative of so-called institutional racism.

• Why passing the bar exam will no longer be a requirement to become an attorney in Washington state. The exam "disproportionately and unnecessarily blocks marginalized groups from entering the practice of law" and is "at best minimally effective for ensuring competent lawyers," the Bar Licensure Task Force determined. "In addition to the racism and classism written into the test itself the time and financial costs of the test reinforce historical inequities in our profession," the task force wrote in its proposal for the change, released last month.

Science

• 'Light Speed' Electrons Discovered Moving in 4 Dimensions For The First Time. An elusive behavior of electrons has finally been isolated from more mundane electron activity in a real-world material. A team of physicists led by Ryuhei Oka of Ehime University has measured what are known as Dirac electrons in a superconducting polymer called bis(ethylenedithio)-tetrathiafulvalene. These are electrons that exist under conditions that effectively make them massless, allowing them to behave more like photons and oscillate at the speed of light.

Technology

• Kit Klarenberg was banned from Elon’s ‘free speech’ X app for offending power. “Following years of pressure from Israel lobbyists and British spooks, I was finally banned by Twitter/X. What does my removal say about Elon Musk, who flaunts his opposition to censorship, while promising to build an “everything app” where you could lose access to banking and messaging for violating dubious speech codes? My removal was justified on the basis that I violated X’s “rules against violent speech.” Having endlessly condemned violence on the platform – in particular, the Gaza genocide – I’m flummoxed.”

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.”

Vaccines

• 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.