Today's Must-Reads - 21 February 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

• Dutch Climate Expert emeritus professor Guus Berkhout: “There is No Climate Emergency; it is a Hoax”. Has climate madness reached its peak? More genuine climate experts dare to speak up against the discourse of fear spread by politicians, movements, and the colored mainstream media. Climate Intelligence (Clintel), a global climate change and policy foundation, takes the lead with honest climate science and assures no climate emergency. “We tell a truthful story, not just one side,” said Clintel founder emeritus professor Guus Berkhout. “Sadly, that was carefully built up by past generations is now rapidly destroyed by the evil climate and green energy policies,” Berkhout added. “Citizens pay the price.”

• Stanford prof who sued critics loses appeal against $500,000 in legal fees. Mark Jacobson, a Stanford professor who sued a journal and a critic for $10 million before dropping the case, has lost an appeal he filed in 2022 to avoid paying defendants more than $500,000 in legal fees. Jacobson, who studies renewable energy at Stanford, sued in September 2017 in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia for defamation over a 2017 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that critiqued a 2015 article he had written in the same journal. He sued PNAS and the first author of the paper, Christopher Clack, an executive at a firm that analyzes renewable energy.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• Why did behavioural scientists crave mask mandates? Professor David Halpern (the leader of the Behavioural Insight Team (BIT) — aka the “Nudge Unit” — energetically lobbied senior scientists and politicians to impose community masking upon British citizens in the early summer of 2020. Why did behavioural scientists covet mass masking? Their strengthening of the idea that nudges lever compliance with top-down restrictions no doubt played a part. And their admiration of Eastern cultures, with their greater willingness to conform, may have also been a factor. Whatever the reasons, one wonders how they reconcile their mask advocacy with the growing recognition that imposing face coverings on healthy people was one of the more irrational, and damaging, of all the Covid restrictions.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• Jeff Bezos unloads around $2.4 billion in Amazon stock, bringing recent sales to 50 million shares. Bezos sold about 12 million Amazon shares, worth approximately $2.03 billion, last week, in addition to another tranche of 12 million shares just days before. He unloaded another 12 million shares the week before that. Bezos’ stock sales have accelerated since he announced last November he would leave Seattle and move to Miami, allowing him to be closer to fiancée Lauren Sanchez and his parents, as well as Blue Origin’s operations.

• The Kremlin has never been richer – thanks to a US strategic partner. Russia is entering its third year of war in Ukraine with an unprecedented amount of cash in government coffers, bolstered by a record $37 billion of crude oil sales to India last year, according to new analysis, which concludes that some of the crude was refined by India and then exported to the United States as oil products worth more than $1 billion. This flow of payments, ultimately to Moscow’s benefit, comes from India increasing its purchases of Russian crude by over 13 times its pre-war amounts.

• UK housing market sees first value drop in a decade. The total value of all homes across the UK has dipped for the first time since 2012. According to figures by Savills, the total value of UK homes now stands at £8.678 trillion. The analysis of the UK’s housing stock reveals that the total value has fallen marginally on 2022 – when values peaked – but remains £1.585 trillion higher than before the pandemic (2019). According to Savills, the value falls, were concentrated mainly in the south. The total value of London’s housing stock decreased by -£39.3 billion (-2.1%), while the South East, South West and East of England saw a combined -£16.5 billion (-0.5%) fall.

Health

• Record long-term sickness bodes ill for UK economic growth. Britain has a sick economy and it is getting sicker. The clear message from last week’s raft of economic data is that the UK is being held back by the growing number of people not able to work because of long-term illness. Figures released last week by the Office for National Statistics illustrated the extent of the problem. The number of people saying they are inactive due to long-term sickness is now 2.8 million – an increase of more than 200,000 in the past year and of 700,000 since the pandemic started in 2020.

Politics

• Russia adds Republican senator Lindsey Graham to ‘terrorists and extremists’ list. Tass, the state-run news agency, first reported the move by Rosfinmonitoring, which allows authorities to freeze Russian bank accounts, though in Graham’s case is likely to be chiefly symbolic. The Rosfinmonitoring list includes more than 12,000 individuals and more than 400 companies, as well as domestic and foreign terrorist entities and Russian political opposition groups, according to the website opensanctions.org. Graham, a South Carolina senator and foreign policy hawk who has long advocated arming Ukraine against Russian invaders, has also been subject to a Russian arrest warrant, for making “Russophobic statements” during a visit to Kyiv.

• Lukashenko: Western special services are preparing provocation in Poland. "We publicize, as best as we can, all the information obtained by our intelligence about various kinds of provocations, extremist actions with the involvement of militants from Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania. Now we will continue this tradition. Here’s one more piece of operational information. I quote verbatim (this is important for the Poles): "Polish and U.S. intelligence are preparing a large-scale provocation against the Polish civilian population, which they will blame on Russia and Belarus," Aleksandr Lukashenko said.

• Bologna will confer honorary citizenship on Julian Assange. “Giving citizenship to Julian Assange is giving citizenship to freedom of the press, the right to information and the truth – writes the group leader of the Civic Coalition and first signatory of the proposal Detjon Begaj in a statement -. In the era of fake news, the right to free and independent information, the right to know documents and facts relevant to the defense of democracy, such as war crimes, which some powers want to hide from public opinion, is fundamental".

• The Last Days of Julian Assange in Britain. The WikiLeaks publisher’s long and winding road through England’s legal system could soon be up. What he faces next is terrifying. “One day in an American prison is like a year in a high-security prison in Britain. You could do a year in Belmarsh and it wouldn’t match a day in one of those places.”

• Everything you need to know about the British public authority at the heart of the Julian Assange case. Since 2010, the Crown Prosecution Service has been at the center of the Assange case. Among deleted documents and controversial decisions, it is urgent to shed light on how the Crown Prosecution Service has handled the Assange case. The author of this article has been engaged in a FOIA battle to defend the right of the press to access the full documentation held by the Crown Prosecution Service on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks in order to factually reconstruct the case.

Science

• Mysterious Ancient Language Revealed on Bronze Hand From 2,100 Years Ago. A team of researchers analyzed the artifact, found at the site of an Iron Age hillfort known as Irulegi in Navarre, northern Spain, for a newly published study in the journal Antiquity—and also suggested the words written on it could be linked to modern-day Basque. Vasconic was spoken by a pre-Roman people known as the Vascones, who once inhabited the western Pyrenees in an area that corresponds primarily with modern-day Navarre, as well as parts of the Spanish regions of La Rioja and Aragon. And as one of only a few known examples of it, the inscription offers fascinating insights into one of Europe's least understood ancient languages.

• Potassium depletion in soil threatens global crop yields. Potassium deficiency in agricultural soils is a largely unrecognized but potentially significant threat to global food security if left unaddressed, finds new research involving researchers at UCL, University of Edinburgh and the UK Center for Ecology & Hydrology. The study, published in Nature Food, found that more potassium is being removed from agricultural soils than is being added, throughout many regions of the world. Potassium is a vital nutrient for plant growth that helps with photosynthesis and respiration, the lack of which can inhibit plant growth and reduce crop yields.

Technology

• British nuclear sub missile launch FAILS as Trident dramatically misfires and ‘plops’ into ocean just yards away. The second failed launch in a row – after a misfire in 2016 – happened while Defence Secretary Grant Shapps was on board HMS Vanguard to witness the test. The Ministry of Defence confirmed an “anomaly occurred” during the January 30 exercise off Florida, but the nuclear deterrent remains “effective". The crew on the nuclear sub perfectly completed their doomsday drill, and the Trident 2 missile was propelled into the air by compressed gas in the launch tube. But its first stage boosters did not ignite and the 58-ton missile – fitted with dummy warheads – splashed into the ocean and sank.

• US Tells Allies Russia May Launch Anti-Satellite Nuclear Weapon Into Space This Year. The development comes after the House Intelligence Committee chairman warned last week of a grave but unspecified security threat from Russia. President Joe Biden later said that the Kremlin has been developing an anti-satellite space weapon that doesn’t pose a direct threat to human lives. The current assessment is that Russia doesn’t plan to detonate any orbital weapon, according to the people. However, there is risk of an accident and a nuclear explosion could potentially affect about a third of satellites and play havoc with communications systems on earth, they said.

Ukraine

• Russian helicopter pilot who defected to Ukraine shot dead in Spain. Maxim Kuzminov's body was found with gunshot wounds on 13 February in the town of Villajoyosa, near Alicante in southern Spain. Spanish media reported that investigators were searching for two suspects who had fled in a vehicle that was later found burnt out in a nearby town. During a flight between two Russian air bases last August, Mr Kuzminov instead landed in Kharkiv, Ukraine with his Mi-8 helicopter as part of a secret operation. Ukraine's GUR military intelligence said it had lured him into defecting. Russian state media claimed at the time of the defection that Mr Kuzminov shot and killed two crew members on board the helicopter who were unhappy about landing in Ukraine.

Vaccines

• US Vaccine Injury Compensation Program Has 10-Year Backlog of Claims. U.S. health officials responded to questions on America’s failing vaccine injury compensation system in a hearing that left the vaccine-injured feeling like addressing the system’s shortcomings is not a priority on Capitol Hill. As of Jan. 1, there were 12,854 claims filed for injuries caused by COVID-19 countermeasures with the government’s Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), including 9,600 related to injuries caused by COVID-19 vaccines. Of the 12,854 claims, 2,214 have been processed, but only 40 claims have been found eligible for compensation.

• UK Medicines Regulator a "Serious Risk" to Patient Safety. The All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on pandemic response and recovery has raised "serious patient safety concerns" about the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), along with other aspects of a system that, "far from protecting patients, continues to put them at serious risk". Medscape News UK has reported increasing concern worldwide about the degree to which medicines regulators are captured by the drug industry. A 2022 BMJ investigation found serious conflicts of interest potentially influencing health policy and approval decisions. Regulatory agency members and expert advisers had financial interests in products being licensed, including several experts on COVID-19 vaccine advisory committees with financial ties to vaccine manufacturers that regulators did not always disclose.