Today's Must-Reads - 22 April 2023

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

I spend a lot of time each day gathering together new information and interesting 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. Today, this is a slimmed down version for all subscribers but will be for paid subscribers only a lot of the time in the future.

Please consider taking out a paid subscription because it enables me to spend longer reporting on the news that isn’t, but should be reported.

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Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• Australian doctors are still being persecuted in March 2023 for questioning provisional approved drugs. AMPS executive member Dr Jeyanthi Kunadhasan is one of many doctors being persecuted for “wrongthink” by the government-bureaucracy AHPRA. She’s speaking out on behalf of her colleagues.

• An unvaccinated terminally ill Alberta Woman was denied a transplant despite proof she had natural Covid immunity. Despite the test results, physicians told her “nothing had changed in regards to healthcare policies pertaining to COVID-19 vaccination requirements” and that she would still need to be vaccinated before the hospital would give her an organ transplant

• Newsweek says Biden and Trump are both wrong - Ron DeSantis had a strong Covid performance. What do you think?

• The Guardian says China’s ‘zero Covid’ policy was a mass imprisonment campaign. “The Chinese government used the pandemic to accumulate ever more power. The result was a totalitarian, anti-scientific humanitarian catastrophe”. Now where have we seen that before!?

Economy/Energy/Finance

• De-dollarization continues. Now Bolivia has agreed with Russia to dump the US Dollar and Euro and carry out international commercial transactions using the Russian Ruble and the Bolivian Boliviano instead.

• China is striking new energy deals as its clout grows in the Middle East. A Chinese stake in a Qatari gas field is the latest sign of Beijing’s growing presence in the region. A Chinese company is also looking to invest $10 billion to mine Afghanistan’s lithium reserves.

• Does Larry Fink know something we don’t? The CEO of BlackRock sold 7% of his own shares this week which is one of his biggest stock sales since just before the Covid crash.

  

• Chile has stunned markets and EV makers by nationalising its lithium industry overnight. The weaponization of commodities in a world that is increasingly turning multipolar and where legacy trade links and commercial bridges are burning down metaphorically (and in some cases literally) is accelerating.

Health

• Why are liver cancer rates surging in Australia? The Sydney Morning Herald thinks climate change could be to blame, driving the growth of dangerous fungi. But could it be something else?

• Harvard Medical School conducted a study which indicated a link between tech use and depression in older adults. An unshocking study result which once again shows why forcing the elderly to isolate was such a bad idea. But the authors conclude that we just need to design better technology for future pandemics.

Science

• Scientists claim to have finally solved the mystery of how the Mayan calendar works. The Mayan calendar’s 819-day cycle has confounded scholars for decades, but new research shows how it matches up to planetary cycles over a 45-year span. That’s a much broader view of the tricky calendar than anyone previously tried to take.

Technology

• The UK government has made £2 million available for novel human augmentation innovations to enhance human capability in defence. DASA has launched a new Themed Competition to develop and prototype human augmentation technology for defence.

• How much does AI cost to run? According to Business Insider, ChatGPT could cost over $700,000 per day to operate. Microsoft is reportedly trying to make it cheaper.

Ukraine

• Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley testified to Congress that not stopping Russia in Ukraine would force a doubling of the US defense budget. He said not supporting Ukraine now would lead to a massive increase in future defense budgets. "If that rules-based order, which is in its 80th year, if that goes out the window, then be very careful”, he said.

• More war drum beating from the Telegraph. This time with the comical threat from Russia that it ‘will send disgustingly damp Britain into the abyss’. To be fair, it is quite damp. Ex-president Dmitry Medvedev has threatened to use a nuclear tidal wave on the UK.

Vaccines

• Beware, the FDA is not retreating on the Covid jabs. It is reloading. Some of you might have jumped with elation on Tuesday after hearing the news that the FDA had de-authorized the original series of COVID shots. What the agency is really doing, however, is reloading so it can enshrine the shots into the permanent immunization schedule and mix them with an ever-growing list of respiratory viral vaccines they are rolling out over the coming months.

• Spectator Australia looks at the powerful politics of Covid vaccines. Whatever one may feel about President Trump, this is about a bigger issue of what has been done to humanity. We have seen the influence of major corporations like Twitter and other social media companies in trying to influence the US election. Could the promise of a wonder drug to make Covid go away have played a similar political role?