Today's Must-Reads - 24 April 2024 - Non-Paywall

The latest news, studies, reports and articles you need to know!

Welcome to your daily dose of curated news and insights! While I can't cover everything, I've hand-picked the most important stories you should have on your radar.

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Climate Change

• Lighting Your Fireplace will Be a $500 Fine for CO2 Police. In South Gloucestershire, England, the City Council has approved the introduction of financial penalties in the district’s smoke control area. In the name of improving air quality, lighting a fire releases harmful pollution by burning wood, which can cause health problems. You will be fined £300 pounds for harming the environment.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• The Three Rs of Fear Messaging in a Global Pandemic: Recommendations, Ramifications and Remediation. Using evidence from published documents, the paper shows that UK Independent Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours' (SPI-B) supported the use of fear messaging during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is inconsistent with the extant psychological literature and contrary to the disaster planning literature. The recommendations regarding fear messaging may have had harmful ramifications and impacts, especially for young people. It recommends that a wider multidisciplinary expertise is employed to deal effectively, ethically and holistically with future crises. Plans for future pandemics must include meaningful engagement with the public, particularly children and young people.

• Appeals Court Backs Forced Vaccination of Children without Parental Consent. A North Carolina Court of Appeals issued the ruling in the case of a clinic, where personnel gave a 14-year-old boy a Covid mRNA shot without consent from the child or his parents. The mother of the boy sued the Guilford County school board and Old North State Medical Society over her teenage son’s forced COVID-19 vaccination in 2021. However, appellate judges agreed that a federal law protected both defendants from legal liability. The court ruled that the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act) protected the clinic and its staff.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• Bank Withdrawal Access Denied To Thousands in Australia As Customers Forced To Move 500 Miles To Get Cash. A group of banking customers in Australia are feeling the repercussions of a shift toward a cashless society, according to a new report. 4,500 residents living in the town of Kununurra are now facing a 500 mile journey to the closest bank, reports Yahoo Finance. The town, located in Western Australia, used to have brick-and-mortar branches and ATMs for Commonwealth Bank (CBA), NAB and Westpac. But all three banks have now left, citing reasons like staffing and security, amid an industry-wide trend of reducing physical locations.

• The AI bubble is noticeable in the number of companies mentioning the word during Q4 2023.

  

• Nearly 40% of Homeowners Couldn’t Afford Their Home If They Were to Buy It Today. Nearly two of every five (38%) homeowners don’t believe they could afford to buy their own home if they were purchasing it today, according to a new report from Redfin, the technology-powered real estate brokerage. Nearly three in five (59%) homeowners who answered this question have lived in their home for at least 10 years, and another 21% have lived in their home for at least five years. That means the majority of respondents have seen housing prices in their neighborhood skyrocket since they purchased their home: The median U.S. home-sale price has doubled in the last 10 years, and has shot up nearly 50% in the last five years alone.

• UPS reports first quarter earnings declines. First quarter earnings results issued this morning by Atlanta-based global freight transportation and logistics services provider UPS were down. Quarterly consolidated revenue, at $21.7 billion, fell 5.3% annually, and adjusted earnings per share, at $1.43, saw a 35.0% annual decline. Consolidated quarterly operating profit came in at $1.6 billion, which was off 36.5% annually.

• US government debt is now rising vertically.

  

Middle East

• Mass graves in Gaza show victims’ hands were tied, says UN rights office. Disturbing reports continue to emerge about mass graves in Gaza in which Palestinian victims were reportedly found stripped naked with their hands tied, prompting renewed concerns about possible war crimes amid ongoing Israeli airstrikes, the UN human rights office, OHCHR, said on Tuesday. More bodies had been found at Al-Shifa Hospital which was the focus of an Israeli military incursion to root out Hamas militants allegedly operating inside which ended at the beginning of this month. After two weeks of intense clashes, UN humanitarians assessed the site and confirmed on 5 April that Al-Shifa was “an empty shell”, with most equipment reduced to ashes.

Politics

• Labour’s dangerous obsession with race. Last week, shadow equalities minister Anneliese Dodds tweeted that businesses led by black, Asian and ethnic-minority (BAME) entrepreneurs are ‘bristling with potential’, but are being held back by the Conservative Party’s ‘economic chaos’. Among other measures, she has pledged to reform the state-owned British Business Bank to offer extra financing opportunities to BAME-owned businesses. No doubt it is true that the Tories’ poor management of the economy is holding businesses back. But why is Labour focussing on minority-led firms? Surely Labour should be pledging to help all businesses realise their potential, regardless of the ethnic identity of their owners.

• Why Indonesia Is China’s New Best Friend in Southeast Asia. When Indonesia’s President-elect Prabowo Subianto chose to visit China months before his inauguration, it caused eyebrows to raise across the region. Jakarta has long sought to balance its relationship with Beijing and its close ties with the US, so to send such a strong message caught many off guard. Yet the blossoming relationship is a sign that these Asian economic giants are finding fresh ways to engage. China and Indonesia’s friendship is being cemented along the lines of increased opportunities for investment, but it’s not just that. Indonesians are increasingly concerned about the Biden administration’s failure to restrain Israel’s actions in Gaza.

• Katherine Maher's past political activity flies in the face of NPR's ethics handbook. NPR reprimanded Uri Berliner for violating its policies while appearing to turn a blind eye towards the brazen conduct of Katherine Maher before she stepped into her role as the organization's president and CEO. While Maher’s social media activity came long before she joined NPR, it nevertheless appears to be in clear violation of NPR's staff expectations laid out in its ethics handbook. A clause in its "Conflicts of Interest" section states "In general, we don't do outside work for government or agencies principally funded by a government, or for private organizations that are regularly covered by NPR." Notably, Maher shared a photo of herself participating in the get out the vote effort in Arizona on behalf of Biden in 2020, even wearing a "Biden for President" hat.

• The Wikipedia fundraising scam. Wikipedia, and its parent organization Wikimedia, has been making the rounds on Twitter. This seems to be because Chris Rufo is attacking the new CEO of NPR (US public ‘radio’), Katherine Maher. It turns out that Maher previously served as the CEO of Wikimedia. This got a lot of people looking into her behavior there, and this brought up the Wikipedia fundraising scam into the limelight. It’s another anti-European (and anti-USA), anti-male, quasi-Marxist organization. This is what your donations to Wikipedia are going to. Wikipedia spends more money on left-wing causes than actually running an encyclopedia, and by a very long-shot.

Science

• Mastering the Mind: Brain Wave Beta Bursts and Their Role in Cognitive Control. The brain processes information on many scales. Individual cells electrochemically transmit signals in circuits but at the large scale required to produce cognition, millions of cells act in concert, driven by rhythmic signals at varying frequencies. Studying one frequency range in particular, beta rhythms between about 14-30 Hz, holds the key to understanding how the brain controls cognitive processes—or loses control in some disorders—a team of neuroscientists argues in a new review article.

Ukraine

• Ukraine cuts consular services for potential conscripts lodged overseas. Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Tuesday that he had ordered services cut for all such men, except for those returning to Ukraine. The move comes as Kyiv pushes to boost conscription in a bid to halt building Russian momentum on the battlefield. Kuleba said in a statement on X that he had ordered the measures to restore what he described as “fair treatment” for men of mobilisation age. “How it looks like now: a man of conscription age went abroad, showed his state that he does not care about its survival, and then comes and wants to receive services from this state,” he said. “It does not work this way. Our country is at war.”

• US preparing $1B weapons package for Ukraine. The tranche will include artillery, air defenses and armored vehicles — Bradley Fighting Vehicles, as well as potentially older Humvees and M113 armored personnel carriers POLITICO first reported on Monday. The Pentagon is still putting the finishing touches on the package, but the total will be roughly $1 billion, said the people, one of whom is a U.S. official. Both were granted anonymity to speak ahead of an announcement.