🔓 Today's Must-Reads - 26 July 2024

Exposing the narrative with the latest news, studies, reports and articles!

Welcome to your daily dose of curated news and insights from across the globe!

There’s a lot of news to get through every day. To save you time and to save you constantly scrolling past inane headlines to find anything of interest, I’ve done the work for you. So grab a cup of tea or coffee, sit down and read the news that really matters.

Today this is a slimmed down version for everyone but is usually for paid subscribers only. Consider signing up as a paid subscriber and join a growing band of independent minds from around the world.

• Navy SEALs fired for refusing COVID vaccine for religious reasons score major win against Biden administration. The mandate enacted in August 2021 led to the forced firing of over 8,000 service members who refused the shot on religious or medical grounds. They were fired, denied trainings to advance in rank and, in some cases, even forced by the military to repay their initial signing bonuses between $4,000 and $7,000. According to the settlement, service members who quit the Navy after being 'mistreated' will have their records corrected. In addition, the Navy also 'agreed to post a statement affirming the Navy's respect for religious service members.' Lastly, the government will pay $1.5 million in attorneys' fees that accumulated over nearly four years of litigation.

• North Korean charged in cyberattacks on US hospitals, NASA and military bases. The indictment of Rim Jong Hyok by a grand jury in Kansas City, Kansas, accuses him of laundering the money through a Chinese bank and then using it to buy computer servers and fund more cyberattacks on defense, technology and government entities around the world. For more than three months, Rim and other members of the Andariel Unit of North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau had access to NASA’s computer system, extracting over 17 gigabytes of unclassified data, the indictment says.

• Perseverance rover discovers rock with potential signs of ancient life. A vein-filled rock is catching the eye of the science team of NASA's Perseverance rover. Nicknamed "Cheyava Falls" by the team, the arrowhead-shaped rock contains fascinating traits that may bear on the question of whether Mars was home to microscopic life in the distant past.

• Donald Trump May Not Have Been Hit By Bullet, FBI Director Says. FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Wednesday that it was not clear whether former President Donald Trump was shot or hit by shrapnel when a gunman opened fire at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, earlier this month. On Wednesday, Wray testified before the House Judiciary Committee that it is not yet certain if Trump's injury was caused by a bullet or shrapnel.

• Vaccine injuries deserve more attention, says vaccinologist. More empathy—and investment—is needed to address vaccine-related injuries, says Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Kizzmekia Corbett-Helaire. Corbett-Helaire, assistant professor of immunology and infectious diseases, was one of the developers of the COVID-19 vaccine. “People who speak out about how they feel after getting a vaccine should not be dismissed or assumed to be anti-vaxxers,” she wrote. “For starters, they deserve empathy from their doctors and other health care providers, as well as from those who set and drive vaccine policy.”

• Rachel Reeves expected to reveal £20bn shortfall in public finances. Experts expect she will be forced to announce tax changes in the budget, with options including capital gains or inheritance taxes and slashing other tax reliefs. Reeves has ruled out changes to income tax, VAT, national insurance and corporation tax – the largest revenue raisers. The prime minister, Keir Starmer, told business leaders this week that the public finances were “in the worst place since the second world war”.

• How Four US Presidents Unleashed Economic Warfare Across the Globe. Today, the United States imposes three times as many sanctions as any other country or international body, targeting a third of all nations with some kind of financial penalty on people, properties or organizations. They have become an almost reflexive weapon in perpetual economic warfare, and their overuse is recognized at the highest levels of government. But American presidents find the tool increasingly irresistible. But even as sanctions have proliferated, concern about their impact has grown.

• Ford loses $50,000 on every electric car. The company posted a loss of $1.1bn for its electric vehicle division, Ford E – equivalent to about $47,600 per car. It sold 23,957 electric vehicles (EVs), an increase of 61pc from a year earlier. The numbers contributed to a torrid first half in which Ford E lost $2.5bn, with the business on track to lose $5bn overall this year.

• German government knew masks didn’t work early in pandemic, report alleges. The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) files, long held from public view, read, “There is no evidence for the use of FFP2 masks outside of occupational safety,” according to German outlet Berliner Zeitung. Nonetheless, some masking requirements remained in effect throughout the country until early 2023. The files noted that the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” narrative was incorrect, but government leaders continued to blame the unvaccinated for the spread of Covid in public comments after that conclusion was reached.

• Civil Unrest Is The Next Most Predictable Crisis For America Now. For the past six months there has been a clear uptick in civil war rhetoric within the establishment media in the US, and we all know that the coming presidential election is the reason for it. The bottom line is that no matter who ends up in the White House in 2025 there will be mass violence, but most of this violence will be reserved for the possibility of Donald Trump’s return.

• Elon Musk says he’s a ‘cultural Christian’ – why some leading thinkers are embracing Christianity. Musk joins many western conservative thinkers troubled by a rapidly changing world. Some of these thinkers have embraced Christianity to combat these changes. Yet they often struggle to accept Christianity’s central supernatural claims, like Christ’s resurrection. In conservative intellectual circles, the receding tide of Christianity is turning. For some, the appeal is aesthetic. The prominent atheist, Richard Dawkins, calls Christianity’s core claims “obvious nonsense”, but he still identifies as a “cultural Christian” because he enjoys hymns and cathedrals.