🔓 Today's Must-Reads - 3 August 2024

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

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• Starmer reveals his authoritarian streak. In a statement on the ugly scenes of public disorder in Southport, the new Prime Minister pledged a ‘wider deployment of facial recognition’ surveillance among a raft of other measures, designed to crack down on far-right agitators in the streets and online. In a moment in which he felt something had to be done, goaded by police chiefs intent on promoting their Chinese-style surveillance tools, Starmer reached blindly into the dark and pulled the first lever he could find. Without consideration for the consequences for our rights, freedoms or society more broadly he touted the rollout of one of the most invasive forms of surveillance technology available today.

• New jobs numbers raise alarm bells on recession risk. Something is going wrong in the mighty U.S. economy. The evidence has been building for months in various minor data points. Now, the big kahuna of economic data confirms it. The July employment numbers showed weak job creation and the highest unemployment rate since October 2021. The jobless rate is still low, but in a healthy economy, the kind of rise we've seen — a gain of 0.6 percentage points since January — simply doesn't happen. Usually, it is a warning sign that a recession is imminent.

• Scrapping of universities cancel culture law faces legal challenge. The Free Speech Union has threatened to launch a judicial review against Bridget Phillipson after she halted new protections for academics just days before they were due to come into force. The Education Secretary announced last week she had pulled the plug on the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 and would now consider repealing it. The flagship Tory policy was set to require universities, colleges and student unions to actively promote free speech on campus.

• Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh Statement on Force Posture in the Middle East. To maintain a carrier strike group presence in the Middle East, the Secretary has ordered the USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN Carrier Strike Group to replace the USS THEODORE ROOSEVELT Carrier Strike Group, currently on deployment in the Central Command area of responsibility. Additionally, Secretary Austin has ordered additional ballistic missile defense-capable cruisers and destroyers to the U.S. European Command and U.S. Central Command regions. The Department is also taking steps to increase our readiness to deploy additional land-based ballistic missile defense. The Secretary has also ordered the deployment of an additional fighter squadron to the Middle East, reinforcing our defensive air support capability.

• Revealed: first picture of war on terror detainee in CIA black site. Between 2002 and 2008, at least 119 Muslim men were hidden, housed, and interrogated at these secret CIA prisons around the world, with 39 of them subjected to what the Bush administration euphemistically labeled “enhanced interrogation techniques”. In 2014, the US government admitted these practices constituted torture, when Barack Obama stated: “We tortured some folks.” No one at the CIA has ever been held accountable for the torture.

• Kamalanomics Leads To A Much Weaker Than Expected Jobs Report As Fears Of A Recession Mount. Over the past 12 months, 1.2 million native-born Americans lost employment, while 1.3 million foreign-born workers found jobs.

• S&P Downgrades Ukraine Credit Rating to 'Selective Default'. The US ratings agency S&P cut Ukraine's credit rating to "selective default" on Friday, citing the war-torn country's failure to make a coupon payment on an existing bond. "The rating actions reflect the missed payment on the coupon of Ukraine's 2026 Eurobond," S&P said in a statement explaining its decision to downgrade Ukraine's credit rating to "SD/SD" from "CC/C." "We do not expect the payment within the bond's contractual grace period of 10 business days," it continued, adding that this view was based on "the passage of a Ukrainian law in mid-July that authorizes the government to temporarily suspend payments" on some debt liabilities.

• Intel shares fall 26% on plans to cut 15,000 jobs. Intel lost more than a quarter of its value on Friday after revealing drastic plans to slash its employee headcount and capital spending, as it suffered the latest setback in its slow-moving turnaround plans. To shore up its weakening finances, Intel also scrapped its dividend and announced an unexpected reversal in its surging capital spending, with investment this year now likely to be 20 per cent less than forecast.

• Britain is coming apart at the seams. The UK feels like a powder keg, threatening to explode at any moment. Recent events have exposed a simmering national anger and a pervasive sense that our social fabric is fraying beyond repair. Last week’s Manchester Airport altercation, the riots in Harehills, Leeds last month and the heinous murder of three innocent little girls in Southport earlier this week have all created an alarmingly volatile atmosphere. While the violence and rioting are unquestionably wrong (and partly fuelled by outright misinformation), they are, unfortunately, not surprising. For years, the British establishment either ignored or vilified those who voiced concerns about Britain’s crisis of cohesion.

• Michelin to lay off 1,400 employees, end tire production in Oklahoma. The company, which has been operating since 1970, will begin winding down tire operations and implement its first round of layoffs next year.

• BMA calls for ban on puberty blockers to be lifted. The doctors’ union also wants a pause on the implementation of a landmark review into gender care for children and young people. It said it wanted to undertake an evaluation of the Cass Review after academics expressed concern about its approach. The review, commissioned by NHS England, called for a move away from medical interventions for children struggling with their gender identity and advocated a more holistic model incorporating better mental health support.

• Hotez Calls for Police Deployment against “Anti-Vaxxers”. Social media went a little bonkers last week when an interview of Texas Children’s Hospital’s Dr. Peter Hotez began circulating with the Big Pharma insider calling for the United Nations and NATO to deploy security forces against “anti-vaxxers” in the United States. Dr. Hotez’s statements first appeared on the YouTube channel of an international pediatric conference that took place in Colombia, but the interview then jumped onto X.

• Hillary Clinton-run group helps fund Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion. A group founded by Mrs Clinton from the ashes of her failed presidential bid has donated $500,000 (£391,500) in the last three years to the protest group’s California-based financiers. A group founded by Mrs Clinton from the ashes of her failed presidential bid has donated $500,000 (£391,500) in the last three years to the protest group’s California-based financiers. Just Stop Oil’s largest financial backer is a controversial Californian non-profit, the Climate Emergency Fund (CEF), which pays for stunts by environmental groups across the world, including Extinction Rebellion.

• Eerie new mind-controlling tech can manipulate emotions and even appetite without any invasive surgery. SCIENTISTS have discovered they can use nanoparticles to control the minds of mice in a groundbreaking new study. With an external magnetic field, scientists at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in South Korea found they could manipulate nanoparticle-activated "switches" inside the brains of mice. The technology, dubbed Nano-MIND (Magnetogenetic Interface for NeuroDynamics), allowed researchers to control the emotions and appetites of mice from afar.

• Investors Are Suddenly Getting Very Concerned That AI Isn't Making Any Serious Money. As the Washington Post reports, investment bankers are singing a dramatically different tune than last year, a period marked by tremendous hype surrounding AI, and are instead starting to become wary of Big Tech's ability to actually turn the tech into a profitable business. "Despite its expensive price tag, the technology is nowhere near where it needs to be in order to be useful," Goldman Sach's most senior stock analyst Jim Covello wrote in a report last month. "Overbuilding things the world doesn’t have use for, or is not ready for, typically ends badly."