Today's Must-Reads - 6 March 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

• San Diego man is first in U.S. to be charged with smuggling greenhouse gases. Michael Hart, a 58-year-old San Diego resident, is accused of bringing hydrofluorocarbons — chemical compounds commonly used for refrigeration and air conditioning — from Mexico to the U.S. and selling them for profit, which violates regulations set in 2020 to slow climate change under the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act. Hart faces 13 separate charges, including conspiracy, importation contrary to law, multiple counts of selling imported merchandise contrary to law and criminal forfeiture. He could face decades in prison if convicted on any one of the charges related to illegal importation.

• Electric cars release more toxic emissions than petrol-powered vehicles and are worse for the environment. The study, which was published in 2022 but has begun circulating again after being cited in a WSJ op-ed, found that brakes and tyres release 1,850 times more particulate matter compared to modern exhaust pipes which have filters that reduce emissions. It found that EVs are 30 percent heavier on average than petrol-powered vehicles, which causes the brakes and tyre treads to wear out faster than standard cars and releases tiny, often toxic particles into the atmosphere.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• Are Covid Lockdowns Behind the Rise in Extreme Poverty in the Global South? In the context of a huge increase in global poverty since 2020 which has driven political convulsions most especially in low-income countries, a closer look at pandemic policies is vital to safeguard against future missteps. Could pandemic poverty have been avoided, and if so, how? Some may say that without Covid lockdowns, the virus would have been so devastating in poor countries as to render all of this academic. Yet in fact, the epidemiological benefits of shutdowns in informal housing are negligible because of the overcrowded nature of such settlements. Indeed, there is strong evidence from Mumbai’s slums that lockdowns accelerated the spread of Covid there.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• Britons need 72-year mortgages to make bills affordable, analysis reveals. Borrowers would need to spread their home loans over more than 70 years to be able to afford the same mortgages on offer just two years ago, banks have said. High house prices and higher interest rates have pushed up the length of affordable loans dramatically, and last year led to the lowest level of mortgages sold to home-movers since 1974. While rates had begun to ease earlier this year, swap rates – a leading indicator for mortgage rates – have more recently begun to climb again. This week, high street lenders HSBC, Clydesdale, NatWest, and Barclays all signalled rate increases ahead of the spring Budget.

• Almost 25% of first-time buyers are taking out loans longer than 35 years. This has jumped significantly since 2022.

  

Health

• Why are so many young people having heart attacks? They lead seemingly healthy lifestyles... but all these people suffered heart problems. Experts say the phenomena is 'frightening'. ‘Between 10 to 20 per cent of my heart attack patients are now under the age of 40,’ says Dr Martin Lowe, a consultant cardiologist at St Bartholomew’s Hospital and The Portland Hospital, both in London. ‘In the US, data shows around one in five heart attack patients is under 40 and we’re catching up in the UK. ‘When I was a junior doctor it was extremely rare to see young people — most patients were smokers in their 50s and 60s.’

• Doctors admit link between transgender hormone therapy and cancer in leaked emails. Leaked emails show other medical professionals admitting that trans patients do not always understand the consequences of gender reassignment. The cache of files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which sets guidelines that have influenced NHS treatment, show that doctors are carrying out life-changing surgery and prescribing puberty blockers even though they are aware the adults and children may not fully understand the long-term ramifications. One doctor talked about a transgender person who died of cancer as a result of his hormone treatment.

Politics

• Top Secret Document Exposes UK Role in Ghana Coup. The UK Foreign Office conducted a covert propaganda campaign to help remove Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah in 1966, declassified files show. Britain’s Foreign Office engaged in “covert attacks” against the government of Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah, a recently declassified file reveals. The objective was to create “an atmosphere” in which Nkrumah “could be overthrown and replaced by a more Western-oriented government”, the file shows. This policy was supported by officials in both Conservative and Labour governments alike.

• America’s economic security doctrine has taken on a darker hue. Washington seeks to defend the rules-based order with unruly, self-interested interventions. One of the few saving graces of the first Trump administration was that the president was more interested in doing deals with America’s competitors than knocking them out. The worry must be that a second Trump administration will not only be fired by a desire for revenge and a radicalised Republican party. It will also inherit from Biden a state machinery schooled on a much darker view of the world than that which Obama bequeathed to Trump in 2016. Whatever the electoral outcome, America’s deep state, once hailed as a bastion of liberalism, is turning to the dark side. 

• Victoria Nuland announces resignation as Biden's Undersecretary of State. Serving as Acting Under Secretary until a replacement is confirmed for Nuland will be Under Secretary for Management John Bass. Nuland and the Biden administration came under fire in September of 2022 after the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines that run under the Baltic Sea between Russia and Germany. Nuland had said earlier in the year, less than a month before Russia invaded Ukraine, "If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward."

• Would Congress overturn a Trump victory? The Democrats could cause chaos with the Colorado ruling. The Supreme Court has ruled that no state can use the 14th Amendment of the Constitution — which bans insurrectionists from holding office — to keep Tump off the ballot. The decision to allow the former president to stand was unanimous, with the Court’s conservative majority and liberal minority in agreement. The conservatives actually went further, ruling that for the 14th Amendment to be brought into action (section 3, incidentally) something important has to happen: Congress would have to approve it. This rather dry-sounding suggestion is anything but for some Americans. A small group of law professors told the Court, with alarm, that it should not pursue this course of action.

• How woke capitalism indoctrinates workers. Employees are being coerced into espousing the political views of their bosses. A new logo has started appearing on websites, in adverts and on shop windows. It’s an uppercase ‘B’ inside a circle, accompanied by the slogan ‘Certified B Corp’. If you’ve not spotted it yet, the chances are you soon will. This March is ‘B Corp Month’. Cue increased branding and glossy magazine publicity. B Corp is the public face of so-called ethical capitalism. A ‘certified B Corp’ is a business or corporation that has been ‘verified’ as having ‘high standards of social and environmental performance’. B Lab publicity makes grand claims that it will ‘shift the behaviour, culture and structural underpinnings of capitalism’ as it seeks ‘to address society’s most critical challenges’.

Science

• This Potentially Inhabited Moon Is Churning Out Enough Oxygen for 1 Million Humans. Jupiter’s icy moon Europa produces plenty of oxygen every day, according to new findings based on data from NASA’s Juno spacecraft. The moon has long been of interest to astrobiologists because of the possibility that life could exist in its subsurface ocean. The research, published this week in Nature Astronomy, focused on data from Juno’s Jovian Auroral Distributions Experiment, or JADE. The scientists estimated oxygen production from the moon based on the amount of hydrogen outgassing from its surface. Their conclusion? Europa generates about 1,000 tons of oxygen every 24 hours, enough for a million (breathing) humans.

• Scientists launch hub to channel quantum power for good. The Open Quantum Institute is calling on researchers from around the world to pinpoint the most promising future applications for the fast-emerging technology—and ensure they are open and accessible to all. "Quantum computing has the potential of changing almost everything," said Peter Brabeck-Latmathe, chairman of the science and diplomacy platform GESDA that conceived of the project. He told AFP the future technology was expected to be "1,000 to 10,000 times more potent than the computing power we have today", insisting it was vital to begin thinking hard about how to govern it and ensure it is used for good.

Ukraine

• Is Putin opening a second front in Europe? The chaos in Transnistria is ripe for exploitation. Could another war be beginning in Europe? The past few weeks in Transnistria are worrying, not least because they are so familiar. The separatist government there is agitating against Moldova, accusing it of destroying the economy, and violating Transnistrian human rights and freedoms. If this is not a new war, it certainly suggests a widening of the existing one. Transnistria, the narrow strip of land running between Moldova’s eastern border with Ukraine, illegally broke away from Moldova in 1990 and is unrecognised as independent by almost all the world, including the UN. But not Russia, of course, which maintains two motorised rifle battalions there.

Vaccines

• German patient vaccinated against Covid 217 times. A 62-year-old man from Germany has, against medical advice, been vaccinated 217 times against Covid, doctors report. The bizarre case is documented in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal. The shots were bought and given privately within the space of 29 months. The man appears to have suffered no ill effects, researchers from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg say. Evidence for 130 of the jabs was collected by the public prosecutor of the city of Magdeburg, who opened an investigation with the allegation of fraud, but no criminal charges were brought.