Today's Must-Reads - 7 February 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

• Ursula von der Leyen scraps pesticide reduction bill, in gift to farmers. The Commission first pitched the Sustainable Use of Pesticides (SUR) regulation in 2020 as part of its Green Deal, von der Leyen’s signature policy project, that involves ambitious and legally binding plans to make the Continent climate-neutral by 2050. The Commission then formally proposed the SUR bill in June 2022, setting a target to slash pesticide use and risks by 50 percent by 2030. But with mounting political opposition from farmers’ lobbies and center-right politicians, and now with farmers’ protests sweeping European countries — and even outside the Parliament itself last week — the EU executive pulled the plug.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• Infant dies after allegedly suffocating on mask at New Taipei daycare. Authorities in New Taipei on Wednesday said they are investigating the death of an 11-month-old boy at a public daycare center, which the child's family allege happened when he suffocated on a mask a teacher forced him to wear. According to surveillance video footage viewed by the parents, the incident on Monday happened when the boy became irritated and took off his mask, after which the teacher put it back on for him. At that point, the child burst out crying, which "possibly saturated the mask with tears and mucus, causing it to stick to his nose and mouth and suffocate him."

Economy/Energy/Finance

• US regulator increases presence at all Boeing facilities - with more inspectors needed. The Federal Aviation Authority is reviewing the long-standing practice of delegating some critical safety tasks to Boeing, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) administrator Michael Whitaker said. Thousands of flights were cancelled by users of the Boeing 737 MAX 9, Alaska Airlines and United Airlines, as a result of the grounding order, which was lifted on 24 January.

• Sweden closes investigation into Nord Stream explosion. The Swedish public prosecutor's office was apparently unable to identify any specific suspects. The German law enforcement authorities could even benefit from the decision. The Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, which took gas from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea, began leaking heavily on September 22nd 2022, with seismic laboratories in Sweden and Denmark picking up signs of explosions. Underwater investigations then proved that the piplines had been sabotaged.

• UK electric vehicle maker Arrival enters administration with 170 jobs at risk. New York-listed company, once valued at $15bn, failed to launch its debut electric van. The move comes a week after trading in the company was suspended on New York’s Nasdaq stock exchange and a notification that the firm would be removed from the exchange was filed. Nasdaq said Arrival had not complied with its listing standards after failing to file accounts for 2022. Arrival’s demise adds another failure to Britain’s mixed recent history in the electric vehicle market. Britishvolt, the electric vehicle battery maker collapsed into administration last year after struggling to secure investment.

Health

• Young adults are having heart attacks more often — What’s causing it? Alarmingly, the occurrence of heart attacks and other forms of heart disease among younger adults (ages 20 to 50) is increasing. The increase in cardiovascular problems in this group, in 2020 and 2021, was so great that it contributed to declines in life expectancy. In 2022, The Journal of Medical Virology reported that heart attack deaths rose 14 percent during the first year of the pandemic. The greatest increase occurred in patients between the ages of 25 and 44. Why there was such a change in this age group is still unknown.

• Common Preservative May Harm Your Gut. Nisin is a popular antimicrobial preservative used in everything from beer to cheeses and dipping sauce. It is made naturally by bacteria to eliminate competition from other microbes by killing them. Compounds like this are often called "lantibiotics" because they are made of special bacteria-derived molecules called lantipeptides. However, while these are very effective at eliminating food-borne diseases, they may also be damaging the "good" microbes in our gut.

Politics

• Everyone loses in America’s misinformation war. There are insidious alliances between Big Tech and government. The below forms part of the testimony Lee Fang delivered to the House Select Committee on Weaponization on 6 February, 2024. Moderna relaunched efforts to influence vaccine discourse, again working with Public Good Projects. Moderna also employed the services of the artificial intelligence firm Talkwalker to monitor vaccine-related conversations across 150 million websites, including social media and gaming platforms like Steam. Moderna labelled almost any critic of the company or vaccine policies as “high risk” for spreading misinformation, including reputable academics like Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya and local elected officials who simply voiced objections to vaccine mandates.

• How Primed for War Is China? How likely is China to start a war? This may be the single-most important question in international affairs today. If China uses military force against Taiwan or another target in the Western Pacific, the result could be war with the United States—a fight between two nuclear-armed giants brawling for hegemony in that region and the wider world. If China attacked amid ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the world would be consumed by interlocking conflicts across Eurasia’s key regions, a global conflagration unlike anything since World War II. How worried should we be?

• The conservative paradox. The Tories face electoral oblivion, having failed to grasp that voters look to government for a shield against insecurity. Is a recovery now even possible? Thatcherism has become an aberration in a deglobalising world. As an economic system it meant non-interventionism in industry and free trade, orthodoxies that make little sense when deindustrialisation has undermined the West’s capacity to defend itself and trade has been weaponised in geopolitical struggles. Yet the intellectual energy is still on the right. Both the progressive left and the establishment right are clinging to an unsustainable status quo: the ossified husk of Thatcher’s free market joined with cheap labour supplied by mass immigration, lightly varnished with expensive green paint.

• Conscription returns to the continent: Latvia reintroduces compulsory service as NATO state moves to deter Russia from invading the rest of Europe. Conscription was reintroduced to the Baltic state at the beginning of January and will apply to all men aged between 18 and 27. Each will have to complete a year of service for the country - even if they live abroad. The country hopes to eventually have 61,000 combat-ready troops split between active and reserve units. It comes as experts warn that we should soon see the policy rolled out in Britain, as they say the UK needs to start training up a 'citizen army' to fend off aggression from Putin.

• Poland is preparing for war with Russia. Sweden and Norway have called on their citizens to prepare for a war with Russia, Germany's Defense Minister Boris Pistorius speaks of a possible war with Russia "in five to eight years". And Denmark expects Russian military force against NATO countries to be “very likely”! Now Poland also admits: We are preparing for war with Russia. Poland's Defense Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz said “I anticipate every scenario and take the worst ones most seriously. That is the job of a defense minister in the situation we find ourselves in today.” He expressly emphasized that he “didn’t just say” these words, but rather carefully considered them. His ministry has already begun concrete preparatory steps.

Science

• Western science beginning to catch up to what Indigenous history has always known. A very, very old mammoth tusk found near a road-widening project, for State Route 54 near National City in the early 1990s, set off considerable controversy among scientists. When a group of archeology, paleontology, and geology specialists (including those from the San Diego Natural History Museum) authored an article in the journal Nature in 2017 arguing proof of human existence in the Americas as far back as 130,000 years ago, it was a shock to convention — Western convention, anyway. The previously held belief was that the Clovis people (named for the spearheads found in Clovis, N.M., in the 1930s) migrated to the area around 13,000 years ago.

• Mysterious 'Stonehenge' structure discovered in US lake. An enigmatic stone structure has been found beneath the waters of Lake Michigan in the US. Not only that, but this underwater creation is around 5,000 years older than its British counterpart. The stones, which are all made of granite – found locally in the area – are estimated to be around 10,000 years old, thereby making the formation one of the oldest ever discovered in North America. And yet, whilst the Lake Michigan stones are relatively similar in size and shape to the monoliths of Stonehenge, their origins are a lot murkier.

  

Technology

• Biden’s AI plan to censor you revealed: Researchers say Americans can’t ‘tell fact from fiction’. Twitter’s censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 could soon be possible on an industrial scale — thanks to AI tools being built with funding from his father’s administration, a report from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee claimed Tuesday. The report reveals how the Biden administration is spending millions on artificial intelligence research designed to make anti “misinformation” tools which could then be passed to social media giants.