Talking Points
- Tory MPs sounded the death-knell for Boris Johnson's premiership
- French presidential hopeful Eric Zemmour was convicted of hate speech
- Sabre-rattling over Ukraine's crisis revealed internal NATO rifts
- A report found Pope Benedict had ignored child abuse
- New studies outlined the efficacy of natural immunity to Delta
- Covid's not all bad: the 10-richest men have doubled their wealth
- China sounded the alarm on COVID ahead of the Lunar New Year
- Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. was cleared to run for his dad's old job
- India pondered what test cricket would look like after Virat Kohli
- A Djokovic-free Australian Open got off to a rowdy start
Dive deeper
We've got quite a bit to get through this week so please keep your questions for the end. Biden racked up a year in office. Another keystone piece of his legislative agenda floundered in the Senate. And, you can rebook your winter holiday to Cuba now.
The year of living dubiously
This week President Joe Biden marked his first year in the Oval Office. In his own words, "I didn't overpromise, and what I have probably outperformed what anybody thought would happen". Let's start with the wins. A $1.2tn infrastructure bill that passed with bipartisan support . An exit from America's longest war - albeit one marked by an ignominious and hasty departure from Kabul . 41 federal district and circuit court judges confirmed - the most since Reagan. A falling unemployment rate that currently sits at 3.9%. Against all odds, a double-dose Covid vaccination rate that is inching towards 75%. The reversal of many of Trump's bureaucratic reforms. And an ambitious climate change proposal that isn't dead, yet.
Then there is the rest of it. The US Senate has proven to be a killing field for Biden's ambitions. The urgently-needed social welfare reforms of the Build Back Better plan are not passing the Senate any time soon — and if they're not passed before the midterms, they likely won't be at all. Even the easiest free-kick imaginable, reinstating an expanded child tax credit to lift 40% of kids out of poverty, hasn't been realised. The effort to protect voting rights has stalled. The filibuster still haunts Democratic aspirations. Stacking the Supreme Court to upend the conservative super-majority is now unpalatable. Roe v Wade is up for debate. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act has collapsed in on itself. Immigration reform (a hospital pass to Kamala Harris) has been scarce. America somehow admitted fewer refugees than under the historic lows of the Trump administration despite raising the cap. Title 42 exemptions — a cruel trick used to expel migrants without having their case heard by an immigration judge — have risen sharply under this administration.
Biden again — "I did not anticipate that there would be such a stalwart effort [by the GOP] to make sure that the most important thing was that President Biden didn't get anything done". This is either an unconvincing excuse, a failure of memory, or a critical overestimation of his own abilities. Biden was Vice-President when the Republicans fought tooth-and-nail against Barrack Obama's agenda in his first-term. He watched reforms slip beyond reach — especially after Republicans retook the House in the 2010 midterms. Year two looms, rather than beckons: the Dems face an equally damaging midterm result.
The April stun in Cuba
In 2017, the first reports of mysterious illnesses began leaking out of the new US embassy in Cuba. A handful of employees in the building began reporting sharp noises, unexplained dizzy spells, and headaches. More cases emerged with similar symptoms. The spooks in Langley — possessors of the most vivid imaginations in America — landed on a theory: a foreign adversary was wielding a directed-energy weapon against US assets abroad. Ever since then we've seen CIA agents and military personnel struck down across the globe. Which bogeyman du jour was responsible? China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela were all suspects. And never you mind that the technology required for this kind of attack is beyond the reach of the world leader in microwave weaponry, which is obviously the United States. The theory was enthusastically promulgated in some of the more excitable corners of the news media.
This week, the Agency's hotly-anticipated interim report into 'Havana Syndrome' stated it is "unlikely" to be the work of a dastardly enemy. " We don't see a global campaign by a foreign actor". Indeed, "we have not identified a causal mechanism, a novel weapon, that's been used at this point". Granted, there are some within the government who believe that the two dozen cases of brain trauma resulted from unknown interference . But the hundreds of other cases of Havana Syndrome? Bunkum. Twaddle. Absolute claptrap. There was no directed energy weapon giving CIA assassins and diplomats' wives a sore tummy. That piercing, "cicada-like" sound that tormented US embassy officials in Cuba was probably just Havana's famously loud Indies short-tailed crickets. Some of you need to go fish Occam's Razor out of the bin where you hurled it like a disposable over four years ago.
In a rare piece of good news: no planes plunged from the skies when telcos rolled out their 5G towers near airports this week. These transmissions may interfere with radio altimeters — a piece of equipment you'd prefer to be flying with than without — which has led to much finger-pointing. A number of carriers re-routed flights, but the worst that has happened so far is that the FAA looks like it hasn't done its job.
Worldlywise
Tonga: ashen and isolated
The Pacific island pictured above is no longer there. Late last year Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai exhibited signs of increased activity. Satellite imagery suggests that activity led to a series of small eruptions which damaged the cone. Given the vent was below sea-level, it's believed that seawater flooded in to meet gaseous magma shooting up through the mantle. Vulcanologists call this a "fuel-coolant interaction". It's nature's equivalent of a weapons-grade chemical explosion. On Saturday, Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai detonated. Ferociously. A shockwave rippled outwards in every direction on the surface, while ash spewed 12km straight up into the stratosphere. The blast was powerful enough to change air pressure thousands of kilometres away. A boom was heard in Alaska seven hours after the eruption. Needless to say, the island is now submerged.
The shockwaves reached Tonga's main island Tongatapu — just 65 kilometres to the south — almost immediately. These were followed first by a series of tsunamis; the largest of which crashed into the west coast 15m tall . Then came the ash, a toxic blanket that continued to fall over the island nation days after it was ejected from the caldera. On Mango Island, the destruction is complete. Every home has been flattened by the waves. Extraordinarily, as it stands, just three people lost their lives — early government tsunami warnings saved countless more. But the days of frantic isolation were just beginning. Subsea internet cables were severed, a delicate thread snapped, leaving Tongans alone with their catastrophe. It took days to clear the runway at the international airport, and for relief flights to land. Food and potable water are the most pressing problems on the islands.
We must pause at Lisala Folau's story . The disabled retiree was swept into the sea when a tsunami hit his home island of Atata. Over the course of 24 hours Folau swam and floated 13 kilometres, resting on uninhabited islands, before reaching Tongatapu. He was just as stunned at the physical feat as the rest of us, "I can't walk properly... and when I can, I believe a baby can walk faster than I".
Ethnic cleansing in Sheikh Jarrah
In 1952, the Salhiyeh family purchased a block of land in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem. They were just one family among thousands expelled from their villages during the bloody pogroms and the war of 1948. At the time, parts of the Holy City were under the protection of Jordan. Land in Sheikh Jarrah was offered up for displaced families. The newly-formed state of Israel now sat on the other side of the Green Line, just blocks away, but the relocations gave many Palestinians the safety to start life again. Life for the Salhiyeh family continued, even during more Arab-Israeli wars, the annexation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and two intifadas.
But in 2017, the Salhiyeh's received an eviction notice from the municipality of Jerusalem. The letter claimed that they had been squatting illegally since the 1990s on land earmarked for a school for children with learning difficulties. Critics argue that a pattern has emerged: fuzzy-sounding initiatives are used as cover for dispossession. The tree-planting programs in the Negev that eject Bedouin from their ancestral lands is just one contemporary example. Back to Sheikh Jarrah, which has been ground zero in a campaign to expel Palestinians and create a geographic area which is homogeneously Jewish. This campaign meets even the most forgiving definitions of ethnic cleansing. In 2021, the ethnic cleansing of Sheikh Jarrah helped spark a brief conflict between militants in the Gaza Strip and Israel. It is this potential for wider violence that led multiple European Union representatives and diplomats to plead for a deferral of eviction. That the expulsions are illegal under international war is of little merit to Israeli courts.
In recent weeks, the authorities announced they were going to seize the property. The stand-off lasted days; it's inevitable conclusion was swift and violent. With nothing left, some members of the family barricaded themselves on the roof, threatening to self-immolate . One member said, "I will not leave here, from here to the grave, because there is no life, no dignity". On Wednesday they were made homeless for a second time in living memory. In a predawn raid, hundreds of Israeli police and soldiers swarmed onto the Salhiyeh property; a dozen were arrested and the rest thrown out into the freezing winter darkness. They could only watch as bulldozers crushed their home down to its foundations.
The best of times
A revolution in historiography
These 5,500-year-old interlocking ornate gold and silver tubes have puzzled Russian historians for over a century. They were unearthed from a mound in Maykop in 1897 and were believed to have been used to erect a screen or comprise the shaft of a sceptre. Modern experts have suggested a simpler answer: they are the world's oldest straws for multiple people to drink beer out of a single vessel simultaneously.
Global genetic cartography
Nearly two decades after the Human Genome Project wrapped up, scientists have set forth on a trickier task: mapping the genomic sequences of every complex organism on the planet. Thanks to leads and bounds in technological prowess, the Earth Biogenome Project aims to record the genome of every described species of plant, animal, fungi, and single-celled organism. This is a simply ludicrous project and deserves nothing but our total adulation.
The worst of times
Cool, something else to fret about
We've had a good run for 10,000 years. Don't get too excited about the next 10,000. No, we're not talking about global warming. This study has found that the 350,000 synthetic chemicals that pollute our skies and waters have pushed the Earth beyond its "planetary boundary" . That is, the chemicals seeping into food chains has the potential to damage the biological underpinning all life. No one tell the Earth Biogenome Project...
A hamster cull in Hong Kong
If you find yourself drawn to the slightly-pudgy, curious faces of hamsters DO NOT CLICK .
Weekend Reading
The image
The quote
"Let’s be honest: Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, okay? You bring it up because you really care, and I think that’s nice, that you care. The rest of us don’t care. I’m telling you a very hard, ugly truth, okay? Of all the things I care about, yes, it is below my line. I care about the fact that our economy could turn on a dime if China invades Taiwan… But every time I say that I care about the Uyghurs, I’m really just lying, if I don’t really care. And so I’d rather not lie to you and tell you the truth. It’s not a priority for me."
– The renowned Canadian venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya gave an unvarnished view of his priorities this week. It's a fascinating look into what is no doubt the beliefs a la mode among the new masters of the universe. Funnily enough, Palihapitiya's fund is called Social Capital.
The numbers
A $1,000,000,000,000 landslide
- Cryptocurrencies went into free-fall this week and lost one trillion dollars in just 72 hours . Bitcoin has almost halved in value since it's all-time high in November.
A $69,000,000,000 potential headache
- Microsoft leapt ahead of its competitors in the race to fill its prospective patented metaverse with a $69bn acquisition of Activision Blizzard . Mixed reviews on the business fundamentals but its a huge sigh of relief for the video-game maker which has destroyed its own reputation in recent years with abuse scandals.
The headlines
"'This new 3-D printed fish fillet means vegans can have their hake and eat it" — The Telegraph . Wonderful, restrained execution. Top marks.
The special mention
News broke this week that Novak Djokovic had invested in a "biotech company" which is manufacturing a Covid treatment. We were as shocked as anyone that the ardent anti-vaxxer would do such a thing! However, five minutes of scrutiny revealed that QuantBioRes is developing a "frequency" treatment. In its words, "a biophysical model based on findings that certain periodicities/frequencies within the distribution of energies of free electrons along the protein are critical for protein biological function and interaction with protein receptors and other targets." In other words: it's homeopathy .
A few choice long-reads
- Buying travel insurance is one of those things we are told is a must. Bloomberg Businessweek endeavours to find out if it is worth it.
- The Economist peeks in the lab to see what Silicon Valley is cooking up next.
- This is an absolute must-read from The Atlantic: Families Are Going Rogue With Rapid Tests.
