Donald Trump has already raised the average tariff on America’s imports by about twice as much as he did in his entire first presidency. Just as damaging, though, has been the uncertainty about what comes next.

After April 2nd—“Liberation Day”, Mr Trump calls it—there will be another round of levies. The president promises 25% tariffs on all imported cars and country-by-country “reciprocal” tariffs based on how much his administration objects to a counterparty’s trade and tax policies. Will these plans change? Who knows? Mr Trump’s use of emergency powers means that he can do as he pleases.

This freedom may suit him. It does not, however, suit America’s businesses, which have no idea how bad the trade war will get; nor its consumers, who fear future inflation. The liberation America needs is from the paralysing uncertainty brought about by Mr Trump’s chaotic approach.

Since the president came to office, hefty tariffs on Canada and Mexico have twice been announced only to be mostly postponed. A long-threatened 10% levy on China has doubled in size.

Read it all.

The unpredictability of Trump’s tariffs will increase the painhttps://t.co/pstoI6GTl7

— Dennis Kendel (@DennisKendel) March 27, 2025

Rapturous applause and a sea of phones in the air greeted President Trump as he walked on stage and declared, “The golden age of America has officially begun.”

He was barely a month into office when the Saudi-backed investor conference in Miami captured the optimism. “The Nasdaq is up nearly 10% in just a few months,” Trump said, ticking through a list of economic indicators. “The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 2,200 points.” On the same day, Feb. 19, the S&P 500 hit an all-time high.

But as Trump unleashed an on-one-day, off-the-next tariff fight with America’s largest trading partners, those gains unraveled. In just a few weeks, the S&P lost $4 trillion in value driven by his whipsaw trade policy, receding optimism about an artificial-intelligence boom and souring consumer sentiment caused by threats of higher prices and weaker growth. A measure of consumer sentiment fell in March for the fourth straight month to the lowest level since January 2021, the Conference Board, a business-research group, said Tuesday.

Markets in the past week have recovered some losses, but Trump is preparing his next shock: an April 2 “liberation day” suite of reciprocal tariffs he said will be applied on any trading partner that charges tariffs or imposes other trade barriers on U.S. products.

Read it all.

Required reading from @NickTimiraos
It's not just uncertainty. It's uncertainty paired with powerlessness. Business leaders now feel vulnerable.https://t.co/mUnpNDYA3V

— Peter Atwater (@Peter_Atwater) March 26, 2025

Over the past decade China’s hacking program has grown rapidly, to the point that in 2023 Christopher Wray, then FBI director, noted it was larger than that of every other major nation combined. China’s growing heft and sophistication has yielded success in three main areas.

The first is political espionage, linked primarily to the Ministry of State Security (mss), China’s foreign-intelligence service. Last year it emerged that one group of Chinese hackers, dubbed Salt Typhoon, had breached at least nine American phone companies, giving them access to the calls and messages of important officials. Ciaran Martin, who led Britain’s cyber-defense agency from 2016 to 2020, compares it to the revelations in 2013 by Edward Snowden, a government contractor, that American spy agencies were conducting cyber-espionage on a huge scale. China was “gaining vast access to the nation’s communications via a strategic spying operation of breathtaking audacity,” he says.

A second is in areas of little espionage value: hacking that lays the groundwork for sabotage in moments of crisis or war. These efforts are led by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), China’s armed forces. In 2023 it became apparent that a PLA-linked hacking group known as Volt Typhoon had, over several years, burrowed into an extraordinary range of American critical infrastructure, from ports to factories to water-treatment plants, across the continental United States and in strategic American territories such as Guam.

All of that builds on a third type of hacking: the industrial-scale theft of intellectual property. In 2013 Mandiant, a cyber-threat intelligence firm, which is now part of Google, made waves when it exposed “apt1”, the label for a group of hackers linked to the PLA. apt1 was not focused on stealing political secrets or turning off power grids but on stealing blueprints, manufacturing processes and business plans from American firms. A year later, America’s government took the then unprecedented step of indicting five PLA hackers for this activity. Keith Alexander, a former head of the National Security Agency (NSA), America’s signals-intelligence service, described this as “the greatest transfer of wealth in history”.

Read it all.

I wrote a piece on China’s evolution into a bigger, more sophisticated and more threatening cyber power over the past decade, and particularly in the last few years. I also look at the pivotal role played by China’s private sector ecosystem in that shift. https://t.co/EyAyZsgG84

— Shashank Joshi (@shashj) March 26, 2025

Some firms may even intend to quietly pare back their investment plans. In 2017 Foxconn, a Taiwanese maker of electronics, vowed to spend $10bn on a plant in Wisconsin that would employ 13,000 people. Mr Trump visited the proposed site, proclaiming it the “eighth wonder of the world”. Yet after much watering down of plans, the company said last year that it had spent just $1bn on the project, and created only 1,000 jobs.

Faced with American tariffs, some foreign companies could instead direct their attention elsewhere. That has been the case with Chinese firms, which bore the brunt of the duties imposed during Mr Trump’s first term. The flow of greenfield FDI from China to America slid from $8.2bn in 2016 to $6.5bn last year. According to Morgan Stanley, listed Chinese firms generated around a quarter of their foreign sales in America in 2024, down from roughly a half in 2016. Instead, they have turned to the fast-growing economies of the global south.

If Mr Trump’s objective is to encourage foreign businesses to build in America, there are more effective policies at his disposal than tariffs. On the campaign trail the president also promised to slash red tape. Tortuous planning processes have long held back American manufacturing. For foreign firms, fixing those would be far more motivating. 

Read it all.

Will Trump’s #tariffs turbocharge #foreign #investment in America?
Companies from #Asahi to #TSMC are expanding production in the country—for nowhttps://t.co/ga2y1Ryoxw pic.twitter.com/kNAGIbbRpA

— pebbleone (@TACITWR) March 17, 2025

US electricity consumption is rising faster than it has in decades, thanks in part to the boom in data center development, the resurgence in manufacturing, and the increasing popularity of electric vehicles. 

Accommodating that growth will require building wind turbines, solar farms, and other power plants faster than we ever have before—and expanding the network of wires needed to connect those facilities to the grid.

But one major problem is that it’s expensive and slow to secure permits for new transmission lines and build them across the country. This challenge has created one of the biggest obstacles to getting more electricity generation online, reducing investment in new power plants and stranding others in years-long “interconnection queues” while they wait to join the grid.

Fortunately, there are some shortcuts that could expand the capacity of the existing system without requiring completely new infrastructure: a suite of hardware and software tools known as advanced transmission technologies (ATTs), which can increase both the capacity and the efficiency of the power sector.

ATTs have the potential to radically reduce timelines for grid upgrades, avoid tricky permitting issues, and yield billions in annual savings for US consumers.

Read it all.

The cheapest way to supercharge America’s power grid https://t.co/fqZ8rCxHM3

— MIT Technology Review (@techreview) March 10, 2025

Sandra, a teenage girl who wears her curly brown hair tied back in braids, awaited the instant message on her mobile phone. The instructions were matter of fact: Wear makeup and a short skirt. If possible, don a crop top.

Like other girls in her neighborhood outside Medellín, Colombia, Sandra said she didn’t always have food for dinner, let alone trendy clothes and electronics. But a friend tipped her off to a sure-fire way to make money fast. This amiguita, she said, told her about the plentiful meals she could afford, the iPhone she uses, the motorcycle she’d soon be sitting astride. Sandra could enjoy this life too, her friend said. The cost? Her virginity. To a foreigner.

Sandra agreed. Her friend connected then-14-year-old Sandra and her younger sister Verónica (both of whose names Bloomberg changed to protect the siblings against reprisal), with a woman, who, on social media projected a youthful, fun-loving air. Known as la patrona, the woman posed in one photo in a white bikini, hand on hip, on a poolside lounge chair surrounded by palm trees.

The woman expeditiously gathered up the girls’ identity numbers and nude photos. She offered them an advance of 8.6 million pesos ($1,990) for jobs well done. The interchanges were carried out through Meta Platforms Inc.’s social media apps Facebook and Messenger, according to Sandra.

Recruitment and grooming of children are but the first in a multi-step process…

Read it all.

Sex trafficking in Colombia runs through a web of US apps like Facebook, Tinder and Airbnb https://t.co/0tD6KNvVJB

— Bloomberg (@business) March 3, 2025

Big Tech’s massive spending on artificial intelligence is set to continue unchecked in 2025 after Amazon topped its rivals with a planned $100bn-plus investment in infrastructure this year.

Spending by the four leading US tech companies had already surged 63 per cent to historic levels last year. Now executives are vowing to accelerate their AI investments, dismissing concerns about the vast sums being bet on the nascent technology.

Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta have reported combined capital expenditure of $246bn in 2024, up from $151bn in 2023. They forecast spending could exceed $320bn this year as they compete to build data centres and fill them with clusters of specialised chips to remain at the forefront of AI large language model research.

The scale of their spending ambitions — announced alongside their fourth-quarter earnings — has surprised the market and exacerbated a sell-off caused by the release of an innovative and cheap AI model from Chinese start-up DeepSeek in late January.

Read it all.

Big Tech is set to spend over $300 billion on AI this year. pic.twitter.com/7AL7J7i5mY

— Brew Markets (@brewmarkets) February 7, 2025

If investment in data centres is about to slow, nobody told Mark Zuckerberg. On January 29th, during an earnings call, Meta’s boss boasted that the social-media giant had plans to build an artificial-intelligence (AI) data centre “so big that it’ll cover a significant part of Manhattan if it were placed there”.

His timing was conspicuous. Only two days earlier the share prices of firms from Nvidia, a chipmaker, to Dell, a manufacturer of servers used in data centres, had nosedived in response to the release of a new AI model created by DeepSeek, a Chinese firm. Its training costs were a fraction of those for similarly powerful Western models, raising questions over how much computing power—and investment—is needed to develop ai systems.

Although many of those share prices have since recovered, the episode has brought increased scrutiny to the huge sums of money that are being spent on data centres. Meta and America’s three big cloud-service providers—Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft—forked out a combined $180bn on data-centre infrastructure last year. Add in spending by smaller tech firms, telecoms providers, big enterprises and data-centre operators such as Digital Realty and Equinix, and the figure rises to around $465bn. Land, buildings and peripheral gear such as electrical equipment make up about 30% of that, with chips, server racks, networking kit and the like accounting for the rest. Cashed-up private-equity firms such as Blackstone have been lured in by the spending boom, undertaking a record $70bn-worth of data-centre deals last year.

Read it all.

The data-centre investment spree shows no signs of stopping https://t.co/SckehPpeGp

— Marc Baronnet (@baronnet) February 5, 2025

The market reaction, when it came, was brutal. On January 27th, as investors realised just how good DeepSeek’s “v3” and “R1” models were, they wiped around a trillion dollars off the market capitalisation of America’s listed tech firms. Nvidia, a chipmaker and the chief shovel-seller of the artificial-intelligence (AI) gold rush, saw its value fall by $600bn. Yet even if the Chinese model-maker’s new releases rattled investors in a handful of firms, they should be a cause for optimism for the world at large. DeepSeek shows how competition and innovation will make ai cheaper and therefore more useful.

DeepSeek’s models are practically as good as those made by Google and OpenAI—and have been produced at a fraction of the cost. Barred by American export controls from using cutting-edge chips, the Chinese firm undertook an efficiency drive, even reprogramming the chips it used to train the model to eke out every drop of power. The cost of building an AI model that can stand toe-to-toe with the best has plummeted. Within days, DeepSeek’s chatbot was the most downloaded app on the iPhone.

The contrast with America’s approach could not be starker. Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, has spent years telling investors—and America’s new president—that vast sums of money and computing power are needed to stay at the forefront of AI. Investors have accordingly been betting that a handful of firms stand to reap vast monopoly-like rents. Yet if fast followers such as DeepSeek can eat away at that lead for a fraction of the cost, then those profits are at risk.

Read it all.

"However, the real winners will be consumers. For AI to transform society, it needs to be cheap, ubiquitous and out of the control of any one country or company. DeepSeek’s success suggests that such a world is imaginable."https://t.co/8aZ4eM5PV5 #USChina #Geoeconomics #地経学

— Ken Doi土居 (@kitakazethomas) January 30, 2025

Almost overnight, DeepSeek has upended many of the assumptions inside Silicon Valley about the economics of building AI, as well as the best technical methods for developing the technology and the extent of the US lead over competitors in China. For much of the past two-plus years since ChatGPT kicked off the global AI frenzy, the industry has bet that the path to better AI depends largely on spending heavily on more advanced chips from companies like Nvidia Corp. and increasingly massive data centers to house them.

US President Donald Trump welcomed the development as “good, because you don’t have to spend as much money.” Industry leader Nvidia, whose shares took a huge hit from DeepSeek’s debut, also lauded it as an “excellent AI advancement” in a statement on Monday.

The market fallout was staggering. Hype over DeepSeek’s feat drove a nearly $1 trillion rout in US and European technology stocks on Monday as investors questioned the spending plans of some of America’s biggest companies. The share plunge in AI chipmaker Nvidia alone erased roughly $589 billion in market value, the biggest wipeout in US stock-market history.

Meanwhile, in DC, lawmakers are left to figure out the best route to beat back China’s progress on a technology some see as crucial to its military and economy, given the Biden administration’s chip export curbs were not enough. David Sacks, President Donald Trump’s crypto and AI czar, said DeepSeek shows the global AI race will be very competitive — while blaming the Biden administration for regulation that “hamstrung” AI development.

Further complicating matters, the renewed uncertainty over large AI investments comes just days after Trump championed a $100 billion joint venture from OpenAI, SoftBank Group Corp. and Oracle Corp. to boost US competitiveness by investing in data centers and other physical infrastructure. Now, there are new questions about the rationale for stratospheric AI budgets.

Read it all.

The censorship part here is eerie. Had a physical reaction while reading that.

Bloomberg: DeepSeek Challenges Everyone’s Assumptions About AI Costs https://t.co/8ewlGlxrkD pic.twitter.com/0R1ns25aoM

— Emily Binder (@emilybinder) January 28, 2025

Q1: What is the status of global agrobiodiversity?

A1: Today, biodiversity is being lost faster than at any time on record. Since the turn of the twentieth century, the average abundance of terrestrial native species has declined by at least 20 percent across most ecosystems around the world, while the number of crop varieties grown on farms has fallen by more than 90 percent over the last 100 years. Paradoxically, it is the agrifood system itself that is the primary driver of the ecological disruption and degradation imperiling agrobiodiversity around the world.

The environmental impacts of modern food production are myriad. About half of all habitable land on Earth is used for agriculture, while agricultural practices and other human activities have degraded up to 40 percent of the world’s land. Some industrial agriculture has led to the overexploitation of resources that drives habitat loss, the decline in the number of crop species and erosion of crop genetic diversity, and the introduction of invasive species and pollutants—all of which disrupt fragile ecosystems.

In this context, agriculture faces the opposing challenges of increasing food production to meet the needs of a growing global population, while reducing its ecological footprint to ensure that natural resources required for productive agriculture are sustained. In the absence of policies that safeguard agrobiodiversity, efforts to meet food demands threaten to erode the foundation of food production itself.

Read it all.

Agriculture is increasingly strained by growing food demand, global conflict, and the loss of its most foundational resource, agrobiodiversity. This loss threatens not just food security, but global security writ large.

Learn more from @CSISFoodWater: https://t.co/HVUCReVKDW

— CSIS (@CSIS) January 22, 2025

Humanity is “on the verge” of having AI agents that can complete tasks in the real world, OpenAI product chief Kevin Weil told Axios’ Ina Fried in Davos Tuesday.

Why it matters: Weil’s prediction comes days after Axios reported that a major AI company was close to announcing a breakthrough regarding the creation of Ph.D.-level AI super-agents capable of completing complex tasks.

What he’s saying: “I think 2025 is the year that we go from ChatGPT being this super smart thing that can answer any question you ask to ChatGPT doing things in the real world for you,” Weil told Axios.

• The advanced reasoning skills of new AI models, and improved ability to be multimodal and engage with humans, will be key to this ability, Weil said.
• He predicted that likely as soon as this year, AI agents will be able to do tasks like filling out forms or making restaurant reservations.

Read it all.

OpenAI product chief says

world is "on the verge" of AI agents https://t.co/PwXP5TX9Vp @ivanas26 @axios pic.twitter.com/VgwPqAg1s6

— Spiros Margaris (@SpirosMargaris) January 22, 2025

As countries around the world continue to pump planet-warming pollution into the skies, driving global temperatures to record levels, the financial world is racing to fund the emerging field of carbon dioxide removal, seeking both an environmental miracle and a financial windfall.

The technology, which did not exist until a few years ago, is still unproven at scale. Yet, it has a uniquely alluring appeal. Stripping away some of the carbon dioxide that is heating up the world makes intuitive sense. And with a small but growing number of companies willing to pay for it, investors are jockeying to be first movers in what they believe will inevitably be a big industry that is necessary to help fight global warming.

Companies working on ways to pull carbon dioxide from the air have raised more than $5 billion since 2018, according to the investment bank Jefferies. Before that, there were almost no such investments.

“It’s the single greatest opportunity I’ve seen in 20 years of doing venture capital,” said Damien Steel, the chief executive of Canada-based Deep Sky, which has raised more than $50 million to develop carbon dioxide removal projects. “The tailwinds behind the industry are greater than most industries I’ve ever looked at.”

Read it all.

It's a strategy that should be pursued but, it can't have any major impact anytime soon. “We need to obey the first law of holes,” …“When you’re in one, stop digging.”The New Climate Gold Rush: Scrubbing Carbon From the Sky https://t.co/Lwlh8Zfeir

— Prof. Peter Doherty (@ProfPCDoherty) December 23, 2024

In a glass-walled conference room in San Francisco, Newton Cheng clicked a button on his laptop and launched a thousand copies of an artificial intelligence program, each with specific instructions: Hack into a computer or website to steal data.

“It’s looking at the source code,” Cheng said as he examined one of the copies in action. “It’s trying to figure out, where’s the vulnerability? How can we take advantage of it?” Within minutes, the AI said the hack was successful. 

“Our approach worked perfectly,” it reported back.

Cheng works for Anthropic, one of the biggest AI startups in Silicon Valley, where he’s in charge of cybersecurity testing for what’s called the Frontier Red Team. The hacking attempts—conducted on simulated targets—were among thousands of safety tests, or “evals,” the team ran in October to find out just how good Anthropic’s latest AI model is at doing very dangerous things.

The release of ChatGPT two years ago set off fears that AI could soon be capable of surpassing human intellect—and with that capability comes the potential to cause superhuman harm. Could terrorists use an AI model to learn how to build a bioweapon that kills a million people? Could hackers use it to run millions of simultaneous cyberattacks? Could the AI reprogram and even reproduce itself?

Read it all.

Meet the "Frontier Red Team" at Anthropic, trying to push their latest AI models to do catastrophic things — in order to stop them before it's too late: https://t.co/HBqGx58Vfd via @WSJ

— Sam Schechner (@samschech) December 11, 2024

Record numbers of US executives are selling shares in their companies, as corporate insiders from Goldman Sachs to Tesla and even Donald Trump’s own media group cash in on the stock market surge that has followed his election victory.

The rate of so-called insider sales has hit a record high for any quarter in two decades, according to VerityData. The sales, by executives at companies in the Wilshire 5000 index, include one-off profit-taking transactions as well as regular sales triggered by executives’ automatic trading plans. The Wilshire 5000 is one of the broadest indices of US companies.

While insider selling is routine — especially as the stock market was already breaking records before Trump’s win — the surge following November 5 underscores how US executives are already profiting personally from his return before he re-enters the White House. The S&P 500 jumped 2.5 per cent the day after the election, its best day in more than two years. The S&P 500 is up more than 24 per cent this year.

Insider selling versus buying at financial institutions was last this high in November 2016 — the first time Trump was elected president. Selling among officials at industrial goods companies has hit the highest level since 2017.

Read it all.

In case you missed it: Corporate insiders cash in on post-election US stock market surge. Insider sales reach an all-time high as executives from Goldman Sachs to Tesla lock in equity gains. Even Donald Trump’s own media group cash in on the stock market surge that has followed… pic.twitter.com/ZMSN3HOYtl

— Holger Zschaepitz (@Schuldensuehner) November 24, 2024

A colation of Christian organisations has written an open letter to high-street banks in the UK, calling on them to stop financing new fossil-fuel extraction or risk losing their business.

The letter, published on Tuesday, is signed by the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Williams, the Methodist Church in Britain, the Scottish Episcopal Church, the Quakers, and several Roman Catholic religious orders. It opposes the $556 billion that Barclays, HSBC, Santander, NatWest, and Lloyds have reportedly provided to the fossil-fuel industry since the Paris Climate Agreement was signed in 2015.

Lord Williams said: “Banks are very understandably seen as institutions we need to be able to trust. What we are asking is that the main high street banks should show themselves to be fully worthy of that trust by playing their part in creating a future we can trust, a future in which our lethal dependence on fossil fuels will at last be put behind us.”

Read it all.

A coalition of Christian organisations has written an open letter to the UK’s high street banks, calling on them to stop financing new fossil fuels or risk losing their business https://t.co/d8hfnnyPUS

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) November 19, 2024

The action is now moving beyond America. With over two-fifths of the world overweight or obese, demand for glp-1 drugs is voracious. Pharma companies are racing to make them work as pills, which would be cheaper to produce than jabs, and to reduce their side-effects. Generic versions for older GLP-1 agonists are entering the market. Semaglutide is to come off patent in Brazil, China and India in 2026; eight such drugs are in the works in China. That is just as well. As incomes in the developing world have risen and life has become more sedentary, people’s waistlines are catching up with those in the West.

Curbing obesity would be consequential. Yet glp-1 drugs promise to do much more. Overweight patients on semaglutide have been found to suffer fewer heart attacks and strokes; the benefits, astonishingly, seem to be largely independent of how much weight is lost. Tirzepatide improves sleep apnoea. Trials show that glp-1 agonists reduce chronic kidney disease in diabetics; and there are signs they may lessen brain shrinkage and cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s. Studies of health records suggest that they may help with addictions, too; people already on glp-1 drugs in America were less likely to overdose on opioids or abuse cannabis or alcohol. Researchers are even talking, in hushed tones, of their anti-ageing effects.

How can one class of drug do so much? As our briefing explains this week, not only do the drugs act in the gut, but they also bind to receptors all over the body and in the brain. 

Read it all.

I’ve been saying this for quite some time: GLP-1 agonists are miracle “everything drugs”! it’s likely there’ll be more of these types of drugs soon

“It’s not just obesity. Drugs like Ozempic will change the world
As they become cheaper, they promise to improve billions of lives” pic.twitter.com/61tc17dKRE

— Derya Unutmaz, MD (@DeryaTR_) October 24, 2024

Private Medicare insurers got about $4.2 billion in extra federal payments in 2023 for diagnoses from home visits the companies initiated, even though they led to no treatment, a new inspector general’s report says.

The extra payments were triggered by diagnoses documented based on the visits, including potentially inaccurate ones, for which patients received no other medical services, the report says. Insurers offering private plans under Medicare, known as Medicare Advantage, are paid more when patients have costly conditions.

Each visit was worth $1,869 on average to the insurers, according to the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services. The findings are similar to those of a Wall Street Journal investigation published in August. It showed that insurers between 2019 and 2021 pocketed an average of $1,818 for each visit based on diagnoses for which people received no other treatment.

The OIG recommended in Thursday’s report for the first time that Medicare restrict or even cut off payments for diagnoses from these visits. 

Read it all.

It is official now that the @HHSOIG has determined that #MedicareAdvantage health plans w/ @UHC leading the way received over $4B in diagnosis upcoding from home visits. Medicare Paid Insurers Billions for Questionable Home Diagnoses, Watchdog Finds https://t.co/OO1R4Alcwk

— Ed Gaines (@EdGainesIII) October 24, 2024

The Church Commissioners excluded, on ethical grounds, more than 800 companies from potential investment last year, including, they report, 38 companies that failed to engage with them over connections with Russia.

The figures are set out in their latest stewardship report, An Ethical and Responsible Approach, published last week. It is prepared annually to meet the reporting obligations of the UK Financial Reporting Council’s Stewardship Code and the Principles for Responsible Investment.

The total endowment fund was valued at £10.4 billion at the end of 2023 — up from £10.3 billion at the end of 2022 (News, 2 June 2023). The report covers the first year of the 2023-25 triennium, in which the Commissioners have committed themselves to distributing £1.2 billion in support of the Church’s mission — an increase of about 30 per cent on the previous triennium (News, 7 June).

Read it all.

The Church Commissioners disinvested, on ethical grounds, from more than 800 companies last year, including, they report, 133 companies that failed to engage with them over connections with Russia https://t.co/pPbbJCy0N8

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) October 15, 2024

AtaLoss was founded in 2016 by Canon Yvonne Tulloch. When she was suddenly widowed, she realised how little she and those around her knew about bereavement, its difficulties and needs, and how hard it was to find understanding support. Yvonne had been trained in funeral ministry, but grief tends to be felt most in the months following the funeral.
 

As a society, we’ve not been good at talking about death. We’re loss-averse and death-denying. The two world wars and medical and economic advances are the major causes of our death denial. Death’s an inconvenient truth, and we avoid talking about it because it’s too painful. In a culture where we worship at the altar of success, losing people feels like failure.
 

We don’t even realise that we need to deal with grief, though it affects our lives so deeply.
 

We’re beginning to realise that change is needed, though, and there’s talk in the media about death, but this tends to be about preparing for death, not grief. We need to understand bereavement better — its profound impact on our physical and mental health — to help those left behind.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

Click below to read the @ChurchTimes interview with Roger Greene, Deputy CEO of @AtaLosscharity as he chats about his role,@thebereavementj, and his book Dancing When the Lights Go Out.https://t.co/0ynQ5bjVt3

— Loss and HOPE (@LossandHOPE1) October 11, 2024

“Nuclear Nightmare,” screamed the headline in Time magazine on April 9th 1979. One of the two reactors at a nuclear-power plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania had suffered an accident. The governor ordered an evacuation of all vulnerable people within five miles of the plant as radioactive gas escaped.

In the end, the accident resulted in no injuries or loss of life. Two decades later, The Economist visited the Pennsylvania hinterlands and found the second, unproblematic reactor still running well and enjoying strong local support. It cranked out power until it was mothballed in 2019 owing not to safety concerns but to competition from cheap shale gas.

Now Three Mile Island is coming back from the dead. On September 20th Microsoft, a tech giant, and Constellation Energy, the utility that decommissioned the trouble-free reactor, signed a deal to return it to service. The utility will spend about $1.6bn to restore the plant by 2028. Microsoft will then buy its carbon-free power for the next 20 years.

Read it all.

Great look at how Big Tech is leveraging its market power and analytics to shift more project risk onto renewable energy developers:https://t.co/n3MsUpHbnj

— Lee Harris (@leee_harris) October 8, 2024

In 2022, Ian caused about $60 billion of insured losses. Milton may result in $60 billion to $75 billion of damages and losses, with some models showing the total reach as much as $150 billion, Chuck Watson, a disaster modeler at Enki Research, said in an X post.

Cat-bond investors may also take a hit from the inland flooding caused by Hurricane Helene. Moody’s RMS estimates that US private-market insured losses from Helene will be $8 billion to $14 billion.

“Helene was a one-in-a-thousand year rainfall event,” said Jonathan Schneyer, director of catastrophe response at CoreLogic Inc., a catastrophe-modeling firm in Irvine, California. “It shows the power of a hurricane further inland.”

Read it all.

Catastrophe bond investors made big profits in 2023 and narrowly dodged a payout for Hurricane Beryl. Milton will likely end that streak. The storm “could lead to one of the biggest reinsurance loss events in history” https://t.co/bZyBgbkjTc

— Amanda Kolson Hurley (@amandakhurley) October 9, 2024

Allison Jumper’s family was a picture of healthy living. Active kids. Wholesome meals. A freezer stocked with organic beef from her in-laws’ farm in Maine.

Then in late 2020, she got a devastating call from her brother-in-law. High levels of harmful “forever chemicals” had been detected on their farm and in their cows’ milk, and they were getting shut down.

At first, Mrs. Jumper worried only about her in-laws’ livelihoods. But soon, her mind went somewhere else: to her own children’s mysterious health issues, including startlingly high cholesterol levels.

“Then it hit me,” she said at her home in Durham, N.H. “Could it be the beef?”

Read it all.

Her family’s farm was hiding dangerous chemicals in their food https://t.co/6aYN9OtCNW

— Judith Enck (@enckj) September 23, 2024

You may

sense that governments are not as competent as they once were. Upon entering the White House in 2021, President Joe Biden promised to revitalise American infrastructure. In fact, spending on things like roads and rail has fallen. A flagship plan to expand access to fast broadband for rural Americans has so far helped precisely no one. Britain’s National Health Service soaks up ever more money, and provides ever worse care. Germany mothballed its last three nuclear plants last year, despite uncertain energy supplies. The country’s trains, once a source of national pride, are now always late.

You may also have noticed that governments are bigger than they once were. Whereas in 1960 state spending across the rich world was equal to 30% of GDP, now it is above 40%. In some countries growth in the state’s economic power has been still more dramatic. Since the mid-1990s Britain’s government spending has risen by six percentage points of gdp, while South Korea’s has risen by ten points. All of which raises a paradox: if governments are so big, why are they so ineffective?

The answer is that they have turned into what can be called “Lumbering Leviathans”. In recent decades governments have overseen an enormous expansion in spending on entitlements. Because there has not been a commensurate increase in taxes, redistribution is crowding out spending on other functions of government, which, in turn, is damaging the quality of public services and bureaucracies. The phenomenon may help explain why people across the rich world have such little faith in politicians. It may also help explain why economic growth across the rich world is weak by historical standards.

Read it all.

Governments are bigger than ever. They are also more useless https://t.co/kt5sIZ1OqF

— Igor Wortel (@itwortel) September 23, 2024

Climate optimism is fading. Higher costs, pushback from businesses and consumers, and the slow rollout of technology are delaying the transition from fossil fuels.

Renewable energy is growing faster than expected. But surging demand for power is sucking up much of that additional capacity and forcing utilities to burn fossil fuels, including coal, for longer than expected.

With greenhouse-gas emissions continuing at record levels, scientists expect floods and heat waves to get worse. This year is on track to be the hottest on record.

“The pace of our response is obviously totally insufficient,” said Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist at Swiss university ETH Zurich. On this trajectory, “it will become increasingly impossible to face the changing climate we are going to experience,” she said.

Read it all.

Climate optimism is fading as high costs and new priorities like AI push the energy transition down the priority list for businesses and investors. Climate week story taking stock of the setbacks w/ @edmballard:https://t.co/7tZDL7w0Sd

— Amrith Ramkumar (@AmrithRamkumar) September 23, 2024

Further tens of millions of pounds are to be pumped into efforts to drastically reduce the Church of England’s carbon emissions over the next six years, the first impact report on its net-zero programme says.

The report summarises progress on the General Synod’s ambition to achieve net zero by 2030, which was set in 2020 (News, 12 February 2020). The Synod approved a “route map” to this goal two years later (News, 15 July 2022).

In real terms, the target is to decrease the Church’s emissions — mainly from its buildings — by 90 per cent against the current baseline: 415,000 tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent (415,000T CO2e). The remaining ten per cent is to be offset by carbon-cancelling schemes, such as tree-planting and installing solar panels.

Read it all.

Further tens of millions of pounds are to be pumped into efforts to drastically reduce the Church of England’s carbon emissions over the next six years, the first impact report on its net-zero programme says https://t.co/GlXOa0tBpM pic.twitter.com/NAkFHUtMIL

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) September 19, 2024

Cyber attacks pose a risk as big as terrorism and flooding, according to two of the world’s biggest insurance groups that are calling for state support to help the industry to absorb losses. 

Insurer Zurich and Marsh McLennan, the world’s biggest insurance broker, say in a new report that cyber threats are “outpacing the ability of traditional insurance and risk management approaches to fully mitigate them”.  There are “limits to the amount of financial loss” the private sector can absorb, the report says, given the potentially huge losses that could be caused by a cyber attack on critical infrastructure.

It proposes a number of steps to address this, including creating public-private partnerships to share losses from currently “uninsurable” events, such as a cyber attack that causes a widespread failure of key infrastructure.

Read it all (subscription).

Insurance groups urge state support for ‘uninsurable’ cyber risks https://t.co/H2zrEsMrLY

— Finance News (@ftfinancenews) September 4, 2024

Firms that manage drug benefits, which promise to keep a lid on high drug costs, instead steer patients away from less expensive medicines and overcharge for cancer therapies, Federal Trade Commission investigators found.

The FTC, in a report released Tuesday, detailed a number of actions that it said large pharmacy-benefit managers use to boost their profits and increase the spending of the health plans and employers that hired them to control costs. The actions can also lead to higher outlays for patients at the pharmacy counter, the agency said.

The findings follow a two-year investigation into the firms, known as PBMs, and calls from some lawmakers to rein in the firms’ business practices.

FTC Chair Lina Khan said the agency planned further scrutiny of big PBMs with the goal of making healthcare affordable. “Dominant pharmacy-benefit managers can hike the cost of drugs—including overcharging patients for cancer drugs,” she said. 

Read it all.

PBMs are a paradigmatic example of how a middleman meant to reduce costs and enhance efficiency becomes so bloated and powerful that it adds to costs and reduces efficiency. Great to see FTC addressing this issue!https://t.co/q0s3VC638W

— Kate Judge (@ProfKateJudge) July 9, 2024

Global defence companies are recruiting workers at the fastest rate since the end of the cold war as the industry seeks to deliver on order books that are near record highs.

A Financial Times survey of the hiring plans of 20 large and medium-sized US and European defence and aerospace companies found they are looking to recruit tens of thousands of people this year. Three of the largest US contractors — Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics — have close to 6,000 job openings they need to fill, while 10 companies surveyed are seeking to increase positions by almost 37,000 in total, or almost 10 per cent of their aggregate workforce.

“Since the end of the cold war, this is the most intense period for the defence sector with the highest increase in order volume in a rather short period of time,” said Jan Pie, secretary-general of ASD, the European aerospace and defence trade association. 

Read it all (registration or subscription).

An FT survey of 20 industry groups has found that they are looking to recruit tens of thousands of people this year, as order books near record highs. https://t.co/ZCOnyOaJCK pic.twitter.com/in7XIqZByA

— Financial Times (@FT) June 17, 2024

For more than a year, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray has warned about a wave of election interference that could make 2016 look cute. No respectable foreign adversary needs an army of human trolls in 2024. AI can belch out literally billions of pieces of realistic-looking and sounding misinformation about when, where and how to vote. It can just as easily customize political propaganda for any individual target. In 2016, Brad Parscale, Donald Trump’s digital campaign director, spent endless hours customizing tiny thumbnail campaign ads for groups of 20 to 50 people on Facebook. It was miserable work but an incredibly effective way to make people feel seen by a campaign. In 2024, Brad Parscale is software, available to any chaos agent for pennies. There are more legal restrictions on ads, but AI can create fake social profiles and aim squarely for your individual feed. Deepfakes of candidates have been here for months, and the AI companies keep releasing tools that make all of this material faster and more convincing.

Almost 80 percent of Americans think some form of AI abuse is likely to affect the outcome of November’s presidential election. Wray has staffed each of the FBI’s 56 field offices with at least two election-crime coordinators. He has urged people to be more discerning with their media sources. In public, he’s the face of chill. “Americans can and should have confidence in our election system,” he said at the International Conference on Cyber Security in January. Privately, an elected official familiar with Wray’s thinking told me the director is in a middle manager’s paradox: loads of responsibility, limited authority. “[Wray] keeps highlighting the issue, but he won’t play politics, and he doesn’t make policy,” that official said. “The FBI enforces laws. The director is like, ‘Please ask Congress where the laws are.’”

Gift Article
Why this year’s election interference could make 2016 look cute
The first big AI crisis isn’t some hypothetical far off in the future. It’s coming on Election Day.
Opinion By Josh @Tyrangiel
May 30, 2024 at 7:30 a.m. EDT https://t.co/tVtkR6qJMe

— K_Conner (@kvconner) May 30, 2024