April 3 2024
Digital Pearl Harbor
1 Chinese cyberattacks laying in wait in US critical infrastructure
2 Ukraine’s Zelenskyy lowers draft age
3 US Speaker Johnson inches forward on Ukraine aid
4 Gen Z embraces non-college career pathways
5 Trump leads Biden in 6/7 swing states
4/3/1860 Pony Express debuts
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1 Chinese cyberattacks laying in wait in US critical infrastructure
A transnational effort produced stark revelations about the extent of China’s malicious cyberactivities last week, with indictments and sanctions against Chinese government-linked hackers accusing them of targeting foreign government officials, lawmakers, politicians, voters, and companies. The accusations, made by the United States, United Kingdom, and New Zealand, centered mainly on espionage and data theft but also involved what U.S. officials and experts said is an alarming evolution in Chinese cybertactics. While the main indictment against seven Chinese nationals was brought by the U.S. Justice Department, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control announced sanctions on two of those individuals and a company linked to China’s Ministry of State Security for targeting U.S. critical infrastructure sectors, including a Texas energy company and a defense contractor that makes flight simulators for the U.S. military. “What is most alarming about this is the focus is not on data theft and intellectual property theft but rather to burrow deep into our critical infrastructure with the intent of launching destructive or disruptive attacks in the event of a major conflict,” Jen Easterly, the director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said in an interview. CISA defines critical infrastructure sectors as those whose destruction would have a “debilitating effect” on the economy, national security, public health, and safety, dividing them into 16 categories including communications, defense, manufacturing, energy, agriculture, water, and transportation. The highest-profile attacks on those sectors in recent years—against the Colonial Pipeline, meat production giant JBS, and government system operator SolarWinds—have been attributed to groups in Russia. But U.S. agencies last year found malware in systems in Guam, home to key U.S. military bases, that they linked to a Chinese hacking group known as Volt Typhoon. Easterly said they have found more examples since then.
2 Ukraine’s Zelenskyy lowers draft age
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has signed into law three measures aimed at replenishing the ranks of his country’s exhausted and battered army, including lowering the age when men become eligible for conscription and eliminating some medical exemptions. While Mr. Zelensky did not say why he had decided to move ahead on at least some changes, Russia’s forces have been on the offensive along the front line and the ongoing fighting has shrunk Ukraine’s supplies of soldiers and weapons. Ukraine’s Parliament has for months debated a bill that covers a more sweeping overhaul of conscription, but political analysts say that calling up more men has become an issue that no politician or military leader wants to be associated with. That included Mr. Zelensky, who had delayed for nearly a year signing the bill lowering the draft age. Ukraine’s army of about one million soldiers is fighting the largest war in Europe since World War II, waged in muddy trenches or the ruins of cities in urban combat. Casualty rates are high. Most men who wanted to volunteer for the military have already done so, and small anti-draft protests had broken out before the new laws were passed. The new measures, which Parliament had passed last May and which Mr. Zelensky signed into law late Tuesday, lower the draft eligibility age to 25, from 27; eliminate a category of medical exemption known as “partially eligible”; and create an electronic database of men in Ukraine starting at age 17. Military recruitment offices are authorized to begin drafting younger men on Wednesday, but it is unclear how quickly Ukraine will draft and train additional troops. Ukrainian generals have warned that Russia is preparing an offensive that could begin this spring or over the summer. The comprehensive mobilization bill that has yet to pass in Parliament envisions three months of training for soldiers drafted during wartime.
Even with the new change, Ukraine’s draft age is unusually high. The country had drafted men aged 27 to 60, and the average age in the military is over 40. Under martial law, all men 18 to 60 had already been prohibited from leaving the country in case any decision was made to draft them. Men and women can volunteer for military service starting at age 18.
In formulating its mobilization plans, Ukraine has had to balance military, economic and demographic considerations. Lowering the draft age will bring more and healthier soldiers to the fight, but poses long-term risks for sustaining Ukraine’s population, given the country’s demographics. As in most former Soviet states, Ukraine has a small generation of 20-year-olds, because birthrates plummeted during the deep economic depression of the 1990s. Because of this demographic trough, there are now three times as many men in their 40s as in their 20s in Ukraine. Drafting men starting at age 25, given the likely battle casualties, also risks further diminishing this small generation of Ukrainians and potentially future birthrates, leaving the country with declines of working- and draft-age men decades from now.
3 US Speaker Johnson inches forward on Ukraine aid
Speaker Mike Johnson has begun publicly laying out potential conditions for extending a fresh round of American military assistance to Ukraine, the strongest indication yet that he plans to push through the House a package that many Republicans view as toxic and have tried to block. His terms may include tying the aid for Kyiv to a measure that would force President Biden to reverse a moratorium on new permits for liquefied natural gas export facilities, something that Republicans would see as a political victory against the Democratic president’s climate agenda. The move would also hand Mr. Johnson a powerful parochial win, unblocking a proposed export terminal in his home state of Louisiana that would be situated along a shipping channel that connects the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Charles.
That strongly suggests that the aid package for Ukraine, which has been stalled on Capitol Hill for months amid Republican resistance, could clear Congress within weeks. It enjoys strong support among Democrats and a large coalition of mainstream Republicans, and the main obstacle standing in its way in the House has been Mr. Johnson’s refusal to bring it up in the face of vehement hard-right opposition in the G.O.P. to sending more aid to Kyiv.
Mr. Johnson’s search for a politically viable option to funding Ukraine’s attempts to fend off Russian attacks puts him in the middle of two powerful and opposing forces. The hard-right flank of his party, led by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and egged on by former President Donald J. Trump, has urged him not to allow a vote on aid for Ukraine, arguing that the United States should not be pouring tens of billions of dollars into another country’s war. But the leaders of most NATO countries have warned Mr. Johnson that a failure to extend help to Kyiv could lead to the young democracy’s undoing, a message that has been echoed by mainstream Republicans, Mr. Biden and Democrats.
4 Gen Z embraces non-college career pathways
America needs more plumbers, and Gen Z is answering the call. Long beset by a labor crunch, the skilled trades are newly appealing to the youngest cohort of American workers, many of whom are choosing to leave the college path. Rising pay and new technologies in fields from welding to machine tooling are giving trade professions a face-lift, helping them shed the image of being dirty, low-end work. Growing skepticism about the return on a college education, the cost of which has soared in recent decades, is adding to their shine. Enrollment in vocational training programs is surging as overall enrollment in community colleges and four-year institutions has fallen. The number of students enrolled in vocational-focused community colleges rose 16% last year to its highest level since the National Student Clearinghouse began tracking such data in 2018. The ranks of students studying construction trades rose 23% during that time, while those in programs covering HVAC and vehicle maintenance and repair increased 7%. “It’s a really smart route for kids who want to find something and aren’t gung ho on going to college,” says Tanner Burgess, 20, who graduated from a nine-month welding program last fall.
A secure job track and the prospect of steadily growing earnings didn’t hurt either. After five years at the profession, he says he expects to be making a six-figure annual income, based on what he sees others around him making.
A shortage of skilled tradespeople, brought on as older electricians, plumbers and welders retire, is driving up the cost of labor, as many sticker-shocked homeowners embarking on repairs and renovations in recent years have found. The median pay for new construction hires rose 5.1% to $48,089 last year. By contrast, new hires in professional services earned an annual $39,520, up 2.7% from 2022, according to data from payroll-services provider ADP. That’s the fourth year that median annual pay for new construction hires has eclipsed earnings for new hires in both the professional services and information sectors—such as accountants or IT maintenance workers—ADP says.
At this point, Brown says, the hardest skilled-trade jobs to fill are those that require college degrees—controls engineers, for example, a role that requires production knowledge, as well as robotics programming skills—along with rich practical experience. “There are college kids coming out with business degrees and wanting to go into plant management,” she says. “But the people we’re going to hire [in many cases] are the ones that have worked 20 years and already know everything about the business.”
5 Trump leads Biden in 6/7 swing states
Donald Trump is leading President Biden in six of the seven most competitive states in the 2024 election, propelled by broad voter dissatisfaction with the national economy and deep doubts about Biden’s capabilities and job performance, a new Wall Street Journal poll finds. The poll of the election’s main battlegrounds shows Trump holding leads of between 2 and 8 percentage points in six states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina—on a test ballot that includes third-party and independent candidates. Trump holds similar leads when voters are asked to choose only between him and Biden. The one outlier is Wisconsin, where Biden leads by 3 points on the multiple-candidate ballot, and where the two candidates are tied in a head-to-head matchup
4/3/1860 Pony Express debuts
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