FLASH Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin re-hospitalized, transferred duties to deputy
1 Kansas City Chiefs win Super Bowl in OT
2 Senate advances standalone military aid bill
3 AZ is semiconductor boomtown
4 Chinese ships get cheaper insurance to thru Red Sea
5 Dramatic hostage rescue in Gaza
2/10/2024 Year of the Dragon begins
see ad astra on x @greg_loving
1 Kansas City Chiefs win Super Bowl in OT; Mahomes MVP
under a crescent moon in Las Vegas, a tumultuous Kansas City season climaxing in a storybook comeback ending, the Chiefs overtime winners over San Francisco, 25-22. Kansas City are back-to-back Super Bowl champs, winners of three of the last five, a sturdy entry among the NFL’s shortlist of dynasties. Mahomes earned that third ring, as well as a third Super Bowl MVP, and there was Kelce, waiting until after the ceremony to plant an Alfred Eisenstaedt Times Square kiss upon the world’s biggest pop star.
This sluggish Super Bowl played out like Kansas City’s season in miniature—inconsistent, irritable, veering on implosion, and then, somehow, ending in joy.
WSJ
https://www.wsj.com/sports/football/chiefs-super-bowl-mahomes-kelce-swift-d7dc8733?mod=hp_lead_pos8
2 Senate advances standalone military aid bill
Hardline conservatives opposed
Eighteen Republican senators joined Democrats on Sunday in voting to advance a $95 billion national security bill that contains funds for Ukraine and Israel, putting the bill on a path to pass the chamber early this week
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is unlikely to take up the legislation if it ultimately passes the Senate, after many hard-right lawmakers have drawn a line on sending funds to Ukraine as it fends off a Russian invasion. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said an “obvious choice” to improve the bill’s chances in the House would be for Democrats to use a discharge petition to circumvent Johnson’s will. Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) said discussions are being held with House lawmakers to follow such a path. The legislation, which also contains more than $9 billion in humanitarian aid and additional funds for the Indo-Pacific region including Taiwan, had been held up in months-long negotiations to attach bipartisan border reforms to it, which most Republicans voted to block last week after Trump signaled his displeasure with the effort.
WaPo
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/11/senate-aid-ukraine-israel-taiwan-aid/
3 AZ is semiconductor boomtown
It took 170 flatbed trucks to haul one of the world’s biggest cranes — the height of two Statues of Liberty — to the outskirts of Phoenix to start building a $20 billion computer-chip factory. On the other side of town, an even bigger chip-manufacturing project is rising from the desert, requiring 12,000 construction workers and $40 billion of investment. Phoenix is a boom town, thanks in part to President Biden. The promise of federal subsidies from the Biden-backed Chips and Science Act of 2022 has sparked some of the biggest investment projects in the nation’s history, transforming Maricopa County into one of the world’s most important manufacturing sites for the tiny components that power all modern electronics. Whether the investments will benefit Biden’s presidential campaign in this vital swing county is unclear. But the projects are creating thousands of high-tech jobs that will draw more professionals, who tend to vote blue, analysts say. Maricopa, the nation’s fourth most populous county, is already purple, having flipped from Trump to Biden in the 2020 election.
WaPo
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/02/12/phoenix-manufacturing-growth-biden-chips-act/
Ed. Note: Trump leads Biden by 4.5% in the avg of AZ polls
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/arizona/trump-vs-biden
4 Chinese ships get cheaper insurance to navigate Red Sea
Chinese-owned merchant ships are getting hefty discounts on their insurance when sailing through the Red Sea, another sign of how Houthi attacks in the area are punishing the commercial interests of vessels with ties to the west. The militants began going after Israeli-linked vessels back in mid-November, before widening their targets to include US and UK ships last month when the two nations bombed Yemen in effort to quell the attacks. The incidents have led to a multi-tiered insurance market in which underwriters differentiate between the carriers they cover. While the overall picture is mixed, some Chinese-linked vessels are having to pay as little as 0.35% of their hull and machinery value to obtain insurance for transit, according to people involved in the market. Most ships are paying somewhere between 0.5% and 0.75% — although that can vary significantly, they said.
Bloomberg
5 Dramatic hostage rescue in Gaza
Israel rescued two hostages held in Gaza in an overnight raid, as the military prepares for a larger operation to enter what it says is the last bastion for Hamas, where more than one million Palestinians are sheltering. The Israeli military said Monday that the rescue of Fernando Simon Marman and Louis Har was a complicated operation, performed under fire in the heart of Rafah, a city in southern Gaza near where Palestinians are seeking refuge from the conflict between Israel and Hamas. At roughly 2 a.m. local time, military forces and a police swat team broke into a house in Rafah and engaged in a gunfight with Hamas militants while shielding the hostages before evacuating them to a secure location, the military said.
Israel privately estimates that as many as 50 of the 130 hostages remaining in Gaza from the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks are dead.
WSJ
2/10/2024 Chinese Year of the Dragon begins
Celebrated around the world, it usually prompts the planet’s largest annual migration of people. And though it is known to some in the West as Chinese New Year, it isn’t just celebrated in China. China's nearly 380 million internal migrants only go home once a year - and the Lunar New Year, the most important festival for family reunion, is usually the time to do it. That is why the Spring Festival travel rush, known as "chunyun", is the world's largest annual mass migration. Authorities are expecting a record nine billion trips this time for the Year of the Dragon.
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