Issue 31
January 18, 2024
FLASH US strikes Houthi rebels for 4th time in Red Sea
1 Chinese lab mapped Covid genome well before revealing outbreak
2 Supreme Court hears case that could dramatically decrease federal agencies power
3 Iran and Pakistan trade strikes
4 US consumer remains healthy
5 Chinese population, birthrate falls
1/18/1919 Post-World War I peace conference begins in Paris
see ad astra on x @greg_loving
1 Chinese lab mapped Covid genome well before revealing outbreak
Chinese researchers isolated and mapped the virus that causes Covid-19 in late December 2019, at least two weeks before Beijing revealed details of the deadly virus to the world, congressional investigators said, raising questions anew about what China knew in the pandemic’s crucial early days. Documents obtained from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by a House committee and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show that a Chinese researcher in Beijing uploaded a nearly complete sequence of the virus’s structure to a U.S. government-run database on Dec. 28, 2019. Chinese officials at that time were still publicly describing the disease outbreak in Wuhan, China, as a viral pneumonia “of unknown cause” and had yet to close the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, site of one of the initial Covid-19 outbreaks.
WSJ
2 Supreme Court hears case that could dramatically decrease federal agencies power
For 40 years, courts have generally deferred to the judgment of federal agencies when it comes to turning laws passed by Congress into detailed regulations designed to protect the environment, consumers and the workplace. They did so because of the precedent set in 1984 in Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which requires judges to defer to the reasonable interpretation of federal agency officials charged with administering ambiguous federal laws. But as the court has moved to the right in recent years, the conservative majority has been less likely to invoke that ruling, which outside groups have long seen as giving unaccountable bureaucrats too much power.
WaPo
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/15/chevron-herring-fishermen-supreme-court/
A divided Supreme Court debated whether and how to curtail the power of federal agencies Wednesday, with liberals urging the court to defer to the judgment of government experts, and conservatives saying judges should not systematically favor government regulators over private companies, industry or individuals in litigation. After more than three hours of argument, it was unclear whether the court’s conservative majority would overturn or simply scale back the 40-year-old precedent that is under review in a pair of cases brought by herring fishermen from New Jersey and Rhode Island.
WaPo
Ed. Note: also see West Virginia v EPA https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_v._EPA
3 Iran and Pakistan trade strikes
In an expansion of hostilities rippling out from the Israel-Hamas war, Pakistan said on Thursday that it had carried out strikes inside Iran, a day after Iranian forces attacked what they said were militant camps in Pakistan. The Pakistani Foreign Affairs Ministry said that the country’s forces had conducted “precision military strikes” against what it called terrorist hide-outs in southeastern Iran. The Iranian state-owned television network Press TV said that seven foreigners were killed in the strike.
NYT
4 US consumer remains healthy
Retail sales in the US soared 0.6% month-over-month in December 2023, following a 0.3% rise in November and beating forecasts of 0.4%.
Trading Economics
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/retail-sales
The biggest US banks believe American consumers have weathered the Federal Reserve’s cycle of interest rate rises in good shape
FT
Americans spent more at stores, auto dealerships and online to close out last year suggesting consumers can continue to drive economic growth in 2024. US shoppers spent a record $222.1 billion online between November and December, up 4.9% from a year earlier. The increase in spending was driven by discounts and usage of “buy now pay later” shopping options.
WSJ
5 Chinese population, birthrate falls
China said on Wednesday that 9.02 million babies were born in 2023, down from 9.56 million in 2022 and the seventh year in a row that the number has fallen. Taken together with the number of people who died during the year — 11.1 million — China has more older people than anywhere else in the world, an amount that is rising rapidly. China’s total population was 1,409,670,000 at the end of 2023, a decline of two million people, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
NYT
The latest numbers points to a fertility rate—the number of children a woman has over her lifetime—that is close to 1.0, a level considered by demographers as “ultralow.”
WSJ
1/18/1919 Post-World War I peace conference begins in Paris
Thanks for reading!
Sports
ATL Falcons interview Jim Harbaugh for coaching vacancy
