June 3 2024
Covid origins; shale patch; non-college voters; IN, SA, MX elections, Chinese land on dark side of moon; Tiananmen
1 Fauci to testify at bipartisan House oversight committee as disturbing picture of coverup emerges
2 US shale industry in $200bn dealmaking wave
3 ELECTION 2024 Biden “hemorrhaging” non-college voters
4 India, South Africa and Mexico vote
5 China lands on dark side of the moon
6/3/1989 Crackdown at Tiananmen begins
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1 Fauci to testify at bipartisan House oversight committee as disturbing picture of coverup emerges
Brad Wenstrup was alarmed. It was February 2020, weeks before the coronavirus pandemic shuttered America’s businesses and schools. But the Ohio congressman, a former military combat surgeon, was reading email from a fellow doctor on how U.S. and Chinese researchers had been experimenting on viruses in Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the outbreak. “Look, I’m military, a military doc. … I started thinking about biological weapons,” Wenstrup recalled in a recent interview with The Washington Post. Four years later, the Republican congressman is still thinking about China’s potential links to covid, as part of his work to shape America’s understanding of the pandemic. As chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic — the only panel in Congress solely devoted to probing a health crisis that left more than 1 million Americans dead — Wenstrup has led investigations into the origins of the virus as well as hearings on school shutdowns, vaccine mandates and possible side effects from coronavirus vaccines. He recruited another doctor — California congressman Raul Ruiz, an emergency medicine specialist — to serve as the panel’s top Democrat last year, promising they would be two physicians working together to get answers and accountability. Wenstrup and his fellow Republicans have focused much of their effort on the possible lab origins of the coronavirus, suggesting federal officials worked to cover up U.S. ties to researchers in Wuhan. The issue is set to receive national attention Monday, when Anthony S. Fauci — to many Americans, the face of the nation’s coronavirus response — testifies in front of the panel. Republicans are poised to grill the former National Institutes of Health official on the agency’s funding of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit organization that participated in risky virus research in China before the pandemic. Federal officials in May halted funding to the organization, citing irregularities uncovered by the coronavirus panel.
Article Source: WaPo
2 US shale industry in $200bn dealmaking wave
Dealmaking in US oil and gas has surged to almost $200bn in the past year as the biggest producers compete to swallow up rivals in a race for scale that has redrawn the national energy landscape. But as the country’s best drilling acreage is snapped up, companies are casting a wider net and looking beyond the most sought after oilfields for acquisitions that will bolster their ability to pump hydrocarbons in the years ahead.Since last July companies including Exxon, Chevron and Occidental Petroleum have announced $194bn worth of deals across the US shale patch, according to consultancy Rystad Energy. This is almost triple the amount in the previous 12-month period. The latest came this week when ConocoPhillips announced a $22.5bn acquisition of Marathon Oil, after talks between the companies were reported by Financial Times. At least another $62bn of assets are known to be on the market, according to Rystad.
The dealmaking burst has entered a new phase. With much of the best acreage spoken for in the prolific Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico — the engine room of the country’s oil industry — companies are looking further afield. Consolidation has left almost two-thirds of the field’s shale oil in the hands of just six companies, Rystad estimated.
“We’ve gone from about 65 to 41 publicly traded oil and gas companies in the US in less than five years.”
Article Source: FT
3 ELECTION 2024 Biden “hemorrhaging” non-college voters
President Joe Biden is hemorrhaging support among voters without college degrees - a large group that includes Black people, Hispanic women, young voters and suburban women - producing a far tighter rematch against his Republican predecessor Donald Trump than seen in 2020, Reuters/Ipsos polling reveals. Biden's support among voters without a four-year degree is down 10 percentage points, compared to this point in the 2020 campaign, the analysis of around 24,000 registered voter responses to Reuters/Ipsos polls in 2020 and 2024 shows. Americans without college degrees made up three out of five voters in 2020.
Article Source: Reuters
4 India, South Africa and Mexico vote
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party is set to win a decisive majority in India’s election for the third time in a row, several exit polls showed, extending his decade in power atop the world’s fastest-growing major economy. The polls showed his Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance will win substantially more seats than the 272 needed for a majority in India’s 543-seat lower house of parliament. Official election results will be released June 4.
Bloomberg
The African National Congress lost its political monopoly on South Africa after election results on Saturday showed that with almost all of the votes counted, the party had received only about 40 percent, falling short of winning an absolute majority for the first time since vanquishing Africa’s last white-led regime 30 years ago. With South Africans facing one of the world’s highest unemployment rates, shortages of electricity and water and rampant crime, the governing party still bested its competitors but fell far short of the nearly 58 percent of the vote it won in the last election, in 2019. The staggering nosedive for Africa’s oldest liberation movement put one of the continent’s most stable countries and its largest economy onto an uneasy and uncharted course. The party, which rose to international acclaim on the shoulders of Nelson Mandela, will now have two weeks to cobble together a government by partnering with one or more rival parties that have derided it as corrupt and vowed never to form an alliance with it.
NYT
Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist and former mayor of Mexico City, won her nation’s elections on Sunday in a landslide victory that brought a double milestone: She became the first woman, and the first Jewish person, to be elected president of Mexico. Early results indicated that Ms. Sheinbaum, 61, prevailed in what the authorities called the largest election in Mexico’s history, with the highest number of voters taking part and the most seats up for grabs. It was a landmark vote that saw not one, but two, women vying to lead one of the hemisphere’s biggest nations. And it will put a Jewish leader at the helm of one of the world’s largest predominantly Catholic countries. Ms. Sheinbaum, a leftist, campaigned on a vow to continue the legacy of Mexico’s current president and her mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, which delighted their party’s base — and raised alarm among detractors. The election was seen by many as a referendum on his leadership, and her victory was a clear vote of confidence in Mr. López Obrador and the party he started.
NYT
Mexico’s peso extended its decline, weakening more than 2% against the dollar, as preliminary election results showed the ruling party winning in a landslide that could empower it to increase state control of the economy.
Bloomberg
Article Source: Bloomberg, NYT
5 China lands on dark side of the moon
China landed an uncrewed spacecraft on the far side of the moon on Sunday, overcoming a key hurdle in its landmark mission to retrieve the world's first rock and soil samples from the dark lunar hemisphere. The landing elevates China's space power status in a global rush to the moon, where countries including the United States are hoping to exploit lunar minerals to sustain long-term astronaut missions and moon bases within the next decade.
Article Source: Reuters
6/3/1989 Crackdown at Tiananmen begins
China’s 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy activists sparked a seminal crisis in Beijing’s relationship with the West. On the massacre’s 35th anniversary, China’s leaders face familiar international blowback over their conduct. Instead of gunfire, today’s sources of discomfort about China are a mix of its aggressive industrial policy and militarization toward neighbors, plus a national-security agenda from Chinese leader Xi Jinping that has curtailed personal freedoms at home and shaped affairs abroad. A poor and relatively backward nation in 1989, China is now an economic powerhouse backed by a formidable military and diplomatic corps vying to reset the global order and impose its will internationally.
Article Source: WSJ
Sources
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/06/02/covid-committee-house-fauci/
2. https://on.ft.com/3x7GN95
3. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/bidens-big-weakness-vs-trump-voters-without-college-degrees-reutersipsos-poll-2024-06-01/
4. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-01/initial-india-exit-polls-show-modi-s-party-set-for-majority-win; https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/01/world/africa/south-africa-election-results.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare; https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/02/world/americas/mexico-election.html; https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-03/mexican-peso-extends-loss-to-2-after-landslide-election-win
5. https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/china-lands-uncrewed-spacecraft-far-side-moon-2024-06-01/
6. https://www.wsj.com/world/china/35-years-after-tiananmen-chinas-conduct-again-triggers-alarm-87700da4?mod=hp_lead_pos8
Thanks for reading!
