Did the United States and its allies, through excess of optimism or naïveté, simply get Mr. Putin wrong from the outset? Or was he transformed over time into the revanchist warmonger of today, whether because of perceived Western provocation, gathering grievance, or the giddying intoxication of prolonged and — since Covid-19 — increasingly isolated rule? The New York Times
All of the Economist’s coverage of the war in one place. The Economist
Jennifer Granholm, who was confirmed as secretary of energy by the Senate on Thursday, takes over a department with a $35 billion budget for an administration that has enthusiastically promoted the further development of clean energy. Even as the Senate vote was tallied, state legislators in Texas were holding hearings on the colossal power failures there of the week before. In a Friday interview with The Washington Post, Granholm had some advice for Texas. But with General Motors vowing to build only electric vehicles by 2035, the former governor of Michigan comes to office on the cusp of national transition.
Satellite data shows nitrogen dioxide emission declines are more modest than during first wave of restrictions. Financial Times
The furious race to develop a coronavirus vaccine played out against a presidential election, between a pharmaceutical giant and a biotech upstart, with the stakes as high as they could get. New York Times
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists‘ 2020 investigation, FinCEN Files, shows how big banks have profited from serving shadowy characters even after authorities fined them for earlier failures. ICIJ
The fightback against Big Tech’s feudal lords has begun. The use of data, after all, is now the world’s biggest business. Some $1.4trn of the combined $1.9trn market value of Alphabet (the owner of Google) and Facebook, comes from users’ data and the firms’ mining of it, after stripping out the value of their cash, physical and intangible assets, and accumulated research and development. The Economist
An inside look at how Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos built one of the largest and most influential economic forces in the world — and the cost of Amazon’s convenience. Jeff Bezos is not only the richest man in the world, he has built a business that is without precedent in the history of American capitalism. His power to shape everything from the future of work to the future of commerce to the future of technology is unrivaled. Youtube
Governments are taking a wide range of measures to tackle the COVID-19 outbreak. We aim to track and compare worldwide government responses to the coronavirus rigorously and consistently. Systematic information on which measures governments take, and when, can help us understand the responses in a consistent way, aiding efforts to fight the pandemic. Our team collects information on common policy responses, scores the stringency of such measures, and aggregates these into a Stringency Index. University of Oxford, Blavatnik School of Government
Faced with plunging profits and a climate crisis that threatens fossil fuels, the industry is demanding a trade deal that weakens Kenya’s rules on plastics and on imports of American trash. New York Times
© Stefan P. Schleicher 2024
