Speed Is Essential.
Canada hearts Connor McDavid.
John Ellis is easily one of the five most insightful and wired-in political minds I have ever met or read. — Charlie Cook, founder of The Cook Political Report.
1. As Texas continues to contend with a growing measles outbreak that has sickened 58 and counting, other states have begun reporting their own cases of the highly contagious disease. Two other states, New Mexico and Georgia, have also reached "outbreak" status as defined by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, meaning they have reported three or more related cases of the disease. But with the CDC only updating case numbers monthly, the task of tracking and announcing the spread has fallen to individual states in the weeks between. (Source: usatoday.com)
Measles outbreaks don’t fade out on their own. Stopping a fast-moving virus means dispatching large teams of virus-trackers and vaccinators. Speed is essential because presymptomatic victims on the move by car or plane can seed new outbreaks. (In the current outbreak, government virus-trackers have named a specific grocery store in Hobbs, New Mexico, that probably contained clouds of infectious viral particles on Feb. 6 and again on Feb. 8.)
And unpopular punitive measures are often required. In New York City’s 2019 measles outbreak, caused by a virus that originated in Israel and spread rapidly through Orthodox neighborhoods in Brooklyn, the city banned all unvaccinated children from school and closed yeshivas that could not document which of their students had been vaccinated. Parents who continued to refuse the shots after initial warnings were fined $1,000. City officials were accused of everything from authoritarianism to antisemitism, but they stopped the outbreak. (A Brooklyn judge rejected a lawsuit against the fines, ruling that “a fireman need not obtain the informed consent of the owner before extinguishing a house fire.”) (Sources: washingtonpost.com, nmhealth.org, pmc.ncbi.nim.nih.gov, nytimes.com, abcnews.go.com)
3. Figure.ai:
We're introducing Helix, a generalist Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that unifies perception, language understanding, and learned control to overcome multiple longstanding challenges in robotics. Helix is a series of firsts:
Full-upper-body control: Helix is the first VLA to output high-rate continuous control of the entire humanoid upper body, including wrists, torso, head, and individual fingers.
Multi-robot collaboration: Helix is the first VLA to operate simultaneously on two robots, enabling them to solve a shared, long-horizon manipulation task with items they have never seen before.
Pick up anything: Figure robots equipped with Helix can now pick up virtually any small household object, including thousands of items they have never encountered before, simply by following natural language prompts.
One neural network: Unlike prior approaches, Helix uses a single set of neural network weights to learn all behaviors—picking and placing items, using drawers and refrigerators, and cross-robot interaction—without any task-specific fine-tuning.
Commercial-ready: Helix is the first VLA that runs entirely onboard embedded low-power-consumption GPUs, making it immediately ready for commercial deployment.
Future AI’s video introduction of Helix is remarkable. (Source: figure.ai)
4. China is ahead of the West in terms of the scale of its humanoid robot industry, controlling more than half of the top listed companies despite lagging in technology for a key part, according to a report by US investment bank Morgan Stanley. Of the 100 publicly-traded companies worldwide Morgan Stanley identified that were “confirmed to be involved” in developing humanoids, 56 per cent were based in China, Morgan Stanley analysts led by Adam Jonas said in the research paper. China is also home to 45 per cent of the world’s integrators, which are firms that customise robots to match end-user needs. (Source: scmp.com, advisor.morganstanley,com)
5. As the campaign draws to a close ahead of Sunday’s federal elections, the mood in the Ruhr, an SPD stronghold that became the symbol of Germany’s postwar social-market economic model, highlights a sense of political upheaval in Europe’s largest democracy. On Sunday, the AfD could for the first time win direct constituencies in the Ruhr, a region with high immigration and which has struggled with deindustrialisation. Scholz, who triggered early elections in November after pulling the plug on his unpopular coalition with the Liberals and the Greens, could lead his party to its worst result since 1887 with a meagre 15 per cent. (Source: ft.com)
6. Eurointelligence:
The one astonishing political development in the last two weeks was the rise of the Left Party. It is now polling steadily above 5% - the representation threshold. This is due to a new leadership, and a great grassroots campaign that has been particularly successful with young people. At the last election, the Left, was the part of old former Communist voters. It got less than 5% at the last elections – and still surpassed the threshold on a technicality. The party mostly made the headlines over its internal divisions. The departure of Sahra Wagenknecht cleared the air – for both sides. Together, they raise their total by 2.5 times – an astonishing increase, mostly, we think, at the expense of the SPD and the Greens. The Greens have targeted the Left Party in the last part of their campaign – so far with no success. (Source: eurointelligence.com)
7. John Authers:
It’s time for Germany to decide. The election sparked by the collapse of its so-called “traffic lights”1 coalition is due Sunday. Even before the dramatic rupture in US-European relations, it was bound to be the most consequential in many years. Now comes the complicated part.
At one level, there is barely any suspense. The polling numbers for the three biggest parties — the center-right Christian Democrats, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) and center-left Social Democrats — are almost exactly where they were 15 months ago….
Barring an epic shock, it will soon be Chancellor Merz. However, the German proportional representation system makes everything else more complicated. A party needs at least 5% of the national vote to get a share of the seats in parliament. Two far-left groups — BSW and The Left — and the liberal Free Democrats are all close to that threshold. If none of them top 5%, then all the seats are shared between the larger parties, and the Christian Democrats can govern in coalition with the Social Democrats. If all three get seats, then the mathematics mean that the two traditional big parties will need to govern with at least one other — presumably the Greens, as all are unwilling to admit the AfD to government. Prediction markets now think it’s a 50/50 shot whether Merz can put together a two-party coalition. (Source: bloomberg.com)
8. Friedrich Merz, the frontrunner to be Germany’s next chancellor, said he’s open to considering common European Union borrowing for defense, a potential game-changer as the bloc responds to Russian aggression and fading US engagement. Asked whether he would accept proposals for softening European Union rules that would open a path to “defense bonds,” the leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union said any such consideration for joint action would have to fulfill a range of conditions and be unanimous — but he didn’t rule it out. (Source: bloomberg.com)
The war that Russia is waging against Ukraine, and that President Trump says he’s determined to end by opening talks with the Kremlin, isn’t just about territorial gains or global power projection. It is, fundamentally, a struggle over historical memory. Three years after the Russian invasion began on Feb. 24, 2022, it is the generational trauma of their country’s suffering under Russian and Soviet rule that motivates Ukrainians to keep defying a much more powerful enemy, despite mounting casualties.
“We realize that, if we stop resisting, we will face extermination and genocide—just as it already happened in our past,” said Olena Styazhkina, a Ukrainian historian and writer.
In 1926, Soviet Ukraine was home to 29 million people. By 1953, when Joseph Stalin died, it had lost almost half that number to famine, war and mass killing. Almost every Ukrainian today is a descendant of the survivors of those dark decades. (Source: wsj.com)
10. The Trump administration is stepping up its push for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to hand mineral rights worth hundreds of billions of dollars to the U.S., after Zelensky’s initial rejection of the demand fueled President Trump’s escalating broadsides against Ukraine’s leader. The White House called Zelensky’s refusal to sign a deal it proposed and his criticism of Trump unacceptable, a day after Zelensky said Trump is living in a “disinformation” bubble and Trump countered by calling Zelensky a dictator. “They need to tone it down and take a hard look and sign that deal,” Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz said Thursday of Ukraine’s leadership on Fox News. Zelensky has said he is open to a deal, but that it needs more work. (Source: wsj.com)
11. John Podhoretz:
Trump is under no obligation to support Ukraine. If he doesn’t, he doesn’t. But doing so while accusing Ukraine of being the aggressor in the most unjustified, pitiless, and brutal war of aggression in our time is an act of infamy almost without parallel. I wrote COMMENTARY’s current cover story. It’s called “Trump 2: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” This is the ugly. This is the more-than-ugly. This is about as ugly as it could possibly get. (Source: commentary.org)
12. A two-and-a-half-year-old girl shows no signs of a rare genetic disorder, after becoming the first person to be treated for the motor-neuron condition while in the womb. The child’s mother took the gene-targeting drug during late pregnancy, and the child continues to take it. The “baby has been effectively treated, with no manifestations of the condition,” says Michelle Farrar, a paediatric neurologist at UNSW Sydney in Australia. The results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine yesterday. The child was conceived with a genetic condition known as spinal muscular atrophy, which affects motor neurons that control movement, and leads to progressive muscle weakening. About one in every 10,000 births have some form of the condition — making it a leading genetic cause of death in infants and children. (Source: nature.com)
13. Isaac Saul:
I asked @grok (Elon Musk’s AI company) to analyze the last 1,000 posts from Elon Musk for truth and veracity. More than half of what Elon posts on X is false or misleading, while most of the "true" posts are simply updates about his companies. (Source: x.com)
14. Connor McDavid scored the overtime winner to propel Canada to a 3-2 victory over the United States in the final of the 4 Nations Face-Off in Boston. (Source: youtube.com. McDavid goal at 3:37 of this video).
15. “USA and Canada have always hated each other on the ice,” said Brock Faber, the young, stout Minnesota Wild blue liner from Maple Grove, Minn. “I think that’s how the guys look at it — nothing more than just the hatred we have for each other on the ice. When you’re born in Canada and you’re a hockey player, it’s just kinda like all you know is just not to like the United States. Same with a hockey player wearing red, white, and blue [when playing] Team Canada — that hatred just comes from when I first started playing hockey.” (Source: bostonglobe.com)
Quick Links: China’s record-breaking blockbuster buoyed by patriotic viewers. China’s distressed developers are increasingly asking local courts to drive their restructuring efforts. China’s alarming sex imbalance: By 2027 one in six young Chinese men won’t be able to find a partner. LGBTQ+ identification in U.S. rises to 9.3%. Investors fear inflation is coming back. They may be right. What’s driving electricity demand? It isn’t just AI and data centers. Alibaba shares jump 13% after pledge to invest ‘aggressively’ in AI. Japan to court Tesla on Nissan investment. Walmart predicts lower-than-expected profits, citing cloudy economy. Its stock fell 6.53%. Inflation warning signs mount. A company called Good Fibes is trying to make a biodegradable alternative to spandex. The more information there is in the world, the more people crave guidance.
Political Links: Europe has had its bleakest week since the fall of the Iron Curtain. It is an indebted, aging continent that is barely growing and cannot defend itself or project hard power. Germany’s historically accurate pollsters are a bit uneasy this time around. Our take is that the AfD will do a bit better than forecast. Germany’s Left Party comes back from the dead. The problem in a nutshell: In 2023, Germany recorded 133,000 patent applications, less than half the numbers in South-Korea and Japan. Argentina Senate suspends primary vote in reprieve for Milei. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) yesterday said he would not seek re-election in 2026. Senate narrowly (51-49) confirmed Kash Patel for FBI director. A novel approach to counter-terrorism: Mr. Patel has said he wants to make FBI headquarters a "museum of the deep state" on his first day. Trump Is planning to take control of the U.S. Postal Service. Trump’s approval ratings are mixed to negative, according to two new polls. Trump rolls back protections for about 520,000 Haitian migrants.
Science/Technology Links: Bespoke vaccines can elicit long-lived immune activity against pancreatic cancer. Groundbreaking study shows potential of new mRNA vaccine to help fight tuberculosis. AI tool diagnoses diabetes, HIV and Covid from a blood sample. Super-speedy sequencing puts genomic diagnosis in the fast lane. Comment allez-vous?: Learning another language may stave off Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia. How tariffs could shock America’s power system. Musk’s xAI receives high marks from early Grok 3 users. A.I. is changing how Silicon Valley builds start-ups. The Wall Street Journal’s guide to the latest AI buzzwords.
War: Xi is trying to secure the devotion of China’s military. China’s two million soldiers, sailors and airmen have been studying Xi’s speeches, learning Communist Party rules and seeking inspiration from revolutionary exploits. US objects to phrase ‘Russian aggression’ in G7 statement on Ukraine. Bombs explode in Israel on empty buses in suspected terrorist attack.
All those poor Ukrainians murdered by that Russian bastard Stalin. Only the New York Times had the balls to call him out for the crimes at the time…..