Weekend Edition
Like a parade of lawn mowers.
“(News Items) is the first thing I read every morning.” — Rob Manfred, Commissioner, Major League Baseball.
The latest ‘Night Owls’ podcast will be posted at some point this morning. Joe Klein and I interviewed Gen. David Petraeus (Ret., US Army) about his new book, “Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine" (co-authored by British historian Andrew Roberts). We talked about wars and we talked about a world in disarray. You can listen to the podcast on Apple, Amazon, and Spotify, as well as on other podcast platforms. Gen. Petraeus was a terrific guest. His book is important and well worth your time.
1. Motoko Rich:
Why should countries care about shrinking populations at a time of climate change, increasing risk of nuclear catastrophe and the prospect of artificial intelligence taking over jobs? At a global level, there is no shortage of people. But drastically low birthrates can lead to problems in individual countries.
Tomáš Sobotka, one of the authors of the U.N. report and a deputy director at the Vienna Institute of Demography, does a back-of-the-envelope calculation to illustrate the point: In South Korea, which has the lowest birthrate in the world at 0.72 children per woman, just over a million babies were born in 1970. Last year, 230,000 were. It’s obviously too simple to say that each person born in 2023 will, in their prime working years, have to support four retired people. But in the absence of large-scale immigration, the matter will be “extremely difficult to organize and deal with for Korean society,” said Mr. Sobotka.
Similar concerns arise from Italy to the United States: working-age populations outnumbered by the elderly; towns emptying out; important jobs unfilled; business innovation faltering. Immigration could be a straightforward antidote, but in many of the countries with declining birthrates, accepting large numbers of immigrants has become politically toxic.
Across Europe, East Asia and North America, many governments are, like Japan, introducing measures like paid parental leave, child care subsidies and direct cash transfers. According to the U.N., the number of countries deliberately targeting birthrates rose from 19 in 1986 to 55 by 2015. (Source: nytimes.com)
2. We linked to this on Friday, but it bears repeating: Nick Eberstadt on “The Age of Depopulation, Surviving a World Gone Gray.” (Source: foreignaffairs.com)
3. Financial Times:
China’s deflationary pressures picked up in September with weaker than expected consumer and factory prices, underlining calls for Beijing to deliver a bigger package of measures to lift the economy. The softer data comes as China’s volatile markets await more detailed information on Beijing’s stimulus plans, after a Ministry of Finance press conference on Saturday that pledged more spending but gave few new figures. China’s consumer prices index was up 0.4 per cent year on year in September, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Sunday, weaker than a Bloomberg poll of analysts that forecast a 0.6 per cent gain and down from 0.6 per cent in August. The producer prices index fell 2.8 per cent year on year, compared with analysts’ forecasts of a decline of 2.6 per cent. The fall accelerated from 1.8 per cent in August and was the steepest decline in six months. (Source: ft.com)
4. Bloomberg:
China moved to further ramp up support for the economy, promising more aid for the slumping property sector and indebted local governments. But officials still haven’t convinced economists that they’re doing enough to defeat deflation.
At a highly anticipated briefing on Saturday, Finance Minister Lan Fo’an refrained from putting a price tag on China’s fiscal stimulus as investors expected, signaling that details would come when China’s legislature meets in the coming weeks. The supportive measures he did announce, however, gave little indication Chinese authorities felt any urgency to ramp up consumption, which many economists see as essential to reflating the economy and putting it on a more positive growth trajectory.
“The policy to support consumption sounds quite weak,” said Jacqueline Rong, chief China economist at BNP Paribas SA. “It is still too early to call an imminent significant turnaround in deflationary pressure or a bottoming-out of the property market, which are the two key issues faced by the Chinese economy.”
Highlighting sluggish demand, consumer prices rose less than expected in September and factory-gate charges fell for a 24th straight month, according to data released Sunday. Officials spoke little about deflation at the hourlong briefing the day before. (Source: bloomberg.com)
5. The Eurozone’s weak economic growth and sluggish consumer price rises have raised concerns that the European Central Bank may be facing the threat of too little rather than too much inflation, economists have warned. The prospect of a bout of reduced price rises is a sharp turnaround from recent historic levels of high inflation, which forced the ECB to push interest rates up to a record 4 per cent in September 2023. Monetary policymakers will meet this Thursday and are widely expected to reduce rates. Having previously not anticipated a cut until December, investors now view a quarter-point reduction to 3.25 per cent as a given. The October cut could usher in a series of faster and steeper reductions in borrowing costs in an effort to stop inflation from persistently undershooting its target, economists said. (Source: ft.com)
6. U.S. consumer confidence declined less than a month before the presidential election, an unexpected downturn after two months of gains. The University of Michigan’s index of consumer sentiment declined to 68.9 in mid-October from 70.1 at the end of last month. Economists had expected the survey to increase to 71.0, according to a poll compiled by The Wall Street Journal. Consumers continue to express frustration over high prices, despite inflation expectations easing since this time last year, Joanne Hsu, the survey’s director, said. (Source: wsj.com)
7. The New York Times:
Vice President Kamala Harris has improved her party’s standing among Black voters since President Biden left the presidential race, but she still significantly trails Mr. Biden’s 2020 share of that vital Democratic constituency, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll of Black likely voters.
Nearly eight out of 10 Black voters nationwide said they would vote for Ms. Harris, the poll found, a marked increase from the 74 percent of Black voters who said they would support Mr. Biden before he dropped out of the race in July. But Mr. Biden won 90 percent of Black voters to capture the White House by narrow margins in 2020, and the drop-off for Ms. Harris, if it holds, is large enough to imperil her chances of winning key battleground states. (Source: nytimes.com)
8. The New York Times:
Vice President Kamala Harris’s support among Hispanic voters is in dangerously low territory for Democrats, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll, while her rival, former President Donald J. Trump, has maintained his strength with the fast-growing group poised to play a key role in deciding control of the White House.
The survey of the likely Latino electorate across the country found Ms. Harris underperforming the last three Democratic candidates for the White House, and vulnerable on a slate of top issues, including the economy, immigration and crime.
Mr. Trump, who shocked Democrats four years ago with his appeal to Latinos, particularly men, has only tightened his grip — even as he closes his campaign with a sharply anti-immigrant message. (Source: nytimes.com)
9. The Wall Street Journal:
With wars in Ukraine and the Middle East looming over the U.S. election, voters give former President Donald Trump the edge over Vice President Kamala Harris on who would better navigate the country through both conflicts, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll of seven battleground states.
Trump leads Harris among swing-state voters, 50% to 39%, on who is best able to handle Russia’s war in Ukraine and has a wider advantage, 48% to 33%, on who is better suited to handle the Israel-Hamas war. The Republican nominee has pointed to his tenure in the White House as a time of relative peace around the world and has claimed—without providing details—that he could resolve both conflicts quickly if he wins in November.
While the survey echoed other polls suggesting foreign policy isn’t a priority for voters in November, the next president nonetheless stands to inherit a pair of conflicts with no clear end in sight and in which U.S. involvement has polarized the electorate. The question of which candidate offers the right mix of experience and leadership has been an important one in the race. (Source: wsj.com)
10. The Washington Post:
Years before the Oct. 7, 2023, attack, Hamas’s leaders plotted a far deadlier wave of terrorist assaults against Israel — potentially including a Sept. 11-style toppling of a Tel Aviv skyscraper — while they pressed Iran to assist in helping achieve their vision of annihilating the Jewish state, according to documents seized by Israeli forces in Gaza.
Electronic records and papers that Israeli officials say were recovered from Hamas command centers show advanced planning for attacks using trains, boats and even horse-drawn chariots — though several plans were ill-formed and highly impractical, terrorism experts said. The plans anticipate drawing in allied militant groups for a combined assault against Israel from the north, south and east.
The trove of documents includes an annotated, illustrated presentation detailing possible options for an assault as well as letters from Hamas to Iran’s top leaders in 2021 requesting hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and training for 12,000 additional Hamas fighters. It is unclear whether Iran knew of the planning document or responded to the letters, but Israeli officials view the requests as part of a larger effort by Hamas to draw its Iranian allies into the kind of direct confrontation with Israel that Tehran has traditionally sought to avoid.
The 59 pages of letters and planning documents in Arabic obtained by The Washington Post represent a fraction of the thousands of records that Israel Defense Forces say they have seized since Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza began Oct. 27. (Source: washingtonpost.com)
11. Saeid Golkar/Kasra Aarabi:
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s influential, ideological armed force, has been riven by divisions between its older, conservative commanders and its younger, radical ranks. The former generally favor exercising some restraint when it comes to Israel, whereas the latter want to go directly after the Islamic Republic’s nemesis. Typically, the older elite have held more influence with the supreme leader. But as more and more IRGC commanders and partners have been killed, the younger generations have gained the upper hand. They have done so by questioning the competence of their elders but also by suggesting that some IRGC elites are actually Israeli assets, including Esmail Ghaani, the IRGC commander who controls Iran’s Quds force—which, in turn, controls Iran’s network of proxy militias. After Israel killed Nasrallah, Khamenei’s calculus appears to have been shaped by this younger cohort. It is part of why Khamenei launched the October 1 attack. (Source: foreignaffairs.com)
12. The Wall Street Journal:
U.S. Air Force Gen. Mark Kelly wasn’t sure what to make of reports that a suspicious fleet of unidentified aircraft had been flying over Langley Air Force Base on Virginia’s shoreline.
Kelly, a decorated senior commander at the base, got on a squadron rooftop to see for himself. He joined a handful of other officers responsible for a clutch of the nation’s most advanced jet fighters, including F-22 Raptors.
For several nights, military personnel had reported a mysterious breach of restricted airspace over a stretch of land that has one of the largest concentrations of national-security facilities in the U.S. The show usually starts 45 minutes to an hour after sunset, another senior leader told Kelly.
The first drone arrived shortly. Kelly, a career fighter pilot, estimated it was roughly 20 feet long and flying at more than 100 miles an hour, at an altitude of roughly 3,000 to 4,000 feet. Other drones followed, one by one, sounding in the distance like a parade of lawn mowers.
The drones headed south, across Chesapeake Bay, toward Norfolk, Va., and over an area that includes the home base for the Navy’s SEAL Team Six and Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval port.
Officials didn’t know if the drone fleet, which numbered as many as a dozen or more over the following nights, belonged to clever hobbyists or hostile forces. Some suspected that Russia or China deployed them to test the response of American forces.
Federal law prohibits the military from shooting down drones near military bases in the U.S. unless they pose an imminent threat. (Sources: af.mil, wsj.com)
13. A new large-scale study, involving nearly a quarter-million adults, found that those with any type of COVID-19 infection in 2020 had twice the risk of suffering a major cardiac event—a heart attack, stroke, or even death—in the three years after a diagnosis than those who weren’t infected. People whose infections were severe enough to warrant hospitalization faced nearly a four times greater risk of a major cardiac event or death than the uninfected group. “These findings are undeniable and extremely troubling,” says David Putrino, the director of the Cohen Center for Recovery from Complex Chronic Illness at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. “The significance of this work is that our current public health policy surrounding COVID-19 is inadequate. People need to be informed of the risks they are incurring to their long-term health by being repeatedly infected with SARS-CoV-2.” (Sources: ahajournals.org, fortune.com)
14. Apple to the rescue.
In your pocket or purse, you may be toting around small devices that, with the help of new software authorized by the Food and Drug Administration, could soon become inexpensive hearing aids. Millions of people already own them.
They’re Apple’s AirPods Pro 2, those white plastic knobs protruding from so many ears in malls and workplaces, on buses and sidewalks. The users may not be among the 30 million American adults reporting some degree of hearing loss; they’re probably just listening to music or podcasts, or talking on their phones.
Within weeks, however, consumers will be able to use those AirPods Pro 2 earbuds to bolster their hearing. Last month, Apple software called Hearing Aid and Hearing Test received a green light from the F.D.A., a first for the regulatory agency. (Sources: nytimes.com, fda.gov)
Quick Links: Chinese scientists hack military grade encryption on quantum computer. Alexei Navalny’s prison diaries. In and around Kyiv, war has become part of daily life, even as the public grows weary of its costs. Zelenskyy says forces are holding positions in Russia’s Kursk region. Ali Vaez: How the failure of Tehran’s strategy is raising its appetite for risk. Pakistan’s internet slows to a crawl as suspicion falls on government. Leaving Kabul: “What happened when the Taliban returned.” Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley: Trump is ‘fascist to the core.” Obama chides ‘brothers’ for not backing Kamala Harris. Medical report: Harris takes several medications to manage seasonal allergies but is otherwise “in excellent health.” Trump grouses about the amount of time he is having to spend raising money. Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) is running behind in his re-election bid. Florida threatens to criminally charge TV stations airing abortion rights ad. Gateway Pundit website admits there was no fraud at 2020 vote count in Atlanta. Unions defy their leadership with more ‘no’ votes on contracts. Boeing will cut 17,000 jobs in bid to slash costs. How this will help Boeing address quality issues is, to put it gently, unclear. How Roger Goodell became the N.F.L.’s $20 billion man. What the socialist paradise of Green Bay says about NFL valuations. Billionaires frustrated with elite colleges are banding behind a fledgling school in Texas that boasts 92 students. Great (upbeat) story: Once the largest city in the U.S. to declare bankruptcy, Detroit is now thriving. Great (illustrative) story: A utility promised to stop burning coal. Then Google and Meta came to town. Dramatic images show the first floods in the Sahara in half a century. Columbus was a Sephardic Jew from Western Europe. Former First Minister Alex Salmond, 'monumental figure' of Scottish politics, has died. He was 69 years old. Mets fever grips Gotham.
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