Our way of keeping you, our members, updated on the stories we’re watching and the ideas we are pursuing.
Openness is at the heart of our journalism. To keep you, our members, updated on the ideas we are pursuing, we’re publishing a weekly Newslist. It’s a feature of every newsroom (usually kept updated by a harried news editor, trying to keep pace with the day’s events) – but the Tortoise Newslist serves a different purpose: ours is an inventory of things to come, shaped by the conversations we’ve had with you, our members, at our ThinkIns.
Topics for discussion:
- Football, racism and patriotism – could some good come of the shootout?
- Homelessness and universal credit – is the £20 uplift working and if so for whom? What about young people?
- Covid numbers – if the link isn’t broken between infection and hospital, what happens after 19 July?
- Origins of Covid – are we back to square one? If so, what next to prevent the next pandemic?
- Love Island – voting is about to begin. Is ITV messing with young minds for ratings?
Tech profits and tax
Apple moved $720 million earned in the UK to Ireland last year to take advantage of low tax rates. It’s a tiny number compared with the company’s global revenues – $111 bn for the last quarter of last year alone – but big enough to strengthen the US-backed plan for a 15 per cent minimum corporate tax rate, which would force Ireland to raise its rate from 12.5 per cent. If Ireland joined the club, which it hasn’t yet. What would make it worthwhile for Dublin?
Carbon sinks
There’s a huge amount being written on natural carbon sinks and how to maximise their extent and potential. We’re talking: mangroves round Australia, Cuba and Indonesia; kelp forests off California and Chile; forests everywhere; farmland everywhere; peat everywhere. This is surely where mighty bites out of atmospheric carbon levels could be taken. What are the policy steps needed to take them? Who needs to be bought off? What are the risks? How do they compare with those of geoengineering? If a trillion more trees isn’t the answer, what is?
Death of radio-astronomy
Last Friday Dr Matthew Bothwell told us the entire field of radio astronomy could be killed off by the hundreds / thousands of mini-satellites being lofted into orbit by SpaceX and rivals in a largely unregulated race to offer the world high-speed satellite broadband. Are we really blinding ourselves to the mysteries of deep space for a faster Love Island download?
J & J vaccine warning
A warning and a thought experiment. First the warning: in the US, the FDA has said there’s a slightly heightened risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome associated with the Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine. It’s not bad enough to warrant suspending the vaccine’s use, but has caused one death and 95 hospitalisations after the administration of nearly 13 million doses. (The syndrome causes the immune system to attack the nervous system.) Now the thought experiment: if there was an agile, beneficent united world government, what would it do right now to get everyone vaccinated? Would it muddle along with a vast patchwork of dissimilar vaccines with dissimilar efficacies? Or would it move progressively to commandeer all manufacturing and distribution capacity for the mRNA vaccines that are plainly the most effective and – though all are safer than not being vaccinated – the safest? Hmm…
Cuba libre?
Not so fast. There have been about 100 arrests, according to local reports, since protests flared up with little warning and no obvious leader in San Antonio de los Baños, near Havana, on Sunday. The ability of savvy web-users to circumvent bans on use of popular social media platforms seems to have facilitated the protests but their ambition is unclear, as is whether they’re the start of something bigger. Watch for updates in the Sensemaker.
