Billionaire Lobby Update:
Breakthrough Energy — Bill Gates' climate change nonprofit — has locked the doors on its policy and advocacy office and has laid off dozens of employees throughout Europe and the US.
Breakthrough's lobbying was central to advancing climate policy through legislation championed by the Biden administration, including the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, and the bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Though the billionaire's for-profit green energy investments at companies like Arnergy and Mission Zero Technologies remain in place, Breakthrough's belt-tightening will likely end the nonprofit's grant-writing efforts.
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The American idea of freedom.includes the responsibility for decisions and their consequences. Is there a growing belief in the liberal West that the average person is simply not capable of that relationship?
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Sat Stats
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Marriages in China plunged by 20% to the lowest level on record last year, a setback to efforts by the government to reverse a demographic crisis threatening the world’s second-biggest economy.
The number of marriage registrations fell to 6.1 million, according to statistics released by China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs on Saturday, after a post-pandemic increase to nearly 7.7 million in 2023. The tally for last year marks the fewest marriages since public records began in 1986 and is less than half the peak reached in 2013.
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If the coastline of the New York Harbor region were stretched out, it would be longer than the state of California. New York City’s waterfront is bigger than Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston combined. As vast as it is, the area that is officially known as the New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary is even more staggering in its complexity, encompassing such a concatenation of inlets, margins, banks, strands, runnels, rivers, reefs, rivulets, coves, creeks, and kills; of brooks, basins, bays, shoals, shores, islands, islets, and peninsulas, of jetties, bluffs, heights, scallops, spits, crags, beaches, reaches, bends, bights, channels, sandbars, sounds, and points, as to be virtually unmatched in the United States.
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In January, the U.S. government had 2.4 million civilian employees, excluding the postal service, and cuts unveiled so far appear to be less than 30,000 in a labor market that has added an average 237,000 jobs over each of the past three months. The ultimate economic impact will depend on how many jobs are actually cut and the spillover effect on contractors and spending.
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While Europe’s role in the slave trade may have been secondary it can scarcely be described as minor. The traffic was broadly based, with ninety-six European ports dispatching at least one voyage to Africa. Almost every port large enough to initiate transoceanic trade participated in the business. Owners, their employees and, most important, the public had unquestioning support for the business until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The Portuguese and Spanish created the Atlantic slave-trading system, and they were the last to abandon it. They dispatched more voyages and carried off far more enslaved women and men than did the British throughout the era.
Generally, the new data reveals a sense of equality between buyer and seller on the African littoral, at least until late in the slave trade era…Africanists have yet to take on board new population estimates for African regions in 1850 and match these with new estimates of the exodus of people that are now available. It now seems unlikely that outside influences transformed the nature of slavery in Africa.
…only four other jurisdictions in the Americas received more African captives than Barbados.--from Eltis
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Households making about $250,000 or more a year now account for 49.7% of all spending compared with about 36% three decades ago.
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Trouble in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Apparently aided by Rwanda.
Göktay Koraltan / BBC
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