1. Thomas Friedman: "One day they may name a street after President Trump in Tehran. Why? Because Trump just ordered the assassination of possibly the dumbest man in Iran and the most overrated strategist in the Middle East: Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani.....Today’s Iran is the heir to a great civilization and the home of an enormously talented people and significant culture. Wherever Iranians go in the world today, they thrive as scientists, doctors, artists, writers and filmmakers — except in the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose most famous exports are suicide bombing, cyberterrorism and proxy militia leaders. The very fact that Suleimani was probably the most famous Iranian in the region speaks to the utter emptiness of (the) regime, and how it has wasted the lives of two generations of Iranians by looking for dignity in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways." (via The New York Times)
2. Retired General David Petraeus, a former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, on the killing of Qassem Suleimani: "It is impossible to overstate the importance of this particular action. It is more significant than the killing of Osama bin Laden or even the death of [Islamic State leader Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi. Suleimani was the architect and operational commander of the Iranian effort to solidify control of the so-called Shia crescent, stretching from Iran to Iraq through Syria into southern Lebanon. He is responsible for providing explosives, projectiles, and arms and other munitions that killed well over 600 American soldiers and many more of our coalition and Iraqi partners just in Iraq, as well as in many other countries such as Syria. So his death is of enormous significance." (via The New Yorker, Foreign Policy)
3. Iran vowed “harsh retaliation” for a U.S. airstrike near Baghdad’s airport that killed a top Iranian general who had been the architect of its interventions across the Middle East, and the U.S. said Friday it was adding troops to the region as tensions soared in the wake of the targeted killing. The killing of Maj. Gen. Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, marks a major escalation in the standoff between Washington and Iran, which has careened from one crisis to another since President Donald Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal and imposed crippling sanctions. The targeted strike, and any retaliation by Iran, could ignite a conflict that engulfs the whole region, endangering U.S. troops in Iraq, Syria and beyond. Over the last two decades, Mr. Soleimani had assembled a network of heavily armed allies stretching all the way to southern Lebanon, on Israel’s doorstep. (via AP, The Boston Globe)
4. Iran’s cyber troops long have been among the world’s most capable and aggressive — disrupting banking, hacking oil companies, even trying to take control of a dam from afar — while typically stopping short of the most crippling possible actions, say experts on the country’s capabilities. But Friday’s American airstrike that killed Maj. Gen. Soleimani, now threatens to unleash a fully unshackled Iranian response, analysts and former U.S. officials warned. They said a variety of potential cyberattacks, possibly in conjunction with more traditional forms of lethal action, would be well within the digital arsenal of a nation that has vowed “severe revenge.” (via The Washington Post)
5. Scores of people have now contracted a mystery respiratory illness linked to a food market in China, local health authorities said. At least 44 people have now been infected in the outbreak of a new type of viral pneumonia, awakening memories of the 2003 Sars outbreak that killed nearly 800 people. Wuhan city health commission said while 11 of the cases diagnosed since December were listed as critical, all those afflicted were being treated in isolation and 121 people who had been in close contact with them were under observation. More here. (via The Independent, CDC.gov, sciencemag.org)
6. Skies turned black and ash rained down as fires raged across southeastern Australia on Saturday, threatening power supplies to major cities and prompting the call-up of 3,000 military reservists. Temperature records were smashed, and gale-force winds pounded fire-stricken coastal communities in the two most populous states of New South Wales and Victoria. New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian warned that worst-case scenario projections were “coming to fruition”, although large-scale evacuations meant the human toll was minimised. Since late September, 23 people have died, more than 1,500 homes have been damaged and an area roughly twice the size of Belgium or Hawaii has burned. Sydney Morning Herald liveblog on the brushfires is here. (via South China Morning Post, Sydney Morning Herald)
7. The death toll from floods caused by torrential rains in the Indonesian capital rose to at least 53 as rescuers found more bodies, disaster officials said on Saturday. The worst monsoon rains in more than a decade deluged Jakarta this week and rising rivers submerged at least 182 neighborhoods while landslides on the city’s outskirts buried at least a dozen people. As the government began seeding clouds in an effort to head off further rain, Agus Wibowo of the National Disaster Mitigation Agency said the fatalities included those who had drowned or been electrocuted since rivers broke their banks on New Year’s Day. Three elderly people died of hypothermia. (via The Guardian)
8. A spike in water temperature of up to 6C above average across a massive patch of ocean east of New Zealand is likely to have been caused by an “anti-cyclone” weather system, a leading scientist says. Appearing on heat maps as a deep red blob, the patch spans at least a million square kilometers – an area nearly 1.5 times the size of Texas, or four times larger than New Zealand – in the Pacific Ocean. (via The Guardian)
9. Ocean acidification threatens to cause billions of dollars in damage to the U.S. economy, harming everything from crabs in Alaska to coral reefs in Florida and the Caribbean, NOAA researchers said in a new report. Carbon dioxide emissions and ocean acidification are occurring at an "unprecedented" rate, deteriorating valuable fisheries and tourist destinations across the United States and its territories, NOAA said in a draft research plan for ocean acidification. "Commercial, subsistence and recreational fishing [and] tourism and coral ecosystems" will likely be damaged by ocean acidification, the plan said. Multibillion-dollar fisheries such as West Coast Dungeness crab, Alaska king crab and New England sea scallops are vulnerable. So are Florida's coral reefs, an asset valued at $8.5 billion. (via Scientific American, ClimateWire.)
10. The United States took measures on Friday to restrict exports of artificial intelligence software as part of a bid to keep sensitive technologies out of the hands of rival powers like China. Under a new rule that goes into effect on Monday, companies that export certain types of geospatial imagery software from the US must apply for a licence to send it overseas except when it is being shipped to Canada. “They want to keep American companies from helping the Chinese make better AI products that can help their military,” said James Lewis, a technology expert with the Centre for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington. The rule was likely to be welcomed by the industry, which had feared a much broader crackdown on exports of most artificial intelligence hardware and software, he said. (via Reuters, South China Morning Post)
11. A new lithium-sulphur battery with an ultra-high capacity could lead to drastically cheaper electric cars and grid energy storage. Mahdokht Shaibani at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and her colleagues have developed a battery with a capacity five times higher than that of lithium-ion batteries. The battery maintains an efficiency of 99 per cent for more than 200 cycles, and a smartphone-sized version would be able to keep a phone charged for five days. (via NewScientist)
12. Federal Reserve officials at their mid-December meeting appeared comfortable holding interest rates steady in the months ahead. Despite some recent economic improvements, officials said they still saw elevated risks of weaker-than-expected growth due to the global slowdown and U.S.-China trade tensions that prompted them to cut rates last year, according to meeting minutes released Friday. The Fed cut its benchmark rate at three consecutive meetings between July and October to a range between 1.5% and 1.75%. Officials held the rate steady in December and indicated they felt no urgency to reverse those cuts anytime soon. (via The Wall Street Journal)
13. American manufacturing activity contracted last month more than it had in a decade, data released Friday showed, a sign that economic damage from President Trump’s trade war could linger even after the United States and China sign an initial trade deal. An index published by the Institute for Supply Management dropped to 47.2 in December, the lowest reading since June 2009 and the fifth straight month of contraction. A reading below 50 indicates the manufacturing sector is contracting. (via The New York Times)
14. In a move that could put the Obama-era health insurance law squarely in the middle of the 2020 election, Democratic-led states Friday asked the Supreme Court for a fast-track review of a recent court ruling that declared part of the statute unconstitutional and cast a cloud over the rest. A coalition of 20 states led by California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra filed a petition seeking expedited review, joined by House Democrats and Washington, D.C. They hope to get a Supreme Court hearing and decision by this summer, before the November election. For the court to agree to such a timetable would be unusual but not unprecedented. (via The Los Angeles Times)
15. A group of leaders of the United Methodist Church, the second-largest Protestant denomination in the United States, announced on Friday a plan that would formally split the church, citing “fundamental differences” over same-sex marriage after years of division. The plan would sunder a denomination with 13 million members globally — roughly half of them in the United States — and create at least one new “traditionalist Methodist” denomination that would continue to ban same-sex marriage as well as the ordination of gay and lesbian clergy. (via The New York Times)
16. The steady decline of Italy’s South, one of Europe’s poorest regions, is emerging as a critical issue for the country’s fragile governing coalition, as banking and industrial troubles there provide a possible opening for a hard-right party seeking to return to power. In recent weeks, the Italian government has said it will take over an important southern bank to save it from collapse, and it is fighting to keep alive Europe’s biggest steel plant and a large factory in Naples. Perennial discontent in the South, which hasn’t fully recovered from the last economic crisis and has scarce job opportunities, makes the region a key political battleground. (via The Wall Street Journal)
17. Ex-Googlers are in open revolt. The latest example came Thursday, when the company’s former head of international relations wrote a withering Medium post about how the once-principled company has abandoned its commitment to not being evil. Disillusioned employees from Alphabet Inc.'s Google aren’t that hard to find these days—it can seem like the company has been in a meltdown for the last two years—but Ross LaJeunesse’s story is notable nonetheless. LaJeunesse is more senior than other Google employees who have publicly objected to the company’s actions. His job was also focused directly on policy, rather than engineering. (via Bloomberg News, Medium.com)
18. Get your flu shot. This flu season is shaping up to be one of the worst in decades, according to the United States' top infectious disease doctor. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, said while it's impossible to predict how the flu will play out, the season so far is on track to be as severe as the 2017-2018 flu season, which was the deadliest in more than four decades, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (via CNN Health)
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Quick Links: The Economist: Chinese technology is booming. Germany faces key Huawei decision. China has made huge strides cleaning up its polluted rivers. To store renewable energy, try freezing air. Canberra and Penrith smash temperature records that stood for 80 years. Only one person died on Oslo’s roads in 2019. Carlos Ghosn: the fugitive. Tesla starts 2020 with a bounce as deliveries surge. How one astronomer hears the Universe.
Political Links: Seventeen charts describe the impact of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. How Trump decided to kill Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Richard Haass: America must be ready for Iranian retaliation. Patrick Coburn: The next war between the US and Iran will be fought out in Iraq. China’s Central Asian plans are unnerving Moscow. Chinese warplanes take South China Sea exercises to new level. China has named a new director of its liaison office in Hong Kong. Five things to know a week before Taiwan elections. How Biden stopped his Iowa tailspin. Klobuchar's campaign in Iowa is getting traction. Hillary Clinton becomes chancellor of Belfast’s Queen’s University. No good idea goes unpunished. Undernews: Trump Deutsche Bank loans underwritten by Russian state-owned bank, whistleblower told FBI.