Recommended Weekend Reading
June 30 - July 2, 2023
Here are our recommended reads from reports and articles we read in the last week. We hope you find these useful and have a great weekend. And let us know if you or someone you know wants to be added to our distribution list.
· North Korea’s Cyber Strategy” Recorded Future
A mention of North Korean hackers typically conjures images of either crippling cyberattacks or, more often, massive cryptocurrency heists. But a new report on the authoritarian state’s capabilities and tendencies paints a different picture. The report, prepared by cyber-intelligence firm Recorded Future and shared exclusively with Foreign Policy, labels espionage as the predominant motive of North Korea’s cyber program. Recorded Future analyzed 273 cyberattacks over a 14-year period linked to North Korean state-sponsored groups and found that information collection was the primary motivation for more than 70 percent of them.
· “Latin America’s Lithium; Perspectives on Critical Minerals and the Global Energy Transition” The Wilson Center
This report examines the region’s enormous potential to supply the lithium needed to drive the global energy transition. This report – the first in a series – looks at how U.S.-China competition is reflected in the scramble for lithium in South America, how opposition to lithium mining in local communities could curtail production, and how to improve regulations regarding water use to ensure a sustainable lithium industry in the region.
· “The End of Optimism in China” Michael Schuman/The Atlantic
The author, who lives in Beijing, writes that in recent years, pessimism has grown in China. The go-go years of China’s economic growth have come to an end, and with them, the easy gains in welfare and free-flowing jobs. Three years of President Xi’s unforgiving “zero COVID” pandemic controls, which locked hundreds of millions into their homes or placed them under other restrictions, exposed the regime’s capacity for irrationality and brutality.
How the Chinese people truly feel about Xi and his agenda is almost impossible to determine in the absence of a free press or freedom of speech. Yet some statistics offer clues. For example, the proportion of adults engaged in starting new companies has fallen dramatically in China recently, from 15.5 percent in 2014 to only 6 percent last year.
· “Egypt’s dog breed ban leaves owners scrambling to save their pets” Al-Monitor
Egyptian authorities recently enacted a law that effectively outlaws the ownership of specific dog breeds. The law provided a list of dog breeds deemed "dangerous" and unsuitable for ownership without thorough safety inspections, including the husky, German shepherd, and Great Dane. Owners of these breeds must either surrender their pets within a month or prepare for confiscatory raids. The law will allow ownership of only ten breeds without inspection — the cocker spaniel, Labrador, poodle, Malinois, Pomeranian, Jack Russell terrier, white shepherd, Maltese dog, and Samoyed — and imposes stringent regulations on breeds such as the pit bull, Rottweiler, German shepherd, boxer, husky, Caucasian shepherd and bull mastiff.
Map of the Week
New data on disparities in Medicaid access to opioid
addiction treatment
From Statnews.com: “An estimated 82,998 people died from opioid overdoses in the U.S. last year. A new study published Friday in JAMA Health Forum drives home how lack of access to lifesaving medications could contribute to these preventable deaths.
The study is the most comprehensive Medicaid analysis of opioid addiction to date, analyzing a national claims dataset with 76 million patient data points between 2016 and 2018. Medicaid patients are already at a disproportionate risk of opioid overdoses, almost four times higher than patients on commercial insurance. Correspondingly, Medicaid is one of the primary payers of opioid addiction treatment in the U.S., covering nearly 40% of adults under 65 with this chronic disease.”
Chart of the Week
Japan is employing ever more immigrant workers
From Macrobond: “With an aging population causing a labor shortage in some industries, historically immigration-averse Japan has been welcoming more and more foreign workers. As the Wall Street Journal recently wrote, it’s also loosening regulations, potentially letting them stay in the country for good. As our charts show, the numbers have quadrupled in just 15 years – and the foreign-born now account for 2 percent of the total labor force. The effects in the services, retail, and hospitality sectors are easily seen in this visualization.
