What Happened Today: March 25, 2022
White House easing Europe’s gas woes; EU regulates Silicon Valley marketplaces; Frostie rug pull
The Big Story
Continuing a series of meetings this week with NATO and European leaders, President Biden announced today a deal to get U.S. natural gas to Europe in an effort to help European nations become less reliant on Russia. In something of a recurring theme for the White House, the announcement was light on details. Lacking the authority to demand that U.S. natural gas exporters send their supplies to Europe, and with ongoing problems at most of the major U.S. coastal export ports, it’s unclear how the Biden administration will satisfy its pledge to disperse what amounts to approximately 10% of the current annual U.S. natural gas export. “I have no idea how they are going to do this,” Charif Souki, a gas production executive, told The New York Times. “But I don’t want to criticize them because for the first time, they are trying to do the right thing.” With roughly 40% of Europe’s natural gas sourced from Russia, much of that sent through Ukrainian pipelines, Europe continues to struggle to stabilize its energy supply while being consistent in its sanctions against the Kremlin. The German economy minister, Robert Habeck said the U.S. supply deal will help his country reach its newly announced goal to be “independent of Russian gas” by the summer of 2024, though it remains to be seen if the European nations weaning themselves off Russian energy supplies will do so with either U.S. natural gas stock or with cargo that was destined for other markets, if not a mix of both. In either case, European leaders remain under intense pressure at home to bring down energy prices, which continue to drive up the cost of household utilities.
Read it here: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-eu-strike-lng-deal-europe-seeks-cut-russian-gas-2022-03-25/
In The Back Pages: Your Weekend Essay: To Life! From Berlin to the Ukraine Border
The Rest
→ Here’s a good rule of thumb: If tech monopolies are complaining that anticipated legislation could stifle innovation, dwindle consumer choices, or hamper growth, it’s probably a good thing—at least for everyone but them. Google, Apple, and Facebook/Instagram parent, Meta, are all barking variations of those arguments against the European Union’s forthcoming regulation, announced last night, that will limit how tech giants operate, with fines worth tens of billions of dollars for certain violations. A potentially groundbreaking set of rules, the Digital Markets Act will likely have global ramifications as tech giants adjust to rules in Europe, where lawmakers have been more strict than the U.S. on Silicon Valley operators doing business on the continent. Though not yet final, the act would, among other things, rein in Google and Amazon’s ability to throttle competitors’ products coming up in searches within their online stores, and allow developers to sell apps to iPhone users without having to do so exclusively through the Apple App Store. Essentially designed to unwind some of the monopoly power tech giants have accumulated over smaller companies, the act “will be the first comprehensive attempt at making digital markets more competitive,” Zach Meyers, a tech industry analyst, told The Wall Street Journal.
→ Growing the possibility of a forthcoming recession, worldwide diesel supplies are struggling to bounce back with renewed demand following a slowdown of production during the COVID-19 pandemic. You have to go back to 2008 to find a time when diesel stock was as low as it is now in Europe, and things aren’t all that much better in the United States. Here, diesel supplies are 21% below the five-year seasonal average before the pandemic. With demand now rising, and the supply chain further strained by the war in Ukraine, inventories are being quickly depleted. As a result, sectors like agriculture, which relies on diesel to power about two-thirds of all farm equipment, and construction operators, with three-fourths of their machines reliant on diesel fuel, are squaring up to the potential need to spike their prices as they ration out the diesel that’s still available.
Read more: https://www.gridbrief.com/p/diesel-black-cascade
→ Young women across Afghanistan were delighted to leave for school on Wednesday morning, with the Taliban finally permitting their return to the classroom for the first time since the Islamic fundamentalist group took over the country last August. Upon their arrival, however, the girls were turned away, told they could not enter the schools until “a plan is drawn in accordance with Afghan culture and Islamic law,” a Taliban representative said. Perhaps evidence of the intergroup power dynamics that have been leading to riffs inside the Taliban since it took over last summer, or just proof that the Taliban wasn’t serious about letting girls receive an education from the start, the move nonetheless shocked the students, many of whom wept outside the school gates, and undermined the goodwill, and potential aid dollars, Western leaders hoped to bestow on the Taliban—as much a reward for good behavior as an attempt to assuage their own guilt for leaving the country in disarray. A United Nations report earlier this month estimated that 95% of Afghanistans do not have enough food, with 23 million facing acute hunger.
→ Prince William and Kate Middleton met yesterday with Jamaica’s Prime Minister Andrew Holness, who told them of his nation’s plans to become an “independent, developed, and prosperous” republic and to remove Queen Elizabeth as its head of state. The Cambridges’ official visit was part of an eight-day swing through the Caribbean—sometimes known as a “vacation.” In addition to scuba diving, a visit to a cocoa farm, and a hangout with soccer stars, the royal couple also encountered large protests in Jamaica that demanded reparations for the 300 years of colonization by the British Empire. The protestors were backed up by dozens of Jamaica’s political leaders, who signed a letter for the visitors with a list of 60 reasons why their country is owed an apology from England’s royal family. In response, Prince William tiptoed around the demands while offering his “profound sorrow” over the colonization, trafficking, and enslavement of Jamaican people. After Jamaica, the prince and princess were off to the Bahamas.
→ Just the numbers: With gas prices in California averaging around $5.88 a gallon (high gas taxes push the California average above the national figure of $4.24 per gallon), car owners could soon receive a direct payment of $400 per car, up to two cars, if Gov. Gavin Newsom’s new gas relief package gets the green light from state lawmakers.
→ Two men were charged on Thursday in the year’s biggest NFT scheme—though it is only March, for those with their sights set high. In January 2022, an NFT creator named “Frostie” rolled out a line of colorful ice-cream-scoop characters, which quickly earned their maker more than a million dollars in sales. Then, within hours of launch, the server supporting the project vanished and the funds were funneled away, which melted the value of the ice-cream NFTs to zero. The Rug Pull, as this common NFT scam is called, in which NFTs are sold with promised benefits and returns before the creators make off with the money, looked like it worked, until the Department of Justice tracked down the duo behind the Frostie scheme and charged them with fraud and money laundering. Remarkably, NFT boosters do not see this episode as an illustration of the market’s instability but of the exact opposite. “This is not the financial crime of old where investigation took months or years,” said Mike Fasanello, the chief compliance officer for LVL, a crypto banking app. “The digital assets space is proving to be a more transparent system than [traditional currency] could ever hope to be.”
→ Going out on top, world number one and recently minted Australian Open champion Ash Barty announced this week that she’s retiring from professional tennis, a move that stunned the tennis world given that she’s only 25 and spent the past 114 weeks as the top-ranked woman. This will be the second time Barty has left the game. After taking the Wimbledon junior title at the age of 15, she stepped away from tennis, citing burnout from the intense travel and demands required for the pro tour. She moved to the more manageable realm of professional cricket instead and eventually came back to tennis, where she won three Grand Slams on a pro circuit that never became less arduous. “I don’t have the physical drive, the emotional want, and everything it takes to challenge yourself at the very top of the level anymore. I am spent,” Barty said of her retirement. The cool, calm, and controlled transition out of the sport might make Björn Borg envious, the Ice Man from Sweden who lost his taste for dominating the men’s tour but eked out a year of sporadic, unenthusiastic tennis before he finally retired at 26, despite John McEnroe’s attempts to persuade his rival to stick around. “When you go out on the court, you should say this is great, I’m going to hit the tennis ball, I’m going to try to win every point, and I like to make a good shot,” Borg said later about why he left the game. “If you don’t think and feel that, it’s very difficult to play.”
→ Speaking of sports, and women’s and men’s leagues in particular. On the occasion of the University of Pennsylvania trans swimmer Lia Thomas’ recent victory in the 500-yard freestyle at the NCAA championships, we might ask, What’s the purpose of gendered leagues in the first place? In a Washington Post column (which the writer riffs on below in a Twitter thread), Megan McArdle points out that “[w]hatever various social purposes women’s sports serve, their justification is biology,” not some subjective idea of fairness. Indeed, biology itself isn’t very fair either, as McArdle argues—some women, like Katie Ledecky, who won the 2017 500-yard race with a time seven seconds faster than Thomas’ recent championship effort—are gifted with genetics that aren’t “fair” for her competitors by the definition used by some in the current debate around Thomas. As a former lackluster men’s swimmer who’s finishing her career as the top-ranked woman in college swimming, Thomas didn’t break any rules making the switch after her gender transition, though that didn’t matter to some of her own aggrieved teammates and many of her competitors—which again raises the question, Who are these leagues for? A question the leagues themselves will no doubt soon have to answer.
→ After putting up a fight against the recall, General Motors has succumbed to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and to endless complaints of sedan drivers across the nation that its SUV headlights are too bright for other drivers on the road—leading the automaker to recall approximately 740,000 of its vehicles. The federal agency found that in cars built between 2010 and 2017, GM was using lights three times brighter than those permitted, a problem GM says it doesn’t yet know how it will fix.
→ The Tab Turn’s Ten! Check out the 10th issue of Tablet Magazine’s printable weekly digest, this week featuring fact-checkers, Putin’s Jewish oligarchs, and Claudia Roden’s home kitchen.
Read more: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-tab-printable-weekly
To Life! From Berlin to the Ukraine Border
On my lap is a list, pages and pages long, of people hunkered down in Lviv, along with the vital medicines they need to survive:
P: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (Anoro Ellipta and 4 inhalers)
A: Cancer (Avastin, 600 mg, 100 tablets)
S: Brain aneurysm (Keppra, 6 packages)
S: Migraines (Sumatriptan)
I’m driving a Renault Kangoo as fast as I can to the Polish town of Narol, near the border with Ukraine. Plugged into the cigarette lighter and squeezed in between the two seats, a fridge hums loudly and makes switching gears difficult. But the fridge is keeping the vital medicine cold.
In the trunk there are hundreds of cans of tuna, pasta, infusions, and syringes. Along with the medicines, the supplies were paid for by donations from all over the world, but they were all gathered in Berlin. It was in Berlin, 80 years ago, where war emerged and spread all over Europe, inflicting death from the West to the East.
And it’s in Berlin where I have been living for the past 22 years with my family, rebuilding a Jewish life. The irony is not lost on me. It causes my head to spin.
Here I am: a Swiss Jew, who grew up in peace and safety, whose grandfather was in Auschwitz, whose grandmother was a hidden child in Budapest, whose great grandfather was from Lviv, and whose father-in-law was liberated by the Russians in the Czernowitz Ghetto in March of 1944.
Here I am: in March of 2022, exactly 78 years later, with this suitcase of history jammed in my head, trying to bring life from the West to the East, from Berlin to the people in need in Lviv. From where death came to where death is found today.
As my friend and I pass Krakow and enter what was once called Galicia, it is my turn to take the passenger seat. I look out the window and see one town after another passing by. I look them up online. There’s Tarnów, once home to 25,000 Jews until World War II, a population with roots back to the 15th century. We pass Debiça, where the Jews first arrived in 1293. During World War II, the Germans created a Jewish ghetto there before eventually killing most of them either on the spot or in the Auschwitz camp. In the forested hills south of the town, strong Polish underground forces operated. As we drive past the forest, I wonder what these trees have seen.
It is nearing midnight, and we miss our exit for the town of Narol. We end up in Jaroslaw. We stop and snap some pictures of the synagogue. It was here that Jews first arrived in the 15th century, and it was here they established a self-governing body, the Council of Four Lands. It is too much, too much history, so much life, so much death.
We go on to Narol and meet our contact, Tadeusz. We park the car, plug in the fridge with the medicine, and fall into an exhausted sleep in the home of Tadeusz’s friends. Tomorrow, Tadeusz will pass the supplies to a courier who will cross the border and, we hope, manage to deliver it to the Jewish community in Lviv.
Before we drive back to Berlin, I look at the map again. Belzec, the third-deadliest extermination camp built by the Germans, is a 10-minute drive away. More than 400,000 Jews were killed, maybe as many as 500,000—only seven survived, and one gave testimony.
Again, it is too much to grasp. For hundreds of years, these towns were teeming with Jewish life. But these are no longer hometowns to Jews. And here we are again, in the midst of a devastating war. The people in Lviv wait for their medicine, many of them refugees from Kiev, Kharkiv, Odessa. Four weeks ago, they had a home, and now they do not.
This trip to the border and back only took 34 hours, but it feels like it’s been a lifetime. On the road back to Berlin, that capital of death 80 years ago, and now my home, I organize my thoughts. Here is what I know.
We Jews can’t hold on to much. We are often forced to let go of our homes and birthplaces. We must be willing to live in places that were off-limits yesterday. But one thing we hold on to and bring with us wherever we go: We value life over everything. No matter how difficult the journey through yesterday’s landscapes of death, and the irony of delivering life to Jews in Galicia from Berlin, that is what we do, as we must, traveling through lifetimes to save a life at a time.
Joelle Spinner is a Swiss Jew who has been living in Berlin for 22 years with her husband and three daughters.