9: Italy

Five Quick Takes on Regime Change in Syria Best Russian aphorism to sum up the challenge that regional and global powers now face in fixing Syria: “It is easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup, than to turn fish soup into an aquarium.”

The Winners and Losers Following the Fall of al-Assad
She Won Over Italy. Now She’s Bringing Trumpism to Europe. Far-right parties like the one Ms. Meloni leads are now involved in governments in seven E.U. countries and are on the rise almost everywhere, including in France and Germany. ...... ......... a hard line on immigration. On this issue, the European Union has shifted to the right in recent years, policing borders and hardening asylum rules. But Ms. Meloni has taken the anti-immigration stance to a new level with her proposal to use detention centers in Albania to check and eventually deport migrants before they even set foot on E.U. soil. Circumventing E.U. laws and projecting brutal toughness, this is exactly the kind of initiative that embodies the Trumpist spirit. ...... Mr. Trump’s disdain for Europe is legendary. He reportedly vowed not to defend the continent if it’s attacked and recently referred to it as a “mini China”

How to Multiply the Power of Women and Girls in Africa
China’s Critical Minerals Embargo Is Even Tougher Than Expected Alarm is rising among multinational companies doing business with China about Beijing’s decision last week to order a trade embargo on the export of four critical minerals to the United States. The central subject of concern is a provision extending the ban to companies in other countries that transfer minerals to American firms after acquiring them from China. ......... The order is the first time China has included a broad ban on so-called transshipment in a government regulation on exports. It also underlines Beijing’s readiness to escalate its tit-for-tat response to the tougher trade policies promised by President-elect Donald J. Trump. ........ The volley of measures could also signal Beijing’s willingness to make a deal with the United States. .............. The spokesman for China’s Commerce Ministry, He Jiandao, defended the new regulations on minerals exports as “a reasonable measure” and said China was “willing to strengthen dialogue with all parties in the field of export controls and jointly maintain the stability and smooth flow of global production and supply chains.” ........... On Dec. 2, Washington added more than 100 Chinese companies to a restricted trade list and banned the sale to China of some of the fastest semiconductors and the equipment to make them. The administration portrayed the action as a technical adjustment to address problems like the creation of shell companies to bypass previously imposed sanctions against existing enterprises. ........... In 1973, Arab countries imposed a six-month embargo on oil shipments to the United States in response to American support for Israel during a Mideast war that year, contributing to a quadrupling of gasoline prices. ....... And in August 1941, the United States, in response to Japan’s aggression on China, placed an embargo on oil and gasoline exports to Japan, four months before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. ........ the Biden administration has restricted the export to China of the fastest 5 percent or so of the world’s semiconductors, which are used in military applications as well as in artificial intelligence.

Chinese Carmakers Are Taking Mexico by Storm While Eyeing U.S. A makeshift dealership for the Chinese electric vehicle company BYD has sprung up in this dusty lot. Esteban Alegría, an employee, said the dealership was selling cars as fast as they arrived from China. Mr. Alegría’s top seller is the Dolphin Mini, a small but capable four-door electric compact that costs about $18,000, about $10,000 less than the cheapest battery-powered vehicle available in the United States. .......... Chinese carmakers are effectively barred from the United States by tariffs that double the sticker price of vehicles imported from China, and they are not yet manufacturing significant numbers of vehicles in Mexico that could be exported across the border. ........ Initially, the plants would serve Latin America, part of a campaign by Chinese automakers to erode the dominance of Japanese, American and European carmakers in places like Brazil and Thailand. ......... But there is little doubt that, eventually, Chinese carmakers hope to use Mexico as an on-ramp to the United States. ........... President Biden and President-elect Donald J. Trump have been emphatic about wanting to keep Chinese automakers out of the United States, well aware of the threat they pose to U.S. car and auto parts factories that employ a million workers. .......... The Chinese government has long subsidized carmakers with the goal of becoming a major auto exporter. ......... China’s car market is the world’s largest by far, and the growing prowess of domestic producers is having far-reaching effects. General Motors said on Wednesday that it would take a more than $5 billion hit to its profit as it restructured its operations in China, which have been losing money in recent years. ......... BYD’s Shark pickup, a $45,000 plug-in hybrid, is poaching buyers from the Toyota Tacoma, he said, while the BYD Song, a $30,000 plug-in S.U.V., is luring customers from the Toyota RAV4. The Chinese models cost $10,000 less than the comparable Toyotas. ......... “I don’t know if people are going to let them sell in the United States,” Mr. López said, referring to BYD, “but they can compete with any brand.” ......... Although U.S. tariffs on cars made in China are high, in theory Chinese cars made in Mexico and exported north of the border would currently have to pay a maximum tariff of just 2.5 percent. .............. The threat from China will grow as electric vehicles become more popular. Those cars already account for half of all new cars in China, giving the country’s carmakers a head start. ............. While Chinese electric vehicles still cost more than gasoline models, she said, they cost only 30 percent as much to fuel.

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Grand Total: A Record $2 Billion Beyond its numbers, the Eras Tour has been a mega-event that elevated the already-super-famous Swift to a new level, making her an epochal symbol of cultural saturation on the level of the Beatles in the 1960s or Michael Jackson in his ’80s prime. Swift’s every onstage utterance, outfit swap or offstage sighting was thoroughly documented, on social media and in the mainstream press, with news outlets big and small rushing to capture Swifties’ clicks. Online, fans tracked every tweak to the three-hour-plus set lists. ........... To prepare herself for the physical demands of the show, she trained for six months, with a cardio regimen that included singing the entire set list while running on a treadmill, she told Time magazine. ..........

“I finally, for the very first time, physically prepared correctly.”

Why Running the Government Like a Business Would Be a Disaster Businesses and government do fundamentally different jobs, and efforts at remaking government with an eye to cost-cutting can end in disaster. That’s because a lot of what the government does is hard to quantify and involves complicated tasks that inevitably require bureaucratic coordination and, yes, inefficiency......... business appears more efficient in large part because what it does is usually simpler than what the government does. ......... and, say, reward F.B.I. field offices based on how much intelligence they produce on potential threats. We’d surely get bloated, uninformative reports that nonetheless fill agents’ word count quotas. (If this sounds like parody, it’s not so different from the approach the military often took in evaluating success in Vietnam: What mattered were easy-to-measure enemy body counts, which turned out to be very different from the harder to quantify metric of winning the war, especially when civilian bodies were easily mislabeled combatants.) ............ because there haven’t been any major terrorist attacks for a while, the masters of DOGE might be inclined to trim the F.B.I.’s budget. While disbanding the F.B.I. is unlikely to be on the agenda, Mr. Musk has already said the federal government “should be able to get away with 99 agencies” rather than the current figure, which he put at around 428. (The figure given by the Federal Register is 441.) ....... or more like D.I.Y. home renovators taking a swing at a load-bearing wall. The problem is that we won’t know what they’ve done until the house has already collapsed. And someone like Mr. Musk may be less attuned to such concerns precisely because when things go awry at his companies — a SpaceX rocket explodes or almost two million Teslas are recalled because of a software failure — the results are not as catastrophic as they can be for government misfires. ............. There are surely some ideas that can be imported from business — ideas that NASA and the Postal Service can pick up from SpaceX and FedEx. (Just as surely, there are ideas that SpaceX could learn from NASA.)

When They Hear Plants Crying, Moths Make a Decision You may not want to sit next to a crying baby on an airplane. Apparently, moths feel the same way about plants........... When some plants are dehydrated or under some other form of stress, they cry a mournful melody made of ultrasonic clicks. Some moths are able to hear those clicks .......... females usually preferred to lay eggs on a thriving plant, which is more likely to provide enough food for the newborn larvae, instead of on a dehydrated one.......

plant bioacoustics