Links, 1 June 2017

Politics

• 20 million starving to death: inside the worst famine since World War II
• Operation Car Wash: Is this the biggest corruption scandal in history?
• Trump:
  • Trump expected to withdraw from Paris climate deal and As U.S. retreats, EU and China seek climate leadership at summit
  • Trump’s Trip Was a Catastrophe for U.S.-Europe Relations and What Was Merkel Thinking?
  • New Trump Budget Completely Disappears In An Amazing Just 3 Days
  • Would You Let Trump Run Your Company?
  • The Coat of Arms Said ‘Integrity.’ Now It Says ‘Trump.’
• After Brexit: the UK will need to renegotiate at least 759 treaties and The Brexit treaty renegotiation checklist and Analysing the EU Exit Charge
• The secret of Roger Ailes’s billion-dollar bubble and Roger Ailes Was One of the Worst Americans Ever
• A Visit to the Mosul Front
• Saudi Arabia Experiments with Reform Amid Economic Downturn
• The Battle for Yemen: A Quagmire for Saudi Arabia and the UAE
• The Six-Day War at 50 and Israel-Palestine: the real reason there’s still no peace
• Colombia’s Guerrillas Come Out of the Jungle
• Unaccompanied Migrant Boys in Greece Turn to Prostitution
• Russia escalates spy games after years of US neglect
• Keeping North Korea Afloat Puts These Nations in Trump’s Crosshairs and The US just pulled off an important missile defense test
• The west is mired in ‘soft’ development. China is trying the ‘hard’ stuff
• Cambodia’s Hun Sen warns of ‘civil war’ as election looms
• Elections in Papua New Guinea’s dysfunctional democracy
• Tracing the source of MacronGate, the Macron offshore papers

 

Economics & Finance

• Speculative Dynamics of Prices and Volume and The Time-Varying Effect of Monetary Policy on Asset Prices and Monetary Policy and Bubbles
• Implementing Monetary Policy: Perspective from the Open Market Trading Desk and a whole bunch of people on QE: Tl;dr for the TSC
• What could a euro-area finance minister do?
• Tax Evasion and Inequality (pdf)
• Decoded: Breaking down how an actual trading algorithm works. and Build Your Own Trading Bot
• The Horrifying Mathematics Of Infinitesimal Agents
• Why getting rid of grades would help rich students — and hurt poor ones
• Cheer up, millennials: your pensions could be even worse
• Darwin visits Wall Street
• Why most older Chinese women do not work and China’s Monetary Conundrum and PBOC Trying to Keep It Simple With Spotlight on Two Rates and When provinces fought back against reform
• “Asteroid worth $10,000 quadrillion ‘could transform global economy’”
• What the Mariel Boatlift of Cuban Refugees Can Teach Us about the Economics of Immigration: An Explainer and a Revelation
• A Not-So-Brief Thought on Zoning
• Using homes as ATMs, not homebuying fervor, was more to blame for the housing crisis and Do Labor Markets Discipline? Evidence from RMBS Bankers
• Which Companies Have the Highest Revenue Per Employee?
• In search of a price index for household income
• The India–Australia FTA’s impossible road ahead
• The Hunger Bonds and Goldman Sachs Under Fire for Venezuela Bond Deal
• Dealer Balance Sheets and Corporate Bond Liquidity Provision
• Beta Convexity
• London’s Brexit Apocalypse Is Nowhere in Sight and The great London property squeeze and Chart of the Week: Brexit and The City and Clearing Fragmentation Follies: We’re From the European Commission, and We’re Here to Help You
• Norges Bank’s video explaining the new bank note (spot the Governor)

 

Science & Tech

• If ET Calls, Think Twice About Answering
• What Both the Left and Right Get Wrong About Race
• Rice Was First Grown At Least 9,400 Years Ago
• NASA’s Van Allen Probes Spot Man-Made Barrier Shrouding Earth
• The Physicist Who Denies Dark Matter
• A Linguist Responds to Cormac McCarthy
• How to Sequence DNA in Space
• What Is Jogging Doing to Your Dog?
• The Spider Web That Gets Stronger When It Touches Insects
• Robot hearts: medicine’s new frontier
• Paul Allen shows off his new rocket-launching plane, and it’s big
• ‘BlessU-2’ robot priest delivers blessings in five different languages
• A Year of Google & Apple Maps
• New paint colors invented by neural network
• Cryptocurrency Might be a Path to Authoritarianism and That thing about bitcoin, crypto currencies and money laundering and The currency of the future has a settlement problem and The Rise of Cryptocurrency Ponzi Schemes
• Net neutrality going down in flames as FCC votes to kill Title II rules
• Are You a Self-Interrupter?

 

Misc

• We Bought a Crack House
• Syrian football: The Dictator’s Team
• The mayor who loved China
• The Rise and Fall of Toronto’s Classiest Con Man
• Why Do Colleges Give Out “Honorary” Degrees?
• Kanagawa woman finds success in crowdfunding matchmaking quest and Chinese Youth: If You Don’t Get Married Soon, The Party Will Help
• The Curious Case of the Disappearing Nuts
• Murakami on going for a run: The Running Novelist
• Prosecutors to drop charges in Stanley Cup dead catfish toss (“No matter how much I ran over it with the truck, the head was too damn big.”)
• Pissed-off artist adds statue of urinating dog next to ‘Fearless Girl’
• The Covfefe Code