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Dose Of News Useful Today
Monday, February 1st
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📅 Happy February
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Welcome to Monday. Today we’re covering the UK and China’s conflict over Hong Kong visas, Johnson & Johnson’s Phase 3 vaccine results, and the CDC’s new mask mandate. 🗞👇
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P.S. Our website was offline this weekend for planned maintenance a little longer than expected – apologies to anyone affected. If you had/are having any issues, please hit the reply button and let us know!
⏰🚀 Ready, Set, Go: Today’s newsletter takes 4.62 minutes to read.
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Daily Sprinkle |
“The most important thing is to try and inspire people so that they can be great in whatever they want to do.”
–Kobe Bryant
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This Week at a Glance
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Monday: Start of Black History Month; Oregon’s Prop 110 decriminalizing drugs takes effect.
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Tuesday: Groundhog Day; CDC rule requiring masks on public transportation takes effect.
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Wednesday: Golden Globe nominations announced.
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Thursday: Optimist Day.
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Friday: Monthly U.S. jobs report.
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🇭🇰🇨🇳🇬🇧 Hong Kong, China, & the UK
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On Friday, China said it will no longer recognize the British National Overseas (BNO) passport - first offered to Hong Kongers ahead of China’s takeover of the country from Britain in 1997 - as a valid travel document or form of identification starting Sunday.
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The move came two days before the UK began accepting applications for a revamped version of the BNO passport offering a path to residency and citizenship for millions of Hong Kong residents.
🤿 A deeper dive…
The BNO passport was first issued in the 1980s and only allowed six-month visits to the UK without the right to work.
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Last July, the UK government announced they would expand the rights granted to Hong Kong residents with a BNO passport. Britain’s move was in response to China passing a controversial national security law effectively ending the agreed-upon “one country, two systems” principle for Hong Kong.
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Under the new guidelines, some 2.9M Hong Kong residents and their dependents (5.2M total) can apply for BNO passports, allowing them to reside and work in the UK for five years, as well as apply for citizenship after staying another year.
About 350k Hong Kongers held BNO passports before the UK offered the new path to citizenship. Government figures show applications surging since pro-democracy protests began in 2019.
What’s Next?
It’s not immediately clear what impact China’s decision will have on Hong Kong residents seeking to leave for the UK.
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The British Foreign Office says a BNO passport is not required to receive a BNO visa as long as applicants can prove eligibility using other documents.
It is also unclear how many Hong Kong residents will choose to immigrate to the UK.
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British officials estimate between 258k and 322k BNO citizens will arrive over the next five years, though they predict an “extreme" scenario where 500k people immigrate within the first year of the program, and up to 1M in the next five years.
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🌎 Around the World
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🇷🇺 Russia: Tens of thousands of people across the country took to the streets on Sunday – the latest in a series of protests in support of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Over 5,100 people were arrested by Russian police during the demonstrations, including Navalny’s wife, Yulia.
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🇲🇲 Myanmar: The military seized power from its civilian-run government early Monday, detaining leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other senior party officials. Local television reportedly said the military was taking control for one year.
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📝 CDC Issues Mask Mandate
The CDC issued a new order on Friday mandating the use of facemasks on most forms of public transportation heading to or operating within the U.S. The mandate, which includes airplanes, buses, ships, trains, taxis/ridesharing services, and transportation hubs, goes into effect tonight at 11:59 p.m. ET.
More: Also on Friday, the CDC separately announced that it would extend a federal moratorium on evictions until March 31st.
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💉 J&J Shares Vaccine Results
Johnson & Johnson published results from Phase 3 trials of its single-shot coronavirus vaccine on Friday, showing it to be 66% effective at preventing “moderate to severe” COVID-19 infections. While the vaccine was 72% effective during testing in the U.S., it was less effective during testing in South Africa (57%), likely due to the recent spread of a new strain of the virus in that area.
📝 Important to Note: The vaccine prevented 85% of severe infections and 100% of hospitalizations and deaths.
In other vaccine news… AstraZeneca on Sunday agreed to supply 40 million coronavirus vaccines to the EU by the end of March, two days after the EU approved it for use.
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⏰ Catch Up Quick
🎤 Coachella 2021 was canceled by health officials due to the pandemic. No information was provided on any potential reschedule dates.
⚖️ Former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith was sentenced to 12 months probation for altering an email used to support a surveillance application in the FBI’s investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. (Left-Center | Right-Center)
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☝️ 1 Last Thing…
Image via Twitter
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A chunk of California’s Highway 1 fell into the Pacific Ocean after a heavy rainstorm south of Big Sur. Bonus: Here's a drone video.
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🚀 Meanwhile, In Sherwood Forest…
Shares of GameStop (+68%), AMC (+54%), Express (+28%), Bed Bath & Beyond (+5%), Blackberry (-4%), Koss (+53%), Nokia (-3%) and other heavily-shorted stocks rose sharply in early trading Friday after Robinhood and other popular online brokerages said they would resume limited trading of the previously-restricted stocks.
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However, the stocks gave back a significant chunk of their previous gains after it was revealed Robinhood imposed even heavier trading limits on the shares in question.
It was unclear when exactly on Friday Robinhood implemented the stricter rules, which apply to a range of stocks and, in the case of GameStop, limit users to buying just one share apiece. Earlier in the day, users had been able to purchase up to five shares.
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Robinhood said it will continue to limit trading Monday on eight stocks, down from as many as 50 on Friday.
GameStop closed Friday at $325 per share (up nearly 1,800% YTD).
💬 What They’re Saying:
"The amount required by clearinghouses to cover the settlement period of some securities rose tremendously this week. How much? To put it in perspective, this week alone, our clearinghouse-mandated deposit requirements related to equities increased ten-fold. And that’s what led us to put temporary buying restrictions in place on a small number of securities that the clearinghouses had raised their deposit requirements on.
It was not because we wanted to stop people from buying these stocks. We did this because the required amount we had to deposit with the clearinghouse was so large—with individual volatile securities accounting for hundreds of millions of dollars in deposit requirements—that we had to take steps to limit buying in those volatile securities to ensure we could comfortably meet our requirements."
–Robinhood, in a blog post Friday.
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📰 In Other GameStop News:
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Melvin Capital Management, one of the hedge funds on the opposite side of GameStop stock’s meteoric rise, lost 53% on its investments in January, per the WSJ.
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☝️ 1 Last Thing…
🧸 Toys R Us closed down its final two stores in the U.S. on Friday.
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🦌 ‘Ice’ Of You to Drop By
A week after his stuffed deer found its way into the frozen Rideau Canal in Ottawa, Canada, four-year-old Nico Lavallée was delighted to learn the National Capital Commission – the organization that manages the canal – rescued his beloved plushie.
And in other news to cure the blues...
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A community of retired military members in San Antonio, TX – including veterans of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam – are working together this February to completely renovate the dilapidated home of 94-year-old World War II veteran and Purple Heart recipient Alfred Guerra.
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Born in January 2020 with a life-threatening disease known as biliary atresia, one-year-old Kasen Donerlson has been labeled a “miracle baby” by doctors after surviving both a 10-hour-liver transplant and COVID-19 – and is now expected to live a long and healthy life.
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🏙️ City Living
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What is the most populous metro area in the world?
A) New York City, New York
B) Shanghai, China
C) New Delhi, India
D) Tokyo, Japan
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(keep scrolling for the answer) |
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Dose of Knowledge Answer |
D) Tokyo, Japan
The Tokyo metro area contains 37.3M people – roughly 6.1M more than New Delhi, the world’s second most-populous metro area. NYC, the largest U.S. city by population, ranks 11th with 18.8M people.
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