The Most Internet-Addicted Countries | Populists & Poor People | Backlash Against Billionaires

“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.”

“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win”

“There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.”

– Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The Internet Is Still Young: A new report of online habits shows that Southeast Asia is one of the most internet-addicted regions on the planet. At the head of the top five list is the Philippines, whose users average 10 hours and 2 minutes of screen time every day. Thailand and Indonesia are also in the top five. Brazil and Colombia rank second and fourth, respectively. Japan is at the other end of the spectrum; users there spent the least amount of time online, with a daily average of 3 hours and 45 minutes. India experienced the biggest jump in internet usage last year. The South Asian nation added almost 100 million users, nearly doubling the same growth in China. Internet penetration in India is now at 41 percent.

The report also reveals that 57 percent of the global population is now connected to the internet, with users spending an average of 6.5 hours online daily. According to the report’s author, Simon Kemp: “The big story in this year’s data is the accelerating growth in internet users. More than 360 million people came online for the first time in 2018, at an average rate of more than one million new users every day.” Kemp calculates that the “world’s digital community will spend a combined total of more than 1.2bn years using the internet in 2019.” Additional read: U.K. Doctors Call for Caution in Children’s Use of Screens and Social Media (NYT, $)

The Tortoise And The Hare But We All Lose: Now that President Trump has said he’s taking America out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), there is speculation, and trepidation, that it could usher in a new arms race with Russia. President Putin even said Russia would mirror the US moves and suspend its own obligations under the pact. Bellicose rhetoric aside, harsh economic reality could well force Putin to keep things pretty much the way they are. His ratings are down; he needs to preserve state funds to hedge against new Western sanctions and raise living standards. He really cannot afford to get sucked into a costly nuclear arms race with the US. That could be why he said Moscow would not be deploying new land-based missiles in Europe or elsewhere unless Washington did so first. (Reuters)

First Navka Tower, Next Navka Steaks: Being a friend or associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin is very lucrative. Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov and his wife Tatiana Navka, an ice dancer who won a gold medal in the 2006 Winter Olympics, lead an extraordinarily affluent lifestyle. Navka, who married Peskov in a 2015 celebrity wedding, has accumulated a real estate empire worth well over $10 million and is designing a riverside palace on an exclusive Moscow estate. The project is being overseen by a Russian tycoon who, documents show, has previously done business with Donald Trump. (Guardian)

Additional reads:

• He Played by the Rules of Putin’s Russia, Until He Didn’t: The Story of a Murder. (NYT, $)
• “The Putin I Knew; the Putin I Know. I met Vladimir Putin and trusted him in the early 1990s, when he was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. Now that he’s Russia’s president, he’s different. He’s no friend of democracy.” (NYT, $)
• Top Russian diplomat meets Taliban, encourages US withdrawal. (WaPo, $)
• A Sparkling Shrine to a Reviled Russian Leader. The main hall at the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center, an homage to the former Russian president.” (NYT, $)

al-Baghdadi Has Flown The Coup: Intelligence officials believe the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi survived a coup attempt last month launched by foreign fighters in his eastern Syrian hideout, and that he now has a bounty on his head. It is thought the incident took place January 10 in a village in the Euphrates River Valley where the jihadist group is clinging to its last little bit of land. Apparently a planned move against Baghdadi lead to a firefight between the perpetrators and the fugitive terrorist chief’s bodyguards, who managed to rush him away into nearby deserts. (Guardian)

Additional world news:

• Year Before Killing, Saudi Prince Told Aide He Would Use ‘a Bullet’ on Jamal Khashoggi (NYT, $)
• Saudi Arabia ‘curtailed’ Jamal Khashoggi murder probe – UN expert: Saudi Arabia “seriously curtailed and undermined” Turkey’s ability to investigate the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a UN expert has said.(BBC)
• Zimbabwe Remains In Turmoil After Unrest And Reports Of Heavy Crackdown (NPR)
• Thank God for Canada!: Our boring neighbor is a moral leader of the free world. (NYT, $)

The Yellow Vests Are A Warning Sign Of What’s To Come Down The Road: In recent months Italy’s two far-right deputy prime ministers, Luigi Di Maio and Matteo Salvini, have criticized French President Emmanuel Macron on a host of hot-button issues from immigration to the gilets jaunes (yellow vest) anti-government demonstrations. After Maio met with gilets jaunes leaders this week and declared a “new Europe is being born of the yellow vests” Macron saw red. He said the comments were unacceptable “provocation” and immediately recalled France’s ambassador to Italy.

Salvini initially seemed contrite, saying Rome didn’t want a fallout with Paris, and suggesting the two leaders meet to iron out their differences. Unfortunately that conciliatory gesture was followed by insistence that Macron address three issues first: make French police stop pushing migrants back into Italy, end lengthy border checks blocking traffic, and hand over some 15 Italian leftist militants granted asylum in France in recent decades. With the European Parliament’s elections coming up at the end of May, France’s Minister for European Affairs, Nathalie Loiseau, just wants everybody to mind their own country’s business and play nice with their neighbors.

With Loan Sharks Circling, The CFPB Spills Some Blood In The Water: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was created in 2011 to protect consumers from predatory lending practices and losses like those suffered in the Great Recession. Its first director, Richard Cordray, took aggressive steps to regulate banks and other financial institutions, and prior to President Trump taking office, the CFPB had returned almost 12 billion dollars to consumers. In 2017 Trump picked Mick Mulvaney to head the agency. As a congressman, Mulvaney had proposed a bill to abolish it, and under his leadership the agency began limiting its oversight of the industry. A rule that would have protected the most vulnerable borrowers from the ballooning debt that can accrue with payday loans was due to be implemented beginning in January 2018, but Mulvaney delayed it. Now the agency’s current chief, Kathy Kraninger, has announced the rule is being scrapped for good. (NPR) Exhibit A: When populists turn on protecting poor people.

Additional news from the U.S.A.

• Jeff Bezos accuses National Enquirer owner of ‘extortion and blackmail’: Amazon CEO and world’s richest man publishes blogpost alleging tabloid threatened to publish nude images of him (Guardian)
• Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Releases Green New Deal Outline(NPR)
• Nancy Pelosi just threw some serious shade at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Green New Deal’ (CNN)
• ‘Executive time’: how, exactly, does Trump spend 60% of his day?: A White House leak revealed most of the president’s time is unstructured, but allies hit back at claims he’s doing nothing(Guardian)
• “Supreme Court Stops Louisiana Abortion Law From Being Implemented: Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court’s four liberal justices in voting for the stay.” (NPR)

Parenting the Next Generation

• The Bad News About Helicopter Parenting: It Works: New research shows that hyper-involved parenting is the route to kids’ success in today’s unequal world. (NYT, $) I appreciate my tiger mom these days.
• Do children in two-parent families do better?: Researchers have been looking at how children from single-parent and two-parent families fare in life. So what did they find? (BBC) The health of families in a country is an accurate litmus test on the health of a country.
• Schools in England Introduce a New Subject: Mindfulness (NYT, $)
• Indian man to sue parents for giving birth to him: A 27-year-old Indian man plans to sue his parents for giving birth to him without his consent. (BBC)

Backlash Against Billionaires

• Super-tall, super-skinny, super-expensive: the ‘pencil towers’ of New York’s super-rich: An extreme concentration of wealth in a city where even the air is for sale has produced a new breed of needle-like tower.(Guardian)
• America’s most expensive home sells for $238m to hedge fund boss: Penthouse at 220 Central Park South is 34 times bigger than average Manhattan apartment: ‘Hope he got a lot of bathrooms,’ says homelessness advocate (Guardian)
• Why Can’t Rich People Save Winter?: Ski season is shrinking. Yet the people who love the sport aren’t doing enough to stop climate change.(NYT, $)
• The Davos set are cosying up to the far right – and scared of the left: The World Economic Forum event revealed how elites are more afraid of leftwing populists, than rightwing ones like Bolsonaro (Guardian)
• How to Get Filthy Rich in America Without Anyone Knowing Your Name (Splinter)
• Fightback against the billionaires: the radicals taking on the global elite (Guardian)
• Abolish Billionaires: A radical idea is gaining adherents on the left. It’s the perfect way to blunt tech-driven inequality. (NYT, $)

Thinking Before Eating

• Hard to Swallow: How the military, a marathoner, and the relentless march of capitalism turned protein bars into an unlikely American staple. (Topic)
• How Energy Bars Became America’s Favorite Snack Food (Outside) We can’t stand energy and protein bars. It takes like fake food and reminds us of soylent green.
• This Is What Happens When You Drunkenly Swallow a Live Catfish: A hard lesson in a very strange party tradition (Atlantic) Protein bars is much preferable to live catfish.
• Eating breakfast is not a good weight loss strategy, scientists confirm: Cereal companies created a myth about the first meal of the day. Researchers keep debunking it. (Vox) Regardless, breakfast is our favorite meal of the day.

“The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.”

“Opportunities multiply as they are seized.”

– Sun Tzu, The Art of War

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