(FREE) PAINE IN THE MORNING: 10 things you need to know this Thursday – March 10, 2022

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Biden Crypto Exec Order: U.S. Must Mitigate ‘National Security’ Risks of Digital Assets – President Biden issued a highly anticipated executive order on cryptocurrency earlier today. The order mentions “national security” twenty times, and stresses the importance of maintaining the dominance of the U.S. dollar.

The executive order directs a number of arms of the federal government, including the Department of the Treasury, the Department of Commerce, and the Attorney General to issue reports on the state of the cryptocurrency industry and their involvement in it within 180 days. – READ MORE

Hawaii becomes last state to lift mask mandate, Idaho ends COVID-19 disaster declaration – Hawaii will lift its statewide mask mandate by March 26.

Gov. David Ige announced the move on Tuesday, citing falling COVID-19 case counts and hospitalizations. – READ MORE

‘No Plans to Open Everything’ Germany Set to Pass MORE Coronavirus Rules as Europe Moves On – While Europe may be moving on from COVID-19 lockdown rules, Germany is instead looking to pass even more legislation in the name of Coronavirus.

Germany has announced that it is looking to pass another piece of lockdown legislation that would enable authorities to curb freedoms in the hopes of tackling the Chinese Coronavirus. – READ MORE

UK Government to Burn $11.4 Billion of Unusable PPE – Britain’s government is preparing to incinerate a considerable portion of the £8.7 billion ($11.4 billion) of personal protective equipment (PPE) bought by the Department of Health and Social Care during the coronavirus pandemic that was found to be unsuitable for use, and in some cases not even meeting basic medical standards.

The government announced during a parliamentary committee hearing on Monday their plan to burn 15,000 pallets of the amassed useless items per month as fuel to generate electricity – there is no indication however that this will meaningfully positively affect Britain’s energy crisis, nor recover the wasted expenditure. The hoard of defective PPE includes visors, gloves and gowns.- READ MORE

Mercedes, Mansions, And Murder: How Fraudsters Spent Millions In COVID Relief Funds – In his 2022 State of the Union address, President Biden said, “Tonight, I’m announcing that the Justice Department will name a chief prosecutor for pandemic fraud.” Sorting through the mounds of waste and abuse in the government’s pandemic relief programs might make that official as sick as the Omicron variant.

With the economy setting new records for growth and prosperity, politicians forced businesses to close their doors in the name of fighting COVID-19. To compensate, the federal government allocated trillions of tax dollars to relieve laid-off workers — but instead of reaching them, some of those funds purchased sports cars, put down payments on luxurious homes, and even reportedly paid a hitman to kill a 24-year-old woman and her three-year-old daughter. – READ MORE

John Kerry: Ukraine crisis is bad, but ‘wait until you see’ flood of climate refugees –President Biden’s climate czar, John Kerry, said that while the Ukraine refugee crisis is a “problem” amid Russia’s invasion, it pales in comparison to the wave of migration that will come if climate change is not addressed.

Kerry, the U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, said during the annual CERAWeek conference in Houston Monday that the U.S. must not lose sight of its path toward clean energy now that the Russia-Ukraine war has accelerated the global energy crisis. – READ MORE

Ukraine Bans Wheat & Grain Exports Vital To Global Food Supply, Citing Citizens Under Siege – Ukraine, known as the “breadbasket of Europe” given it’s long been among the world’s top ten wheat exporters and supplied over $6 billion in agricultural products to the European Union in 2020, has issued an emergency order Wednesday banning the export of grains and other products.

The ban includes the export of wheat, oats, millet, buckwheat, sugar, live cattle, meat, and other products considered vital to the global economy. But amid wartime, and with Ukraine’s government saying many of its citizens are now starving under Russian siege, Ukraine’s minister of agrarian and food policy Roman Leshchenko said the drastic action was taken to avert a “humanitarian crisis in Ukraine,” stabilize the market and “meet the needs of the population in critical food products,” according to the AP. – READ MORE

Job Openings Top 11 Million, Adding to Inflationary Pressures – The number of job openings in the U.S. rose to what would have been a record level in January–if not for the upward revision to an all-time high for December.

There were 11.3 million jobs posted at the end of January, exceeding the consensus forecast of 10.9 million and the prior month’s preliminary estimate of 10.925 million, Department of Labor data showed Monday. – READ MORE

Unreliability Of U.S. Electric Grid Increasingly On Display – As energy becomes an increasing focus, problems with the U.S. power grid are coming under even more scrutiny. The grid is becoming less and less reliable at the same time that consumers are becoming more dependent on electricity to power phones, computers, and electric vehicles.

The U.S. power grid has become less dependable over the past 20 years, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal, which found there were 180 “major disruptions” of power in 2020, which is up from under 24 in 2000. – READ MORE

Media Tries to Gin Up Another Crisis: This Time It’s Spiders as Large as a ‘Child’s Hand’ – This story is for all you arachnophobes out there who hope the idea of a spider invasion is too far-fetched to be true.

They’re coming. This spring, giant Joro spiders — as large “as a child’s hand” — will “parachute” up and down the East Coast. The spiders, native to Asia, hitched a ride in a shipping container and arrived in Georgia in 2014. Now, they’re ready to break out of Georgia and use their large webs to float on the wind for long distances. – READ MORE