We haven’t seen this many global supply trade warnings since we stopped checking “Is the ship still stuck?”. War, climate change, and other abominable factors are disrupting oceanic trade routes—and threatening global GDP.

What are these “chokepoints” we’ve been hearing so much about? Usually narrow canals and straits, these maritime hotspots handle massive amounts of traffic every day. The Malacca Strait—which connects the Pacific Ocean to the Indian Ocean—the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, and even the South China Sea are vital waterways that could upend the global shipping industry if blocked (aka choked).

The chokepoint under the most duress lately is the Red Sea, which feeds into the Suez Canal, an area that accounts for $1 trillion in global trade every year. Since November, Houthis have fired missiles at passing commercial ships in the region. The attacks have forced vessels to go all the way around South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, which can add 10–14 days to the trip, according to Reuters.

Targeting these chokepoints is a no-brainer for bad actors, since they are geographically small and valuable targets:

• Every day the Suez Canal was shut down in 2021 cost the global trade industry nearly $10 billion.
• The Suez Canal Authority told Reuters last week that revenue fell 40% in the first 11 days of January because of unrest in the region.

The US and UK have made it clear that they will take military action to protect ships and global supply chains. Yesterday, the US launched another strike against Houthi anti-ship missiles.

It’s not just geopolitics threatening trade. A drought plaguing Central America has left the Panama Canal with dangerously low water levels. So low, in fact, that the canal had to cut ship crossings by 36% this week. The cuts are expected to cost the canal operator between $500 million and $700 million.—MM

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The DOJ released a scathing report on the Robb Elementary School shooting. In the 600-page report, the department called the response to the 2022 Uvalde, Texas, shooting—which left 21 people dead, most of them children—a total failure, blaming police and local and state officials for ignoring protocols and “egregious poor decision making.” The gunman, an 18-year-old who was armed with a semiautomatic rifle and known to be seriously troubled, was inside a pair of connected fourth-grade classrooms for 77 minutes before police confronted him. Several officials involved in the response, including school district police chief Pete Arredondo, have already either been fired or resigned. But some families of the killed and wounded didn’t think the DOJ’s investigation into the response went far enough because it didn’t bring criminal charges against those officials.

Pakistan launched retaliatory airstrikes into Iran. The strikes targeted areas that Pakistan said harbored separatist terrorist militants. At least nine people were reportedly killed. That came two days after Iran launched missiles into western Pakistan at a different separatist group, which Pakistan condemned and said killed two children. The tit-for-tat airstrikes threaten the already uneasy relationship between the neighboring countries amid fears of a growing regional conflict. The day before it launched strikes into Pakistan, Iran fired missiles at ISIS targets in Syria, as well as what it claimed was an Israeli spy base in Iraq.

Reddit’s IPO is reportedly due in March. According to Reuters, the social media platform’s long-awaited initial public offering will launch by the end of March after it makes its public filing in late February. It’ll be the first big social media IPO since 2019, when Pinterest went public. All eyes will fall on Reddit’s own users, who are known to fuel meme stock rallies—namely AMC and GameStop—and could help prop up the company’s debut on the stock market. Valued at about $10 billion as of 2021, Reddit reportedly will sell 10% of its shares as it competes with TikTok and Facebook for attention and ad dollars.

The World Economic Forum wraps up today in Davos, Switzerland. After a week of big-name CEOs and global leaders talking shop and fine-tuning their James Bond villain auditions, here are some memorable moments you may have missed from arguably the world’s most important annual gathering.

“Today, I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger.” Javier Milei, Argentina’s new president, rallied against what he described as Davos’s “socialist agenda,” which he said “will only bring misery to the world.” Elon Musk enjoyed the speech.

“We’ve seen technology go really wrong, and we saw a Hiroshima. We don’t want to see an AI Hiroshima.” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff acknowledged widespread fears that rapid AI development could spell disaster. (Salesforce recently launched its own AI-powered software, Einstein GPT.)

“That’s going to make a lot of people uncomfortable.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said future versions of AI will give different answers to different people based on their locations and opinions. He said the company “has to be somewhat uncomfortable as a tool builder with some of the uses of our tools.”

“At the end of the day, you can eat less calories. You cannot have less liquid.” Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey isn’t worried that Ozempic will hurt the soda giant’s business because Coke owns almost every other beverage line that you’ve heard of has a wide range of products, including bottled water.

Honorable mentions…JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon begged everyone to stop asking him about bitcoin, while Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s Boeing 737 home broke down before takeoff.—CC

Be grateful your neighbor only has a yappy dog—locals and animal rights groups in Texas and Georgia are going Donkey Kong mode over plans to put tens of thousands of monkeys in their backyards.

Southwestern Georgia residents packed a city council meeting this week to demand that officials block a company called Safer Human Medicine from constructing a $396 million monkey breeding center in their community. The proposed center would hold up to 30,000 long-tailed macaques to be sold to medical research groups.

Some of the executives who run Safer Human Medicine used to work at the $12 billion biomedical company Charles River Laboratories, which came under fire last year for allegedly labeling smuggled wild monkeys as lab-bred. Charles River also recently tried to build a macaque facility in southeastern Texas, but local outcry and a PETA campaign have stalled those plans.

Opponents of the monkey facilities worry about…noise levels, the risk of escape, the spread of disease, the disposal of each facility’s waste—which PETA estimates could nearly fill an Olympic pool every day—and how they might affect property values.

What’s the point? The breeding facilities would be a domestic source of research monkeys for clinical drug testing amid a tight global supply of the test animals.—ML

Stat: At the risk of sounding like your grandmother, you really do need to get some sleep, my loves. Americans average less than six and a half hours of sleep per night, according to a new study reported on by Axios. And it’s much worse in some states than others: In Hawaii, for instance, ~76% of people get less than the doctor-recommended seven hours, while in South Dakota and Washington, ~62% do. Researchers say that in cities on the western edges of their time zones, like Tallahassee, Florida—where it stays lighter out for longer—people tend to get less sleep. So if you’re struggling to get some shut-eye, perhaps consider moving to Sioux Falls.

Quote: “I do see color because I believe if you don’t see color, you can’t see racism.”

When the NFL’s New England Patriots officially announced their new head coach, Jerod Mayo, at a standard press conference this week, the team was likely expecting little fanfare. But after owner Robert Kraft said he was “colorblind” when hiring Mayo, the first Black head coach in franchise history, Mayo responded almost immediately with a different view. The former linebacker’s comments earned plaudits from several observers, who noted that NFL coaches—especially brand-new ones—rarely comment on issues of race.

Read: How a grad student busted the myth that cryptocurrency is untraceable. (Wired)

The feeling of getting a 5/5 on the Brew’s Weekly News Quiz has been compared to someone offering you a ride home just as you open the Uber app.

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Go nuts: Why you should be eating more nuts and seeds.

Learn: Americans’ opinions on scientists.

Watch: Society of the Snow is on track to become one of Netflix’s most popular non-English movies.

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