Autoimmunity Has Reached Epidemic Levels. We Need Urgent Action to Address It - Scientific American   

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Short-sellers are endangered. That is bad news for markets - The Economist   

If you want to be liked, don’t be a short-seller. Some other investors might defend you, at least in the abstract, as an important part of a healthy and efficient market. But to most you are—at best—a ghoul who profits from the misfortune of others. At worst, you are a corporate raider who bets that honest firms will go bust and then spreads lies about them until they do. Even your defenders will melt away if you pick the wrong target (shares they own) or the wrong moment (a crash in which many are losing money but you are making it).

Since the authorities are often among these fair-weather friends, the list of historical short-selling bans is long. It features 17th-century Dutch regulators, 18th-century British ones and Napoleon Bonaparte. The latest addition, issued on November 6th, came from South Korea’s Financial Services Commission. It has caught the zeitgeist well, and not just among the army of local retail investors who blame shorts for a soggy domestic stockmarket. Wall Street’s “meme stock” craze also cast amateur traders as the heroic underdogs, pitted against villainous short-selling professionals.

Meanwhile, one of America’s best-known shorts, Jim Chanos, wrote to his investors on November 17th to announce the closure of his main hedge funds. “Our assets under management just fell to the point where it was no longer economic to run them,” he explains, defining that point as “a few hundred million”. At its peak in 2008, a few years after predicting the downfall of Enron, an energy company, his firm was managing “between $6bn and $7bn”. Since being set up in 1985 its short bets have returned profits of nearly $5bn to its investors.

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Recycling 'end-of-life' solar panels, wind turbines, is about to be climate tech's big waste business - CNBC   

The growing importance of wind and solar energy to the U.S. power grid, and the rise of electric vehicles, are all key to the nation's growing need to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, lower carbon emissions and mitigate climate change.

But at the same time, these burgeoning renewable energy industries will soon generate tons of waste as millions of photovoltaic (PV) solar panels, wind turbines and lithium-ion EV batteries reach the end of their respective lifecycles.

As the saying goes, though, one man's trash is another man's treasure. Anticipating the pileup of exhausted clean-energy components — and wanting to proactively avoid past sins committed by not responsibly cleaning up after decommissioned coal mines, oil wells and power plants — a number of innovative startups are striving to create a sustainable, and lucrative, circular economy to recover, recycle and reuse the core components of climate tech innovation.

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How to restore Britons’ confidence in the police - The Economist   

“Hello police!” shouted a toddler as James and Jordan strolled through Horsham, a market town in south-east England. Next they were hailed by a man with learning disabilities who wanted a “Sussex Police” pen: “I’ve been very good!” Then a woman ran out of Waterstones, a bookshop, to tell them someone had shoplifted a pile of books. “Don’t think she would have bothered to report that if she hadn’t seen us walk past,” said Jordan, as he went into the shop to take a statement.

It seemed unlikely that the shoplifter would be caught. Like many places in Britain, the town has seen a rise in retail theft, petty incidents of which are rarely prosecuted. But catching criminals is not the chief purpose of neighbourhood policing teams (npts), small teams of officers who concentrate on specific geographical areas. Across England and Wales npts are stepping up local foot patrols and making sure residents know their names and faces in a push to restore public confidence. That confidence has declined dramatically.

A YouGov poll taken in November found that 49% of Britons thought the police were “doing a good job”, down from 77% four years previously (see chart). In his most recent assessment of policing in England and Wales, Andy Cooke, His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, described this as one of policing’s “biggest crises in living memory”. He could not remember, he said, “when the relationship between the police and the public was more strained than it is now”.

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