🌊 Europe Takes Big Bite of Apple

Happy Cinco de Marcho.

The Punxsutawney Phil haters are awfully quiet right now. If anything, the weather-prognosticating groundhog is guilty of understatement with his early spring prediction. Detroit just had its warmest March 4 in history, with a high of 74. Cleveland and Buffalo also had highs in the 70s yesterday. Apparently this warm front has a thing for cities that haven't won Super Bowls.

But don’t get used to it! Balance will be restored to the Lake Erie Universe with a weekend forecast of wind, overcast skies, and wind chill in the 20s.

In today's edition:

And so much more!

–Max, Max, Jen, and Alex

KEY STORY

European Commission Fines Apple ~$2B

The European Commission (EC) fined Apple $1.95B for violating antitrust laws by harming competition among music streaming rivals

• Spotify – by far Europe’s largest streaming service – has long complained that Apple has used its App Store to harm Spotify’s ability to compete with Apple Music. Among other things, Spotify alleges that the App Store prevents it from informing app users about better deals it offers on the internet, i.e., off the App Store

• On Monday, the EC fined Apple $1.95B for violating antitrust laws through those practices, claiming it forced consumers to pay “higher prices for music”

Dig Deeper

• Spotify said the fine “sends a powerful message – no company, not even a monopoly like Apple, can wield power abusively to control how other companies interact with their customers”

• In response to the fine, Apple accused Spotify of hypocrisy, claiming Spotify has gained millions of users through Apple’s service. “Fundamentally, their complaint is about trying to get limitless access to all of Apple’s tools without paying anything for the value Apple provides,” a spokesperson said in a statement

KEY STORY
SCOTUS Reinstates Trump

The US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) unanimously reversed a Colorado court ruling that barred Donald Trump from its primary ballot

• In December, Colorado’s Supreme Court disqualified Trump from its ballot. It cited Section 3 of the US Constitution's 14th Amendment, which bans insurrectionists from holding public office

• Trump appealed to SCOTUS, which on Monday unanimously reversed Colorado’s ruling, arguing that states do not have the right to enforce Section 3

• The ruling means that Colorado – and Maine and Illinois, which had also disqualified Trump – must permit Trump to be on its ballot

Dig Deeper

• Section 3 of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment says that “no person” who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the US can serve as an “officer of the United States”

• Colorado’s Supreme Court ruled that the January 6th riot was an insurrection; Trump did incite it; Section 3 does apply to the presidency; and state courts have the authority to invoke the 14th Amendment in this context

• SCOTUS argued unanimously that states have no authority to enforce Section 3. It didn’t comment on other aspects of the case

KEY STORY

OTC Birth Control

The US’ first over-the-counter (OTC) birth control pill will be available by the end of the month

• Opill is a women’s birth control pill that is highly effective at preventing pregnancies. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved it 50+ years ago as a prescription drug

• Last July, the FDA approved Opill for OTC sale, calling it “more effective than currently available [OTC] contraceptive methods”

• On Monday, Opill’s manufacturer announced it had begun shipping the drug to retailers and pharmacies across the US. A one-month supply of the pills will cost $19.99 and a three-month supply $49.99

Dig Deeper

• OTC drugs are available without a prescription, but some insurers don’t cover them

• In a press release, Opill manufacturer Perrigo announced it will launch a “cost-assistance program” to help “qualified low-income, uninsured individuals obtain Opill at low or no cost”

SPONSORED

Salt With Your Citrus?

Together with LMNT

Robb Wolf, a biochemist and Navy SEAL resiliency committee member, found himself at odds with the market's electrolyte drink offerings, all of which seemed to betray the very essence of a healthful lifestyle by being laden with sugar

• Understanding the critical role electrolytes play in maintaining health, yet dismayed by the existing sugary solutions, he set out to create his own: LMNT

• With no sugar, artificial ingredients, or the junk of conventional sports drinks, LMNT offers a clean electrolyte mix solution

• The bonus is that LMNT tastes great, which makes it the perfect mocktail mixer—or cocktail, if you choose!

Dig Deeper

• Want to give Citrus Salt — one of our favorite flavors — a try? We recommend this NoCal Margarita Mock/Cocktail recipe: 1 stick pack of LMNT Citrus Salt; 16–32 oz soda water; and 2 tablespoons lime juice — mixed and served over ice

• As always, LMNT is offering Roca followers a free sample pack and no-questions-asked refund policy with any purchase. Try it out here and let us know what you think! 

KEY STORY

Iranian Assassin On The Loose

The FBI is searching for an Iranian fugitive believed to have recruited assassins to kill top Trump administration officials

• On Friday, the FBI’s Miami field office issued a public alert for Majid Farahani, who it accused of working “directly or indirectly” for Iran to hire assassins to kill “current and former” US politicians

• Iran’s targets allegedly include former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who held office under Trump. The FBI believes Iran is targeting US officials who played a role in the 2020 drone assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, a top Iranian commander

Dig Deeper

• In 2022, the US charged a 45-year-old Iranian national for allegedly hiring assassins to kill former National Security Advisor John Bolton, “likely in retaliation for the January 2020 death of…Soleimani”

• In December, the US Treasury Department sanctioned Farhani for “recruiting individuals for various operations in the [US], to include lethal targeting of current and former” US officials

• It’s unclear why the FBI issued its most recent advisory on Friday

RUNDOWN
Some Quick Stories for the Office

💻 Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira – who leaked hundreds of highly classified national security documents through Discord – pleaded guilty to six counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information. He faces up to 16 years in prison

✈️ Weeks after losing a federal antitrust lawsuit, JetBlue and Spirit terminated their proposed merger. The merger would have made the joint carrier the US’ fifth-largest, allowing it to compete with other major airlines

🇫🇷 On Monday, France became the first country to enshrine abortion access in its constitution. The drive to enshrine it in France’s constitution originated after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022

🇺🇳 The UN found “reasonable grounds” to believe that Hamas members committed sexual assaults on October 7. However, despite “concerted efforts” by the UN to have victims of sexual violence come forward, it was not able to meet “any survivor/victim of sexual violence from 7 October”

🎥 Dune: Part Two earned $81.5M in North American theaters during its opening weekend and $97M internationally. Its grand total — $178.5M – is more than the next three opening weekends of 2024 combined

💰 Jeff Bezos is once again the world’s richest man, Bloomberg reported, reclaiming that title for the first time since 2021. As of Monday, Bezos’ net worth was $200B, versus Elon Musk’s $198B and Bernard Arnault’s $197B

☘️ Discover Ireland's wonders with Indus Travels! Experience Dublin's vibrancy, explore the Ring of Kerry's scenic beauty, and uncover historic sites like the Cliffs of Moher. Book now for an unforgettable journey through Ireland!  Special Offer (if available/ applicable): 20% Off W/Air*

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COMMUNITY
Weekly Debate

Most news companies repress ideas they don’t agree with. We are different. To prove it, we’re making this a place where people can have a free and open debate. Each week we lay out a debate on Monday and feature responses below, replies to those the following day, and so on.

This week’s Roca Wrap asked: Are food companies exploitative?

Have additional thoughts or replies to Paul, Lucette or Paula? Keep the debate going and reply to this email!

More replies and yesterday’s poll results are below the Wraps.

COMMUNITY
Treasure Hunt

Welcome to the weekly Roca treasure hunt! The rules are simple:

• Every day we give a hint. You get one guess, which you submit by emailing [email protected] with a Google street view screenshot

• Unlock an extra hint each Thursday once you refer five friends

• The first person to guess the answer wins this week’s prize: A free year of Roca premium!

Clue 1: 311

Clue 2: A King's game and a companion's check

Know the answer? Send the Google street view screenshot to [email protected].

POPCORN
Some Quick Stories for Happy Hour

⛳️ Top Gun : An Indianapolis man was arrested after his illegal firearm discharged at Topgolf during a golf swing. Police say he proceed to “play it off as if nothing happened”

🚗 Grand Theft Dummy: Los Angeles police arrested a 33-year-old man for unsuccessfully attempting to steal a self-driving Waymo taxi

🐐 ”Who’s your OAT?” The battle for oldest person in the world is heating up. The official oldest is a 118-year-old Spanish woman, but a Vietnamese woman claims she’s 119

🏈 Release time, let’s ride: The Denver Broncos notified quarterback Russell Wilson, 35, that he will be released. In March 2022, they signed the nine-time Pro Bowler to a five-year, $242.6M extension

🏰 Average Cambridge dorm: A 33-year-old University of Cambridge academic living in a medieval tower escaped a bathroom after being trapped for seven hours by picking the lock with eyeliner and a cotton ball

🏎 Wheels of justice: London police recovered F1 driver Gerhard Berger’s special-edition Ferrari – a red F512M Testarossa valued at ~$444K – 28 years after its theft in Italy

ON-THE-GROUND
Roca in Serbia

We send our co-founder Max Frost to investigate topics around the world and he writes about them here. He’s currently writing from Serbia. Subscribers receive the full stories.

Russia is all over Serbia: Russian flags, Russian companies, Russian language.

“Serbia Russia – Brothers,” is a common graffiti slogan; others show Serbian and Russian flags tied together.  

This connection began in the 1400s, when the Ottoman conquest of Serbia led some Serbs to take refuge in Russia. Russians and Serbs were both Slavs, predominantly Orthodox Christians, and spoke related Slavic languages. Russia then continued to cultivate ties with Serbia, both for cultural and strategic reasons. 

Russia helped Serbia obtain independence in 1868. The countries then formed an alliance that obliged Russia to defend Serbia if it were attacked. When Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia in 1914, that agreement forced Russia into the conflict and sparked World War I. In the decades after the war, Russia supported the establishment of Yugoslavia and then guided Yugoslavia’s transformation into a communist country, although the countries then had a falling out.

Russia opposed NATO’s 1999 bombing of Serbia and criticized NATO’s move to carve an independent Kosovo out of Serbia. Vladimir Putin has often used that policy to defend his actions in Ukraine and elsewhere. Today, the logos of Russian railway, news, and energy companies are plastered on billboards and buildings around the country. 

Serbians thus refer to Russians as their “brothers.” But Russians are now calling in a favor.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of Russians have moved to Serbia. Many are software developers who were working for Western companies but could no longer do so from Russia. Some are business owners who either relocated their companies to avoid sanctions or who just transferred them to Serbian ownership to evade them. Others wanted to avoid the draft, opposed the war or government, or just found it too hard to make a good living in Russia. 

One Russian woman I met, Daria, summed it up like this: “We moved in August of 2022. Because of the SMO [‘Special Military Operation,’ Russia’s term for the war in Ukraine] my husband could no longer continue working on Russian territory (he’s an IT specialist) and we needed to find an alternative. Serbia seemed hospitable to immigrants like us. With one daughter and two dogs, we moved by car to Novi Sad.”

That situation has played out so many times that today you can hardly go anywhere in Belgrade without hearing Russian. This is especially true in nice areas: Russia is wealthier than Serbia, and many of the Russian émigres are wealthy. At some nice cafés, bars, and restaurants, I heard more Russian than Serbian. 

That is straining relations between the “brotherly” people. I couldn’t do an interview in Serbia without somebody blaming the Russians for dramatically pushing up their rent. One landlord told me the Russians have enabled him to increase rents from €300 to €600; another told me he’s been able to quadruple his. Poorer Serbians are left to move further away from the city. 

Boris, interviewed in yesterday’s installment, said Russians are establishing their own communes where they don’t need to speak Serbian. They have their own gyms, are bringing their own entertainers – and it’s rubbing some people the wrong way. 

“Now, with Russians coming, with the inflation and everything, the price of life here is almost the same as in Vienna,” one Belgrade resident told me. 

Danica, interviewed two days ago, told me, “Russians are like our ‘Orthodox brothers,’ etc. But since they started coming, I think that a lot of Serbians realized that we don't share the same mentality. Russians are much colder than us…I think their mentality, their way of thinking, their culture, their communication are more similar to Scandinavia than it is to the Balkans.”

“Here, it's like the southern European thing. You know, people sit outside, they're warm, they're drinking their coffee, they're relaxing, this and that. We share more with southern Italy than we do with the entire eastern Europe. I was in southern Italy, I was in Naples, and I will say, people from Naples are more similar to people from Belgrade than Poland, Russia, or Ukraine.”

Having traveled in both Russia and Serbia, I agreed: Serbs are warm, chatty, huggers – people who are eager to invite you in and talk. Russians take much longer to open up. 

“And then, also, you feel like they consider you to be inferior,” Danica said. “They consider you to be a rat in your own country.”

Perhaps the Russians and Serbs aren’t so brotherly after all.

Reply to this email to let us know what you think!

ROCA WRAP
The Defector

Adrian Hong – a.k.a. Matthew Chao, a.k.a. Oswaldo Trump – is a humanitarian (or a criminal or a spy) and a wanted man with a target on his back.

Hong was the child of Christian Korean missionaries living in Tijuana, Mexico. His parents – devoutly religious and committed to charity and discipline – raised him in California until he enrolled as a history major at Yale University. 

Soon after arriving, Hong read the memoir of a North Korean defector and became inspired to help more North Koreans escape. In 2004, age 18, he founded Liberation for North Korea, later known as Liberty in North Korea (LiNK). The group started with human rights advocacy but became something far bigger: An organization that would help North Koreans escape their country.

The militarized border between the Koreas makes it virtually impossible for defectors to cross from North to South. Instead, they have to smuggle themselves into China, then across the country into other, less hostile ones.

Those who are caught in China are deported back to North Korea, where they may be tortured or killed. Others end up stuck in China as victims of human trafficking, forced marriages, and domestic slavery.

Soon after founding LiNK, Hong and other members began traveling to the China-North Korea border to do research, conduct interviews, and help defectors escape. They also helped free North Koreans who were trapped in China.

In 2006, Hong, then 22, helped escort six North Koreans trapped in China to a US embassy in Southeast Asia, after which they came to America and became the first North Koreans to be granted asylum in the US.

Later that year, Hong led another six North Koreans to a US consulate in China.

The American officials refused to accept them, though, and Chinese authorities caught them, leading to their arrests. After 10 days, Hong was deported to the US. He said at the time that before leaving, he looked into the North Koreans’ eyes: “There is nothing like looking in the eyes of someone who thinks they are going to die,” he said. The US ended up getting China to release those six North Koreans.

By 2008, LiNK had over 100 chapters and was helping run the North Korean “underground railroad,” while Hong had connected with President George. W. Bush, among others.

Yet Hong “became convinced that bolder action was required” to challenge North Korea’s government, and left the group that year. With a deep rolodex of people in the American foreign policy world, Hong established the “Pegasus Project,” which sought to spread information in closed societies.

When the Arab Spring erupted in 2011, Hong declared it a “dress rehearsal for North Korea” and traveled to Libya to learn some lessons on Muammar Gaddafi’s downfall.

In February 2017, Kim Jong-Un’s half-brother, Kim Jong-Nam, was fatally poisoned in a Malaysian airport. Soon after, Jong-Nam’s son posted a video in which he thanked Hong and a new organization, “Cheollima Civil Defense,” for rescuing him, his mother, and his sister. It later emerged that that group – which proceeded to declare itself North Korea’s government-in-exile – had been conveying secret messages to help high-ranking North Koreans defect.

Around that time, Hong’s colleagues said he began carrying multiple cell phones, taking intense security precautions, and holding meetings in hotels around the world. His group, Cheollima Civil Defense rebranded to “Free Joseon” and began attempting increasingly bold defections, like one in 2018.

North Korean officials typically aren’t allowed to be alone in public, lest they defect or hostile governments contact them. But in November 2018, North Korea’s acting ambassador to Italy asked his wife to take a walk.

Leaving their young daughter behind, the couple walked outside and climbed into a car – driven by a Free Joseon driver. They subsequently disappeared, marking one of the highest-ranking defections in North Korean history.

It’s unclear why the couple abandoned their daughter – it’s been suspected she refused to leave or something went wrong in the defection process – but she subsequently was returned to North Korea, where she may have faced brutal punishment.

But for Hong and Free Joseon, the defection was a success – and more would follow.

Reply to this email to let us know what you think!

ROCA WRAP
The Defector

Adrian Hong – aka Matthew Chao, aka Oswaldo Trump – is a humanitarian (or a criminal or a spy) and a wanted man with a target on his back. 

Adrian Hong was the child of Christian Korean missionaries living in Tijuana, Mexico. His parents – devoutly religious and committed to charity and discipline – raised Hong in California until he enrolled as a history major at Yale University.

Soon after arriving, Hong read the memoir of a North Korean defector and became inspired to help more North Koreans escape. In 2004, age 18, he founded Liberation for North Korea, later known as Liberty in North Korea (LiNK). The group started with human rights advocacy but became something far bigger: An organization that would help North Koreans escape their country.

The militarized border between the Koreas makes it virtually impossible for defectors to cross from North to South. Instead, they have to smuggle themselves into China, then across the country into other less hostile ones.

Those who are caught in China are deported back to North Korea, where they may be tortured or killed. Others end up stuck in China as victims of human trafficking, forced marriages, and domestic slavery.

Soon after founding LiNK, Hong and other members began traveling to the China-North Korea border to do research, conduct interviews, and help defectors escape. They also helped free North Koreans who were trapped in China.

In 2006, Hong, then 22, helped escort six North Koreans trapped in China to a US embassy in Southeast Asia, after which they came to America and became the first North Koreans to be granted asylum in the US.

Later that year, Hong led another six North Koreans to a US consulate in China.

The American officials refused to accept them, though, and Chinese authorities caught them, leading to their arrests. After 10 days, Hong was deported to the US. He said at the time that before leaving, he looked into the North Koreans’ eyes: “There is nothing like looking in the eyes of someone who thinks they are going to die,” he said. The US ended up getting China to release those six North Koreans.

By 2008, LiNK had over 100 chapters and was helping run the North Korean “underground railroad,” while Hong had connected with President George. W. Bush, among others.

Yet Hong "became convinced that bolder action was required” to challenge North Korea’s government, and left the group that year. With a deep rolodex of people in the American foreign policy world, Hong established the “Pegasus Project,” which sought to spread information in closed societies.

…

Reply to this email to let us know what you think!

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COMMUNITY
Weekly Debate

Yesterday’s Poll:

In general, do you consider surge pricing “exploitative”?
Yes: 82%
No: 18%

EDITOR’S NOTE
Final Thoughts

Happy Tuesday Roca! We’ll keep it short today with a simply thank you for being here.

See you tomorrow,

— Max, Max, Alex and Jen