We were looking up global homeless statistics — as one does on weekends in late February — and couldn’t believe Japan’s numbers. In a country of 123M people, officials estimate a homeless population of ~3,000. We then compared that number with those of top US cities and… wowzer. Denver, sorry to pick on you, but we had to choose somebody and your airport is way too far from your downtown. Plus, you’re way too elevated.

In today's edition:

And so much more!

–Max, Max, Jen, and Alex

A Houston resident pleaded guilty to insider trading after overhearing his wife’s work call

A think tank led by US consulting firm McKinsey advised China’s government on how to dominate high-end tech, the Financial Times reported

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed indefinite military control over Gaza after the war

Together with DUER

Roca loves a classic pair of denim jeans, but we’ve found it difficult to wear jeans with our active lifestyle as we travel around the world to bring you the most interesting stories. That is, until we found DUER — the denim that is made to move

Police charged a man for the murder of a 22-year-old nursing student

🗳️Donald Trump defeated Nikki Haley in South Carolina by a 20-point margin. Haley vowed not to drop out, but one of her biggest donor groups announced Sunday that it would stop funding her campaign

🇺🇦 Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died since Russia invaded Ukraine two years ago. Russia says as many as 300,000 Ukrainians have died; the US puts the figure around 70,000

🧫 Donald Trump said on Friday that he “strongly” supports in-vitro fertilization. Trump’s statement came a week after Alabama’s top court ruled that frozen embryos can be treated as children, leading IVF clinics in the state to pause treatments

🇷🇺 Russian officials released Alexei Navalny’s body to his mother over a week after his death. Navalny’s widow said Putin pressured officials “not to give [the body] back, pressure the mother, break her, and tell her that her son’s corpse is rotting”

󠁵󠁳󠁫󠁳👴 California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) said that it’s “because of” President Biden’s age “that he’s been so successful.” When asked if Biden should be doing more public appearances, Newsom said, “I think he’s doing everything he needs to do”

🏫 Newly released footage showed Nex Benedict, a trans Oklahoma student who died last week, describing the altercation that preceded their death. Benedict said a fight broke out after a group of girls made fun of Benedict in the bathroom. Benedict hit her dead during that fight, began experiencing headaches, and died a day later

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.

Read this week’s Roca Votes Wrap below and then let us know: Do you consider obesity a major issue in your country? If yes, do you find semaglutide’s popularity a helpful or harmful development?

In a related poll, we ask:

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

Clue 1: Three continents strong

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

Congratulations to Roca Reader Tammy for being the first to correctly guess Mount Vernon as last week’s Treasure Hunt location, chosen in honor of President’s Day weekend.

Clue 1: Distillery’s yield but not a peak: George Washington ran one of early America's largest whiskey distilleries at Mount Vernon. Despite the name, Mount Vernon is flat land along the Potomac, chosen for fertile farming grounds

Clue 2: The legacy of my mentor at sea: Vernon refers to British Admiral Edward Vernon, whom Washington's half-brother served under/looked up to

Clue 3: Revolutionary's retreat: Following the Revolutionary war, Washington spent much of his time at Mount Vernon

Clue 4: Ha-ha separations: Mount Vernon features several "ha-has", or sunken fences popular in the 18th century allowing unobstructed views while preventing livestock passage

Clue 5: Along my beloved Potomac: Mount Vernon borders Washington's beloved Potomac River

🦉 RIP, Flaco: Flaco – a Eurasian eagle owl who escaped from NYC’s Central Park Zoo last February – died after crashing into a Manhattan building

💰 Best I can do is $5: AT&T announced a $5 credit for customers affected by Thursday’s cell service outage. The outage impacted thousands of customers nationwide for several hours

🏎 $78M check? Believable! Police arrested a 21-year-old Indiana man for attempting to buy a Porsche with a fake $78M check. He reportedly tried to grab the keys after employees refused his purchase

🏀 End to court storming? Duke men’s basketball star Kyle Filipowski suffered a knee injury when Wake Forest fans stormed the court after their 83-79 upset win, prompting calls to end court storming

🧴 Pablo Moisturizer-bar: A Canadian couple reported that Punta Cana airport security detained them on drug charges after flagging a white substance in their luggage. The substance was moisture absorber

🥧 Pie and dry: Elon Musk pledged to resolve issues with a California bakery after Tesla canceled a pie order, leaving the bakery’s owner “high and dry.” Tesla had ordered 4,000 pies costing $16,000

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.

Many people in Serbia hate America. Here is why one such man, Simon, does.

Simon was born in 1976. Four years later, the Yugoslav dictator – ”Tito” – died, and the country began to crumble. From being the envy of Eastern Europe, the country began to dissolve along ethnic lines.

As Yugoslavia fell apart, so did Simon’s life. His father left in 1989. In the early 1990s, the Yugoslav wars began. The United States and other countries responded by sanctioning Serbia, which was supporting Serb militias in Croatia and Bosnia. The economy rotted like Simon’s food, for which he waited in long lines. 

“I will tell you one experience. Sunday, Sunday lunch. I wake up a little bit earlier than usual. We like to eat meatballs in tomato sauce. Mother was preparing that, but covered it with a cloth. 

“I open it a little bit to see what's going on. It was a little different color. But okay, I don't know. We start to eat lunch. I take one bite and I discover – it's not that meatball kind of meat. I ask my mother what it is, she was fighting to answer.

“In the end, my brother who is four years older told me that the kind of meat – it's a kind of fat sausages, from the pig’s organs, heart, liver – that kind…But it’s not for preparing and cooking.”

“I decided to – out of respect for my mother – to eat one. God knows how hard it was, but I ate that ball. And that was the end of the lunch.”

“Meat was far away,” he said. “This was sanctions.”

That was in the mid-1990s.

In 1999, when Simon was 23, and American bombs began falling on his city.

“Bombing was all around. Bombs hitting one kilometer from here. We feel that on the windows, on the building, everything moved a few millimeters. It was terrible and horrible. And I was 23 years old and I spent my best years somewhere in an underground building, shelter. It was terrible.

“The military airport is seven kilometers from here. My window is looking at that and I saw – I remember exactly clearly like yesterday – I saw the red and yellow from an explosion. And I just count a few seconds, air traveling to my building for detonation. And with many buildings, a small place – it's very acoustic. You cannot imagine that sound, especially at night when it's so quiet and peaceful. And when it detonated…

“I remember one, some of the first night of bombing, I was asleep and detonation woke me up. I was like a cat on the roof. And from that moment, I was really, really afraid to go to sleep, to have that experience again, to have that strong sound wake me up.”

NATO was dropping bombs to punish Serbia for its actions in Kosovo, in southern Serbia. Kosovo is ethnically Albanian and Muslim. Serbia cracked down on the Albanian minority, some of whom began killing police officers, soldiers, and Serb civilians. Serbia responded with massacres. The situation escalated and a war began. NATO intervened and bombed Serbia until its military capitulated. 

NATO’s intervention left Kosovo de facto independent. It has since declared independence and become a close US ally, with numerous NATO bases there. Simon theorizes NATO intervened not for human rights, but to seize Kosovo’s resources and establish those bases. 

Simon then decided to leave Serbia. He moved to Greece – ”with a bag full of food and a bag full of paint” – hoping to find a job as a painter in a tourist town. But then his mother fell ill and he was sucked back to Serbia, dashing his hopes of emigrating. 

When he got home, his mother told him there was an opening for an art teacher at the school we were standing outside of. He took the job, which he still has today. 

Several years later, he tried to emigrate again, this time to Malta, in the Mediterranean. But he soon had to move back to Serbia for unclear reasons. He didn’t want to return, but he was pulled back in. 

After that, he moved to Austria, which he loved. It was the first place where by living “normally,” he could live well. 

“If you are a working man, working with good habits, discipline – you will live normally. It’s not ‘live normally first ten days and the next 20 days decide, ‘Will I buy two liters of milk or one liter of milk?’’”

But again, he needed to return to Serbia, where poverty was the reality. He said he and his wife both work as teachers, then work second jobs the rest of the night. Even so, they still can’t afford enough food for their family for the month. 

The icing on the cake, he said, was corruption: The government was “glued with criminals.”

All of this left him “1% optimist.” 

“This kind of Europe, the Balkans – there is no shiny future. Unfortunately, no happiness, no future.”

What would make him happy? 

“I would like to work one job. And to spend my free time with the children. That's my utopia.”

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

We founded RocaNews because we wanted news companies to give us just the facts – not tell us what to think. That inspires us each week to do the “Roca Votes” Wrap, in which we summarize a controversial topic and see how Roca Nation feels about it.

What do Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey, and Amy Schumer have in common?

They’ve all taken semaglutide, a drug you may know better by brand names Ozempic and Wegovy.

The popularity of Ozempic and similar drugs has skyrocketed in recent years: Over the last five years, the total number of prescriptions has increased by a factor of 40, according to Epic Research. In the last three months of 2022, US doctors wrote 9M prescriptions for them.

The only thing slowing the growth of the drugs is that drug manufacturers can’t keep up with demand for them.

In the 2010s, the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk developed semaglutide to treat diabetes. In 2017, the FDA approved Ozempic, a brand name for semaglutide, specifically as a therapy for diabetes. Users quickly noticed that it did more than treat their diabetes: It shrank their waistlines.

Novo Nordisk decided to release semaglutide as a dedicated weight loss drug under a different brand name, Wegovy, which received FDA approval in 2021. Wegovy and Ozempic have since become the most popular weight loss drugs, propelling Novo Nordisk to become Europe’s most valuable company.

Semaglutide mimics a natural bodily hormone that tells the brain you’re full. It also slows digestion by increasing the time it takes for food to leave the body. Both Ozempic and Wegovy are taken by injection, although Novo Nordisk recently received approval to sell semaglutide as an oral pill as well.

Data show that despite their soaring popularity, Ozempic and Wegovy are reaching a fraction of their potential markets.

Roughly 3% of US adults take Wegovy, Ozempic, or similar diabetes and weight loss drugs. 42% of US adults are obese and millions more overweight, though, which means they have significant room to expand. Morgan Stanley projects that over the next 10 years, 7% of the US population — 24 million people — could be taking these drugs.

The drugs’ popularity has prompted questions about their side effects.

Common side effects include vomiting, diarrhea, constipation, and stomach pain, although the FDA side effect database reports that 7,075 users had side effects, resulting in 187 deaths.

One viral side effect is “Ozempic Face,” which describes the gaunt-looking face of Ozempic users who’ve rapidly lost weight.

Several lawsuits have been filed over serious side effects like gallbladder disease and gastroparesis, which the plaintiffs say Novo Nordisk failed to advertise and which the company says are not real concerns.

Some people say it’s too soon to know the drugs’ long-term impacts and should therefore be treated with care.

One representative study of 2,000 obese adults compared those using semaglutide plus a diet and exercise program with those who only did the diet and exercise program. After roughly 16 months, half of those who took semaglutide had lost 15% of their body weight and nearly a third lost 20%.

Those who only did the diet and exercise program lost about 2.4% of their weight. Other studies have confirmed similar levels of weight loss from comparable regimens.

In most developed countries, semaglutide is available via prescription to people who are obese, suffer from weight-related health conditions, or more.

While the drugs appear to be undeniably effective, people have voiced concern about unknown side effects, drug dependence, and more.

Others have said that even if semaglutide is a miracle drug, it is not a fix for the habits and lifestyle decisions that contribute to obesity.

That leads us to today’s Roca Votes:

Do you consider obesity a major issue in your country? Do you consider semaglutide a step toward solving that problem?

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

We founded RocaNews because we wanted news companies to give us just the facts – not tell us what to think. That inspires us each week to do the “Roca Votes” Wrap, in which we summarize a controversial topic and see how Roca Nation feels about it.

What do Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey, and Amy Schumer have in common?

They’ve all taken semaglutide, a drug you may know better by brand names Ozempic and Wegovy.

The popularity of Ozempic and similar drugs has skyrocketed in recent years: Over the last five years, the total number of prescriptions has increased by a factor of 40, according to Epic Research. In the last three months of 2022, US doctors wrote 9M prescriptions for them.

The only thing slowing the growth of the drugs is that drug manufacturers can’t keep up with demand for them.

In the 2010s, the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk developed semaglutide to treat diabetes. In 2017, the FDA approved Ozempic, a brand name for semaglutide, specifically as a therapy for diabetes. Users quickly noticed that it did more than treat their diabetes: It shrank their waistlines.

Novo Nordisk decided to release semaglutide as a dedicated weight loss drug under a different brand name, Wegovy, which received FDA approval in 2021. Wegovy and Ozempic have since become the most popular weight loss drugs, propelling Novo Nordisk to become Europe’s most valuable company.

Semaglutide mimics a natural bodily hormone that tells the brain you’re full. It also slows digestion by increasing the time it takes for food to leave the body. Both Ozempic and Wegovy are taken by injection, although Novo Nordisk recently received approval to sell semaglutide as an oral pill as well.

Data show that despite their soaring popularity, Ozempic and Wegovy are reaching a fraction of their potential markets.

Roughly 3% of US adults take Wegovy, Ozempic, or similar diabetes and weight loss drugs. 42% of US adults are obese and millions more overweight, though, which means they have significant room to expand. Morgan Stanley projects that over the next 10 years, 7% of the US population — 24 million people — could be taking these drugs.

The drugs’ popularity has prompted questions about their side effects.

Common side effects include vomiting, diarrhea, constipation, and stomach pain, although the FDA side effect database reports that 7,075 users had side effects, resulting in 187 deaths.

One viral side effect is “Ozempic Face,” which describes the gaunt-looking face of Ozempic users who’ve rapidly lost weight.

Several lawsuits have been filed over serious side effects like gallbladder disease and gastroparesis, which the plaintiffs say Novo Nordisk failed to advertise and which the company says are not real concerns.

Some people say it’s too soon to know the drugs’ long-term impacts and should therefore be treated with care.

One representative study of 2,000 obese adults compared those using semaglutide plus a diet and exercise program with those who only did the diet and exercise program. After roughly 16 months, half of those who took semaglutide had lost 15% of their body weight and nearly a third lost 20%.

Those who only did the diet and exercise program lost about 2.4% of their weight. Other studies have confirmed similar levels of weight loss from comparable regimens.

In most developed countries, semaglutide is available via prescription to people who are obese, suffer from weight-related health conditions, or more.

While the drugs appear to be undeniably effective, people have voiced concern about unknown side effects, drug dependence, and more.

Others have said that even if semaglutide is a miracle drug, it is not a fix for the habits and lifestyle decisions that contribute to obesity.

That leads us to today’s Roca Votes:

Do you consider obesity a major issue in your country? Do you consider semaglutide a step toward solving that problem?

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

This was an example of a “Roca Votes” Deep Dive. Try a free two-week trial for Roca Premium and you’ll unlock:

We hope you all had great weekends, Roca Nation. We’re curious to read your thoughts about today’s Roca Votes, in addition to the rest of our coverage. Sometimes Mondays can be soft on news. Not today!

— Max, Max, Jen and Alex