Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.

Romania and Bulgaria to join Schengen border-free zone by air and sea

Summary: Now that Austria has dropped a 2022 objection it raised due to concerns about more illegal immigration coming into Europe, Romania and Bulgaria are set to join the European Schengen Zone—which allows free movement between Schengen countries for people living in the Zone—following more than 10 years of attempting to do so.

Context: About 400 million people live in Schengen countries and can thus travel around the Zone without needing passports or having to pass through additional security checkpoints that are often required for folks visiting from international locales; these two new entrants to the Zone will only have air and sea passage for the time being, with talks about opening land borders continuing into 2024, and this addition means Ireland and Cyprus are now the only EU countries that aren’t also part of the Schengen Zone.

—BBC News

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US grounds some Boeing MAX planes for safety checks

Summary: Following an emergency landing necessitated by a piece of fuselage tearing off the side of an Alaska Airlines jet on Friday, US regulators have temporarily grounded 171 Boeing 737 MAX 9 jets for safety inspections.

Context: Remarkably, no one was seriously injured when a chunk of the plane tore off mid-flight, though the jetliner did lose pressurization and several passengers suffered minor injuries as a consequence; everyone with a stake in this matter, from Boeing to Alaska Airlines to the FAA have announced investigations into what happened and how to keep it from happening again, and this is just the most recent grounding of Boeing MAX jets—a design that has been plagued with issues since its introduction, including a global grounding for 20 months in 2019 and 2020 that followed a pair of crashes that killed 346 people.

—Reuters

Republicans erupt over secrecy in defense secretary's hospitalization

Summary: Republican lawmakers have expressed deep concern and anger about a delay in being notified about the hospitalization of US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Context: What seems to have happened is Austin went in for an elective medical procedure of some kind, there were complications, and he was then admitted to the hospital on January 1; the issue is that people who are meant to be kept in the know about vital military matters, like Congress and the President, don’t seem to have been made aware of this, even though the Deputy Defense Secretary was reportedly made ready to act in Austin’s place, if need be—though she was on vacation in Puerto Rico at the time; so while Austin has said in a statement that he’s on the mend and takes responsibility for any transparency issues that might arise from his decision not to make a more complete disclosure about his hospitalization, some folks on the Republican side of the aisle are chalking this up to bad communication practices in the Biden administration, while others are saying Austin needs to be held accountable for this insufficient disclosure.

—Axios

Manufacturing capacity spending in the US has been on a wild tear since the introduction of the CHIPs Act and Infrastructure Law a few years ago (and were further augmented by the Inflation Reduction Act), and this has both supported the economy in the short-term and (ostensibly at least) bulwarked it in the longer-term as the US pivots away from tight ties with China and attempts to bring some of those offshored production jobs (especially in security-related industries, like microchips) back to North America.

—Axios

216,000

Number of new jobs US employers added in December (on a seasonally adjusted basis) according to a new report from the US Labor Department.

That’s higher than most experts expected, and it’s making an anticipated (and by investors at least, hoped-for) March-ish initial drop in interest rates less likely, as it suggests the economy is still hot enough to handle the additional downward pressure for longer.

—The New York Times

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