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

Eastern Congo residents scramble for food and safety as conflict intensifies

Summary: Food supplies have been disrupted in Goma, located in the eastern portion of the Democratic Republic of Congo, as the country’s army attempts to fend off a group of rebels called M23, which are allegedly backed by neighboring Rwanda.

Context: Clashes between these groups have been ongoing for a while now, but they escalated significantly at the beginning of the year, and thousands of civilians have been forced to flee their homes as the rebels have taken more territory, stressing infrastructure in Goma and worsening an already bad humanitarian crisis in the area; international actors like the US have urged Rwanda to withdraw their personnel from the area and to stop supporting M23, but without success so far, and this heightening conflict increases the strain on national resources and systems that are attempting to help the more than 800,000 internally displaced people living in the country, and the more than 2.5 million who were previously displaced and who are attempting to rebuild their lives in this eastern region, in particular.

—Reuters

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Domestic uranium enrichment gets $2.7 billion boost from US Senate

Summary: The US Senate has approved a bill that would provide $2.7 billion for the domestic enrichment of uranium, which would allow—among other things—for the expanded domestic production of the types of uranium used for existing and future nuclear power plant designs.

Context: This investment would allow the US to produce more of its own uranium fuel rather than buying it from Russian-controlled businesses, as is the case today, but support for building more nuclear power infrastructure in the country is mixed, and the effectiveness of next-step designs for power plants are still in question; also in question is whether the bill can be passed by the House, as many House Republicans are irked by what they perceive to be a lack of southern border security funding, and have thus voted against pretty much everything that’s arrived on their docket.

—Utility Dive

An executive bought a rival’s stock and the SEC says that’s insider trading

Summary: A biotech executive earned about $120,000 buying options on a rival company’s stock, and the US Securities and Exchange Commission is accusing him of committing insider trading, even though he didn’t have inside information about the company whose stock he purchased.

Context: He did, however, have information about his employer’s stock, and he assumed, rightly as it turned out, that this information would allow him to make money on that competitor’s stock because of how the market would shift after the knowledge he had was announced to the rest of the world; this is an example of what’s called “shadow insider trading,” because it involves using inside information, but to trade in other companies’ stocks, not one’s own, which is a trickier thing to prove, but something the SEC is trying to crack down on, because it’s arguably the same thing—taking advantage of insider information to profit—it’s just achieved in a somewhat more circuitous fashion; it’s not clear that this case will be decided in the SEC’s favor, but if it is, there’s a good chance we’ll see more such cases in the near-future.

—The Wall Street Journal

Netflix continues to be the singular winner of the online video streaming wars, and Disney, which has long been considered a serious contender in this space due to their huge portfolio of beloved and valuable IP, is beginning to see a decline in their paid subscriber numbers, leading to raised prices and expense-cutting efforts (which could worsen the problem, at least in the short-term).

—Chartr

840 mph

Ground speed achieved by American Airlines Flight 120 from Philadelphia to Doha over the weekend—one of the highest such speeds on record for a non-supersonic passenger (Concorde) flight.

This and other weekend flights were nudged to high speeds by a powerful jet stream the tallied the second-highest winds in the Washington-Baltimore region since we started tracking such things back in the 1950s, at one point weighing in at 265-mph, all that wind becoming a tailwind (pushing the planes from behind) for jets headed in the right direction.

—The Washington Post

Trust Click

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