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

Canada to sanction West Bank settlers and Hamas leaders

Summary: The foreign minister of Canada has announced sanctions on Israeli settlers who incite or commit violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, and new sanctions against Hamas leaders.

Context: The details of these sanctions haven’t been divulged, but they’re likely to be similar to sanctions imposed by the US on the same groups last week, as both governments are attempting to both support the Israeli government and protect Palestinian civilians from violent elements within Israel, including settler groups that regularly engage in violent attacks on civilians in the West Bank as they illegally claim land in the territory for themselves and their government.

—Reuters

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Google will no longer back up the Internet

Summary: Following years in which the search giant would keep a backup of webpages it crawled while mapping-out links and generating search results, Google has announced that it will be doing away with its cached webpage feature.

Context: The feature was created to help users who had unreliable internet connectivity load the sites they wanted to visit, and it allowed folks to reference earlier versions of sites, and sites that are not loading for whatever reason; the majority of users probably weren’t aware cached sites even existed, which is likely part of why Google is getting rid of this no doubt expensive to maintain feature, but online archivists are concerned because these cached pages represented a huge stockpile of internet history documentation, and their disappearance from Google’s servers leaves the Internet Archive as the only entity still attempting to keep these webpage snapshots alive and available on a large-scale.

—Ars Technica

Crash tests indicate nation’s guardrail system can’t handle heavy electric vehicles

Summary: New research from the University of Nebraska has found that electric vehicles can plow right through the steel guardrails that line American highways despite those same guardrails being more than capable of containing most gasoline-powered cars.

Context: Electric vehicles weigh about 20-50% more than their conventional vehicle kin because their batteries are incredibly dense and heavy, in some cases weighing as much as a small passenger vehicle all by themselves—which makes them more resilient and safe for their passengers, on average, but causes more damage to anything they collide with; consequently, steel barriers meant to keep cars from flying off overpasses or toppling over cliffs aren’t capable of handling the increased weight of some EVs, pointing at one more element of the existing US transportation system that will probably need increased investment and an overhaul as the country continues to slowly segue toward electrification.

—The Associated Press

Further evidence that AI is where the money’s at in the US tech scene can be found in San Francisco’s commercial real estate market, where more than a quarter of all leases were held by AI-oriented companies in 2023.

—Quartz

$250 million

Value of a deal (it’s actually “up to $250 million”) struck between Spotify and podcaster Joe Rogan for the former to distribute the latter’s show, including an upfront payout minimum, and a revenue-sharing agreement (for ad sales).

This deal deviates from the previous one Rogan had with Spotify in that the show will no longer be kept exclusive to the Spotify platform, focusing on a YouTube-distributed video version and allowing the audio version to be more widely broadcast.

Rogan’s show is consistently one of the most popular in the world, and regularly attracts headlines for being controversial.

—The Hill

Trust Click

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