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

Biden promises aid to California after mudslides and power outages

Summary: An atmospheric river that rolled through California over the past few days has triggered more than 120 mudslides, forced evacuations and rescue missions, and left hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses without power for several days, alongside all the destruction to roads and buildings and other sorts of infrastructure; there are three confirmed deaths so far, and millions of residents remained under flood alerts as of late Tuesday night.

Context: This new wave of storms follows another wave a week earlier and though these atmospheric rivers are normal aspects of the water cycle in California, typically providing the area about 50% of the rain it receives in a year, these storms have become more intense in recent years, with 46 atmospheric river events tallied on the US West Coast since last winter, nine of which were categorized as strong, two that were extreme, and one that was exceptional.

—The New York Times

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Samsung billionaire acquitted in succession suit

Summary: The executive chairman of Samsung, Jay Y. Lee, has been acquitted of stock manipulation charges by a Seoul court, the judge in the case saying there wasn’t enough admissible evidence to find him guilty.

Context: This is a somewhat surprising ruling, but one that should allow Lee and Samsung to move on from a case that’s plagued them since 2015; Lee was convicted on charges of bribery and corruption in a separate case in 2017, and he spent some time in prison, but was ultimately pardoned by the president in 2022; Samsung is a vital business for the South Korean economy, and is enmeshed with much of the larger, global tech industry, which has made the series of corruption-related charges against company leadership in the past few decades incredibly inconvenient for a lot of people, including facets of the South Korean government.

—Bloomberg

Nayib Bukele reelected as El Salvador president in landslide win

Summary: El Salvadoran President Bukele won his reelection bid in a big way, taking somewhere in the neighborhood of 80-85% of the vote.

Context: The 42-year-old leader has been controversial, using authoritarian tactics to reshape the government in his image, filling all facets of it with loyalists, while cracking down on gangs in the country in a manner that has alarmed international human rights organizations; at the same time, though, he’s become incredibly popular in-country because those gangs were a persistent and pernicious issue, shaping everyday life in El Salvador in a big and negative way; so while he’s been called a dictator by some, many locals seem happy with how he’s using his allegedly dictatorial powers, which is why, despite the constitution disallowing his reelection, he was able to run and win, and could possibly continue to do so in the future as many times as he pleases.

—The Guardian

A remarkably large chunk of all of China’s GDP and investment growth in 2023 came from renewable energy industry products and services like solar, battery storage, and electric vehicles.

—CarbonBrief

98%

Estimated data center GPU (graphics processing unit) market share claimed by Nvidia, according to research conducted by Wells Fargo and shared by a Microsoft employee.

GPUs have traditionally been used for video production, high-end video games, and crypto-mining, but have in recent years been adapted for general computing purposes and for AI-oriented tasks, making them increasingly vital and allowing entities like Nvidia (which has long focused on GPUs) to elbow-aside other market behemoths like Intel, which were slower to enter this sub-industry.

—ExtremeTech

Trust Click

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