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

Turkey parliament backs Sweden's NATO membership

Summary: After a long delay, Turkey’s MPs have signed off on Sweden’s bid to join NATO, and Turkish President Erdogan is expected to sign the legislation later this week or early next week.

Context: Turkey and Hungary were the only two countries to hold out on allowing Sweden to join the defense bloc in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the leaders of both countries gave justifications for this gatekeeping, but it’s generally understood that both were also seeing what they could get from other NATO nations as a trade for their support—Erdogan wanting newer-model American military hardware and a change to Sweden’s constitution that would hurt some of their political enemies, and Hungary’s Orbán angling to secure the release of EU funds that have been held back because of the country’s democratic backsliding under his governance; yesterday, Orbán indicated that he’ll offer his own approval on the matter in the near-future.

—BBC News

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Palworld is a hit, and it’s easy to see why

Summary: A surprise video game hit, Palworld, has dominated industry conversation and sales on game platform Steam since it was released as an early access (meaning unfinished but playable) game on January 19, despite—or maybe at least in part because of—the controversy surrounding it.

Context: The pitch for Palworld is that it’s Pokémon with guns, and that captures something of the essence of the game as it’s thematically and visually incredibly similar to Pokémon—to the point that there have been accusations of copyright infringement, as some of the in-game monster models seem to be rip-offs of the more well-known monster-capturing and battling game’s characters—but it’s a lot more brutal and violent than the child-approved and mainstream Pokémon series, and it has crafting and survival elements that Pokémon lacks, elements that have been very popular in the gaming world, of late, and that combination of attributes has helped Palworld tally around 6 million sales in its first handful of days on the market, alone.

—The Verge

China weighs stock market rescue package backed by $278 billion

Summary: Chinese lawmakers have signaled that they’re considering a rescue package of around 2 trillion yuan, which is about $278 billion, pulled from the government’s offshore accounts and injected into the country’s state-owned companies in order to shore-up the Chinese stock market.

Context: Word of this potential policy arrived just after the Chinese central bank cut its reserve requirements for commercial banks by 50 basis points, which means they don’t need to keep as much cash on hand, allowing them to invest more money, alongside several other efforts that are similarly meant to help juice the economy at a moment in which it’s sluggish and flashing warning signals for even more of a slow down; the government has apparently been considering this stock market-bolstering move since at least last October, but hesitated to move forward as they aren’t sure if it will work and are concerned it might look more like weakness than strength, and thus could potentially achieve the opposite of their intended outcome.

—Bloomberg

United Airlines has said its service capacity growth will necessarily shrink in the coming years due to its heavy existing and intended reliance on Boeing planes, which have suffered and array of issues in recent years; United has a bunch of Boeing’s next airliner on order, but it doesn’t anticipate it will get them on time (Boeing’s history and current problems are the focus of today’s LKT More Things bonus episode).

—Quartz

$5 billion

Approximate price (it’s likely a bit more than that) Netflix has agreed to pay for WWE Raw (an American wrestling show) over the course of a 10-year deal that begins in January 2025.

This is being seen as a big bet on sports-like content that will give Netflix (hot on the heels of largely positive financial and subscriber numbers) more live content and (it hopes) more customers who are keen to watch sports programming on a weekly basis.

—The Wall Street Journal

Trust Click

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