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

UN chief calls for resumed funding of Palestinian aid agency after allegations of militant ties

Summary: Following accusations that its employees played a role in the Hamas sneak-attacks on Israel on October 7, the UN aid agency responsible for providing medical and food assistance to Palestinians in Gaza is warning that it’s on the verge of collapse due to suspended funding.

Context: The head of the UN has asked the governments that pulled funding from this aid agency to return to the table, as the 13,000 or so employees it has working in Gaza, most of those employees Palestinians, are the only real source of humanitarian aid for the more than 2 million people who are depending on them for bare-bones survival; a total of 12 agency employees were accused of participating in the attack, nine of whom were fired immediately, two of whom are in the process of being identified, and one who has been confirmed dead; this call for support is arriving alongside word that there could be a new ceasefire deal sometime in the near-future, which could see the release of more than 100 Israeli hostages in exchange for a pause in the fighting for weeks or months, but that’s still speculative at the moment and there’s no indication as to what Palestinians in Gaza will do for food and shelter in the meantime, if this aid agency is unable to provide these necessities.

—The Associated Press

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Trolls have flooded X with graphic Taylor Swift AI fakes

Summary: Explicit images of performer Taylor Swift have been circulating on social networks, most prominently on Twitter/X where one such image attained more than 45 million views, hundreds of thousands of likes and bookmarks, and about 24,000 retweets in the 17 or so hours before it was pulled down, the verified user who shared it suspended.

Context: This is just one notable instance of a growing problem across social media and other, more private social spaces, where women and girls in particular are having their faces and likenesses applied to existing adult content or used as source material for the creation of new, pornographic images and videos without their consent; this is becoming a bigger issue now because while it’s always been possible to make such imagery using Photoshop and similar tools, that tended to require some degree of skill and time, while modern generative AI tools make it cheap and easy to produce such images, which has allowed school-aged boys to create such videos and images of their female classmates—in most cases, at the moment at least, without facing any consequences because our current laws don’t say much about the legality of this sort of act.

—The Verge

Trump will appeal $83.3 million E. Jean Carroll verdict

Summary: Former US President Donald Trump has been ordered to pay $83.3 million to writer E. Jean Carroll who only sought $10 million for the damage she said her reputation suffered after he was convicted of sexually assaulting her, but then continued to deny it and call her a liar.

Context: Trump was ordered to pay Carroll $5 million by another jury in May of 2023 for essentially the same behavior, and he is appealing both that earlier and this new verdict, which could mean years before a payout is actually made; Trump and his team maintain that he’s innocent of the sexual assault charge and that Carroll is lying, while Carroll and her team maintain that Trump’s continued lies about her have destroyed her career and have led to death threats from his fans, potentially putting her life in danger.

—Reuters

More women own homes in the US than men, and the portion of homes owned by single women is increasing faster than for single men (ownership is at 13% for single women vs. 10.2% for single men), with solo woman mortgages accounting for 18% of all new applications on the market in 2023.

—Axios

20%

Increase to estimate of how much ice Greenland’s glaciers have lost over the past four decades, which adds up to about 1,000 gigatons (1 gigaton = 1 billion tons) of ice that wasn’t previously accounted for, on top of the earlier 5,000 gigatons of loss that was tracked.

That increase is based on a new study that used satellite imagery to more accurately track the retreat of the Greenland ice sheet.

—AFP News

Trust Click

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