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

AI outperforms conventional weather forecasting for the first time

Summary: A new study published in the journal Science by a team at Google’s DeepMind shows that their GraphCast AI model has significantly outperformed conventional weather forecasting models when it comes to predicting global weather conditions up to ten days in advance.

Context: This is just an initial study, so we’ll see if the findings hold up as more research is done, but it would seem that applying specialized AI tools to weather forecasting may result in better performance across 90% of 1,380 tested metrics, and that it may be able to do so faster and cheaper than existing models, with one estimate from the machine-learning coordinator at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts suggesting that this sort of model could be around 1,000-times cheaper, in terms of energy consumption, compared to traditional methods.

—Ars Technica

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UK top court says a plan to send migrants to Rwanda is illegal

Summary: The UK’s Supreme Court has ruled that because asylum-seekers sent to Rwanda as part of a plan by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government to keep migrants from reaching the country would be “at a real risk of ill-treatment,” his plan is unlawful.

Context: Sunak made keeping asylum-seekers who reached the UK via small boats from entering the country—sending them to Rwanda, with whom the UK has a treaty on the matter, while they go through the formal asylum-seeking process—a key part of his government’s policy, so this is being seen as a significant loss for his administration; no one has yet been sent to Rwanda under the auspices of this plan, though, as it was immediately challenged in court, and part of the issue cited by the deciding justices is Rwanda’s historical mistreatment of asylum-seekers, though Sunak’s government and the Rwandan government argue that the country has become a safe place for refugees due to reformations it’s made in the years since its infamous 1994 genocide.

—The Associated Press

House passes Johnson’s plan to avert shutdown in bipartisan vote

Summary: A US government spending bill has been passed by the House in a bipartisan vote that will keep the government open into early 2024.

Context: The House Speaker, Mike Johnson, was forced to rely upon Democrats for the majority of the votes this bill received, though the vote was still 336 in favor and 95 against, so it passed the two-thirds threshold required but was far from unanimous or popular, especially amongst Republicans; the cadre of Republicans most responsible for booting the previous House Speaker did not support the bill, though they haven’t indicated they’ll be coming after Johnson for this bipartisan effort the way they came after McCarthy for doing basically the same thing; this bill is ostensibly meant to give Congress more time to come up with an actual, long-term spending bill, keeping funding levels where they’ve been, not providing more aid for Ukraine or Israel, and essentially kicking the can down the road, once more, till funding runs out, once again, on January 19, 2024 for one bundle of government programs, and February 2 for another.

—The New York Times

The number of international students at US universities has surged to a more than 40-year high, driven in part by a significant increase in Indian students (up 35%), which is more than making up for a loss in Chinese students.

—The Washington Post

$228 million

Sum Japan-based Nissin Foods—which holds a ~40% share of the instant ramen market segment in the US—plans to spend to expand its US manufacturing capacity.

That investment includes a 640,640 square-foot (nearly 60,000 square-meter) building in South Carolina, which is expected to be operational by Fall of 2025, and to create more than 300 local jobs.

—Food Dive

Trust Click

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