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

Portuguese PM António Costa resigns over lithium deal probe

Summary: The Prime Minister of Portugal has stepped down following an allegation of corruption related to concessions awarded for energy deals in the country; Costa has not been named as a suspect, but following a search of his official residence, he said that his remaining in office would be a distraction, and the President agreed, accepting his resignation.

Context: This corruption inquiry is related to the alleged granting of concessions for hydrogen production and lithium mining—two developments associated with the deployment of more renewable energy infrastructure throughout the EU—and the construction of a data center south of Lisbon; the country’s Infrastructure Minister has also been indicted in the energy deal-related inquiries, and though we don’t know all the details of this apparent scandal yet, the investigation is pretty big, with 140 detectives having searched 17 residential properties and 25 other locations, so far, so it would seem law enforcement is taking this seriously and is keen to nip any suggestion of corruption tied to infrastructural development in the country in the bud, posthaste.

—BBC News

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BlackRock to invest $550 million in Occidental's carbon capture project

Summary: The world’s biggest money management company, BlackRock, has announced that it will invest more than half a billion dollars in a direct air capture plant being built by Occidental Petroleum in West Texas.

Context: Direct air capture, or DAC, refers to basically vacuuming up air and filtering CO2 from it, typically on a large scale, and then (in this case at least) pumping it underground for ostensibly permanent storage; Occidental is investing in this technology and its related infrastructure because doing so could allow them to continue pumping oil and gas, and selling those products, even as renewables become more popular and legislatively favored; the company is planning to build around 100 of these sorts of plants alongside this initial, largest-of-its-kind-so-far plant in Texas.

—Reuters

Arab states intensify pleas for Gaza cease-fire as public anger mounts

Summary: A slew of Arab-majority Middle Eastern countries have upped their appeals to the US and UN, asking them to pressure Israel for some kind of cease-fire in Gaza, suggesting that more violence could break out across the region if something significant doesn’t change soon.

Context: The Biden administration has been pushing for a small-scale, humanitarian cease-fire for weeks, but has mostly run up against a wall in this regard, its influence with the Israeli government coming up short against the latter’s desire to root-out and kill-off as much of Hamas’ leadership as possible; Israeli military leadership is apparently intending to provide security in Gaza for the foreseeable future, essentially occupying it, something that the US and other governments have publicly said they should not do, but again, the Israeli government seems less receptive to such calls at the moment, so while that external pressure could eventually have an impact on policy, it may be a while before Netanyahu’s government makes that pivot.

—The New York Times

The ESA’s Euclid space mission released its first five images on Tuesday, demonstrating the telescope’s capacity for producing ultra-sharp images of huge patches of sky; this mission will ultimately create a 3D map of the visible universe, including the 95% of the cosmos made up of so-called “dark matter” and “dark energy,” which we’re still trying to understand and quantify.

—The European Space Agency

1,000

Number of pieces of recyclable trash AI-aided machines can sort per minute, compared to 50-80 pieces sorted by human workers.

That’s a fairly astonishing increase, and it’s leading to a rapid deployment of these sorts of machines at recycling facilities across the United States—a country where recycling services have been hobbled by a shortage of workers and ballooning costs that have made recycling economically unsustainable in some areas.

—The Wall Street Journal

Trust Click

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