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

Argentina's Peronists soar in election to seal run-off with radical Milei

Summary: The incumbent Peronist coalition received 36.6% of the vote in Argentina’s general election last weekend, which is enough to put them in first-place, but not enough for them to win outright, which means they’ll face the controversial and colorful Javier Milei in a runoff election on November 19.

Context: Milei shocked many pollsters in the country’s August primaries by winning the vote on a platform based on fairly extreme, far-right positions and an authoritarian approach to governing, including the dissolution of the country’s central bank and the adoption of the US dollar as the country’s official currency; he wasn’t able to repeat that feat in the general election, taking second place with about 29.9% of the votes, but that’s enough to worry the Peronist coalition, which has overseen a devastated economy and inflation rates that have hit 124%, amplifying a cost-of-living crisis and causing many people to consider any possible alternative, even a radical one, to the current status quo.

—Reuters

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Philippines and China trade blame over collisions in disputed South China Sea

Summary: The Philippine and Chinese governments have each accused the other of causing a pair of ship collisions in the South China Sea.

Context: This is a hotly contested area that both countries claim as their own, and both are in the process of building-out local military infrastructure to reinforce those claims, with China having done a lot more of that, so far, than the Philippine government; both sides accuse the other of acting aggressively and unreasonably in this and other recent, near-miss cases, and though no significant damage was reported in either collision, accidents caused by misunderstandings and bravado on the part of military leaders and captains wanting to make a point are watched closely, as there’s some concern that they could spiral into military conflict if not handled carefully, especially in hot-spots like this one.

—France 24

Chevron buys Hess for $53 billion

Summary: Fossil fuel giant Chevron has announced that it will be buying oil and gas exploration company Hess for about $53 billion.

Context: That’s a big investment, though still smaller than the $60 billion-or-so purchase-price of Pioneer Natural Resources that Exxon Mobil announced a few weeks ago; while Pioneer will mostly allow Exxon to expand its shale oil efforts in Texas, Hess will give Chevron shale properties in North Dakota, and perhaps more importantly, a major oil field in Guyana—a country that’s expected to become the world’s fourth-largest offshore oil producer within the next decade; both purchases set these multinational companies up to keep producing fossil fuels well into the future, striking a bullish stance at a moment in which many governments and companies are investing heavily in renewable energy infrastructure.

—The Associated Press

Older-model aircraft are seeing a price-increase as newer models flail, suffering from all sorts of hardware and software issues that have kept them grounded, in some cases, and mired in bad news cycles, in others.

—The Wall Street Journal

4.8 hours

Amount of time the average US teen spends on social media each day.

Older teen girls tend to spend more time on social media each day, and 51% of US teens spend at least 4 hours per day on a combination of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter/X, and WhatsApp, with YouTube and TikTok being by far the most popular social apps for people in this age group.

—Gallup

Trust Click

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