One Sentence News

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

Forest fires kill more than 100 in Chile and menace urban areas

Summary: More than 100 people have been confirmed killed by a wave of fires across Chile, some of which are saddling up to densely populated regions and popular tourist areas.

Context: The Valparaíso metropolitan region, which is the second-largest in terms of population in the country and located about midway down the length of Chile, is being especially threatened by wildfires right now, and the coastal city Vina del Mar has already been hit hard; wildfires are common in Chile this time of the year, but this year’s wave is hitting closer to highly populated and developed areas than usual, making them more dangerous and destructive.

—Reuters

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US strikes steer clear of Iran’s red lines

Summary: US forces launched retaliatory airstrikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen over the weekend, following a separate set of airstrikes on Iranian paramilitary forces and militia groups that are financially and militarily supported by Iran’s government, hitting more than 85 targets across Syria and Iraq.

Context: The targets in that earlier array of strikes reportedly included intelligence centers, storage facilities for missiles, rockets, and drones, and command and control centers, and Iranian officials are not thrilled about this and they’ve issued new warnings about certain potential targets that should not be messed with (the implication being that doing so would trigger a counter-counterattack), but it would seem, so far at least, that the targets selected did not cross red lines drawn by the Iranian government, which could serve as a warning but also prevent a cycle of escalation that might otherwise further inflame conflict in the region.

—The Wall Street Journal

Senegal’s president calls off a national election, his critics call it a coup

Summary: The President of Senegal, Macky Sall, has announced the cancellation of a national election that was scheduled for about three weeks from now, sparking accusations of a coup from his opposition.

Context: The ostensible reason for this cancellation is that there’s a dispute between the legislative and judicial arms of the government that must be resolved before an election can take place; opposition leaders have called this a manufactured crisis meant to allow the president to avoid being challenged at the polls, and the dispute is over whether citizens with duel-citizenship should be able to hold office—one would-be candidate was kept from running on this basis, he accused two judges of corruption following that decision, and it would seem that this is the president’s justification for delaying the election indefinitely, though there are also questions about the constitutionality of the president’s own candidacy, so it’s generally assumed that while there may be some legal issues to sort out here, this is also probably at least partially a self-serving decision.

—The New York Times

Meta (parent-company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, among other brands) achieved the biggest surge in US stock market history, its market valuation increasing by more than $200 billion on a single day last week; the company also holds the record for the biggest market value decrease in history, and this increase is being attributed to the company’s expense-cutting, the announcement of its first-ever dividend, and the announcement of a large stock-buyback program.

—Bloomberg

>878

Number of days Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko had spent in space as of Sunday—a new world record.

That’s the total number of days, not continuous, and he’s expected to reach about 1,110 days by late September.

The previous record-holder was fellow cosmonaut Gennady Padalka.

—Reuters

Trust Click

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

Naira plunges 31%, brings currency closer to Nigeria street rate

Summary: Nigeria’s currency, the naira, has dropped to a record-low value against the US dollar after a change in the way exchange rates are determined went into effect.

Context: This is the second devaluation of the naira in just seven months, and it lowers the currency’s value by nearly a third, down to just over 1,400 naira to a dollar; this change brings the naira’s official value closer to its street value of around 1,450 to a dollar, and the idea is to reduce volatility related to low dollar liquidity in the country while at the same time controlling exchange market fluctuations and increasing transparency to ease some of the damage caused to local and global perception of the naira.

—Bloomberg

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House panel approves impeachment charges against Mayorkas

Summary: The Republican majority of the House Homeland Security Committee has voted, along party lines and without evidence, to recommend that the House impeach the US homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for his handling of security at the border between the US and Mexico.

Context: This is generally being seen as a means by which House Republicans can paint Biden’s administration as being soft on border security at a moment in which the White House has indicated it supports a new set of Republican-proposed immigration policies that would give Biden the power to shut the border down when the number of people trying to cross it grows to unmanageable levels; former President Trump has been pressuring Congressional Republicans not to support these policies, despite their having called for them, so he can continue to use the issue of immigration during the run-up to November’s election, and though this proposed impeachment is unlikely to make it past the Democrat-controlled Senate, it could still represent a symbolic victory for Republicans during that same election lead-up.

—The New York Times

Alaska is short on gravel and long on development projects

Summary: Though rich in other natural resources, the US state of Alaska lacks sufficient stores of gravel, which is necessary for all sorts of construction projects.

Context: Gravel has always been in relatively short supply in Alaska, especially in far-flung, remote parts of the state, but the need for this fundamental construction material has been increasing as climate change has tweaked the nature of some of these regions, their infrastructure needing to be stabilized as frozen ground melts and seawalls needing to be erected to protect coastal areas from erosion; the cost of importing gravel to where it’s most necessary, though, is also growing—a cubic yard of aggregate gravel, which is the kind used for construction projects, can go for upwards of $800 in some rural regions, while the same sells for a mere $15 in well-connected cities like Anchorage.

—High Country News

The US economy is doing just incredibly well compared to its economic peer countries, growing faster than other wealthy nations and tamping down inflation more effectively, as well.

—Axios

8 billion

Number of plays the New York Times’ puzzles and games tallied in 2023, led by the popular Wordle which unto itself netted 4.8 billion plays.

Games have become an increasingly important component of the NYT’s subscription offerings as other news entities (even big ones) have seen numbers and revenues drop at a moment in which technology and changes to the ad market have made income streams precarious.

—Axios

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

Vietnam and Philippines sign deals on security in disputed South China Sea

Summary: The leaders of the Philippines and Vietnam have signed a series of deals related to their naval activities in the South China Sea.

Context: This is likely to irritate China, which has ongoing disputes with both nations, though especially the Philippines, over islands and shoals and fishing rights in portions of the South China Sea which China considers to be its territorial waters; China has been accused of militarizing the area, building out weaponized platforms and arming its fishing vessels, and the number of close-calls and collisions between vessels in the region have increased, raising tensions and upping the likelihood of some kind of more formal scuffle at some point—which is part of why non-Chinese entities in the area have been making these sorts of deals in recent years.

—Al Jazeera

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Elon Musk won’t get his $55 billion pay package after all

Summary: A Delaware judge has ruled in favor of Tesla shareholders who sued to keep owner Elon Musk from receiving a pay package worth about $55 billion which was approved by shareholders in 2018.

Context: The lawsuit alleges that Musk misled shareholders when he proposed the incentive plan six years ago—they weren’t even told that he was the person who originally proposed it—and it’s also been alleged that board of the company is beholden to Musk, despite claims that they decided on the pay package independently; Musk may decide to appeal this decision, and in recent weeks he’s been publicly angling for more voting rights within the company.

—The Verge

India navy rescues two hijacked vessels off Somalia coast in two days

Summary: The Indian navy has rescued two vessels that were hijacked by pirates off the Somalian coast in the past few days, alone.

Context: Piracy is common in this part of the world, but successful hijackings of ships have been relatively rare until recent weeks, when military vessels patrolling the area, including Indian vessels, were predominantly called northward to help cargo ships pass through the Red Sea safely in the midst of rocket and drone attacks from Houthi rebels in Yemen; there’s a growing military presence in this area, as a huge portion of global trade typically passes through the Red Sea and into the Suez Canal, and that flow of goods has been disrupted by these Houthi attacks.

—BBC News

By most metrics the US economy is doing remarkably well, but sentiment amongst US citizens is still lagging those recent (and upbeat) economic indicators.

—Gallup

0

Number of cases of cervical cancer found in women who were given the HPV vaccine before age 14 (when they’re 12 or 13).

The human papillomavirus (HPV) can cause cervical cancer in women who catch it, so this is a truly heartening finding—including the revelation that patients who only received one or two of the three total shots were also seemingly protected from cervical cancer.

Newer versions of the vaccine (Gardasil 9) protect against more types of HPV, making them even more effective than the earlier version that was administered for this study.

—STAT News

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

French farmers block major roads around Paris over falling incomes

Summary: Farmers from across France have moved their tractors and other heavy equipment into Paris, blocking the capital city’s streets to protest what they claim are persistently falling incomes, environmental regulations they worry will make them less competitive with farmers in other European countries, high levels of regulatory red tape, and competition from neighboring nations.

Context: This is similar to other protests happening throughout France and across the EU right now, as farmers in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany have all launched similar efforts to protest their own nation-specific issues and EU policies they feel have stifled their capacity to operate and ability to earn sustainable incomes; these farmers say they aim to keep food deliveries from reaching grocery stores and to thus force the government to take their demands seriously; police have been told not to intervene, so far these protests have been peaceful, and the government has indicated it’s working on solutions to the farmers’ stated problems.

—BBC News

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Colombia declares national disaster as wildfires spread through parched forests

Summary: The Colombian government has declared a national disaster as 31 separate wildfires tear across the country, their spread sparked and amplified by unusually hot and dry weather conditions.

Context: Those weather conditions are being flogged by the El Niño phenomenon that’s roiling the water cycle and increasing temperatures globally right now, and temperatures around the world are increasing, on average, due to human-stoked climate change; this emergency declaration will allow the government to inject more money into disaster relief efforts, and the fires are expected to continue to plague Colombia, and to increase in scale, through March.

—Bloomberg

Imran Khan sentenced to 10 years ahead of Pakistan’s elections

Summary: The previous Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, was sentenced to ten years in prison yesterday in a move that’s widely being seen as an effort by the country’s military to keep him out of play during the nation’s upcoming election.

Context: Pakistani citizens will head to the polls on February 8, and Pakistan’s military is not keen to have Khan roil up populist sentiment against their preferred candidate, a former prime minister who was ousted by the military in 2017 and who had been living in exile until late-2023 when he was welcomed back to serve as an alternative to Khan; Khan was arrested on corruption charges in May of 2023, which triggered protests and a three-year prison sentence which was suspended in August; Khan remains in prison for a separate alleged crime, and this new sentence is seemingly intended to keep him there for the foreseeable future.

—The New York Times

China is investing heavily in its local semiconductor (microchip) industry and has been since a trade-war with the US started to threaten its access to these assets back in 2016.

—Quartz

$100 million

Value of a three-year distribution and ad-sale deal Sirius has made with an interview podcast called Smartless, which is hosted by actors Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, and Sean Hayes.

The show has been with Amazon for three years (a deal worth somewhere between $60 and $80 million), and this new deal is mean to help bolster Sirius’ new streaming service, which it hopes will help it compete with Spotify and Amazon.

—Bloomberg

Trust Click

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

China's Evergrande ordered to liquidate, with debts of $300 billion

Summary: Early Monday morning, a Hong Kong court ordered China’s one-time largest real estate developer, Evergrande, which has more than $300 billion in liabilities, to liquidate its assets.

Context: This is being seen as one more punch in the gut to China’s already reeling economy and stock market; the country’s economy is heavily reliant on its property market, and there was some hope that a restructuring deal could prevent a full-on collapse of the company, but this suggests that’s not going to happen, and though the company reportedly has about $240 billion in assets, creditors are expecting a recovery rate of less than 3% of what’s owed, representing a staggering loss for folks who invested their savings in unbuilt or unfinished Evergrande properties, and for the many other entities that are financially tied to the company.

—Axios

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Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger to leave ECOWAS bloc with immediate effect

Summary: The leaders of Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso, three West African states led by military juntas that successfully toppled their previous democratic governments, have announced that they are leaving the Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS.

Context: This isn’t much of a surprise, as these three nations have been at odds with their democratic neighbors for years, though that diplomatic prickliness was kicked up a notch last July when a military coup in Niger de facto aligned it with Burkina Faso and Mali, which held their own coups in 2022 and 2020, respectively; this trio was already suspended from ECOWAS and has been facing sanctions from ECOWAS nations, so this announcement is mostly just a formalization of their separation from this group, along with the unveiling of a competing organization called the Alliance of Sahel States.

—France24

GOP negotiator defends border proposal amid Trump pressure

Summary: Congressional negotiations over a border deal have become complicated as former President Trump has said he doesn’t like the deal that’s been proposed, but many of his fellow Republicans think it’s solid, and President Biden has said he would support its immediate implementation if it’s passed.

Context: This is a weird moment as Democrats have been largely pushed to the “light touch” side of the immigration policy spectrum by Republicans, who have typically favored a more hardcore approach, allowing for the complete closure of borders if it’s deemed necessary; the deal that’s on the table seems to lean heavily toward Republican priorities on the matter, and Biden is possibly giving his blessing because the issue has become historically vast, by some metrics at least, but also because passing it could take the immigration debate off the table heading into election season; Trump is reportedly dismissing the plan for the same reason, wanting to retain immigration as a cudgel to hit Biden with, and he is thus pressuring Congressional Republicans to keep it from passing, but many of them are still trying to get some kind of immigration reform past the finish line, posthaste, despite that pressure.

—Bloomberg

Satellite image of the US Tower 22 military base in northeastern Jordan, which was struck by drones over the weekend, killing three American soldiers.

—The Associated Press

$40 million

Sum of money five people who were arrested by Ukraine’s security service allegedly tried to steal—the money earmarked for buying mortar shells.

Two of those arrested over the weekend were senior officials from the country’s ministry of defense, and they allegedly worked with the chief executive of a defense firm to divert the payment for 100,000 shells to private accounts, never delivering the paid-for ammunition.

Corruption has long been, and remains, a significant issue throughout Ukraine’s government, and it’s considered to be a significant hurdle if the country wants to join NATO and potentially even the EU, someday.

—The Guardian

Trust Click

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

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

Gene therapy allows an 11-year-old boy to hear for the first time

Summary: An 11-year-old boy who was born deaf due to a mutation in a single gene has had that gene replaced using a new gene therapy technique and is now able to hear.

Context: This same rare, congenital type of deafness affects around 200,000 people globally, and it’s expected that more people will gain access to this treatment soon—though researchers are currently focused on making sure the therapy works as intended in younger patients, before a next-step goal of revising it to target other sorts of congenital deafness; the same general therapy approach is also being applied to other gene-caused conditions, and the optimistic hope is that this could someday lead to a portfolio of broad-based therapies for all sorts of disorders and debilitations, though the theory and practice of targeting the right genes and delivering the therapies are still being refined.

—The New York Times

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Global coal exports and power generation hit new highs in 2023

Summary: New data from environmental think tank Ember indicate that global coal-powered electricity generation hit a new high in 2023, and the export of thermal coal passed 1 billion metric tons for the first time even as the deployment of renewables continues to mark new milestones.

Context: The majority of coal mining, export, and use takes place in Asia, in part because that’s where coal can be mined efficiently, and in part because a lot of middle class population growth is happening in China, Southeast Asia, and in Africa where China in particular does a lot of business—so even though solar, wind, and nuclear power are expanding rapidly, many growing nations are still at least partially reliant on coal because of its accessibility, low price, and flexibility (especially within aging energy production infrastructure).

—Reuters

Nuclear power output expected to break global records in 2025

Summary: A new report from the International Energy Agency indicates that new reactors coming online over the next few years will make 2025 a record year for nuclear power.

Context: This parallels news that renewable sources will likely overtake coal (in terms of overall power generation, globally) in 2025, and it’s illustrative of how much money is being plowed into creating stable, reliable energy sources as the world struggles to pivot away from fossil fuels, but doesn’t yet have flexible enough grids and sufficient battery storage to juggle all the intermittent electricity being produced by new and often quite large-scale solar and wind installations.

—The Guardian

File this under “shocking but not surprising”: the concentration of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere is increasing at a rapid enough clip that it’s now considered unlikely we’ll be able to limit average global climate temperature increase to the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 degrees C.

—Axios

775

Number of brand-name drugs that have seen price-hikes in the US in 2024.

The median price increase is about 4.5%, but some saw 10% hikes—in both cases higher than the 3.4% rate of inflation in December of 2023.

This is happening in the context of US lawmakers casting heightened scrutiny on pharmaceutical companies for their pricing practices (drug prices are way, way higher in the US than the rest of the world, and have been pretty much forever).

—The Wall Street Journal

Trust Click

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

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

Japan becomes the fifth nation to land a spacecraft on the Moon

Summary: Last Friday, Japan became only the fifth country to successfully soft-land on the Moon when its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM mission touched down within its target area, livestreaming the landing on YouTube.

Context: Japan’s space agency, JAXA, announced that the craft’s solar array wasn’t operating as it should soon after landing, so its battery drained in a matter of hours, but the mission is still considered to be a success as even crashing something into the Moon is a big deal, but safely landing within an intended target area, and then sending photos home of the surface of the Moon is even more remarkable to the point that it’s been accomplished only 22 times by four countries (the US, USSR, China, and India) since the first successful landing in 1959, leading up to this Japanese mission.

—Ars Technica

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Billions of cicadas will buzz this spring as two broods emerge at the same time

Summary: Two broods of periodical cicadas, which spend the majority of their life underground before popping up to the surface every 13 or 17 years, depending on their brood’s cycle, will emerge at the same time this year, blanketing the eastern portion of the United States in what look like giant crickets and their loud mating sounds.

Context: The last time the emergence of these two broods lined up in this way was in 1803, and the degree to which even just one brood can carpet the landscape with harmless but omnipresent and loud and crunchy cicadas and their cast-off exoskeletons cannot be overstated—they tend to upend local ecosystems and can disrupt sleep cycles, make driving more dangerous, and generally dominate the visual and audible landscape in the areas where they’re most prevalent; the afflicted regions will begin to see these two waves of cicadas when the ground temperature reaches something like 64 degrees Fahrenheit (or about 18 degrees Celsius), and that typically happens sometime late-April to mid-May, depending on which part of the country we’re looking at.

—NPR News

Australia’s 'golden visa' scheme for wealthy investors axed

Summary: A scheme that allowed wealthy overseas investors to attain an Australian visa if they invested more than $5 million Australian dollars (or around $3.3 million US dollars) in the country has been halted, the government saying it led to poor economic outcomes.

Context: This program, which issued so-called “significant investor visas” or SIVs to folks with money who the Australian government hoped would then invest more of their resources in the country, apparently did not lead to more investment, and critics have long contended that these golden visas mostly served to help corrupt officials park illicit funds in Australia at the expense of more deserving people who might otherwise be welcomed into the country; the government will now pivot its resources toward attracting skilled workers, reserving more visas for them and fewer for the sorts of people who might have previously used this program for its money laundering potential and various wealth-hiding loopholes.

—BBC News

The share of employees in the US who are working from home at least some of the time is way down from its pandemic-era peak, but it’s also way up from the 3% of people who worked from home before COVID-19 upended everything.

—Axios

53%

Percentage of inflation in the second and third quarters of 2023 that resulted from corporations raising prices, rather than broader economic variables.

In other words: corporations saw an opportunity to raise their profits (when people already assumed inflation was high, so they could justify those price-increases more easily, pocketing the difference) and that “greedflation” has led to a windfall for consumer-facing companies, but smaller bank accounts for those who buy their products (and damage to the economies in which they all operate).

—The Guardian

Trust Click

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

Cameroon launches routine malaria shots in global milestone

Summary: Yesterday, Cameroon launched the world’s first-ever routine vaccination program for malaria, kicking-off an effort that’s expected to save the lives of tens of thousands of children across Africa each year.

Context: This is the culmination of a forty-year effort that includes the distribution of bed nets and the application of a malaria vaccine that has been approved by the World Health Organization, and which has proved successful in recent trials; another 19 countries across the continent are planning to roll out similar programs in 2024, and they aim to vaccinate about 6.6 million children across the involved nations through 2025; about half a million children under the age of five die of malaria each year in Africa, and insecticide resistance in local mosquito populations are amplifying the problem—so this program is arriving just in time, and the approval of a second vaccine that will become available later this year has eased concerns about potential vaccine supply squeezes.

—Reuters

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NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

Summary: After an unexpected communications outage over the weekend, the tiny Mars-based helicopter Ingenuity reestablished contact with its car-sized rover home-base, Perseverance, in turn reconnecting with its NASA handlers on Earth.

Context: Ingenuity was initially intended to serve as a test-vehicle, allowing NASA engineers to experiment with expanding their exploration capabilities using flight in the less-dense-than-on-Earth Martian atmosphere; the helicopter, which is about 1.6 feet or half a meter tall, was built to survive five flights, but this outage occurred on flight 72, as it has followed in the footsteps of NASA’s Mars rovers in massively outliving its anticipated expiration date, having covered more than 10 miles or about 17 kilometers of the Martian surface since it arrived in 2021.

—Phys.org

Ahead of New Hampshire primary, underdog Nikki Haley gets one-on-one race with Donald Trump

Summary: Over the weekend, Republican presidential primary contender and governor of Florida Ron DeSantis withdrew from the race, leaving former South Carolina governor and former US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley to face off with Trump in today’s New Hampshire primary.

Context: DeSantis’ pullout wasn’t a huge surprise, as his platform was almost a carbon-copy of Trump’s, so there wasn’t a hugely compelling reason for most Republican voters to choose him over the former president who retains the lion’s share of his party’s support; Haley, in contrast, has carved-out a more traditional conservative platform, a bit like the one Republican candidates favored before Trump upended things in 2016, and though she’s still not expected to win this primary or the Republican nomination, there’s a chance she could outperform expectations in this and the South Carolina primary in February, doing well enough that she can then justify continuing to oppose Trump in the lead-up to the election in November.

—The Wall Street Journal

The daily death toll in the Gaza Strip has been cut in half over the past month—a grim hint of progress in a conflict that has reportedly led to the deaths of more than 25,000 Gaza residents at the hands of Israeli troops and airstrikes, the majority of those killed civilians.

—The New York Times

36,571.80

Share average achieved by Japan’s Nikkei Index on Monday—a level not seen since February 1990—before dropping slightly by the end of the day.

Japan’s stock market has been on a tear, of late, despite all sorts of issues with the larger Asian market and long-term stagnation across much of Japan’s economy that relatively recently has been showing signs of renewed vigor.

—Reuters

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