One Sentence News

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

Leading ingredient in over-the-counter decongestants doesn't work

Summary: A Food and Drug Administration panel has determined, after reviewing years’ worth of research data, that a key ingredient in many popular decongestants, phenylephrine, doesn’t actually work when taken orally, despite helping relieve stuffy noses when delivered via nasal spray.

Context: The findings indicate that when taken orally, only about 1% of the drug ends up in the bloodstream, which eventually brings it to the afflicted nose tissues—which makes the job its meant to do, constricting the blood vessels in the nose and sinuses, all but impossible; the FDA found that pill- and liquid-based versions of the drug were originally approved because of flaws in the original studies that no longer stand up to modern testing scrutiny, and although phenylephrine has since become the most popular decongestant on US shelves, it’s possible non-nasal versions of it will be taken off the market in the near-future, if the FDA decides to remove its “safe and effective” designation.

—Live Science

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McCarthy, facing an ouster and a shutdown, orders an impeachment inquiry

Summary: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has announced an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, seemingly to assuage further-right members of his party who have threatened to remove him as Speaker and to prevent the passage of a government budget, forcing a shutdown, if he failed to do so.

Context: This inquiry is not a full-on impeachment process, and by all indications the votes to move forward—including from Republicans, most of whom have indicated they think this inquiry is a distraction—don’t exist, but the claim is that the Biden family, including President Biden’s son, Hunter, have been doing illegal things to profit from Joe Biden’s place in the Senate, then the Vice Presidency, then the Presidency; no evidence has been presented to back these claims, thus far, and it’s been reported that former President Trump has been pushing his supporters in the House to force this announcement, which suggests they think there’s some benefit to be had in this inquiry, even if it never culminates in a real-deal impeachment.

—The New York Times

Sweden to increase defense budget to meet NATO target

Summary: The Swedish government has announced that it will increase its defense budget by significantly more than previously announced, adding another €2.2 billion to their bottom-line in order to hit NATO’s 2% defense spending goal.

Context: This is notable in part because Sweden is new to the NATO alliance, and other governments have been slow to hit these targets, despite ongoing concerns related to Russia and its invasion of Ukraine, and how that conflict might spill-over into other European nations at some point; this announcement also arrives shortly after European Union leadership called for an ambitious expansion of the bloc, which could substantially bolster NATO participation in the area, alongside EU governance throughout the region.

—Euractiv

Satellite images of Durna, Libya, on September 2 and September 12, show the extent of the damage caused by floods that burst local dams, demolishing entire neighborhoods and killing an estimated 5,000 people, with more than 10,000 still missing.

—Axios

0.956 seconds

Time required to hit 62 mph (100 km/h) from a standing start for a scratch-built electric car designed and fabricated by a team of students at the Academic Motorsports Club Zürich and two Swiss universities.

That’s a new record (beating the previous one—set last year by German students—by more than a third) and it allows their EV to hit that target speed after crossing just 40.3 feet (12.3 meters).

—Ars Technica

Trust Click

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

Filling of Grand Renaissance Dam on the Nile complete

Summary: The Ethiopian government has announced the completion of the years-long process of filling its Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which is on the Nile and has sparked all sorts of diplomatic issues between Ethiopia and its downstream neighbors, Egypt and Sudan.

Context: This should, ostensibly at least, be good news, as now that the dam is filled, Ethiopia won’t need to truncate the flow of water on the Nile in order to fill it, which has been a significant source of outrage for the governments of Sudan and Egypt; that said, the Egyptian foreign ministry has condemned the final filling of the dam as illegal, and has said that this could weigh on negotiations between the three countries about Nile water management which were suspended in 2021, but which picked back up last month; the dam should be capable of generating more than 5,000 megawatts of electricity, which would more than double Ethiopia’s existing, total electricity production—only half of the country’s 120 million people currently have access to electricity, and this could go a long way toward providing energy for more of their population.

—Al Jazeera

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Flooding in Libya leaves 5,000 people feared dead and more missing after storm collapsed dams

Summary: A Mediterranean storm has triggered floods across Libya, breaking dams which then amplified the floods, leading to the complete destruction of entire neighborhoods in several costal towns; as many as 5,000 people may be dead according to a government representative, and ten thousand more are still missing.

Context: Libya is in the midst of an ongoing crisis that has left it without a central government since 2011, and that, in turn, has meant little investment in upkeep for public services and infrastructure; the country is currently split between rival eastern and western governments, each with their own collection of militia enforcers, and this long-term conflict and governance disarray, combined with a lack of maintenance, has contributed to the severity of these floods.

—The Associated Press

The antitrust trial against Google Search starts today

Summary: A major court case that pits the US Department of Justice against Google began yesterday, kicking-off a 10-week throwdown between a Justice Department that’s been fairly hands-off with the tech industry for decades and a search provider that’s become one of the biggest and most influential companies in the world.

Context: The big argument from the Justice Department is that Google, by paying big bucks to make itself the default search engine on most browsers and devices, has created an illegal monopoly and should therefore maybe be broken up or otherwise punished; Google, for its part, argues that it maintains a 90% share of the general search market because it’s just better than its opposition, and folks who want to change their default search engine can do so with just a few clicks; there are more specifics being worked through, but that’s the core argument, and this case is being compared to the 1990s case against Microsoft which ultimately, and maybe even somewhat ironically, led to a settlement that allowed the Google Chrome browser to step onto the scene and become dominant.

—The Verge

Germany—usually one of the most potent economies in the world—has been struggling compared to other wealthy nations in recent years, with business activity numbers flagging, manufacturing (usually it’s main thing) numbers stalling from 2018, onward, and its exports to China plateauing or dropping since around the same time.

—The Wall Street Journal

2,862

Number of people confirmed killed by the recent earthquake in Morocco, as of Monday; that number is expected to grow in the coming days.

At least 2,562 people have been injured, according to the most recent numbers released by the country’s Interior Ministry, and though emergency crews have been working hard across the afflicted region, Morocco’s government has reportedly been hesitant to accept outside aid, which may be slowing rescue efforts in some areas.

—The New York Times

Trust Click

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

EU and US back trade corridor linking Europe, Middle East, and India

Summary: Over the weekend, leaders from India and the EU announced a new economic corridor meant to link Europe with the Middle East and India using train lines and sea lanes—a project that would initially link India, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, Israel, and the EU, and which would speed up trade between these regions by up to 40%.

Context: This project, called the Partnership for Global Infrastructure Investment, could help normalize relations between governments in the region—including Israel and the Gulf states—but would also serve as an economic counterweight to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which is meant to accomplish basically the same thing, connecting nations across Asia, Africa, and Latin America using the Chinese economy as a center of gravity and Chinese assets for loans and infrastructure build-out; China has been criticized for their approach, as it’s left a lot of the involved countries with gobs of debt and not much economic benefit, and this project is ostensibly meant to do the same, but without that purported debt-trap diplomacy angle; announcing a project and building-out the requisite infrastructure and international deals are two separate things, though, and those involved with this new plan have said they’ll lay out more complete plans over the next few months, at which point we should have a better idea of timelines, costs, and so on.

—The Guardian

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Biden visits Vietnam to bolster alliance confronting China

Summary: US President Biden has made an official visit to Vietnam as part of a larger effort to build a wall of allies in Asia, and to make economic deals throughout the region that replace or exclude China.

Context: Vietnam has in recent years become a medium-sized manufacturing powerhouse, and there have been all sorts of efforts by Western nations to amplify that, the hope being that manufacturing currently being done in China could move elsewhere in Southeast Asia, to governments that are more willing to play ball with the current international order than China’s leadership seems to be—including that of Vietnam; this visit culminated with the announcement of a new, tight partnership between the US and Vietnam, which puts the US in the same, highest-tier diplomatic category as China and Russia, and some human rights activists are not thrilled about this, as Vietnam’s government is an enthusiastic jailer of activists and journalists.

—The Washington Post

Lithium cache found in US may be world’s largest

Summary: A new study estimates that a volcanic crater on the Nevada-Oregon border in the US may harbor the world’s largest supply of lithium, weighing in at somewhere between 20 and 40 million metric tons.

Context: If accurate, this would rival or far surpass the supply contained in Bolivia’s salt flats, which contains about a fourth of the world’s currently confirmed supply of the metal with about 23 million tons; the lithium in this caldera is reportedly contained in clay rather than brine, and is close to the surface, which would make it relatively cheap and easy to mine, and if these numbers are correct this could dramatically change the balance of global renewable energy manufacturing leverage—though there are environmental concerns with any potential mining project, and this one is contained in land Native American activists consider sacred and environmentalist groups have been trying to preserve, which makes further exploration and the utilization of this lithium anything but a done deal.

—Futurism

Nearly 2,500 people have been confirmed dead following a 6.8-magnitude quake in Morocco, which has devastated a slew of populated regions and destroyed essentially all the buildings in some cities and towns; this was the strongest quake to hit the area in more than 100 years, and it was a shallow quake (located about 11 miles beneath the surface), which is part of why it was so destructive.

—The Washington Post

122 grams

Volume of oxygen created on the surface of Mars using a microwave-sized device called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) located on NASA’s Perseverance rover.

That’s about as much oxygen as a small dog would breathe in 10 hours (this is the measurement all the press releases are using, which I think is great) and the device functions by converting some of the abundant CO2 on Mars into oxygen, demonstrating that this could be done on a larger scale if we were to put humans up there for long periods of time at some point (this small version of MOXIE produced about 12 grams of oxygen per hour, which was twice as much as NASA was hoping for).

—CNN

Trust Click

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

Morocco races to dig out survivors after strongest quake in 100 years

Summary: At least 2,000 people have been confirmed killed, so far, in the wake of the strongest earthquake to hit Morocco in about a century—weighing in at 6.8 on the Richter scale—which collapsed buildings constructed from traditional, mud-brick materials and trapped what are thought to be thousands of people in debris.

Context: Moroccan personnel bolstered by foreign volunteers and equipment are scrambling to rescue survivors across the central and southern portions of the country, and many roads, especially to hard-hit communities in the High Atlas Mountains, remain blocked, hindering these efforts; smaller aftershocks have also hindered search and rescue personnel, and it’s anticipated that because of these confounding issues, and the strength and location of the original quake, the official death toll could climb quite a bit higher in the coming days.

—The New York Times

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African Union made permanent member of G20 at Delhi summit

Summary: The African Union, consisting of 55 African member states—though six of those nations have been suspected because they’re currently run by military juntas—was added to the G20 intergovernmental forum as a permanent member at this year’s summit in India.

Context: This move is expected to add more visibility to concerns held by African nations, as previously only South Africa was a G20 member, and it may require that the forum change its name, as previously it consisted of 19 nations and the EU; the G20 is an important symbolic body because, before the addition of the AU, it encompassed about 80% of the world’s income, 75% of international trade, two-thirds of the global population, and 60% of the world’s land area; those figures will increase as the African Union’s numbers are incorporated, since Africa is the fastest-growing continent by many metrics.

—The Guardian

Maldives presidential election heading for 2nd round after no clear winner emerges

Summary: The presidential election held in the Maldives this weekend ended without an outright winner, making a second round of highly contentious voting all but certain.

Context: The leading candidates in this election present diametrically opposed paths for the island archipelago nation, with one favoring a lean toward China, the other supporting a bias toward India; there are eight other candidates in the running, too, which complicates things a bit, but the meta-narrative pervading this vote is that one of the main candidates would put the Maldives more firmly in India’s orbit while his opposition would do the same for China at a moment in which the India Ocean is being geopolitically carved-up for a stand-off between China and the West.

—The Associated Press

Research by McKinsey suggests that the impact of generative AI will be a lot more substantial on some professions than others, with educators and training professionals seeing a lot of automation because of these technologies, while builders and repair professionals may see relatively little (compared to a scenario in which these technologies were not deployed at their current scale).

—McKinsey

17

Number of people who have been arrested in Cuba for allegedly recruiting citizens to fight for Russia in Ukraine.

The recruited Cubans were reportedly told they would be given civilian jobs (in construction) in Russia, but were actually intended for the front lines of the invasion (other Cuban citizens have already been deceived in this way, and their families don’t know where they are or if they’re okay—only that they were tricked).

The Cuban government has great relations with Russia, but has said they are working to break up this network of recruiters because they are not involved in the invasion of Ukraine, and would not abide this kind of bait-and-switch approach to recruitment even if they were.

—The Associated Press

Trust Click

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

Note: There won’t be a Friday edition of OSN this week as I’ll be on a little roadtrip, but I’ll talk to you again on Monday!

Record rains flood Greece just as wildfires let up

Summary: Heavy rainfall has triggered floods in central Greece and in neighboring Bulgaria and Turkey, causing untold damage and at least seven deaths, so far.

Context: These floods are hitting just as wildfires, which have plagued Greece for weeks, began to subside, mimicking a pattern we’ve seen in other places around the world over the past year or two, and further straining already drained national and regional rescue services; local authorities have warned that heavy rains could continue through today, and that more rivers might overflow as a consequence, leading to more destruction and possibly more deaths, as well.

—The New York Times

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World likely has hottest summer on record

Summary: The first batch of global temperature data for August has arrived, and it’s looking like August of 2023 may be the hottest one on record, as was the case with June and July of this year.

Context: If confirmed, that would make the summer of 2023 the hottest summer on record, and though there are confounding factors—like the ocean-warming El Niño phenomenon and ongoing wildfires across Canada—that could be temporarily tipping the heat-scales this year, some scientists are worried that this might be the beginning of an overall hotter climactic period, rather than an unusual one-off.

—Axios

Scientists cryopreserve and revive coral fragments in a world first for conservation

Summary: A new study in Nature Communications indicates that for the first time scientists have been able to freeze fragments of coral into a glasslike state, before then thawing them and returning them to seawater, the coral reviving and functioning as normal after 24 hours.

Context: This is notable because of what it might mean for cryopreserving other organisms in the same way (including maybe human organs, for transport and preservation), but it also suggests we may be able to help preserve coral species at a moment in which warming oceans are threatening their health, which in turn threatens the health of the many other species that rely upon them and the reef systems they create; half the planet’s coral reefs disappeared due to overfishing and pollution from 1950 through the 2020s, and we lost about 14% of our global coral population between 2009 and 2018, alone; research has suggested that we could lose another 70-90% of our reefs if the climate warms to 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels, which we’re projected to hit sometime between 2030 and mid-century—so this preservation method could be vital to saving an ecosystem-rooting species, if we reach that milestone.

—Smithsonian Magazine

In the US, Medicare expenses have been increasing ever since the program was introduced, and these costs were expected to increase dramatically over the past few years; strangely, though, actual Medicare costs have flatlined during a period in which one would think such costs would balloon (a global pandemic!); no one is certain why this is happening, but it’s been called, by one Harvard professor of health policy and medicine, “the most important thing that has happened to the federal budget in the last 20 years.”

—The New York Times

66.11%

Amount by which deforestation in the Brazilian portion of the Amazon rainforest decreased in August, which brought it down to its lowest monthly level since 2018.

That’s down from an all-time high under previous Brazilian President Bolsonaro (who was an enthusiastic deforester), and it shows that current President Lula’s efforts to reduce deforestation (and ostensibly at least, improve the overall health of the Amazon) seem to be working.

—Reuters

Trust Click

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

ASEAN leaders to meet in Jakarta for regional summit, amid tensions over new Chinese map

Summary: Representatives from the ASEAN group of Southeast Asian nations kicked-off their annual summit in Jakarta yesterday, the meeting focusing on a range of issues related to Myanmar’s ongoing civil crisis and general economic concerns, but much of the conversation so far has been focused on China’s new official national map which claims sovereignty over a bunch of territory that other nations also claim as their own.

Context: The offended parties are many are varied, ranging from India, which shares a border with China, both nations claiming territories along that border and at times fatally fighting over them, to the Philippines, which claims islands in the South China Sea that China also claims, to Chinese ally Russia, which is has expressed irritation over China claiming an island along their shared border that the Chinese and Russian governments agreed nearly 20 years ago to split; pretty much every country that shares a border with China has something to be upset about on this new map, though, which the Chinese government says it released in order to correct issues with other, existing regional maps; the degree to which this will further unify other Southeast Asian nations against China has yet to be seen, but it’s unlikely to help ease any of those tensions.

—The Straits Times

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Kim Jong-un and Putin plan to meet in Russia to discuss weapons

Summary: The leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, is planning to visit with Russian President Putin in Russia sometime later this month, reportedly to discuss the former providing the latter with weapons for its ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

Context: This is notable in part because Kim Jong-un doesn’t leave North Korea very often, and in part because it reinforces suspicions that Russia is having trouble keeping its troops equipped for what’s become a fairly attritional, grinding sort of combat in Ukraine; the US and other Western nations have been trying to dissuade countries like North Korea and China from providing arms to Russia, but these attempts have gone about as well as you would expect, so far—though in a few cases the declassification of intelligence about the logistics of these transfers seems to have slowed these sorts of transactions.

—The New York Times

China’s Country Garden buys time to repay debt—but not long

Summary: The largest real estate company still standing following a wave of collapses and bankruptcies in China, Country Garden, has received approval from its investors to extend the maturity date on some of its bonds by three years, which will give it more time to pay off that particular debt (which was originally due Monday alongside a far smaller interest payment, which it paid), though it still has another big debt to pay later this week, which has been describe as “make or break.”

Context: The Chinese real estate sector has been responsible for about a third of the country’s economic growth over the past few decades, but real estate purchases have slumped and companies have gone under at a worrying pace, leaving buyers without finished homes and investors without their hoped-for profits; Evergrande was perhaps the largest and most well-known of the previously high-flying Chinese real estate companies to go under in the past year or so, but Country Garden is also being closely watched, as there’s a chance it can recalibrate its accounts and get back on its feet, but it’s also in a pretty bad spot monetarily, with a lot of debt to service, so these moves might help it stabilize, but might also represent the death throes of yet another Chinese real estate giant.

—The Wall Street Journal

Spotify spent more than $1 billion on podcasting industry acquisitions (shows by famous people, exclusive rights to Joe Rogan’s show, pod tech companies) over the past handful of years, but that investment doesn’t seem to have paid off, and in fact may represent a huge hole in the company’s profits; US podcasting revenue (overall) is expected to increase 25% from 2022 numbers in 2023, up to about $2.3 billion, and is looking like it will more than double by 2025, but the size of the market is still too small for a billion-dollar bet to make sense according to many analysts, which is why Spotify is now floundering in this regard, despite holding some of the industry’s most desirable properties.

—The Wall Street Journal

7nm

Scale of the semiconductor found in Huawei’s new Mate 60 Pro smartphone.

The chip—called the Kirin 9000s—was fabricated by SMIC, a Chinese company that was thought to be incapable of producing chips of this scale and sophistication, raising concerns that the US’s sanctions on chip-related technologies to China may not be working as intended (though some analysts have said this means the sanctions are porous, but not pointless).

—Bloomberg

Trust Click

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

Ukraine's Zelenskiy moves to replace wartime defense minister

Summary: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced over the weekend that he will replace defense minister Oleksii Reznikov, who has been running things since Russia invaded in February of 2022, with Rustem Umerov, who has been serving as the head of Ukraine’s State Property Fund.

Context: The outgoing defense minister has been accused of corruption, including charging higher prices for fundamentals like food and then pocketing the difference, though he contends that these accusations are just smears; the incoming defense minister, who Zelensky says won’t have any trouble being approved by parliament, has attained a stellar reputation running a fund that, until he took control of it, was plagued by accusations of graft; this change in leadership is occurring at a moment in which the Ukrainian government is trying to weed-out corruption, even within the government itself, as this has long been an issue in the country and Ukraine’s outside supporters have expressed concern that the billions of dollars and high-end military equipment they’re sending to the Ukrainian military might not make it to the front lines.

—Reuters

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India launches a spacecraft to study the sun after successful landing near the moon’s south pole

Summary: Over the weekend, India’s space agency kicked-off its first sun-focused mission, successfully launching a satellite that will be placed at the L1, gravity-stabilized Lagrange point located about 930,000 miles, which is about 1.5 million kilometers, from Earth.

Context: This launch, which was successful, occurred just a few weeks after the agency’s also-successful landing of a lander and rover on the southern polar region of the Moon, representing another win for a space agency that has a lower budget than most, but which has been racking up accolades, of late; this satellite is meant to keep tabs on solar activity, including the sort that could impact power grids and satellites on and around Earth, while also studying the sun’s corona, chromosphere, photosphere, and solar wind.

—The Associated Press

China’s battery plant rush raises fears of global squeeze

Summary: China’s production of battery factories is looking likely to cause their output to overshoot demand, stoking concerns that they could create a boom-bust cycle mimicking those recently seen in the country’s property and solar power markets.

Context: Chinese state governments provide local businesses with subsidies to build-out manufacturing capacity for things they’re likely to need in the near-future, and when these states compete to produce the same things all at once, they sometimes end up with a lot more manufacturing capacity than the market justifies, which in turn can leave them with gobs of (for instance) e-bikes or old-style electric cars that cannot be sold because they have way more than they need, and which must then be junked at a significant loss; this system of incentives is effective for stimulating manufacturing infrastructure, but has historically also been prone to sparking overproduction, and that leaves these industries prone to bubbles, and that in turn means a lot of sunk investment, lost resources, and in some cases a refocus on exports, which can cause geopolitical tensions and complicate markets the Chinese government would prefer to corner for its internal use.

—Financial Times

The US has a remarkably safe airline industry, but an unfortunately (and out of proportionally) bad car-safety record, overshadowing even nations with lax regulations and comparably inferior traffic infrastructure in terms of car-related deaths—many of these deaths the consequence of unsafe roads, the American prioritization of larger vehicles (SUVs and giant trucks), and the necessity of using such vehicles on a daily basis in many parts of the country (as opposed to being able to take mass-transit, cycle, or walk).

—Vox

104

Number of government and private education institutions that have been damaged and vandalized in Sudan since the Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces started fighting each other in mid-April.

Fires have been set, buildings have been looted, and infrastructure has been severely damaged to the point that it (buildings, transportation, etc) is no longer usable.

All such institutions in the country have been closed since mid-August until further notice because of ongoing fighting.

—University World News

Trust Click

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

Inmates free 57 Ecuador prison guards after stand-off

Summary: Inmates at six different prisons across Ecuador have released 50 guards and seven police officers they held hostage over the weekend, the gangs that orchestrated the hostage-taking seemingly aiming to derail attempts by the government to reduce the power such gangs hold in the country.

Context: The Ecuadorian government has been jailing a lot of gang-tied criminals throughout the country in recent years, and as a result the prisons have become hubs of power for these gangs, from which they manage their empires; efforts to rein-in their power within the prison system, including searches for drugs and weapons, led to this taking of hostages, and several bombs went off throughout the country, seemingly targeting prison system infrastructure; all of which made pretty clear who holds the power here, and all of which seems to have been performed without causing any casualties, as the hostages have been released and the bombs didn’t hurt anyone; now the Ecuadorian government, which is just two-months out from a presidential run-off vote, is trying to decide how to move forward with an election that’s already been marred by the gang-conducted assassination of one of the candidates, who was running on an anti-corruption, anti-gang platform.

—BBC News

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Death under investigation at Burning Man as flooding strands thousands at Nevada festival site

Summary: Tens of thousands of people attending the annual Burning Man art and culture event in the Nevada desert were left stranded at the festival grounds over the weekend as flooding from storms in the area turned the dry ground into deep mud; one person has been confirmed dead since the stranding began, though details from the local sheriff department are sparse.

Context: Event organizers have encouraged attendees to remain calm, shelter-in-place, and conserve food and water, and online rumors of ebola spreading throughout the camp seem to be false, though medical professionals have noted an uptick in concerns about stomach bugs and hypothermia, as tends to be the case with any such event in these sorts of climactic conditions; vehicular access to the area has been closed because of the mud, the regional airpot is closed, and about 70,000 people were estimated to still be at the event as of Sunday.

—The Associated Press

Meta’s ‘biggest single takedown’ removes Chinese influence campaign

Summary: Tech company Meta has said they’ve removed 7,704 Facebook accounts, 954 Facebook pages, 15 Facebook groups, and 15 Instagram accounts tied to an ongoing influence campaign by the Chinese government, meant to sow distrust about and discord within the United States.

Context: This is the largest such influence campaign that’s been identified, to date, and it includes accounts on other platforms like TikTok, Twitter, Substack, LiveJournal (which is apparently still around), and Blogspot, amongst many other such publishing and social networks; this is the seventh influence campaign from China that Meta has removed in the past six years, alone, four of which were uncovered and removed in the past year; the company was able to tie these efforts to a collection of Chinese law enforcement offices across China, identifying individual office efforts based on their work shifts and meal breaks.

—The New York Times

Meta (parent-company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) has been blocking links to news sources in Canada for the past month or so, with apparently little impact on usage of their services in the country (according to third-part tracking firm data)—which would seem to back up Meta’s assertion that their Canadian users don’t rely upon these networks for news consumption overmuch; this link-blocking effort is a response to a new law that requires huge internet companies pay news publishers for the articles users share on these platforms.

—Reuters

2025

Year by which a global lithium shortage could severely constrain supply of the material, according to some new estimates.

Other analysts see a longer timeframe, but agree that a substantial supply-constraint could land sometime in the next handful of years to a decade, due especially to the expansion of the electric vehicle market (which is expected to grow more than 20% year-on-year from 2023-2032 in China, alone) and the deployment of city-scale energy backup systems that rely upon lithium-ion batteries.

—CNBC

Trust Click

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

Note: I’m trying something new today, merging the email and podcast version of OSN into one publication. We’ll see how this looks/feels—please let me know if there’s any weirdness or undesirable side-effects on your end.

UN warns that hundreds of thousands in Southeast Asia have been roped into online scams

Summary: The UN human rights office has released a report indicating that at least 120,000 people in Myanmar and about 100,000 in Cambodia have been forced into conducting online scams by criminal gangs.

Context: These gangs seem to be targeting migrants and often lure their victims with false recruitment communications, implying that they would be hired for real jobs, only to then lock them into scam-related labor, preventing them from leaving through use of torture, sexual violence, detention, and other sorts of coercion; this parallels international concerns related to so-called “pig butchering” schemes where victims are fleeced by (often, but not exclusively) supposed women on dating and social media sites, but these supposed women are actually men and women being held against their will by gangs, forcing them to conduct these sorts of grifts; in June, 2,700 of these forced workers were rescued in the Philippines, and the Philippines, Thailand, and Laos have been flagged as other destinations or transit sites for people being trafficked in this way.

—The Associated Press

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NASA officials sound alarm over future of the Deep Space Network

Summary: NASA officials have said that the agency’s Deep Space Network, which is made up of antennas in California, Spain, and Australia that are used to maintain contact with all sorts of space missions, is straining under the weight of all the communications signals it’s managing.

Context: The DSN is currently maintaining contact with about 40 missions that, lacking the Network, wouldn’t be functional, and another 40-plus missions will be added to the Network over the next decade, nearly doubling the amount of traffic it will have to deal with despite already being overburdened, at times by as much as 40%; those running the Network are also worried about the increasing size of the communications it’s juggling, as the hardware being sent into space becomes more sophisticated and the transmissions they send to Earth grow from bytes into gigabytes—everyone understandably wanting 8k images and videos, but each upsizing of resolution dramatically increasing the load placed on these antennas; all of which means there are signals that the global scientific community might benefit from that are being lost or delayed; earlier-planned efforts to build-out the network are currently five years behind schedule and will cost more than $700 million to complete, and new communication stations that will be placed around the world and dedicated to lunar missions won’t be operational until 2027.

—Ars Technica

Visa and Mastercard prepare to raise credit card fees

Summary: Two of the largest credit card companies in the US are planning to increase the fees they charge merchants in October and April, which some estimates suggest could result in an additional half-billion dollars in fees each year.

Context: Merchants pay to accept credit cards every time a customer uses one, that fee going to the card company, but they also pay for using credit card networks, these latter fees typically going to the bank that issued the card; US merchants paid Visa and Mastercard about $93 billion in fees in 2022—which was up from just $33 billion in 2012—and it’s likely this fee-bump will result in higher prices for some goods at some vendors, though Congress recently introduced legislation that would allow merchants to process these cards using other networks (which is something they can already do for debit cards) and that could lower the fees they have to pay to process card-swipes if the law is passed.

—The Wall Street Journal

Chinese oil giant Sinopec recently announced that gasoline demand in China is expected to peak this year, which is two years earlier than the company’s earlier estimate; this change is being attributed to the takeoff of the electric vehicle market in the country, and it’s surprising in part because Sinopec benefits from a robust gasoline market—so if anything they’re incentivized to underplay risks to this market (implying that this must be a significant, obvious (if you’re looking at the numbers) change, if they’re making this call).

—Bloomberg

$100 million

Size of investment by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund in the US’s Professional Fighters League—a mixed martial arts entity that represents the country’s newest foray into entertainment-related assets.

Alongside this investment, the representatives announced that the League would be creating a regional (Middle East and North Africa) tournament in 2024, and that this new venture would be headquartered in Saudi Arabia.

—Financial Times

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In this episode:

Gabon officers declare military coup, president detained

Expensive drugs targeted for first US price negotiations

The UN is undertaking an unprecedented 6-month withdrawal of nearly 13,000 peacekeepers from Mali