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

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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

Trust Click

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