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

Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey indicted on federal bribery charges

Summary: New Jersey Democratic Senator Robert Menendez and his wife have been indicted for bribery, the US Justice Department announced late last week, on charges that they accepted stacks of cash, bars of gold, and other assets in exchange for nudging government policy to benefit the Egyptian government.

Context: This is a rapidly evolving story, but basically this senator has allegedly been abusing his position as a senator and as the head of the Foreign Relations Committee to enrich himself and his wife, netting hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, gold, paychecks for made-up jobs, and a luxury vehicle, by helping to facilitate military sales and financing for the Egyptian government, in one case helping them attain hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid from the US despite human rights concerns; Menendez has also been accused of trying to disrupt federal investigations of his allies and attempting to get people sympathetic to his goals into office; Menendez was charged with corruption in 2017, but the jury was deadlocked and he won reelection the following year; this case is far bigger, a lot more colorful, with gobs of photographic evidence of the bribes in question, and will be conducted in New York instead of New Jersey, all of which could mean a steeper, uphill legal battle for Menendez and his wife; some Democratic lawmakers have publicly demanded Menendez resign, but he has thus far claimed to be innocent and has said he doesn’t plan to step down.

—The Washington Post

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Hundreds of ethnic Armenians flee Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia

Summary: Days after the Azerbaijani military seized control of the disputed, breakaway territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, thousands of ethnic Armenians have fled across the border into Armenia, fearing ethnic cleansing.

Context: This is another rapidly evolving story, and in essence this region is highly contested, internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, but governed by the Republic of Artsakh since 1994; in 2020, Azerbaijan reclaimed most of the territory surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh, alongside a third of Nagorno-Karabakh itself, and on September 19th the Azerbaijani government launched a large-scale offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh, ultimately disarming the Republic of Artsakh military, and that, in turn, has worried Armenians in the region that local Azerbaijanis might feel emboldened to kill them, and that has triggered this growing exodus to the west, across the Armenian border; this region has long been war-torn, ethnic animus at times being tempered by negotiations moderated by Russia, but now that Russia is distracted by its invasion of Ukraine, these two governments have generally had to deal with each other more directly, with middling success.

—Al Jazeera

Amazon to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic as AI arms race escalates

Summary: Amazon has announced that it will invest up to $4 billion in AI company Anthropic, the latter using Amazon-made custom chips while the former incorporates Anthropic’s AI technology into its suite of business tools.

Context: This is just the most recent agreement between a major tech behemoth and a rapidly growing AI-focused startup, the first of which was Microsoft’s deal with OpenAI, but pretty much everyone is getting involved in this emerging dynamic at this point, the AI companies needing a lot of money and the entrenched tech-titans wanting to get a foot in the door in a segment of the tech industry they might otherwise miss out on, falling behind their rivals; Anthropic is best known for its AI chat assistant, Claude, which directly competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT offering, and the company has also seen recent investments from Google and Salesforce, while Amazon has indicated it’s open to investing in other AI startups, as well.

—The Wall Street Journal

Lake Prespa in North Macedonia is one of Europe’s oldest lakes and is foundational to the country’s ecosystems, but over the past few months the lake’s water level has been dropping precipitously, amplifying a decades-long trend that has seen its surface area decrease by 7% since 1984, which has worried locals, impacted other nearby lakes (which are interconnected), put a slew of native wildlife at risk, and has made survival for human residents in the area more tenuous.

—Reuters

2,180

Number of climate-related legal cases being tracked, globally, as of the end of 2022.

That’s double the number tallied in 2017, and the majority of them are based in the US, brought by US citizens and organizations against polluters, governments, and the like (which makes sense, as the US is highly litigious in part because a lot of change occurs as a result of the incentives provided by the legal system).

—Vox

Trust Click

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