One Sentence News

• One Sentence News / June 28, 2024

  Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.Note: As I mentioned in yesterday’s OSN, this will be the last edition of the email and podcast for the foreseeable future, as I’ll be reinvesting the (substantial amount of) time and effort required to produce it each day in other things (including a new, news-related project called “Some Thoughts About”).If you’re a paying OSN subscriber, the balance of your payment will be refunded, and the OSN archive will be opened up, all paywalls removed.Thank you so much for supporting this project, and for caring enough to spend some of your time, each day, learning about what’s happening in the world around you.(And if you want to fill the news-shaped hole in your heart with another pod and/or email, I run a news analysis podcast called Let’s Know Things, and a weekly email of curated links to news-related things called Notes On the News.)Gay sex ban in Namibia ruled unconstitutionalSummary: A Namibian court has ruled that same-sex acts between consenting men are no longer illegal in the country, and that laws which declared them to be illegal are themselves unconstitutional.Context: These laws only ever declared same-sex acts between men illegal, not women, and it’s still illegal to marry someone of the same sex in the country, but this is considered to be a big deal because these laws made gay relationships taboo and fueled a lot of discrimination toward anyone who was, or seemed to be, gay—a social stance that also made it more difficult to provide health services, like HIV vaccines and treatments, to folks in a region in which infection rates are very high.—BBC NewsOne Sentence News is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.On day of fatal BP refinery blast, 3,712 safety alarms and one unsent emailSummary: An explosion at a BP oil refinery in Ohio in 2022 was preceded by thousands of safety alarms and a breakdown in communication between daytime and evening shift workers, according to a new report from federal investigators who spent two years looking into the blast, which killed two refinery workers.Context: Among other things, the report indicates that BP neglected to shut down production at the refinery when warning signs indicated they should, and they didn’t fix obvious issues with equipment, despite having been told over and over about these issues by employees, and these issues eventually culminated with a series of malfunctions, 3,712 alarms in a 12-hour period, and an explosion that led to even more warnings, confusion, and delayed responses; the refinery has since been sold to a Canadian company, which says it restarted production at the facility last year, and that it’s working with regulators to make improvements and upgrade safety measures.—The Wall Street JournalIndonesia is trying to block LGBTQIA content from the internetSummary: A new Indonesian bill, which is based on an earlier proposed bill that was shelved following widespread public backlash, would restrict content in the country that portrays “LGBTQIA behavior,” and anything that shows lifestyles or actions that might be imitated by the public, allowing the government to shut down or censor social platforms, TV networks, and other broadcast mediums, alongside the people using them to share content, using fines and license cancellations; the bill also places limits on investigative journalism in the country. Context: That earlier, shelved bill would have forced LGBTQIA Indonesian people into conversion therapy programs, and this new one approaches the same topic from a different angle, its terms vague enough that it would apparently—according to criticisms from legal experts and opponents in the country—allow the government to shut down and silence any publication, journalist, influencer, or network it doesn’t like, which would extend its existing censorship powers, which it justifies by claiming it needs to tackle so-called fake news; international human rights groups have noted a significant rightward-shift in Indonesia’s government in recent years, and this new proposed bill is likely to be passed before the current president leaves office later this year.—Rest of WorldPart of what’s informing the rate of electrification (and the deployment of renewable energy sources) in various countries is the cost of electricity versus competitive fuel types (like gas); in China, electricity is cheaper than gas, which makes deploying more clean sources of electricity an easier bet, though they’re also at that point, in part, because of previous investments in the same (at a time in which other sources were more competitive).—Sustainability By Numbers1011Number of drones the US has approved for sale to Taiwan for about $360 million.That figure includes 720 Switchblade missiles (and its accompanying fire-control systems), and up to 291 Altius 600M loitering munitions (and supporting components).Despite never having controlled it, China claims Taiwan as its own, and has threatened to take the island nation by force, if necessary; this sale was approved in the midst of a more-intense-than-usual pressure campaign from China to keep Taiwan isolated from outside influences, and pull it into its sphere of influence.—CNNTrust Click This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit onesentencenews.substack.com

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• One Sentence News / June 27, 2024

  Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.Note: This is a difficult note to write, because I love OSN and I know there are a lot of people who read and listen to it, and who rely on it to help them maintain a situational awareness about the world.But I recently made the decision to put OSN on pause, indefinitely, so I can reallocate the (significant) time and energy required to produce it each day to other things, for the foreseeable future. I’m truly sorry to those who will be disappointed by this decision, but thank you very much for your support, attention, and for caring about what happens in the world.So! Tomorrow’s (Friday) edition of the email will be the last one, for now.If you’re a paying OSN subscriber, you’ll be refunded whatever balance is left on your subscription—I’ll leave the OSN archive online, but I’m removing the option to pay for it, as while I may come back to it at some point, I don’t know when that might be and I don’t want to tie up your money for the duration.(I’m still running my news analysis podcast, Let’s Know Things, and I curate a weekly selection of news-related links in my Notes On the News email, if you’re interested.)Thanks again, and I’ll see you one more time, tomorrow :)Kenyan protesters promise more rallies after at least 23 die in clashesSummary: Protestors in Kenya, demonstrating against new tax hikes in the country, fought with police outside parliament earlier this week, eventually breaking into the parliamentary compound just minutes after the body voted in favor of these hikes; 23 people were killed during these protests across the country, and protest leaders are encouraging people to keep hitting the streets, and to occupy the State House, the president’s office and residence, and the local offices for the World Bank and IMF later this week; President Ruto now says he won’t sign the bill into law in response to these protests.Context: This is being seen as the most serious crisis Ruto has faced since he stepped into office two years ago, and the government has deployed the army to help keep the peace during what it’s calling a “security emergency”; lawmakers have said the tax hikes are necessary to avoid a budget gap, though they removed a few of the more contentious ones in the final version of the bill in order to avoid creating any more turmoil; protestors are now demanding, online, in addition to the whole of the bill being voided, that Ruto resign from office.—ReutersOne Sentence News is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Biden pardons thousands of US veterans convicted under law banning gay sexSummary: US President Biden has announced that he will pardon thousands of veterans who were convicted, over the past six decades, under a law that banned gay sex in the military, which in many cases resulted in dishonorable discharges, and a consequent loss of benefits, alongside all the other social and legal consequences of being discharged in that way.Context: The US government has a long history of witch-hunts, including a big one in the 1950s that became known as the “lavender scare,” which aimed to weed out anyone who would today be considered LGBTQ+ from government employment, including in the military; a policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” under former President Bill Clinton allowed such people to serve in the military as long as they weren’t open about their sexuality, and that was repealed in 2010, but throughout that period, service-members were still persecuted for their sexuality if they were at all public about it.—The GuardianIsraeli military must draft ultra-Orthodox Jews, Supreme Court rulesSummary: Israel’s Supreme Court has ruled that the country’s military must draft ultra-Orthodox Jewish men who are religious students, despite a long-time exemption this group has enjoyed.Context: Netanyahu’s far-right allies in government, those that are keeping him in office, are themselves made up of and supported by ultra-Orthodox organizations, and that’s part of why they’ve been able to avoid the draft for this long, despite the military being spread somewhat thin during its invasion of the Gaza Strip, and new rumblings that it might also enter a more formal conflict with Lebanon-based Hezbollah, as well; this decision could make life more difficult for Netanyahu, who will likely be pressured by his allies to do something about this ruling, though it could temper some of the protests that have been erupting on a regular basis across the country, some of which have been focused on this—in the minds of many, unfair—draft exclusion.—The New York TimesAfter a long period in which few NATO members met the recommended military spending threshold of 2% of their GDP, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has nudged that number up, with only 7 countries hitting that goal in 2022, but (an estimated) 23 managing it in 2024.—Sherwood$50.7 trillionAnticipated size of the US national debt by 2034, according to a new projection from the Congressional Budget Office.That’s up from the Office’s previous projection just four months ago, which came in at $48.3 trillion.—The Washington PostTrust Click This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit onesentencenews.substack.com

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• One Sentence News / June 26, 2024

  Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will plead guilty in deal with US and be freed from prisonSummary: Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks who published a trove of classified US military documents in 2010 and has been on the run from the US Justice Department ever since—initially spending years living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, before being locked up in a UK prison—has reportedly made a deal that will see him plead guilty to one of the 18 charges on which he was indicted in 2019, which will allow him to return to his home country of Australia with a time-served sentence.Context: Assange was at the center of several major scandals in the early 20-teens, most of them linked to allegations of hacking, divulging state secrets, and embarrassing the US military, because many of the classified documents that were leaked by WikiLeaks were related to US activities in Afghanistan and Iraq, and diplomatic cables from around that same time, and several of them showed human rights violations or contained transcriptions of US officials insulting their international peers; Assange has long struggled against extradition to the US, fearing he would face the death penalty if sent there, and this agreement, if it’s approved by a judge, would seem to end his long-time exile, allowing him to return home to his family without any additional prison time.—The Associated PressOne Sentence News is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Music industry giants allege mass copyright violation by AI firmsSummary: A group of music industry entities, including Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and Warner Records, have sued Udio and Suno—a pair of AI-oriented music-generation companies—for allegedly ripping off songs owned by these labels to train their AI systems.Context: These companies are just two of many that have popped up over the past year or two, and which allow their customers to generate ostensibly original music just by describing what they want to make, and that’s possible because the AI systems they use are trained on gobs of existing music, much of which is allegedly owned by these record labels, and which, according to these lawsuits, were incorporated into the training data illegally; this is similar to other lawsuits that are working their way through global court systems right now, related to books, photos, films, journalism and other sorts of human-made work that are being collected and aggregated by AI companies to train their models, and there’s little in the way of existing legal precedent on this sort of thing, so it’s difficult to say, at this point, how these sorts of cases will pan out in different legal jurisdictions.—Ars TechnicaChina becomes first country to retrieve rocks from the Moon’s far sideSummary: The Chinese space program successfully returned lunar soil samples from the far side of the Moon, yesterday, marking yet another accomplishment for the burgeoning program, and a new first-ever achievement for humanity.Context: The Chang’e-6 mission was a follow-up to previous Chinese missions that demonstrated the country’s growing capacity in space, initially allowing them to photograph and map the Moon’s surface, then land on and deploy a rover on the side facing Earth, then deploying a rover on the far side of the Moon—a first for any space agency—in 2019; the agency’s previous Moon mission brought about four pounds of Earth-side Moon regolith home (something that’s only been previously accomplished by the US and Soviet Union), and this most recent achievement is thus far unique to China, which means it’s a big deal in terms of their in-space credibility, but also for human knowledge, as those far-side lunar materials could teach us a lot about how that half differs from the side we continuously see, and about the Moon’s origins.—The New York TimesUsed EVs have become less expensive in the US, on average, than their gas-consuming competition according to a recent report from iSeeCars; this price difference is being attributed to a perceptual value-drop in EVs, due to infrastructural limitations (especially a dearth of charging stations in some regions).—Business Insider$10.75 billionSum Amazon will invest on cloud and logistics infrastructure in Germany, most of it by 2026, according to a recent announcement by the company.That’s in addition to a previously announced investment by Amazon in Germany, which (including the new sum) adds up to a total of just over $19 billion, this fresh investment alone creating something like 4,000 jobs in the country. —ReutersTrust Click This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit onesentencenews.substack.com

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• One Sentence News / June 25, 2024

  Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.Somalia asks peacekeepers to slow withdrawal, fears Islamist resurgenceSummary: Somalia’s government has asked the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia, which is a peacekeeping force of about 4,000 troops, to slow their withdrawal from the country, which is currently expected to be completed on December 31 of this year; around half that force is scheduled to be withdrawn by June, and the government is asking them to wait until September.Context: The ATMIS is an African Union force, is largely funded by the EU and US, and is in Somalia to help the government fend-off extremist militants in the region, especially those aligned with al Shabaab; the government is concerned their own forces won’t be ready to fill in the gaps left by the ATMIS when they pull out, basically, and that could leave a power vacuum al Shabaab or another group could rush to fill; the head of the ATMIS has said there’s no definitive timeline for concluding negotiations regarding the withdrawal, and that everyone involved has committed to achieving sustainable peace and security in the area.—ReutersOne Sentence News is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Greece introduces the six-day work weekSummary: A new law that comes into effect in Greece on July 1 will allow business owners in some sectors to assign their employees hours up to six days a week, if they deem it necessary, adding a 40% supplement to the employee’s daily wage if they are called in for a sixth day of labor.Context: This is a contentious piece of legislation, as while it could help boost the wages of some hospitality, agricultural, and retail workers in particular, it’s generally not meant to increase the number of hours they work, but rather than number of total hours businesses are producing goods and services, and Greek workers already work more hours than those in any other European country, tallying an average of 41 hours per week (the pay they receive per hour is low by European standards, however); collective agreements have been frozen in the country for years, as the government has had to ask for three economic rescue packages, and has suffered through 15 years of recession and austerity measures, so this is generally being seen as another effort to shore things up at a moment of relative calm in that regard, making up for a lack of skilled workers by putting those who are available to work a little more, each week.—Deutsche WelleGunmen kill 15 police officers and several civilians in Russia’s southern Dagestan regionSummary: Attacks by gunmen on two Orthodox churches, a synagogue, and a police post in two cities in the southern Russian republic of Dagestan on Sunday have left more than 15 people dead, according to local officials.Context: These attacks occurred near-simultaneously, and the country’s Anti-Terrorist Committee has said the five confirmed gunmen have been killed, while the governor of the republic said six “bandits” were “liquidated”; no one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks, though there was a report that a local official was detained because of his son’s possible involvement; another recent attack on a concert hall in Moscow, during which 139 people were killed, was initially (and without evidence) blamed on Ukraine, before the government admitted it was an Islamic State-linked group, and some reports suggest officials may try to link this new attack to Ukraine, as well, though there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that’s the case.—The Associated PressThe 2024 US election is looking to feature the most “double-hater” voters on record, with around 25% of surveyed Americans saying they don’t particularly like either major candidate.—Axios$91.4 billionSum spent by the nine nuclear-armed countries on nuclear weapons in 2023, according to a new report by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.That’s about $3,000 per second, and is around $10.7 billion more than was spent in 2022.—VOA NewsTrust Click This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit onesentencenews.substack.com

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• One Sentence News / June 24, 2024

  Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.Chad joins other countries in eliminating sleeping sicknessSummary: Chad has become the 51st country to officially eliminate sleeping sickness from within their borders, marking the halfway point to a goal set by the World Health Organization in 2021 to eliminate it in 100 countries by 2030.Context: Sleeping sickness is a parasitic infection caused by the tsetse fly, and it’s only found in Subsaharan Africa, mostly in poorer regions; this infection initially manifests with flu-like symptoms, but eventually also leads to behavior changes, difficulty sleeping, and confusion, and can ultimately result in a coma or death; early detection and treatment of sleeping sickness has helped substantially improve health outcomes in those afflicted, and most of the countries that have eliminated it, thus far, have invested in reducing infection reservoirs, which in this case often means applying insecticide to, and treating afflicted cattle to keep tsetse flies from acquiring the disease from animals, in the first place.—AfricanewsOne Sentence News is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Internet Archive forced to remove 500,000 books after publishers’ court winSummary: The Internet Archive, which lost a court case brought against it by book publishers in March of last year, recently pulled around half-a-million books from its online open library.Context: This is the result of a years-long struggle between publishers and the Internet Archive, but in essence, the IA is a nonprofit that aims to preserve and make available all sorts of digitized materials, including things like websites, games, and apps, but also print materials that have been scanned, and which are difficult or impossible to find anywhere else; during the height of the pandemic, the IA made all of its books available to anyone who wants them, removing its typical one-person-at-a-time approach that mimicked more conventional libraries, as a sort of emergency, everyone is being forced to stay at home gesture, and that sparked additional legal efforts on the part of book publishers, who were already opposed to the IA’s actions, saying they amounted to piracy; this takedown of hundreds of thousands of books published by the lawsuit-bringing publishers is being appealed, and on one side of this debate are book-readers and open information activists who say this could portend bad things for the future of libraries of all kinds, and on the other are publishers and some authors who say, basically, if these folks make our work available for free, online, how will we be able to keep publishing books?—Ars TechnicaGilead says its HIV prevention shot was 100% effective in a clinical trialSummary: Drug-maker Gilead has announced that its twice-yearly injectable HIV drug, lenacapavir has demonstrated 100% efficacy in a late-stage clinical trial.Context: This double-blind, phase 3 trial involved 5,300 women in South Africa and Uganda, and none of the women in the group that got the drug were infected with HIV during the trial period, while 39 women in the group that didn’t receive it did develop HIV; these results were considered to be so good by an independent data monitoring group that the trial was ended early so all of the women could be offered the drug; results for a second trial that involved men who have sex with men, instead of women, are set to be announced in late-2024 or early-2025, and Gilead’s stock price rose more than 9% following this announcement.—QuartzA recent survey from YouGov found that younger Americans like wearing suits more than older Americans, but that a sizable chunk of the population—despite owning a suit—never wear it; a big change from the previous professional paradigm, and a number that’s possibly being influenced by the pandemic-era shift to remote work.—YouGov20%Increase in the number of passengers riding Amtrak trains the first seven months of the company’s most recent budget year (which began in October of 2023), according to Amtrak’s CEO.He also said the company is on track to exceed its all-time record high number of passengers served in a single year (32.3 million), which was set in 2019.Amtrak has seen a recent surge in new government funding to help it refurbish popular routes and stations, and introduce new ones to serve currently unserved areas, and this increase was tallied despite the company currently suffering from several diminished routes and issues with some of its tracks.—ReutersTrust Click This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit onesentencenews.substack.com

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