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

Claudia Sheinbaum claims sweeping mandate to become Mexico's first female president

Summary: Nobel Prize-winning climate scientist and former mayor of Mexico City Claudia Sheinbaum has become Mexico’s first female president, pulling in somewhere between 58.3% and 60.7% of the vote.

Context: Sheinbaum was supported in her campaign by her mentor, the outgoing President Obrador, and while this election is being seen as a milestone moment for a country that’s historically been very keen on traditional, Catholic church-encouraged, gender roles—Sheinbaum’s main opponent was also a woman—it was also marred by a record number of assassinations, 37 candidates having been murdered by cartels leading up to the vote.

—Reuters

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China lands a spacecraft on the moon’s far side to collect rocks for study

Summary: China’s Chang’e-6 spacecraft has successfully deposited a lander on the far side of the Moon, that lander tasked with using a drill to gather up to 4.4 pounds, or about 2 kilograms of material from the surface, which will then be returned to the orbiting craft, which will shoot the materials back to Earth, that package scheduled for arrival sometime around June 25.

Context: This is just one more Moon-related success in a series of such successes for China’s space program, which has picked up the pace in recent years to compete with the US, both nations scrambling to juice their Moon programs in order to establish infrastructure that will help them lay claim, or prevent the other from laying claim, to what may be relatively scarce water resources that will be necessary for long-term inhabitation of the Moon.

—The Associated Press

Third human case of bird flu from cows—this one with respiratory symptoms

Summary: A third person in the US, a Michigan dairy farmer, has been infected with a confirmed case of avian influenza virus, often called bird flu or H5N1, after coming into close contact with an infected dairy cow.

Context: This infection is suspected to be another case of cow-to-human transmission, but the infected person also has respiratory symptoms, which is a first, and which is alarming to some experts, as that could provide the virus a means of mutating into a human-to-human transmissible form; no other workers on that dairy farm have reported symptoms, and the infected worker is reportedly recovering, but disease experts are continuing to watch the spread of this virus in cows and other mammals as bird flu is incredibly deadly, killing more than half of the humans it has infected since 2003, and because this tends to be the path these sorts of zoonotic diseases take before achieving a human-optimized form.

—Ars Technica

Russian forces have recently made a significant and sustained push into Ukrainian territory near the nation’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, forcing thousands of civilians to flee and worrying military experts that this may be a feint meant to pull troops away from another, even more substantial target.

—The New York Times

3 million

Number of followers former President Trump attained on social short video platform TikTok after about a day on the network.

That compares to an account run by President Biden’s campaign, which has a little more than 340,000 followers on TikTok.

Biden recent signed a bill that could ban TikTok in the US if the China-based company that owns it doesn’t divest itself of the company, and Trump unsuccessfully attempted to ban it on national security grounds when he was president.

—Reuters

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

Trump guilty on all counts in hush-money case

Summary: Former President (and current Presidential Candidate) Trump was convicted of all 34 felony counts that he was charged with in a New York case that centered around falsifying business documents to conceal hush-money payments made in 2016, when he was initially running for President.

Context: This is big news in part because this is the first time in US history that a former president has been convicted of a felony, and in part because this is the only case against Trump, out of four total ongoing cases, that is likely to culminate before the November election, and this outcome—depending on who you listen to—will either rally Trump’s supporters to his side, or cause vital independent votes to drift away in favor of Biden, or in favor of simply not voting for anyone, in either case influencing the outcome of that contest in a potentially significant way.

(More on this case and its significance in tomorrow’s Let’s Know Things episode.)

—The New York Times

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South Africa's ANC facing coalition as election ends decades of dominance

Summary: For the first time since the end of apartheid in the country, South Africa’s African National Congress, or ANC party has not won a majority of the vote, which will force it to build a coalition government with another party or parties.

Context: In 2019, the ANC claimed 57.5% of the vote, and this time around it looks like it’ll have around 40%, so this represents a significant drop in support, and that drop is being attributed, in part, to the party’s seeming inability to rein-in corruption and crime, and keep the lights on, the nation long suffering regular power outages; markets have been responding to this outcome cautiously, as depending on which smaller party or parties the ANC decides to form a government with, South Africa could become more or substantially less business-friendly.

—Reuters

US dismantles 911 S5 botnet used for cyberattacks and arrests admin

Summary: The US Justice Department has announced that it, in collaboration with law enforcement entities from around the world, have taken down what seems to be the world’s biggest botnet, the 911 S5 botnet, and arrested its administrator in Singapore.

Context: This botnet, which was formed by installing malware on victims’ computers, usually via malicious VPN software, allowed its controller to create a network of more than 19 million compromised devices, access to which was sold to clients for all sorts of criminal behaviors including fraud, harassment, bomb threats, and child exploitation; the botnet’s administrator faces a maximum penalty of 65 years in prison if convicted on all counts.

—Bleeping Computer

Though many DTC (direct-to-consumer) businesses have flagged (after a period of relative success in the early 2000s) in recent years, pet supply company Chewy has been consistently killing it, increasing sales to 153-times their 2013 levels in 2023.

—Sherwood News

$135 million

Value of aid pledged to Eastern European nation, Moldova, to help bolster its energy security and capacity to deal with disinformation efforts that are attempting to keep it from turning further Westward, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Russia has been supporting local separatists, similar to how they supported such groups in Crimea leading up to their initial incursion into Ukraine in 2014, and there are concerns that Kremlin higher-ups might be eyeballing Moldova as a next-step means of weakening the alliance European nations have been building against Russia’s expansionism.

—The Associated Press

Trust Click

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

Iran further increases its stockpile of uranium enriched to near weapons-grade levels, watchdog says

Summary: The United Nation’s nuclear watchdog agency released a report on Monday indicating that Iran’s nuclear program has upped its stockpile of uranium enriched up to 60%, which is just a small, relatively simple step from 90%, which is weapons-grade, by around 45.4 pounds (which is about 20.6 kilograms) since February.

Context: The generally accepted volume of 60%-enriched uranium necessary to produce a nuclear weapon is around 92.5 pounds, or 42 kilograms, if that uranium is then further enriched to 90%, and Iran’s total stockpile of enriched uranium is thought to weigh in at around 1,360 pounds (more than 6,000 kilograms), which means they’ve grown their overall stockpile by nearly 1,500 pounds (675 kilograms) since February; Iran has consistently said that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only, but much of the international community doesn’t believe that to be true, and the country has been operating under severe sanctions of all kinds, including nuclear-related sanctions, for a long time as a consequence—and a 2015 deal that allowed them to enrich uranium to up to 3.67% purity and to maintain a small stockpile has long since lapsed, and Iran’s government hasn’t allowed the UN’s nuclear watchdog to reinstall monitoring equipment that Iran removed in 2022.

—The Associated Press

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China is pouring almost $50 billion into its chipmaking efforts despite US sanctions

Summary: Despite efforts by the US government to hobble China’s semiconductor and artificial intelligence development, the Chinese government has set up a fund worth around $47.5 billion that will be invested in its local semiconductor industry.

Context: This is the third investment the Chinese government has made in its local chip-making capacity, responding in large part to the US’s attempts to keep it from accessing the most advanced chips on the market, which has a lot of loopholes, but has made it tricky enough for them to get such chips that China has seemingly decided to ensure they’re capable of making them in the future, not being able to rely on the global market for such things; now, their stated goal is to up their internal semiconductor capacity so that it matches the standards of the international community by the end of the decade.

—Quartz

ConocoPhillips to acquire Marathon Oil in $17.1 billion all-stock deal

Summary: Fossil fuel giant ConocoPhillips has made a deal to acquire fossil fuel giant Marathon Oil for just over $17 billion in stock, which—if the deal passes regulatory scrutiny—would merge two of the US’s largest oil companies.

Context: The global oil industry is in the midst of a huge shake-up, many of the largest entities gobbling each other and their smaller rivals up in order to consolidate, grow, and claim a portion of a sector that’s currently booming, but which is also expected to peak soon, as renewables claim more and more of the global energy market.

—The Wall Street Journal

Chipmaker Nvidia’s market cap is booming, approaching $3 trillion, which is within spitting distance of Apple’s, and which puts it far ahead of even the biggest companies in other growth industries, like China’s solar panel market.

—Bloomberg

27,000

Approximate number of government-made apps currently operating in Indonesia—a figure that’s prompted the country’s president to demand his government’s various agencies stop making new ones.

The government is now saying this overabundance of custom apps for various, specific purposes needs to be whittled down to reduce bloat and bureaucracy, and to make life easier for citizens.

—Cybernews

Trust Click

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

Egyptian soldier killed in Israel border incident

Summary: An Egyptian soldier stationed near the country’s border with Rafah was shot and killed during a cross-border exchange of fire between Egyptian and Israeli soldiers; both countries’ militaries are investigating what happened.

Context: This is notable in part because it’s occurring at a moment in which much of the international community is turning on Israel due to the nature of their invasion of the Gaza Strip, and because Egypt was the first Arab country to sign a peace deal with Israel 45 years ago; on the day of the shooting, just hours previous, Israel’s military launched a strike on Rafah that they say killed two senior Hamas officials, but which also killed at least 45 people when it set a tent camp ablaze.

—BBC News

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Brazil floods produce hundreds of thousands of climate refugees

Summary: More than 160 people have been confirmed killed, and hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes, many of them permanently, following significant floods that surged through cities in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul last month.

Context: Entire cities are still submerged even a month later, and the few areas that didn’t flood, or only flooded briefly, are now struggling to house tens or hundreds of thousands of people who have been displaced by rising waters; climate migration is becoming increasingly common and a bigger and bigger strain on regional resources, and many people who would have previously left temporarily are deciding to permanently evacuate flood-prone areas, because those floods are becoming more common and more devastating as average global temperatures increase; the past few years have seen several substantial floods that have resulted in large numbers of climate refugees, including floods in Pakistan in 2022, which displaced around 8 million people, and floods in Ethiopia and Kenya in 2023 and earlier this year, respectively, each of which resulted in hundreds of thousands of newly homeless, displaced people.

—The Washington Post

Pakistan temperatures cross 52 C in heatwave

Summary: Pakistan’s southern province, Sindh, recorded nearly historic temperatures for the region over the past month, this week hitting 52.2 degrees Celsius, which is about 126 Fahrenheit—and the heatwave is still ongoing.

Context: The area that’s seeing the highest temperatures in Pakistan right now is known for extremely hot summers, but this year’s heatwave is hitting the economy especially hard, as people are staying indoors and avoiding going outside as much as possible, and the heat feels worse than usual because of local weather conditions conditions made more prominent by human-amplified climate change.

—Reuters

After decades of decline, summer teen labor-market participation is seeing an upswing, in part because the jobs available to teens are increasing pay proportionally more than other sorts of jobs, and in part to help their families cover the costs of price-inflated goods.

—Axios

56

Number of new warships the Indian Navy will add to its fleet in the next ten years, according to the Chief of Naval Staff.

That number includes six submarines and an aircraft carrier.

The Indian fleet currently claims 132 vessels, alongside 32 that are being built or under contract to be built.

—The Print

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