One Sentence News / April 1, 2024

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

Ukrainian navy says a third of Russian warships in the Black Sea have been destroyed or disabled

Summary: Following a successful drone strike on a Russian amphibious landing ship that was docked in Sevastopol, the Ukrainian Navy has announced that about a third of Russia’s Black Sea fleet has been destroyed or disabled.

Context: Though Ukrainian forces continue to struggle against Russian advances on land, due in part to the nature of the conflict, and in part to waning monetary and hardware support from its allies, its efforts in the Black Sea have been comparably consistently successful, and these strikes, utilizing an array of unmanned aerial and water-skimming drones, have forced the Russian fleet to pull back, making these warships a lot less effective in terms of supporting ground-based Russian forces, and opening more paths for ships carrying Ukrainian grain to foreign ports.

—The Associated Press

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Serious security breach hits EU police agency

Summary: A collection of highly sensitive files that contain the personal information of law enforcement executives with the agency were stolen from Europol’s headquarters in the Hague last summer, according to internal notes and statements from current and former officials.

Context: This seeming theft is still being kept largely under wraps, with only relatively minor details leaking to the press, but the head of Human Resources at Europol has reportedly been put on administrative leave during an investigation into what transpired, and though there’s a chance this is a matter of internal intrigue—one person at the agency trying to harm the reputation of another—the missing files contain all sorts of personal details about Europol higher-ups that could be used to hurt or blackmail those people, and they were hidden in a safe in a restricted room, so figuring out how they were taken and why has become an agency-wide scandal and priority.

—Politico

US solar factories strike deal to produce 'Made in USA' panels

Summary: Georgia-based solar cell company Suniva and Canada-based Heliene, which has solar panel operations in Minnesota, have partnered up to produce “Made in the USA” solar panels as part of an effort to stoke US-based manufacturing in a highly competitive global market.

Context: The solar panel market is largely owned by China, which is actually over-producing panels right now, and thus dumping this sort of hardware on foreign markets, which is great in the sense that solar panels are cheap and abundant, but not so great in that this tends to kill off local manufacturers of the same, because they can’t possibly compete with those prices; the US Inflation Reduction Act has money for US-based and allied interests that are willing to flesh-out their local manufacturing capacity for these sorts of goods, so this partnership was sparked by the promise of federal subsidies on their investments, but it could also help spur new local competition, especially if the government clamps-down further on foreign-made panels that could negatively impact the local market.

—Reuters

The collapse of a major bridge in Baltimore after a cargo ship plowed into it last week has the Department of Transportation looking into data about other such bridges throughout the US, and about 6.8% of the more than 600,000 bridges the Department tracks are considered to be in “poor” condition, which suggests they’re in need of repair, refurbishment, or replacement.

—Axios

$280 billion

Total global losses attributable to natural catastrophes in 2023, according to new data from the Swiss Re Institute.

The Institute expects that such losses will continue to increase by about 5.9% each year, as has been the case from 1994-2023, and only about 38% of such losses were covered by insurance in 2023 (with more of these losses expected to become uninsurable in the coming years)

—Axios

Trust Click

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