One Sentence News / April 2, 2024

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

Turkey’s Erdogan suffers setback in nationwide election

Summary: Turkey’s opposition party did incredibly well in the country’s recent round of local elections, maintaining control of Istanbul and other large cities that President Erdogan had hoped to claim, and scooping up several other cities, as well.

Context: This is being seen as a rebuke of Erdogan and his party, who has been investing heavily in becoming a negotiator and intermediary for other nations on the global stage, but who has been less popular within Turkey’s borders, attempting to establish himself as a leader of Muslim communities and undertaking a bizarre and counterintuitive approach to tempering high levels of inflation, which only made the problem worse; Erdogan has been in power for more than 20 years, and has reinforced his hold on the government during that time, but this wave of victories for his opponents, which helped them take the largest share of nationwide votes for the first time since the 1970s, could weaken that hold.

—The Wall Street Journal

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Unprecedented GPS jamming attack affects 1,600 aircraft over Europe

Summary: Over the course of 63 hours and 40 minutes in late-March, GPS signals were disrupted in the Baltic region, affecting hundreds of passenger airlines and even more cargo flights.

Context: This region, which is home to former Soviet nations like Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, has experienced semi-regular GPS jamming since December of last year, when Russia’s local fleet reportedly began engaging in electronic warfare exercises; this sort of effort can result in false, “spoofed” GPS signals for aircraft and other vehicles that rely (at least in part) on those signals to figure out where they area in the world, and this has sparked concerns that these nations, alongside Poland, Germany, and Sweden, which have also experienced these sorts of interference patterns in the past few months, might be targeted for this kind of disruption, allegedly instigated by Russia, on a more regular basis.

—New Scientist

AT&T confirms data for 73 million customers leaked on hacker forum

Summary: Following two weeks of denial, AT&T has now confirmed that a huge trove of customer data leaked on a hacker forum did, in fact, originate with them, though they continue to claim that there’s no indication their systems have been breached by hackers.

Context: This trove of data contains information on 65.4 million former AT&T customers from 2019 and earlier, alongside security passcodes and other info for 7.6 million current customers; this stolen data was originally made available by a hacker or hacker group called Shiny Hunters, which put it up for sale in 2021, but AT&T denied that it originated from them, and continued to do so until another hacker leaked that data trove in mid-March of this year, which seems to have triggered this confirmation from the company (two weeks after the leak) that the data originated with them, which in turn resulted in emails to customers asking those whose data was exposed to reset their passcodes.

—Bleeping Computer

There have been ups and downs, but the US stock market has been on a tear in 2024, so far, despite still-high interest rates and the array of international conflicts (and threatened conflicts) muddling an already complex election year.

—Reuters

$50 billion

Value of bonds the US wants to issue (alongside its Group of Seven allies) backed by Russian assets that have been frozen by the governments of the nations where those assets are held.

In essence, when Russia invaded Ukraine, about $280 billion of its assets held mostly in foreign banks were seized, and this proposal says those assets should be used to support bonds that would generate money for Ukraine; which is something that hasn’t been done before, and there are reasons to think it won’t work—but this idea has been floated long enough (and by enough governments) that it seems likely it’ll be tried in the near-future.

—Bloomberg

Trust Click

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