One Sentence News / April 3, 2024

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

Iran vows response after strike it blames on Israel demolishes consulate in Syria

Summary: Following a strike—which has been widely attributed to Israel—on Iran’s consulate in Syria on Monday, which reportedly killed two top Iranian generals and five officers, Iran’s government and representatives from one of its proxies, Hezbollah, have said they will respond.

Context: Israel semi-regularly takes out Iran’s assets, human and infrastructural, using these sorts of strikes, and they seldom take credit for or comment on them, so it’s difficult to definitively say that they played a role in them, but it’s generally assumed that they launched this attack, that Iran’s government will be very angry about it, that, bare-minimum, Iran’s proxies like Hezbollah will launch retaliatory attacks against Israeli assets, possibly including their own regional consulates, and that there’s a chance this could serve as a spark that makes the conflict in Gaza regional—though Iran has made pretty clear so far that they’re trying to avoid that, so there’s a chance they’ll stick with proxy counterattacks for the time being.

—The Associated Press

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Germany shuts down 15 coal-fired power plants

Summary: Germany shut down 15 of its remaining coal power plants on Sunday and Monday, the country’s Economy Minister saying that they weren’t necessary or economical to keep online, and that this will help them achieve their goal of phasing out all such plants by 2030.

Context: The German government decided to keep a bunch of coal power plants online in 2022 because of a surge in energy prices resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—they were heavily reliant on fossil fuels imported from Russia, and when those supplies were targeted by sanctions, the country scrambled to keep enough energy flowing to support their population and their power-hungry manufacturing base; coal plants, then, despite conflicting with their emissions goals, were kept online as a just-in-case measure, but they ultimately weren’t necessary, in part because of liquified natural gas imported from the US; even after these shutdowns, coal remains Germany’s second most vital energy source, accounting for about 26% of their total electricity generation.

—Euractiv

UN picks Saudi Arabia to lead women’s rights forum despite ‘abysmal’ record

Summary: The UN’s Commission on the Status of Women, which is the body’s commission for promoting gender equality and empowering women, has elected the Saudi ambassador to the UN as its chair after he ran for the position unopposed and without dissent at the group’s most recent meeting.

Context: Human rights groups are decrying this decision, as Saudi Arabia has one of the world’s worst records for gender equality, Saudi women enjoying few of the rights men are granted by law and tradition; this is being seen as an effort by the Saudi government to burnish its reputation on this matter as it invests in all sorts of tourism efforts, hoping to pull in huge crowds of people from around the world, their treatment of women and other traditionally oppressed groups reportedly limiting them in that regard.

—The Guardian

The director of the US Congressional Budget Office has warned that new projections suggest the country’s debt burden is heading into unprecedented territory, which could spark a market selloff of the kind the UK saw in 2022, tipping the economy and government into crisis as soon as 2026.

—Financial Times

$43 billion

Value of the European Union’s Innovation Fund, which is an investment vehicle meant to help the bloc compete with “green” incentives provided to businesses making things like batteries and solar panels by the US’s Inflation Reduction Act.

The EU aims to provide their own competing incentives to keep European businesses from investing in new assets in the US instead of within the bloc, but the Innovation Fund hasn’t had as much success as they’d hoped for, thus far, raising questions about the Union’s efforts to hit its 2040 emissions targets.

—Bloomberg

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