One Sentence News / March 22, 2024

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

Damaged undersea cables disrupting Africa’s internet will take weeks to repair

Summary: Following reports of widespread internet outages across Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, and Côte d’Ivoire on March 14, Ghana’s National Communications Authority has said it could take up to five weeks to fully restore service to the region because of damage to the undersea cables that connect these nations to the internet.

Context: Undersea cables are fundamental components of global internet traffic, and they’re regularly damaged by accident, and in some rarer cases, intentionally; the companies that manage internet services in this part of Africa have said that some kind of “external incident” resulted in a cut to these cables, and while some of these services were able to reroute their traffic to undamaged lines, other areas remain partially or entirely blacked out for the moment, and this has disrupted civilian traffic, but also more fundamental economic services, like online banking operations.

—Semafor

One Sentence News is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Egypt signs expanded $8 billion loan deal with IMF

Summary: The International Monetary Fund has announced that it will increase its existing $3 billion loan program with Egypt by an additional $5 billion after the government allowed its currency to collapse in value, hiked its basis points rate, and announced a massive new investment deal with the UAE.

Context: This investment came at a tumultuous time for Egypt, as the government has been investing in a new capital city east of Cairo and has been making quiet investments in the Sinai region, in case the conflict in Gaza spills across the border in the shape of refugees fleeing Israel’s invasion of the Strip; the Egyptian government has been piling on debt, but that Emirati investment, paired with an agreement to allow the market more control over their currency’s value seems to have sealed the deal with the IMF, making them more confident the Egyptian government would be able to stabilize things in the coming years, rather than making things economically worse.

—Reuters

Weakening El Niño likely to become La Niña by summer, NOAA says

Summary: The El Niño phenomenon that has been influencing weather patterns around the world since July of 2023 seems to be waning and making way for its opposite, the La Niña phenomenon, which is now expected to arrive sometime in the late summer of 2024.

Context: This is news because these phenomena—which are basically climate patterns that push global trade winds in different directions, powered by either warm or cold water rising to the surface of the Pacific Ocean—influence all sorts of things, globally, including the temperatures and weather conditions we experience, the size and quality of crop yields, rainfall (or a lack thereof) in different places, fish populations in different parts of the world, and when and how dramatically seasons arrive; there’s also a chance it will help reduce the record-high average temperatures we’ve been experiencing this past year, though the degree to which we can attribute those record highs to El Niño, as opposed to climate change, is still being assessed.

—Weather.com

Air pollution (especially of the nanoparticle variety) remains a huge and persistent issue across much of Asia, and many national capitals are the worst in terms of the health impacts on citizens who breathe consistently unhealthy air.

—Bloomberg

~$500 million

Sum that video game studio Scopely spent to promote its multiplayer mobile game Monopoly Go.

Despite the huge size of the investment, it was apparently a good one: the game has been downloaded more than 100 million times, has become one of the most popular games on the planet, and has earned the company more than $2 billion since it was launched in April of 2023.

—Kotaku

Trust 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