One Sentence News / May 27, 2024

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

More than 670 feared dead in Papua New Guinea landslide

Summary: Estimates from the UN’s International Organization for Migration indicate that more than 670 people have probably died in a massive landslide in Papua New Guinea that buried more than 150 houses last Friday—the true number is still in question, as unstable conditions in the afflicted region have made rescue efforts difficult.

Update: The estimated number of people buried has risen to more than 2,000.

Context: Around 4,000 people live in the area impacted by this landslide, more than a quarter of whom have now been displaced, fleeing homes adjacent to the landslide, which is ongoing and still putting those who remain at risk; the afflicted area has served as a refuge for people fleeing nearby conflicts, so there’s a chance the death count will be even higher than anticipated, and the landslide also blocked a regional highway, cutting off multiple towns and villages, alongside an economically important gold mine.

—Reuters

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Russia steps up a covert sabotage campaign aimed at Europe

Summary: American and European security officials have announced that Russian operatives across Europe have been engaging in minor acts of sabotage, especially arson, as part of a larger effort to slow the transfer of military supplies to Ukraine and to make it look like there’s local opposition to that support.

Context: Russia’s GRU, its military intelligence agency, is reportedly orchestrating this campaign, and targets so far have included a paint factory in Poland, a warehouse in England, and an IKEA in Lithuania; alleged Russian operatives are reportedly also planning to attack weapons manufacturers and energy infrastructure in Norway, military bases operated by the US, and have carried out beatings in Poland—all of which is purportedly meant to sow chaos, disrupt support for Ukraine in the EU and NATO, and potentially create justification for other sorts of regional aggression in the future.

—The New York Times

The US built a $320 million pier to get aid to Gazans, but little of it has reached them

Summary: The Pentagon invested about $320 million to build a floating pier, operated by around 1,000 sailors and soldiers, to create a new corridor through which international aid could enter the Gaza Strip, bypassing a blockade by Israeli forces that has hampered such efforts since Israel’s invasion of the Strip; only 820 tons of aid arrived via the pier in its first week of operation, though, only two-thirds of which successfully reached distribution points.

Context: That means only about 15% of the minimum aid necessary to sustain Gaza’s population of more than two million people was successfully deployed via this pier, and over the weekend one of the supports for the pier broke amidst choppy waters, which could further truncate the flow of aid, though the US military says the pier is still operational and safe to use despite that damage; restrictions placed on the flow of aid by the Israeli government has made speeding up the import of aid difficult, and some aid trucks have been commandeered by desperate Gazans on one hand, and Israeli fundamentalists trying to prevent said aid from getting to Gazan Palestinians, on the other; the total amount of aid coming in via all available corridors remains far below what international humanitarian organizations say is necessary to sustain Gazan citizens in the midst of Israel’s ongoing invasion of the Strip, which it says is necessary to kill or capture the remaining vestiges of Hamas’ leadership, who are still operating in the region.

—The Wall Street Journal

According to a new study, daily marijuana use has surpassed daily alcohol use in the US for the first time, purportedly because of a broad-based shift in behavior amongst Americans, though the change is especially prevalent in young people (and overall growth in marijuana use has surged as more states have moved to legalize the drug, and as the federal government has started the process of reclassifying it).

—Axios

262%

Increase in revenue for chip-maker Nvidia, which has been booming ever since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and the subsequent surge in investment for AI-everything: a category of computation for which Nvidia’s chips are optimized.

—Yahoo Finance

Trust Click

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