One Sentence News / August 4, 2023
Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.
Meta starts blocking news in Canada over law on paying publishers
Summary: Meta, the parent-company of Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, has announced that it has started to remove access to news content on its platforms for Canadian users in response to a local law that would require internet behemoths like Meta to pay news publishers for their work.
Context: This Canadian law is similar to one that was deployed in Australia in 2021, and which led to an agreement between Australian media companies and tech-giants like Google and Meta, along with amendments to the legislation; Google has said that the Canadian version is broader, though, and Meta has said that news articles don’t make up an appreciable percentage of most users’ feeds, and thus, more or less, won’t be missed; the Canadian Prime Minister has said that these tech companies’ arguments are flawed, and that their stance on presenting news is bad for democracy.
—Reuters
Europeans evacuate Niger amid risks of wider conflict
Summary: Hundreds of European citizens have been evacuated from Niger on a plane sent by France, following a coup by the Nigerian military that is now threatening to spark conflict in the region.
Context: This is a rapidly developing story, but basically Burkina Faso and Mali both had their own military coups recently, and that made the democracies in the area nervous; this new coup further stoked that nervousness and an alliance of those nations have said they’ll do whatever they can to reverse the Nigerian coup, even to the point of sending in troops to bring back the former government, and there have even been some light sanctions put into place against Niger, including the truncation of energy imports; in response to that, the military governments of Burkina Faso and Mali have said they would treat an incursion into Niger by these democratic nations as an attack on them, which has raised international concerns about a potential regional conflict.
—The New York Times
Incandescent lightbulbs are now banned in the US
Summary: After years of legislative efforts to phase-out old-school incandescent lightbulbs in favor of newer LEDs, the US government has banned the sale of older, energy-inefficient bulbs in the country.
Context: Incandescents are the oldest type of commercial lightbulb, and President Obama meant to phase them out during his tenure, but that plan was stymied by his successor, President Trump; President Biden put the ban back on the table, and the new rule, which bans the sale but not the use of most older bulbs was announced in April of 2022; to get a sense of just how much more efficient LED bulbs are compared to incandescents, the former produces 75-110 lumens, a measurement of light output, per watt of energy, while the latter only produces 12-18—what’s more, LEDs last 25- to 50-times longer, use 85% less energy, and thus rack up much smaller energy bills, and that’s expected to save US citizens about $3 billion a year on their utilities.
—Quartz
The billions of dollars flooding into various manufacturing sectors across the US from the government have pulled in billions of dollars in business investments, as well, sparking a sudden and dramatic increase in factory investment across the country.
—Axios
2 hours
Maximum amount of time kids between the ages of 16 and 18 would be able to spend on mobile devices each day in China, under new regulations laid out by the country’s Cyberspace Administration.
Non-adult children also won’t be allowed to access the internet through their devices from 10pm-6am under this proposed plan—all of which is meant to reduce what the government says are high levels of internet addiction amongst young people in the country.
—Bloomberg
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