Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.
US pressing Israel to allow same levels of aid into Gaza as during ceasefire
Summary: Now that a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas has ended, the US government and other allies are pressuring Israel to allow the same volume of humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip as was allowed during that pause in the fighting.
Context: Aid groups have warned that there’s a substantial and still-growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, especially southern Gaza where many Palestinians from the northern portion of the Strip have been forced to flee by Israel’s invasion, and though more aid is being brought in, now, than before the ceasefire, it’s still substantially less than was imported before the fighting began—it’s estimated that about 4% of the average daily aid that was brought into the region pre-invasion is now being allowed into Gaza by Israel.
—Axios
The X Prize is taking aim at aging with a new $101 million award
Summary: The X Prize Foundation has announced a new prize aiming to address the mental and physical decline that often comes with aging, which will award $101 million to anyone who can prove they’ve reversed a decade’s-worth of such decline in older adults by 2030.
Context: Previous X Prizes have stimulated developments in private space flight, fuel efficiency for vehicles, oil cleanup efforts, and health sensors in small gadgets, and the general model involves making a bunch of money available to anyone who wants to make progress in these spaces, incentivizing more private investment in solving specific problems, which then tends to evolve entire industries (though with mixed success, as in some cases the industries or fields they’re meant to stimulate evolve past X Prize goals before they’re met, as was the case with a 2013 genomics-focused prize); this new prize is meant to help increase healthspan, if not lifespan, and is primarily aimed at an emerging category of therapies that seem to be able to help older human beings enjoy a higher quality of life in their latter-years by helping them remain more physically and mentally capable, longer.
—MIT Technology Review
South Korea launches first military spy satellite, intensifying space race with Pyongyang
Summary: Less than two weeks after North Korea launched its first successfully installed spy satellite, South Korean officials announced that they had done the same—though in their case using a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to get into orbit, while the North Koreans used their own launch systems.
Context: This is notable in part because North Korea has been working on launching their own satellites for a while, unsuccessfully until now, and in part because these launches would seem to be upping tensions on the peninsula, where both nations—which are persistently on a knife’s edge with each other—can now spy on each other’s military installations without relying on anyone else’s in-orbit assets; South Korea has said it plans to launch another four spy satellites by the end of 2025, and the South is reportedly keen to launch at least some of them using their own rockets, in part because they want to demonstrate that the North has not pulled ahead of them, technologically, in this regard.
—The Guardian
Between 1950 and 2022, the US provided Israel with more than 70,000 weapons, as tallied by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s Arms Transfers Database; that number is expected to increase substantially in 2023, following the sneak-attack by Hamas militants that sparked a full-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israel’s military.
—Axios
15%
Percent by which Russian President Putin has decreed troop numbers in Ukraine will be increased—which means something like 170,000 new soldiers will need to be recruited.
That’s a sizable increase, but Russian officials have said they don’t plan to conscript more soldiers for the effort and would rely on volunteers (though the term “volunteer” has been used loosely in Russia, of late, with some recruitments looking a lot like forced conscriptions, by international standards).
—France 24
One Sentence News / December 4, 2023