One Sentence News / February 8, 2023
The news simply summarized / February 8, 2023
OSN is also a podcast / Buy me a coffee
Rescuers race against time after earthquake kills at least 7,100 in Turkey and Syria
Summary: The official death toll of the 7.8 and 7.5 magnitude quakes that struck Turkey and Syria a few days ago has exploded from a few thousand on Monday to somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 as of Tuesday night, and officials are saying that this figure will climb still-higher in the coming days as rescue workers and residents in afflicted areas continue to unearth neighbors and loved ones from the rubble of collapsed buildings throughout the Turkey-Syria border region.
Context: The winter cold has become a pressing issue alongside all the damage, as there isn’t heat or energy across most of the impacted area right now, and though Turkey has had offers of assistance and resources flood in from around the world, the Syrian government—which is on few governments’ friends list right now, in part because of the ongoing, decade-plus civil war it’s been fighting against its own citizenry—they haven’t been as lucky, though the damage is reportedly even more extreme on that side of the border because of that aforementioned, long-term conflict.
—The New York Times
FBI charges neo-Nazi leader in plot to attack Baltimore power grid
Summary: The Orlando-based leader of a neo-Nazi group that’s keen to spark the collapse of civilization and a fellow traveler he met online have been charged with plotting to take out Baltimore’s power grid, but their efforts were reported to the FBI by a confidential informant before it could come to fruition, and the duo are now in custody.
Context: The pair were apparently hoping to cause a cascading power-failure in a majority African-American city by strategically targeting especially vital and expensive-to-repair portions of Baltimore’s grid; there have been attacks on these sorts of systems in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Washington in recent months—which were basically the consequence of someone firing a gun at a piece of electrical grid equipment, causing damage, though nothing catastrophic—but it’s currently unknown whether those attacks were connected to this plot or this genre of hate group.
—Reuters
Wikipedia ban in Pakistan over alleged blasphemous content lifted
Summary: Two days after the Pakistani government banned and blocked the web-based, crowdsourced encyclopedia Wikipedia in the country, the Prime Minister has ordered that it be restored immediately, though they’ll be looking into alternative technical means through which they might ban the stuff they don’t like, while continuing to allow access to all the other stuff.
Context: The site was banned, according to the country’s Information Minister, for blasphemous content—something that’s taken very seriously, sometimes deadly seriously, in Pakistan—and the Wikimedia Foundation released a statement in the wake of the ban saying, in essence, we can’t censor the portions of the site you don’t like because that’s not how a crowdsourced site works, and we have a policy about not making those sorts of decisions in any region; YouTube was blocked in the country for more than three years between 2012 and 2016 for similar reasons, and TikTok was banned for about six months back in 2020, but both were also ultimately unblocked by the government.
—Al Jazeera
A successful strain o the H5N1 avian flu has been crisscrossing the planet, killing hundreds of thousands of wild birds and entire regional populations of domesticated ones; worryingly, it’s also being found in mammals, with likely local transmission (from mammal to mammal) occurring between them, which is the sort of thing that sometimes leads to human-aligned mutations (though this flu is also why egg prices have been so high in some countries, recently, which is the more pressing problem for many people).
—BBC News
232
Number of apps (most of them with links to China) the Indian government is moving to block as part of a larger effort to prevent the misuse of Indian citizens’ data.
138 of these apps are gambling-related and 94 of them provide off-book loan services that are illegal or borderline-illegal.
This is just the most recent crackdown on these types of apps, and more than 300 China-linked apps have been banned in India in recent years.
—TechCrunch