One Sentence News / November 16, 2022
The news simply summarized / November 16, 2022
OSN is also a podcast / Buy me a coffee
Sponsor: Subscribe to Smartr Daily to get thought provoking ideas and insights delivered straight to your inbox, daily.
Sponsorships allow me to produce this publication & send it out to everyone for free—if you’re keen to sponsor an OSN email please respond for details :)
Biden and Xi clash over Taiwan in Bali but Cold War fears cool
Summary: US President Biden and Chinese President Xi have sat down, in person, for a three-hour meeting meant to help the two governments come to some kind of understanding and blunt the possibility of military conflict.
Context: This meeting has sparked optimism, in part because both sides walked away with good things to say about the other, and because tensions have been high following a series of back-and-forth provocations over the past year or so, especially but not exclusively related to the two countries’ disagreement about the independence of Taiwan—something the Chinese have indicated they would go to war over, while Biden has said a Chinese attack would bring the US to Taiwan’s aid; it’s not clear whether this meeting will lead to any tangible outcomes, but there’s a chance simply clearing the air will help the two nations work together on shared concerns like the climate crisis and bringing the invasion of Ukraine to a peaceful end.
—Reuters
Russian missiles cross into Poland during strike on Ukraine
Summary: This is a “big if true” story, so take it with a grain of salt, but it would appear that during a wave of missile attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, Russia has—possibly accidentally—struck territory in neighboring Poland, killing two people and sparking concerns about the triggering of NATO’s Article 5 collective defense provision, which essentially says that if one NATO member is attacked, every other member of the alliance will consider it an attack on themselves.
Context: This story is based on an investigation into reports that two people died from an explosion in a Polish village near the border with Ukraine at the same time Russia was firing a large number of missiles at Ukraine, including in that area, so even if the reports are confirmed, we don’t know if the explosion was caused by a missile strike, if it was intentional or unintentional, or if it was actually remnants of a missile that was destroyed by Ukrainian anti-missile defenses; it’s also important to note that NATO’s Article 5 isn’t an automatic mechanism that forces everyone to go to war with anyone who hits a NATO member, it’s the beginning of a conversation to figure out what to do and a commitment to support each other if they determine someone was actually attacking one of their own—so while there’s a lot of speculation right now that this might be the beginning of WWIII, that would seem to be a big, assumption-laden leap at this point.
—The Associated Press
Google pays nearly $392 million to settle sweeping location-tracking case
Summary: Google has agreed to a deal with 40 US states of not quite $392 million to settle a slew of cases related to allegations that the company continued to track users through their devices, even after they turned location tracking off.
Context: The suit alleges that since at least 2014 Google has tracked people when they had every reason to believe they weren’t being tracked, and that it sold that location data to digital marketers to sell more ads; alongside the monetary payout, Google has committed to make their location-tracking policies more clear to users, though a Google representative said, after the trial, that the case was based on outdated data-collecting methods, so the things they were brought to court over weren’t really relevant anymore, anyway; this follows another settlement for a similar case in Arizona last month for which Google paid $85 million.
—NPR News
London is no longer home to the largest European stock market, as French companies have bulked up (due to changing consumer preferences) and British companies have underperformed (due to a sluggish British pound, but also more exposure to global recession-hit industries).
$70 million
Amount of public funds El Salvador is estimated to have lost as a consequence of Bitcoin’s declining price—it’s down 21% this week, alone.
El Salvador’s (pseudo-authoritarian) leader, Nayib Bukele, made Bitcoin legal tender in the country in 2021 and started buying tokens with government money around the same time.
The tokens his government has purchased have lost about 67% of their value, thus far (that’s the drop since he started buying them, at least).
El Savador has a poverty rate of about 26%.
—El País