Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.
Inmates free 57 Ecuador prison guards after stand-off
Summary: Inmates at six different prisons across Ecuador have released 50 guards and seven police officers they held hostage over the weekend, the gangs that orchestrated the hostage-taking seemingly aiming to derail attempts by the government to reduce the power such gangs hold in the country.
Context: The Ecuadorian government has been jailing a lot of gang-tied criminals throughout the country in recent years, and as a result the prisons have become hubs of power for these gangs, from which they manage their empires; efforts to rein-in their power within the prison system, including searches for drugs and weapons, led to this taking of hostages, and several bombs went off throughout the country, seemingly targeting prison system infrastructure; all of which made pretty clear who holds the power here, and all of which seems to have been performed without causing any casualties, as the hostages have been released and the bombs didn’t hurt anyone; now the Ecuadorian government, which is just two-months out from a presidential run-off vote, is trying to decide how to move forward with an election that’s already been marred by the gang-conducted assassination of one of the candidates, who was running on an anti-corruption, anti-gang platform.
—BBC News
Death under investigation at Burning Man as flooding strands thousands at Nevada festival site
Summary: Tens of thousands of people attending the annual Burning Man art and culture event in the Nevada desert were left stranded at the festival grounds over the weekend as flooding from storms in the area turned the dry ground into deep mud; one person has been confirmed dead since the stranding began, though details from the local sheriff department are sparse.
Context: Event organizers have encouraged attendees to remain calm, shelter-in-place, and conserve food and water, and online rumors of ebola spreading throughout the camp seem to be false, though medical professionals have noted an uptick in concerns about stomach bugs and hypothermia, as tends to be the case with any such event in these sorts of climactic conditions; vehicular access to the area has been closed because of the mud, the regional airpot is closed, and about 70,000 people were estimated to still be at the event as of Sunday.
—The Associated Press
Meta’s ‘biggest single takedown’ removes Chinese influence campaign
Summary: Tech company Meta has said they’ve removed 7,704 Facebook accounts, 954 Facebook pages, 15 Facebook groups, and 15 Instagram accounts tied to an ongoing influence campaign by the Chinese government, meant to sow distrust about and discord within the United States.
Context: This is the largest such influence campaign that’s been identified, to date, and it includes accounts on other platforms like TikTok, Twitter, Substack, LiveJournal (which is apparently still around), and Blogspot, amongst many other such publishing and social networks; this is the seventh influence campaign from China that Meta has removed in the past six years, alone, four of which were uncovered and removed in the past year; the company was able to tie these efforts to a collection of Chinese law enforcement offices across China, identifying individual office efforts based on their work shifts and meal breaks.
—The New York Times
Meta (parent-company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) has been blocking links to news sources in Canada for the past month or so, with apparently little impact on usage of their services in the country (according to third-part tracking firm data)—which would seem to back up Meta’s assertion that their Canadian users don’t rely upon these networks for news consumption overmuch; this link-blocking effort is a response to a new law that requires huge internet companies pay news publishers for the articles users share on these platforms.
—Reuters
2025
Year by which a global lithium shortage could severely constrain supply of the material, according to some new estimates.
Other analysts see a longer timeframe, but agree that a substantial supply-constraint could land sometime in the next handful of years to a decade, due especially to the expansion of the electric vehicle market (which is expected to grow more than 20% year-on-year from 2023-2032 in China, alone) and the deployment of city-scale energy backup systems that rely upon lithium-ion batteries.
—CNBC
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