WHAT’S THIS? The Stringer publishes a roundup of news items that you may have missed—with a global bent.
A 22-year-old from the Iranian Kurdish town of Saqez, Masha Amini probably had no idea she’d die because she wore the wrong thing.
But earlier this month, she was thrown in jail in Tehran for “unsuitable attire.” She’d been picked up by the “morality police”—an Iranian vice squad that enforces moral codes—and she died in custody.
In a rare twist of fate, her story really only began there.
Her death drew an outcry: Protests—when, globally, public protests are becoming relatively uncommon—engulfed the streets. Amini’s death fueled a rare challenge to the Iranian establishment, with protestors—many of them roughly Amini’s age—fulminating against the clerical class.
It was met with force: Attempts to repress the dissent have felled 83 people so far, according to one oft-cited estimate from Iran Human Rights, an international nonprofit. The morality police slunk away amid the uproar.
POLITICS and WORLD
SOMALIA’S FAMINE: Despite international warnings, Somalia’s brutal famine is causing incalculable misery and pointless death. Drought and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which swelled grain and fertilizer prices, intensified the famine: roughly half of the population needs food assistance and nearly a third of children may be suffering from malnutrition.
CITIZEN SNOWDEN: After more than a decade in exile, Edward Snowden received Russian citizenship. It’s the first time I’ve been on Russia’s side for a while.
BALLOT OR BULLET: In Ukraine, armed soldiers are canvassing for votes in a “referendum” on joining Russia. Meanwhile, Ukraine has put in for fast-tracked NATO membership.
TALIBAN SWAP: After two years spent enduring the Taliban’s version of hospitality, U.S. Navy vet Mark Frerichs was swapped for an Afghani drug trafficker.
SEEKING REPRESENTATION: The Cherokee Nation is reinvigorating its campaign to get a seat in the U.S. Congress.
The infamous forced removal of the Cherokee from the midwest in 1835, the Trail of Tears, was tied to the “Treaty of New Echota.” That treaty also guaranteed the Cherokee Nation a seat in Congress.
Though it’s been unfulfilled for hundreds of years, Kim Teehee—whom the Nation selected, in 2019, as the nominee for the position—says there’s bipartisan support for enforcing that provision of the treaty.
ECONOMICS
HOUSING: In the U.S., the mortgage rate “eclipsed 7 percent,” the highest level since the beginning of the Great Recession in 2007, chilling home purchases. Given the portion of wealth tied up in property in America, this doesn’t seem to bode well for inequality. Mortgage rates in the UK are also “scarily high.”
THE FUTURE
JUST SAY NO: Helsingør—the port city in Denmark where the castle from Shakespeare’s Hamlet resides—banned Google in its schools. The tech giant had become central to their education system, especially in the heat of the pandemic, until their data protection regulator realized that the schools didn’t know how the company was using student data and hadn’t done their due diligence. The ban caused some chaos, revealing just how reliant they were on the tech.
ART BY AI: AI is getting better at art. OpenAI opened up access for the second version of DALL-E, which generates eerily good pictures. And Meta AI gave notice of its own “Make a Video” series which creates AI-generated videos.
SCIENCE
SPACE INVESTING: Administrators for NASA have expressed interest in letting private companies take more control of the “boring stuff” like rocket launches. It continues the trend of privatization touching virtually every sector in America, from education to, apparently, rocket science. But with privatization, there are some concerns about letting the fox into the chicken coop.
SPACE SMASH: NASA published photos from the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, mission—the world’s first “planetary defense” demo. They sent a craft to crash into Dimorphos, a moonlet asteroid in the Didymos double asteroid system. CNBC called it a “smashing success,” which is more than I can say for their humor… It has trouble landing.
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