Arms trade
Last week Australia announced plans to buy 20 of an American company’s truck-mounted artillery rocket launchers over the next three years, as well as Norweigian-made missiles. The plans are just the tip of a global trade in weapons.
Data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute informed this interactive that shows that hundreds of these transfers happen each year, ranging from relatively small transfers of vehicles or guns, through to massive deals like Australia’s, worth billions of dollars.
Satellite shared use
SpaceX, which is expected to list on the stockmarket in 2023, recently won another contract from NASA to supply the International Space Station with its Dragon spacecraft.
The company also operates more than 3,000 Starlink satellites to provide home internet and was last month granted authorisation from the US Federal Communications Commission to launch thousands more.
This data visualisation, using data from the Union of Concerned Scientists, shows that it’s not uncommon for companies to jointly operate satellites with governments or militaries.
Energy transition
The pace of shifting energy sources away from fossil fuels was in the spotlight in November as countries returned from the COP27 climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt without a commitment to phase them out.
Renewable alternatives made up more than a quarter of the global electricity supply in 2019. They are now a significant part of most major countries’ global electricity supplies, according to data from the International Renewable Energy Agency, shown in the map below.
But electricity is just one part of the total energy picture, and current policies are not enough to avert 2 degrees Celsius of warming.
Social media contracts
Tech companies are again in conflict with regulators, as the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) last week again fined Meta (Facebook’s parent company) EUR 390 million for not seeking sufficient permission from users to personalise ads with their data.
The DPC has issued a series of fines to Meta totalling more than EUR 1 billion between September 2021 and November 2022.
Amongst other reasons, regulators are intervening because the terms users agree to when signing up for tech services are difficult to navigate.
The ‘secondary’ agreements that tech companies ask users to agree to have grown massively over the last 15 years, a 360info investigation found.
Facebook’s secondary agreements, for example, have brought its total terms of use to nearly 30,000 words — approaching the length of a novel.
Student flows
Border closures during the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the massive flow of students overseas. As the lucrative Chinese student market opens back up, where students go is an open question.
A report released on Friday by the Australian Government’s Centre for Population predicts that student migration to the country will return to pre-pandemic levels this year, while a report from the Institute of International Education suggests that student migration to the US is also beginning to recover.
In the past, students have moved to just a few wealthy economies to study. But this model is changing.
Countries such as China and Singapore, traditional student exporters, are starting to attract their own student migration.
Below, see where students typically came from and went to before the pandemic — as well as the drop in traffic as borders began to close.
Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.
