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Dear reader, this will be the last edition of the World Weekly. Thank you for following along as long as you have. I hope this newsletter has been able to make international news a little more accessible to you. This edition covers President Joe Biden's poor performance in the debate with rival Donald Trump, Julian Assange's 14-year-long legal battle with the US coming to an end, and the growing issue of space debris.
A moment from the first presidential debate between US President Joe Biden and former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. (Reuters)
Biden's debate debacle
US President Joe Biden on Thursday faced off with his predecessor, Donald Trump, in a CNN debate meant to address concerns over his age, but it did not seem like he was successful.
In the 90-minute segment, as HT reported: "Trump contrasted his presidential record of safe borders, a thriving economy and an America respected by the world against Biden’s alleged failure on all these fronts. Biden, meanwhile, contrasted his record on employment creation, infrastructure, and an America standing strong with allies against adversaries with Trump’s pro-rich economic policy, anti-abortion social policy, and a foreign policy that antagonised allies. Biden also termed Trump a convicted felon and questioned his morals."
Despite this, the optics were not good for the incumbent president. From the moment he came into view for the camera, Biden, who is already the oldest American president at 81, had a distant look in his eyes, was hard to understand (his aides said he had a cold), and, at times, incoherent, allowing Trump, at one point, to quip, "I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence, and I don’t think he did, either."
A CNN poll showed 67% to 33% of watchers believed Trump — who refrained from his usually aggressive and emphatic speaking style, but continued to employ falsehoods — performed better than the president. The same people had earlier said they believed, 55% to 45%, that Biden would perform better.
What does this mean: Biden has been trailing behind the former president in opinion polls for months and made only minor gains earlier this month when Trump was convicted in a hush-money case. His performance has stirred panic among Democrats who now believe there is a very real possibility that they will lose the November elections.
As a result, “The movement to convince Biden to not run is real," one House Democrat told Politico. There's still time for the party to float a fresh candidate. But Biden, himself, has to step down for that to happen and it does not seem to be that way. “I think we did well,” Biden told reporters after the debate. When asked if he had any concerns about his performance, he said, “No, it’s hard to debate a liar.”
“His biggest issue that he had to prove to the American people was that he had the energy and the stamina. And he didn’t do that,” CNN political commentator Kate Bedingfield said.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange waves after arriving at Canberra Airport in Canberra, on Wednesday. (AFP)
Assange is home
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, pled guilty on Wednesday to one count of conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified national security information under the US Espionage Act, ending his years-long battle with the United States. He was sentenced to five years in jail - time which he has already served at Belmarsh prison in the UK while fighting extradition to the mainland US - and, by Wednesday evening, had returned home to Australia.
Assange, an editor, publisher and computer specialist and his WikiLeaks were thrust into prominence - and notoriety - in 2010 after releasing nearly half a million documents related to the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - the biggest security breach of its kind in US military history.
Press freedom advocates hailed the 52-year-old for exposing US military misconduct in foreign countries. But American prosecutors alleged that Assange was nothing more than a hacker and had conspired with an Army private - identified as intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning - to obtain and publish sensitive government records.
After a trial, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison, the longest sentence in a leak-related case in the US. However, her sentence was, later, commuted by former president Barack Obama.
What does it mean: While the plea deal on Wednesday ended Assange's 14-year-long legal battle, experts and rights activists raised concerns over what his plea deal means for press freedom and whistle-blowers. In court, Assange reasserted that he was a journalist and that what he did was protected under the First Amendment (which protects free speech and press) of the US Constitution.
"A court won’t readily be able to cite DoJ v Assange in future rulings, but that doesn’t mean this guilty plea won’t embolden future federal prosecutors with an axe to grind against the press," said Trevor Timm, the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, in the Guardian. "Just imagine what an attorney general in a second Trump administration will think, knowing they’ve already got one guilty plea from a publisher under the Espionage Act."
“Unfortunately, the precedent has already been set, both legal and political, that the Espionage Act can be used against a journalist’s source,” Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, told Vox. “[The Obama administration] normalised the use of the Espionage Act against whistle-blowers, journalists’ sources, government insiders, whatever you want to call them.”
Two men with SpaceX retrieve space junk that fell earlier this year from one of its spacecraft back to Earth, near Ituna, Saskatchewan on Tuesday. (AP)
More junk collects in space
US space agencies on Friday said a defunct Russian Earth observation satellite reportedly disintegrated into nearly 200 pieces in orbit near the International Space Station (ISS) around 9:30 pm (IST) on Wednesday.
It wasn't immediately clear why the satellite, declared dead in 2022, shattered at an altitude of 355 km in low-Earth orbit, prompting astronauts aboard the ISS to take shelter for over an hour, but it spotlights the growing menace of space junk. The US space command said it was tracking the "over 100 pieces of trackable debris". Russia has yet to acknowledge the incident.
What does this mean: As of January 2022, there are over 9,000 metric tons of space debris—including old satellites and spacecraft, liquid expelled from space vehicles, garbage bags, nuts and bolts, among other things—circling in just the outer layers of Earth’s atmosphere and experts have warned the issue is only getting worse. At orbital speeds (28.163 km/h) even the smallest piece of junk (like a paint chip) can be fatal. Plus, such a crowded orbit “will make it harder to launch (active missions), to find a window where there are no satellites that you might hit on the way up,” Dr Samantha Lawler, assistant professor of astronomy at Campion College, University of Regina, Canada, has told HT.
That's all for this week, folx. If you have any suggestions, feedback, or questions, please write to me at sanya.mathur@hindustantimes.com
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