One Sentence News / Nov 24, 2021

The news simply summarized / November 24, 2021

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Note: I’ll be taking Thursday and Friday off for Thanksgiving, but I’ll see you again next Monday morning :)

Summary: US President Biden has ordered that a record amount of oil, 50 million barrels-worth, be released from the country’s strategic reserve, which will hit the market in concert with oil from the reserves of China, Japan, India, South Korea, and the UK.

Context: The goal here is to lower oil prices after requests made by these leaders to those of OPEC+ nations—a cartel of countries that control much of the world’s petroleum markets—failed to result in more output, which would have helped accomplish that aim; it’s unclear at this point what OPEC+‘s response to this will be, though markets, which were forewarned of this move, didn’t drop oil prices substantially on the news, and it’s broadly suspected this type of temporary measure, though impressive in scope and in terms of the nations involved, probably won’t achieve the intended goal, at least not for long.

Summary: A 35-day strike by workers at Deere & Co, the company behind John Deere tractors and other such equipment, ended with a union victory, netting the more than 10,000 striking employees a new contract that will increase their base pay by 10% alongside further pay increases through 2025, and both immediate and longer-term bonuses.

Context: This strike ended right before one of Deere & Co’s busiest seasons, and it’s representative in some ways of the larger trend in employee strikes around the US, as businesses continue to have more job openings than people to fill them and employment conditions worsen in at times dangerous ways, due to the ongoing pandemic and the many uncertainties we currently face, globally; it’s a moment of outsized leverage for employees, in other words, and many workers and unions are taking advantage of that leverage to rebalance things.

Summary: Tech giant Apple has filed a lawsuit against Israeli cyberintelligence company NSO Group in retaliation for their targeting of Apple customers with spyware.

Context: NSO Group, which allowed their customers to spy on people through their devices, including iPhone cameras and microphones, using a nearly undetectable hack that took advantage of a now-patched security flaw, was recently blacklisted by the US government for spying on journalists, activists, and critics of violent regimes worldwide, and this lawsuit suggests they may face yet more scrutiny and legal challenges in the coming years now that they’ve been outed.

Number of years NBCUniversal will have streaming rights for Premier League soccer in the US, after a new deal that will cost them a reported $2.6 billion.

If that reported value is accurate, this represents a tripling of the previous US broadcast rights for league games, and points at NBC’s desire to aim people at their streaming service Peacock (in the midst of much competition in that space right now), but also the increasing value of sports content on such services.