April 20 — Europe's Climate Crisis and China's Nuclear Ambitions

Every day, I ask ChatGPT to read the top 1000 trending news and post only the significant ones. No junk news, ever: if nothing significant happens, nothing gets posted.

But first, a big announcement: the News Minimalist website is live!

Now you can see all the top news that happened each day sorted by significance. In the future, I’ll add more features: search and filters by category.

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Now, back to actually significant news…

Today ChatGPT read 1344 articles and gave 4 of them a score over 6.5.

After removing duplicates and repeats, here is today’s most significant news:

‘Frightening’: record-busting heat and drought hit Europe in 2022. Continent set for further drought in 2023, scientists say, as unstoppable impacts of climate crisis mount. — The Guardian

The climate crisis caused record heatwaves and drought in Europe last year, resulting in over 20,000 deaths and damaged crops, according to a report by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). With the hottest summer on record and the driest year, Europe faced numerous challenges such as low river flow rates, high carbon emissions from wildfires, and significant glacier ice loss. Despite these issues, Europe experienced its highest solar radiation in 40 years, boosting solar-power generation. Rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions is essential to limit further damage from global heating.

3 Nuclear Superpowers, Rather Than 2, Usher In a New Strategic Era. — The New York Times

Beijing is preparing to start a new reactor on the Chinese coast, just 135 miles from Taiwan, that the Pentagon believes will fuel China's nuclear arsenal expansion, potentially making it a rival to the US and Russia. The reactor, known as a fast breeder, is efficient at producing plutonium, a key component in nuclear weapons. Russia is supplying the nuclear material for the reactor, with both countries cooperating on a project that could lead to a combined arsenal surpassing that of the US. This development is causing a reevaluation of American nuclear strategy as the nation faces a complex three-way nuclear rivalry, which challenges the deterrence strategy that has historically prevented nuclear war.

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News Minimalist