The Morning Dispatch: Russia Steps Up its Energy War with Europe

Happy Wednesday*! If you have an extra $1,000 just lying around, Apple’s unveiling its brand new iPhone today. We hear it has a slightly better camera!

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

  • Chileans voted 62 percent to 38 percent in a referendum on Sunday to reject an updated constitution championed by the country’s new, far-left President Gabriel Boric. The document would have replaced the constitution written and adopted under Gen. Augusto Pinochet in the early 1980s with a more progressive vision for the country, dramatically expanding the role of government to allow for stepped up environmental regulation, more generous social welfare programs, a nationalized health care system, and more. Chilean voters had overwhelmingly indicated in a 2020 referendum they supported revising their constitution in some manner, so Boric pledged Sunday reformers would redouble their efforts to reach an agreement that “unites us as a country.”

  • Kenya’s Supreme Court on Monday upheld William Ruto’s presidential election victory, unanimously rejecting challenges to the results from Raila Odinga, Ruto’s opponent and Kenya’s longtime opposition leader. The country’s electoral commission had declared Ruto—Kenya’s deputy president since 2013—the winner of the contest in mid-August, but four of the electoral commission’s seven members disowned the results due to “the opaque nature” of the general election’s final days. Odinga issued a statement this week expressing “vehement” disagreement with the court’s ruling but promised to respect the body’s decision as he has “always stood for the rule of law and the constitution.”

  • After a two-year investigation, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission has fined Instagram 405 million euros—the second-largest privacy-related fine in European history—for allegedly mishandling teenagers’ data by allowing users under age 18 to open “business accounts” on the social media platform that many didn’t realize exposed their contact information to the world. A spokesperson for Meta, Instagram’s parent company, claimed executives “engaged fully” with the investigation but were disappointed by the size of the fine. “This inquiry focused on old settings that we updated over a year ago,” the spokesperson said. “We’ve since released many new features to help keep teens safe and their information private.”

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