What a summer! It felt like years, if not decades, of news happened in just a few months
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with stories about current events and trending topics.
We took the summer off—not “off” really. What happened is, I wanted to spend two months heads down on some business issues, so I recorded the July and August episodes all in one week at the end of June.
I figured, summer is quiet. Not much is going on. You won’t miss the current events topics.
Wow, was I wrong. This summer was jam-packed with news—Trump was shot, Crowdstrike, a huge prisoner exchange, the Olympics, and more. So today, we’ll review this crazy summer. And on Thursday, we’ll talk about the biggest story in the U.S. over the last few months.
The expression I’ve chosen for this episode is “get out of.” So that’s coming up after our main story.
This is lesson number 706, so you can find the transcript, activities, exercises, translations, and more at PlainEnglish.com/706.
Summer 2024: Three months that felt like decades
Many summers are quiet : people go on vacation , business activity slows down , there isn’t much political news .
That’s not how it went this year. June, July, and August 2024 were jam-packed with news. Here’s a rundown of what happened in these three months.
The biggest story of the summer in the U.S. was incumbent president Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 election campaign. Kamala Harris, the sitting vice president, has received the Democratic Party’s nomination and will face former president Donald Trump in November.
Mexico elected its first female president, and first Jewish president, Claudia Sheinbaum in June.
In the United Kingdom, British voters kicked out the Conservative majority , handing control of the government to the center-left Labour Party and new prime minister Keir Starmer. It was the Conservative Party’s biggest defeat in its 190-year history.
Across the Channel , France elected a new National Assembly in a rollercoaster two-round election. After the first round, the far-right National Rally party, led by Marine LePen, appeared to be on the verge of winning a majority for the first time in history. But the centrist Ensemble and the leftist New Popular Front worked together to deny the far-right alliance its majority in the legislature . No party won a majority.
Speaking of France: the water was dirty, the track was purple , and “les bleus” made French fans proud. At the Summer Olympics, the French national team took home 64 medals, including 16 golds and the silver medal in men’s soccer. This was France’s best Olympic performance ever in the modern era .
They did swim in the river Seine . Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo swam in the river before the games began, achieving a decades-old dream of Paris mayors to take a dip in the city’s famous river. Some long distance swimming events had to be postponed due to bacteria levels. Athletes confirmed the river was…not crystal-clear.
The four-hour opening ceremonies featured national teams floating down the river. It was the first time in the modern era that opening ceremonies were not held in a stadium.
Russia and a group of western democracies completed the largest prisoner swap since the Cold War.
It all came together on August 2 in Ankara, the capital of Turkey. Russia and Belarus released 16 people, three to the U.S. and thirteen to Germany. These included activists , journalists , dissidents , and Western citizens.
Paul Whelan is a former U.S. marine and had been held in Russia for six years: he was the highest-profile American held in Russia. Evan Gershkovich, an excellent reporter for the Wall Street Journal, was detained over a year ago after he was arrested on a reporting trip . They were both released in this swap. Germany secured the release of Russian opposition figures and dissidents who had been detained by the Putin regime .
But this came at a high price . The U.S., Slovenia, Norway, Germany, and Poland released a total of eight people to Russia. They included hackers , smugglers , and assassins .
Venezuela held an election on July 28. Since strongman Nicolas Maduro came to power , almost eight million people have fled the country and the economy has shrunk by about three quarters, according to some estimates. Respected opinion polls predicted that the opposition candidate would win the election by a wide margin . Printouts from the election machines show a convincing defeat for the government.
Still, the government declared victory for Maduro—a result few in Venezuela believe. The government has not released detailed election tallies and it stopped the publication of vote totals on the night of the election. It blamed hackers .
Venezuelans took to the streets to protest. The opposition has published images of the voting machine printouts on social media, showing their ample margin of victory. The government responded brutally : they have gone door to door arresting opposition activists in a crackdown chillingly known as “Operation Knock Knock.” Access to the social network X was suspended and the government has instructed citizens to delete WhatsApp from their phones.
Former U.S. president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt at an outdoor campaign rally in Pennsylvania. Trump was on stage , giving an address , when he turned his head to refer to a chart projected on a screen. Just as he did that, a bullet grazed his ear , drawing blood .
The shooter was a teenager. He was on the roof of a nearby building. Snipers working for the Secret Service shot him seconds later. The Secret Service is the agency tasked with securing the president , former presidents, high-level officials, and presidential candidates. The director of the agency resigned in the aftermath of the shooting .
It was called the world’s biggest IT outage . On July 19, cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike pushed out an update to its software on Windows computers. But the software contained a bug that caused users’ computers to crash . The fix was simple, but it took some time to roll it out to all affected machines.
The outage affected airlines , banks, hotels, hospitals, factories , broadcasters , retail stores , and more. It was estimated to cause $10 billion in damage.
In Brazil, a commercial passenger plane crashed in a residential area of the state of São Paulo, killing 62 people. It was Brazil’s worst plane crash in decades.
Three Taylor Swift concerts were cancelled in Vienna. Investigators discovered that a 19-year-old follower of an Islamist terrorist organization had been collecting explosive material to use in a car bomb outside the stadium.
Willie Mays, one of baseball’s greatest players, died on June 19. He began his career in 1948 in the Negro Leagues—a separate league for black players—before moving to the New York Giants in the major leagues . He played 23 seasons of professional baseball and was one of the most beloved players in history. He was 93.
Jeff’s take
This summer was incredible. We’ll talk about Biden’s debate and eventual withdrawal from the race on Thursday. But literally all summer long, there was something huge in the news every single week.
July 19. I was on a domestic flight here in Mexico and the airline’s systems were all down. After a three-hour wait in line, I got a paper boarding pass , written in pen .
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