Flagship

Israel launches hospital raids

Israeli forces raided a major Gazan hospital complex that the country’s officials say has become a hub for Hamas militants. Accounts of the operation in Gaza City differed — Palestinian officials described the use of tanks and heavy gunfire, while Israel’s military insisted it had carried out a “precise operation” — but the raid nevertheless pointed to the continued intensity of the war in Gaza even as Israel dispatched negotiators to Qatar for renewed ceasefire talks. It also highlighted the worsening humanitarian situation: Israeli military officials urged Gazans in the hospital to flee to the south of the enclave, where more than 1 million are already massed, and desperately short of essential supplies.

Putin win bodes ill for democracy

Russia’s stage-managed elections underline worsening trends for democracy worldwide, analysts said. Vladimir Putin’s reelection to a fifth term spotlights “a steady process of authoritarian learning” over recent decades in which autocrats have increasingly mimicked free elections in order to cement their power, the political scientist Brian Klaas wrote in his newsletter. Analysis by Sweden’s V-Dem Institute, a democracy-focused think tank, found an accelerating decline in free and fair elections, while polling by the Pew Research Center pointed to falling support for representative democracy. “Russia’s farce election sums up a grim moment in global democracy,” a Washington Post headline noted.

EU inks Egypt migration deal

The European Union signed a €7.4 billion aid deal with Egypt aimed at bolstering the country’s flailing economy and curbing migration from Africa. The agreement is part of a growing theme in which richer Western countries offer financial help to developing ones to reduce irregular migration, even as high-income nations court skilled labor worldwide: The EU has similar deals with Turkey and Tunisia, and is in talks with Morocco, Politico reported; Washington has opened migrant-processing hubs in Colombia and Guatemala; Italy is processing asylum applications in Albania; and the U.K. is fitfully trying to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. Rights groups have condemned many of the deals, though, with Human Rights Watch saying Brussels’ latest agreement “rewards authoritarianism.”

More safety woes for Boeing

A United Airlines Boeing 737-800 landed safely after a panel fell off its fuselage during the flight. The missing part was not noticed during the flight, but it’s more bad news for the aircraft manufacturer, under scrutiny after a series of high-profile safety concerns. As well as deadly crashes in 2018 and 2019, a cabin door blew out of one 737 in January, forcing an emergency landing. Last week a 787 fell unexpectedly, injuring 50 passengers. Vox reported that investigations found dozens of failings in a Boeing factory, and that “Boeing sometimes valued cost- and corner-cutting measures” over employee concerns. One whistleblower died by suicide last week. Commercial flight remains, however, one of the safest ways to travel overall, 595 times safer than driving.

Safest year for NYC’s pedestrians

New York City’s pedestrians had their safest-ever year in 2023. There were 101 deaths in the 8.5-million-person city, down from over 700 in 1990. NYC in 2014 embraced a goal of zero traffic fatalities, imposing 25 mph speed limits, traffic-calming measures, and education programs. Progress has been unsteady, but in Brooklyn, for instance, deaths are down 38% since 2019. Cycle deaths have not fallen, although it’s worth noting that the city government estimates that the number of daily cyclists has almost doubled since 2012. New York’s success contrasts with a grim national picture: 2022 was the worst year for U.S. pedestrian deaths in 40 years.

Tougher US media climate

Fewer tough, critical, or investigative articles are being published in the U.S. than any time in recent memory: That’s the conclusion of a recent piece by Semafor’s media reporter. Several factors are to blame, including a worsening legal climate and declining journalistic business models, as well as increasingly emboldened billionaire critics of the press and growing celebrity power. “The result is that the last word often goes to the highest bidder, the most powerful person, or the biggest celebrity,” Max Tani wrote. In The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, a former Time Inc. editor-in-chief harkened back to an era in which his boss, the company’s chief executive, rebuffed the U.S. president’s pressure over a story.

Brazil opens China inquiry

Brazil launched an investigation into an apparent flood of cheap goods from China. With the country’s economy in the doldrums, China’s companies are looking abroad for sales, prompting the U.S., European Union, and others to impose restrictions on incoming Chinese goods such as electric vehicles. “Prolonged declines in China’s export prices may cause trade tensions between China and some major economic powers to rise,” Nomura analysts said recently. The investigation also points to the balance Brazil is trying to strike in its relations with the U.S. and China respectively: Its ties to Beijing are mostly economic, but Washington is a bigger foreign investor, analysts at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace noted.

Sen. Michael Bennet; Sen. Ron Wyden; Kevin Scott, CTO, Microsoft; John Waldron, President & COO, Goldman Sachs; Tom Lue, General Counsel, Google DeepMind; Nicolas Kazadi, Finance Minister, DR Congo and Jeetu Patel, EVP and General Manager, Security & Collaboration, Cisco have joined the world class line-up of global economic leaders for the 2024 World Economy Summit, taking place in Washington, D.C. on April 17-18. See all speakers and sessions, and RSVP here.

Unsung Dominican Republic’s success

The Dominican Republic has quietly become a Latin American economic success story. Despite sharing an island with troubled Haiti, the nation of 11 million has averaged 4.9% GDP growth over the last 50 years, the Financial Times’ Latin America editor wrote. The boom has made it the region’s seventh largest economy, overtaking Venezuela and Ecuador, both far more populous. The International Monetary Fund projects that the Dominican Republic could become an “advanced” economy by 2060. Its popular president told the FT that his government is “pro-investment, pro-business,” while increasing social spending. Concerns over climate change and a problem with drug-money laundering remain, but the Dominican Republic stands out among Latin America’s “stop-go policies and political extremes.”

‘Red-teaming’ AI to reduce misinfo

Artificial intelligence companies are increasingly “red-teaming” their products before release. Sora, OpenAI’s impressive-looking text-to-video AI, has been demonstrated but not made available, partly because the firm is probing the model to assess “its capacity for deepfake videos, misinformation, bias, and hateful content,” IEEE Spectrum reported. Red teams play the role of adversaries, trying to find weaknesses and vulnerabilities: Like any software, generative AI can be hacked externally, but can also go wrong in other, less predictable ways. To some extent, stopping AIs from producing harmful content is like building a typewriter that won’t write rude words, but Google’s experience with its Gemini AI offering awkwardly inaccurate historical images recently has made the industry nervous.

Sheeran’s Punjabi delights fans

Ed Sheeran sang in Punjabi as he performed alongside Indian singer Diljit Dosanjh in Mumbai. The Englishman is one of the world’s biggest stars, having sold more than 150 million records, and Dosanjh is a huge name in India. The pair dueted on Dosanjh’s track Lover during Sheeran’s Asia and Europe tour of his album Autumn Variations. India’s economic growth has made it an increasingly important market in several sectors — smartphone sales grew tenfold between 2011 and 2021, and electric vehicle sales surged 50% last year — and the music industry is no different: It has doubled in size since 2016, making Sheeran’s rapid mastery of Punjabi an excellent business decision.

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• U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrives in Manila on an official visit.
• Greeks celebrate an annual flour-throwing festival in the coastal fishing town of Galaxidi.

Word to your moms, I came to drop bombs

Steven Spielberg’s Masters of the Air miniseries concluded on Friday. On How the World Became Rich, the economic historian Mark Koyama writes that it was “a remarkably realistic and compelling depiction” of the Allied strategic bombing campaign in World War II. That campaign was bloody and dangerous, and many scholars have suggested it was ineffective, a waste of money and lives. But is that true? Not if you consider the opportunity cost which the campaign imposed on Germany, says Koyama.

People imagine battles win wars, but a plane blown up in the factory is just as gone as one shot down in combat, and bombing raids destroyed thousands. The strategic bombing campaign forced the Wehrmacht to deploy vast numbers of guns and fighters at home, rather than on the Eastern Front. It also destroyed oil facilities, drying up supply, and cut off transport links. And it forced German factories underground, making them far less efficient. “Masters of the Air does a fantastic job of depicting the sacrifices made by the men of the 8th Air Force,” writes Koyama. “But the economic approach to warfare adds to our understanding of just how critical their contribution was.”

Safe word

There is a famous Biblical passage, from the Book of Judges, in which an Ephraimite soldier is captured by the Gileadites, and he tries to pretend to be a Gileadite to avoid being horribly murdered (the Old Testament involves a lot of people being horribly murdered). His captors test him: “Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right.” So they horribly murder him. That’s the origin for the English word “shibboleth,” meaning a word used as a tribal marker.

Ed West, in Wrong Side of History, looks at the history of shibboleths, in their most literal sense. The “Peasants’ Revolt” in 1381 saw an English mob demanding people say “bread and cheese” — Flemish merchants were unable to, and 35 were murdered. The Flemish themselves massacred French people who struggled to say “schild en vriend” (shield and friend) in 1302. In the 20th century Dominicans killed Haitians who couldn’t pronounce the local word for “parsley.” And as recently as 2022, a viral video showed Ukrainians interrogating a suspected Russian saboteur by making him say the Ukrainian word “palyanytsya,” a kind of bread, apparently hard for Russians to pronounce.

To every thing there is a season

In February 2022, there were about 275,000 births in the United States. In August of that year, there were 335,000. Americans are much more likely to be born in summer than in winter. The seasonality of births is well-established, but it varies from country to country — Europe’s births tend to be earlier in the year than the Americas’ — and over time: In Spain, for instance, the annual fluctuations have declined, and also moved, shifting from a spring peak to a summer one.

Why is this? On Scientific Discovery, Saloni Dattani tries to piece it together. Societies’ move away from agrarian economies might be relevant: Perhaps parents planned to avoid births during the busy harvest season. And climate seems to be a factor. Birth seasonality correlates with latitude, and a really hot day, 90 degrees Fahrenheit or higher, noticeably reduces births nine months later. Flagship speculates that some things are less appealing when you’re already hot and sticky.

An Indian whodunit novel has been adapted into a movie now streaming on Netflix. Set in a colonial-era club in New Delhi, Murder Mubarak explores class and identity in contemporary India through a murder mystery, coming “the closest any film has come to re-creating [author Anuja] Chauhan’s universe,” wrote one reviewer in The Indian Express. She nevertheless pointed viewers back to the source material, the 2021 book Club You To Death. “Very few can do the insider-outsider divide with such acuteness, both sharp and warm,” she said of the writer.

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