Flagship

US, Japan ready new deals

The U.S. and Japanese leaders will announce upgraded space and defense ties during an official visit by Japan’s prime minister to Washington, talks centered around their shared concern over China’s growing power. Japanese leader Fumio Kishida described the two countries as “global partners” in an interview with Nikkei, pointing in particular to upgraded “defense and national security cooperation.” The trip is part of Washington’s push to harden its alliances against Russia and China. Though Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine is of huge concern, the overriding long-term worry remains Beijing: The U.S. wants to expand its Asia-Pacific defense grouping with the U.K. and Australia to include Japan, and this week also hosts the Philippines president, who is locked in a tense maritime dispute with China.

Arizona reinstates 1864 abortion law

Arizona’s highest court reinstated a 160-year-old law banning nearly all abortions, deepening a national row that is affecting the coming presidential election. The 1864 law does not carry exceptions for rape or incest, and threatens up to five-year jail terms for abortion providers. Democrats, including U.S. President Joe Biden, immediately condemned the ruling, and many Republicans — including those who have previously supported the law — distanced themselves from it, pointing to its political toxicity. This week, Biden’s challenger for the presidency Donald Trump said abortion policy should be decided by state governments, an announcement which triggered backlash from all sides, signaling “just how precarious the topic of abortion remains,” Semafor’s Shelby Talcott noted.

Biden sees poll and funding boosts

U.S. President Joe Biden received good news ahead of his November showdown with Donald Trump. A new poll showed Biden four points ahead, slightly extending his lead from March, and an aggregate of bookmakers’ betting odds put him neck-and-neck with Trump for the first time since September. Biden’s campaign also has roughly double his rival’s campaign funds, with $192 million. In The Atlantic, though, one politics writer asked why, given Biden’s popular policies — notably allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices and bring healthcare costs down — he doesn’t have a more convincing lead: It’s as though “voters’ impressions of political candidates have little to do with the legislation those candidates pass.”

Personalized cancer vaccine hopes

Moderna’s stock jumped on news that an early trial of a personalized cancer vaccine showed promise that it could work against several cancer types. Cancer vaccines, unlike vaccines for infectious diseases, are administered to patients who already have cancer: They tell the immune system what to attack on the tumor. In a personalized vaccine, researchers analyze the genes of a patient and tumor and design mRNA molecules specifically to those genes. Moderna’s mRNA-4157 was safe and boosted immune responses in patients with head and neck cancers, having previously shown that it reduced recurrence in melanoma patients. Hopes of broadly effective treatment led Moderna shares to jump 6%: It is good news for the company, whose only product on the market — the COVID-19 vaccine — is seeing declining demand.

Largest Gaza aid airdrop so far

Gaza received its largest airdrop of aid so far, timed to coincide with the end of Ramadan. The 14 aircraft, of nine different nations including the U.S., U.K., and France, carried tons of food and medical supplies — although even one huge A400M transport plane can only carry as much as a single truck, meaning the airdrop is an ineffective method of carrying aid. U.S. President Joe Biden said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was making “a mistake” with his approach to Gaza, slowing the access of aid. Biden urged “the Israelis to just call for a ceasefire, allow for the next six, eight weeks, total access to all food and medicine going into the country.”

Colombia’s Uribe faces fraud trial

Former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe will face trial over witness tampering and fraud. According to prosecutors, he is being investigated over an alleged attempt to discredit accusations that he had ties to right-wing paramilitaries, El Espectador reported. Uribe joins a group of former top Latin American officials who are being investigated by their successors that includes former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and the ex-vice president of Ecuador. The trials underscore a wave of “anti-incumbency” that has taken hold of the region, an expert wrote in Americas Quarterly: Excluding autocratic regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua, incumbent parties have won just five of the 31 presidential elections held in Latin America since 2015.

Zuma allowed to run in South Africa

A court in South Africa overturned a ban on the candidacy of former President Jacob Zuma, allowing him to run in next month’s general election. The electoral commission had barred Zuma from running under the argument that a previous criminal conviction prohibited him from holding public office. Although the African National Congress — Zuma’s former party which has ruled the country since the end of white-majority rule in 1994 — is expected to win the biggest share of the votes, his new party could win a portion big enough to make it kingmaker in a coalition government, an expert at the University of Johannesburg said.

Stéphane Bancel, CEO, Moderna; David Zapolsky, Senior Vice President, Global Public Policy & General Counsel, Amazon; Arati Prabhakar, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Accenture Chair & CEO Julie Sweet, Co-Founder & Chairman of Infosys, Nandan Nilekani and Aravind Srinivas, Co-Founder, Perplexity AI will join the Global AI & Policy Session at the 2024 World Economy Summit to discuss the implications of AI in our everyday lives — from the way we learn, to how we work at the office or on the factory floor. Explore the latest in the AI revolution and the ways which companies are racing to take advantage of the technology, and what we can learn from past attempts to regulate tech.

April 18 | 2:30 p.m.-5:30 p.m. ET | Washington, D.C.

Fitch downgrades China

The ratings agency Fitch warned of China’s fast-growing debt load as it cut the country’s outlook to negative. The downgrade underlines growing global concern over Beijing’s economic prospects: Its moribund real-estate sector is saddled with debt, with a major property developer hit with a liquidation petition just this week, and local governments have taken out huge — and often opaque — amounts of borrowing in recent years to fuel infrastructure expansion. In Fitch’s view, that could worsen still, with China likely to pile on further loans to dig itself out of a broad economic slowdown. China’s finance ministry disputed the ratings agency’s assessment, insisting the country could manage its overall debt burden and economy.

Sheep employed to tend solar panels

Sheep are becoming a vital part of the green energy revolution. The U.S. solar industry has grown at record pace, bringing enough capacity online last year to power 6 million homes. But the sites need to be kept clear of vegetation which could shade the panels. A trade body estimated that the number of sites using sheep to graze around solar farms has risen 10-fold in two years, and Wall Street investors are increasingly backing sheep farmers, who have been struggling with falling demand for meat and wool. Sheep’s presence in solar farms “helps to ease some of the hesitance around the change” from communities, many of whom have lived with livestock farming for generations, one investor told the Financial Times.

Mount Etna blows smoke rings

Sicily’s Mount Etna, Europe’s largest active volcano, blew near-perfect “smoke rings” over the weekend. Smoke rings are formed by pulses of gas moving through a narrow passage and suddenly emerging into open space: Whales have also been known to blow bubble rings. A crater atop a narrow vent on Etna’s surface opened last week, and bubbles bursting in the magma below sent pulses, mainly water vapor rather than smoke per se, through the vent. The rings are not uncommon: Etna — which has been active for 500,000 years and regularly forced nearby villages to evacuate, burying the town of Nicolosi altogether in the 17th century — is “the most prolific volcano on this planet in terms of vapor rings,” a volcanologist told The Washington Post.

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• Muslims around the world begin Eid al-Fitr celebrations.
• France’s prime minister meets with his Canadian counterpart in Ottawa.
• The classical pianist Lang Lang is awarded a star on the Hollywood walk of fame.

Used to describe the growing demographic of people who are above the designated poverty line, earning too much to qualify for social services, but still not able to afford the basics of life. United Way, a nonprofit that operates U.S. community service helplines, estimates that there are 36 million ALICEs in the country. The federal poverty level for a family of four is $31,200: United Way estimates that in Connecticut, with housing, groceries, healthcare, transport, technology, and transport, the bare minimum survival budget for a family with two young children is $126,000. “It’s heart-wrenching to have to say to someone who’s struggling, ‘I’m sorry, you’re not eligible,’” one helpline operator told The Wall Street Journal.

The latest episode of The Simpsons focuses on labor conditions in ghost kitchens. In “The Night of the Living Wage,” Marge begins working for the delivery app Gimme Chow but is quickly disillusioned by the grueling shifts, low pay, and poor treatment of workers, at one point telling Lisa, “It kind of shakes my faith in billionaires.” She ultimately establishes a union, whereas Homer — who has been using Gimme Chow regularly — sides with the app’s owners. The episode’s writer told Eater that he hoped that, along with making viewers laugh, it encouraged them to be “more aware … it’s so easy to just take the phone out of our pockets and order anything, like Homer does. But that comes with the price of human misery sometimes.”

• Hong Kong, long at a crossroads, now faces one.
• The US is sending confiscated Iranian weapons to Ukraine.
• A group of Swiss women have won a landmark European climate case.