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EU’s Ukraine support falls short

European pledges of deterring Russia and backing Ukraine were undermined by reports that a major announcement of military aid was largely repackaged funds. In a rare move, Denmark expanded conscription to include women, Poland’s president urged NATO members to up spending to 3% of GDP rather than the obliged 2%, and Czechia’s leader has argued for pooled contributions. Yet a newly announced €5 billion fund for arms shipments to Kyiv was labeled a “Potemkin village” by Politico, made up largely of prior commitments. Coupled with deadlock in Washington, the resulting lack of support for Ukraine could soon translate to the battlefield: The Ukrainian front line is “more fragile” than it appears, according to the Institute for the Study of War.

Putin slammed on eve of election

Two prominent Vladimir Putin critics slammed the Russian president’s crackdown on speech and political opponents on the eve of elections observers characterized as a sham. Describing Putin’s bid for a third consecutive term as “illegal,” Vladimir Kara-Murza — writing from a prison colony where he is jailed on charges of treason — said in The Washington Post that Putin was “a dictator and a usurper.” Also in the Post, Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of the late Putin opponent Alexei Navalny, argued Western leaders incorrectly viewed the Russian president as “a legitimate political leader,” adding: “Putin is not a politician, he’s a gangster.” If Putin serves another full term, he will have held power longer than any Russian leader since Catherine the Great.

AI’s developments and setbacks

Three companies released new artificial intelligence models, moving the technology into new areas. OpenAI-backed Figure unveiled a humanoid robot capable of real-time conversation, reasoning, and precise manipulation — its smooth stacking of dishes is faintly uncanny — while Cognition’s “coding assistant” writes entire software projects on its own, fixing bugs and testing code as it does so, and Google’s SIMA follows natural-language instructions in 3D environments, such as video games. AIs still face teething troubles: Semafor’s Technology Editor Reed Albergotti reported that Adobe’s Firefly image creation tool had the same flaws as Google Gemini, depicting Nazi soldiers and Vikings as Black. Adobe is not a “hotbed of employee activism” like Google, Reed wrote, saying the “common denominator is the core technology for image generation.”

Worries over Chinese debt

Persistent trouble at major Chinese property developers, coupled with concerns over huge and opaque levels of local-government debt, raised questions over the country’s growth prospects. Country Garden missed a yuan-denominated bond payment, and Moody’s withdrew Vanke’s investment-grade credit rating over worries it — like many Chinese real-estate firms — was mired in too much debt. Beijing, meanwhile, ordered provinces to scrap infrastructure projects to curb a mammoth pile of local government debt, the size of which is unclear, spurring analysts to speculate that the country will fall short of its 5% economic growth target. Investors, so far, are undeterred, snapping up the bonds at discounted prices, apparently confident that Beijing will bail out any troubled provincial authorities.

Malaysia boosts Singapore rail plan

Malaysia revived ambitious plans for a high-speed rail link between Kuala Lumpur and neighboring Singapore. The idea was first floated in 2013, but the two countries’ governments could not agree. Now Malaysia has received proposals from seven groups, including a Chinese state-backed consortium and South Korea’s Hyundai. The project hopes to cut the 200-mile journey to about 90 minutes, from about four hours by car, and boost investment in Malaysia’s southern state Johor. Southeast Asia’s first high-speed rail link, from Jakarta to Bandung in Indonesia, opened in October, and a line between Thailand’s Bangkok and Kunming in China, via Laos, is also planned, both backed by Beijing.

UN plans ‘airbridge’ to get aid to Haiti

The United Nations wants to build an “airbridge” into Haiti from neighboring Dominican Republic to get aid into the troubled country. Gangs have all but taken over Haiti: Prime Minister Ariel Henry is unable to reenter the island and has said he will resign after he appoints a transitional council. In Foreign Policy, Caribbean policy expert Alexander Causwell wrote that Haiti’s collapse is not a mere “uptick in gang violence,” as the U.N. security mission describes it, but “a full-blown insurgency.” Restoring order will require not simply police action but a military intervention, he argued: The international community should “speak about Haiti’s crisis in clearer terms,” Causwell said, or it will “doom any intervention before it has begun.”

Israel-Lebanon fighting intensifies

Israel stepped up its air assault on Hezbollah in Lebanon, while the Iran-backed militant group responded with its largest rocket barrage of the war so far. Israeli jets struck targets inside Lebanon on two consecutive days, killing at least two Hezbollah members. The near-daily clashes have forced tens of thousands of people, on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border, to flee their homes, and raised concerns of a wider regional confrontation. Israeli strikes, since the Israel-Hamas war began, have killed around 250 people — mostly Hezbollah members — in Lebanon, Reuters reported, while attacks from Lebanon have killed six Israeli civilians and 12 soldiers.

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Child labor in Brazil’s açaí industry

Children in Brazil are being employed to harvest açaí as demand for the berry — a favorite of well-heeled Western consumers — soars. Across the Amazon, children often as young as 13 climb 70-foot-tall trees to harvest the fruit, exports of which generate tens of millions of dollars for Brazil’s economy. Despite progress, child labor remains prevalent across Latin America and the Caribbean: According to the U.N.’s children agency, more than 8 million children between five and 17 are engaged in child labor in the region, a figure that jumped as economies slowed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Chocolate prices set to soar

Cocoa-processing plants in West Africa have stopped or slowed operations because they can’t afford to buy cacao beans, raising the global price of chocolate. El Niño, a warm-weather pattern, has caused drier conditions in Ghana and Ivory Coast, two of the world’s biggest cacao producers, which in turn have devastated crops, causing prices for the bean to soar to record highs. In response, chocolate-makers have begun increasing prices: According to a research firm, retail prices in the U.S. jumped almost 12% last year alone, and could rise further this year. “Given where cocoa prices are, we will be using every tool in our toolbox, including pricing,” the head of Hershey’s said.

Hit play adapted as novel

A hit play was published as a novel. Suzie Miller’s 2022 one-woman play Prima Facie, starring Killing Eve’s Jodie Comer, is about a working-class female lawyer in London who is raped: It sold out in Broadway and the West End and won Olivier awards for its writer and star. The pipeline usually goes from novel to play, or novel to film, but Miller told The Guardian that the more expansive literary format allowed her to expand the backstory and the characters’ psychological motives: “It was like stretching out your limbs in a yoga class.” Miller dedicated the novel to the “one in three” women who are sexually assaulted in the U.K.

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.

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The number of dollar millionaires in India, up from 473,000 a decade earlier. The new cadre of millionaires differs significantly from earlier ones, The Economist reported: They are younger, with many still in their 30s; they play a larger role in the country’s stock market, helping make it one of the world’s largest; and in perhaps the best showcase of India’s economic transformation and improving physical infrastructure, a growing share no longer live in top-tier cities such as Mumbai or Delhi. They’re from “Indore or Bhopal or Lucknow or Kanpur… It completely bamboozles me,” a former wealth manager said.

A new book charts the history of public housing in London. In London Estates, Slovenia-born Thaddeus Zupančič captures some 275 post-war council estates built in the city between 1946 and 1981. The photographer counts the Chicksand Estate, dominated by a brutalist brick-and-exposed-concrete tower in Whitechapel, and the low-rise, redbrick Lillington Gardens Estate in Pimlico as among the most influential modernist contributions to the city. His favorite small council estate in London is on Dunboyne Road in Camden. “It’s sensitive, beautiful, perfect,” he told Dezeen.

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