Flagship

Kyiv’s missile stocks running low

Ukraine’s air defenses are nearly depleted and Russian military jets could soon step up operations behind the front lines if stocks are not replenished soon, a U.S. intelligence leak suggested. Surface-to-air missiles destroyed many Russian aircraft early in the war, leading Moscow to pull them back. But the leaked documents say Kyiv will run out of missiles by late May, meaning planes could attack Ukrainian artillery and shift the balance of power. Western allies are scrambling to supply both ammunition and new missile systems. Ukrainian officials have cast doubt on the authenticity of the leaked documents, but U.S. officials seem to suggest that they are real, The New York Times reported.

China naval drill encircles Taiwan

China launched military exercises encircling Taiwan in apparent response to Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen meeting U.S. leaders last week. Taipei said 70 Chinese aircraft and 11 ships surrounded the island. Beijing said its forces had carried out “multiple waves of simulated strikes on important targets.” On Saturday NATO announced its own largest-ever air force exercises this summer, intended to test U.S. and European forces’ cooperation. Meanwhile French President Emmanuel Macron, flying home from a Beijing visit, told Politico that Europe should avoid getting “caught up in crises that are not ours,” such as Taiwan, and being U.S. “vassals.” He said the EU should boost defense spending to become a “third superpower.”

Saudis in Yemen for peace talks

A Saudi Arabian delegation is in Yemen, holding talks with Houthi rebels and raising hopes of an end to the country’s long-running civil war. Saudi Arabia supported the Yemeni government after rebels seized the capital Sana’a, leading to a proxy war with its regional rival Iran, which backed the Houthi. Hundreds of thousands have died from violence, disease and malnutrition since 2014, and more than 80% of Yemenis rely on aid. A truce was announced last year, and although it expired in October, fighting has not resumed. Saudi and Iranian officials met in Beijing last week: The Sana’a talks suggest a rapprochement was reached.

Jupiter alien-hunter ready for launch

A mission to search for life on Jupiter’s moons should launch this week. The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, JUICE, will launch from French Guiana and fall through space for eight years before entering Jupiter’s orbit. The discovery of oceans of liquid water under the ice on Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, three of Jupiter’s largest moons, made them — along with Saturn’s satellites Enceladus and Titan — the most promising places in the Solar System to look for extraterrestrial life. By the time JUICE arrives, NASA’s Europa Clipper will already be there, having taken a faster route via flybys of Earth and Mars.

Libyan migrants adrift in Med

A boat that departed from Libya with around 400 people is adrift off the coast of Malta and taking on water. Alarm Phone, a volunteer network that tracks migrant crossings in the Mediterranean, said authorities had not yet launched a rescue operation. More than 15,000 people crossed the Mediterranean in March, up from 2,500 a year earlier. Italian prime minister Georgia Meloni, an anti-migrant hardliner, has warned that Europe faces an “invasion” this summer. Despite the perils — crossing the Mediterranean is the most dangerous migrant route in the world — conflict and extended droughts across Africa continue to fuel record migration.

New rules to boost US EVs

The U.S. government will announce new car pollution rules this week, meant to ensure that two out of every three passenger vehicles sold by 2032 are electric, The New York Times reported. The rules would bring the U.S. into line with the EU, U.K. and Canada and augment existing incentives on electric vehicles and other green tech. The rules will strain manufacturers’ supply chains and require infrastructure overhauls, and may face legal challenges. It could also affect the 2024 presidential election: The auto industry is a major employer in several swing states. The U.S. wants to boost its EV manufacturing, but one manufacturer is looking elsewhere: Tesla announced plans to build a battery factory in Shanghai.

Traffickers prey on Colombian soccer

Young Colombians who dream of becoming professional soccer players are increasingly exposed to human trafficking networks, a recent UN report found. Soccer careers are so short — most players only play until their mid-thirties — that aspiring stars are “in a race against time” to secure a professional contract before they turn 18, El País reported. This pushes teenagers to leave their towns and villages for cities, where most big clubs play. There, the budding stars fall prey to fake scouts who lure them with supposed trial opportunities, only to ensnare them in human trafficking webs where they have their documents seized and are forced into menial work.

AI ‘catastrophe’ warning

A third of artificial intelligence researchers think AI could lead to a “nuclear-level catastrophe,” a new report by Stanford University found. The report found that two-thirds of new AI PhD graduates now go straight into industry rather than academia, and that industry now makes most new AI models, driven both by AI’s profit and its cost. The headline result, though, is that 36% of researchers thought AI could be deadly. “These are mostly people who know what they are talking about,” an author told IEEE Spectrum. And the numbers are nearly a year old: “It would be interesting to see them now, given what has been happening.” Three-quarters also said it could soon lead to “revolutionary social change.”

Full-color e-readers on horizon

Full-color “electronic paper” is on its way. The tech company E Ink, which makes the displays for Kindles and other e-readers, unveiled a new product capable of displaying colors almost as vivid and multihued as those on an LCD TV. E-paper displays reflect light, rather than emitting it, allowing them to be read under natural light, to be viewed from all angles, and to continue displaying an image without power. Existing color e-paper is limited in color and slow to update. The new E Ink product is intended for billboard advertising, but hopefully will pave the way for comic books and images that actually look good on your Kindle.

The U.S.-Mexico border is in crisis. Immigration enforcement turns away hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers, and Congress is in stalemate over how to deal with it. In The Agenda, Semafor’s new video series detailing Washington’s highest-stakes challenges and the good-faith efforts to solve them, Joe Posner looks at how a bipartisan group of moderates is working toward a compromise.

• President Joe Biden will travel to Belfast for the 25th anniversary celebrations of the Good Friday Agreement.
• The spring meetings between the World Bank and the IMF begin in Washington.
• JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank are expected to respond to lawsuits over their dealings with Jeffrey Epstein.

Where did the great awokening awake?

A decade or so ago, there was a sharp increase in attention towards -isms and -phobias. Around the world, news outlets’ use of terms such as “racism,” “sexist,” and “transphobia” shot up tenfold between about 2010 and 2020. The data scientist David Rozado argues that, contra one common hypothesis, this phenomenon did not start in the U.S.: It appeared almost simultaneously worldwide.

It’s an interesting theory, although Flagship’s Tom is still unconvinced. Rozado’s key chart shows when mentions peaked in each country, but not how big the peak is: It’s normalized so 0 is the lowest number of mentions and 1 is the highest, which makes all the curves look the same size. A country going from zero mentions to 10 would look the same as if it went to 100 million. It also seems like social media, rather than news media, is the place to look. But this is an unexpected finding, and should make us less confident that “The Great Awokening” is entirely U.S.-born.

Letter bombs

The First Amendment in the U.S. protects speech from government interference. But “free speech” is wider than the First Amendment, and involves more than just freedom from the government. There are lots of ways speech can be limited, for better or for worse.

The legal writer Popehat points to a common form of “practical censorship”: The use of threatening legal letters. He notes a particularly stupid and unpleasant one, sent by a small liberal-arts college in California in response to a former employee’s criticisms. “Foolish and meritless … threat letters get sent by the dozen, every day,” he says. People without the resources or contacts to find a lawyer are scared into silence by them. The plaintiffs, and lawyers, who make these threats “should be called out, condemned, and shunned.”

Fear and loathing in Silicon Valley

What’s it really like working in artificial intelligence at the moment? It’s crazy, writes Nathan Lambert, a researcher at the AI company Huggingface. “Every single person I know,” he says, has had their career upended by ChatGPT, “the first iPhone moment of AI.” It’s led to “career changes, projects to be abandoned, and tons of people to try and start new companies in the area.”

The industry has been shaken up, he says, and it’s both energizing and stressful: “It seems like everyone is simultaneously extremely motivated and extremely close to burning out.” The field is “charging ahead,” but safety concerns have suddenly become salient. Lambert expected those fears to “approach much more gradually, like climate concerns rather than Ukraine concerns,” but it’s been overnight. As a result, “I’m oscillating between the most motivated I’ve ever been and some of the closest to burnt-out I’ve ever felt.”

Metallica’s latest album was fuelled by a secret ingredient: Earl Grey tea. The heavy metal legends who once thanked “Carlsberg lager, Absolut vodka and Alka-Seltzer” in their album sleeve notes have since mellowed: “The days of going off your rocker all night and watching the sun rise are somewhat behind us,” their drummer Lars Ulrich told the BBC. Their new album, 72 Seasons, is one of the band’s “hardest, most pulverising records to date,” but also an expression of vulnerability, dealing with singer James Hetfield’s rehab and divorce. And it’s powered by Earl Grey. “There’s a teapot and a cup right in front of me, within arm’s reach,” Ulrich said. “Not only is it yummy but it keeps me fired up.”

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— Tom, Prashant Rao, Preeti Jha, and Jeronimo Gonzalez.

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