Flagship

Sudan violence intensifies

A U.S. diplomatic convoy was fired upon and the EU ambassador assaulted in his home during worsening violence in Sudan. Nearly 200 people are known to have died in three days of fighting between rival military factions, with the capital Khartoum hit by airstrikes and artillery. The U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the attack on the convoy “was reckless, it was irresponsible and of course unsafe.” The EU ambassador was not seriously hurt. The U.S. has no plans to evacuate its personnel, and international groups are attempting to bring the two groups to the negotiating table.

Brazil capital attack hearings begin

Brazil’s Supreme Court opens hearings today over the January 8 riots during which supporters of Jair Bolsonaro stormed government buildings after the former president’s election loss. The court will hear the first 100 of nearly 1,400 cases this week, Folha de S.Paulo reported. Last week, the court ordered Bolsonaro to testify over his role in the attempted coup. Prosecutors say he and his sons — themselves members of Congress — incited the riots by questioning the legitimacy of the election results. Separately, Bolsonaro faces corruption charges for failing to declare a gift he received from Saudi authorities.

An anti-Russia atomic alliance

Five nations formed a new alliance intended to reduce Russia’s grip on the world’s supplies of nuclear fuels. The U.S., U.K., France, Canada, and Japan will collaborate to find other sources of uranium ore and help other countries diversify their supply chains, pushing Russia aside so that “neither [Russian President Vladimir Putin] nor anyone like him” can “hold the world to ransom again,” the U.K. energy minister said. Oil export sanctions hit Moscow’s income, but Russia is also a major exporter of uranium, providing 20% of the EU’s fuel and providing technical support for many reactors. That income stream has been largely untouched by sanctions.

AI art wins photography award

A photographer turned down an award after admitting to using artificial intelligence to make the winning entry. Boris Eldagsen’s black-and-white image of two women won the Sony World Photography Awards in the creative open category, but Eldagsen then said he had “applied as a cheeky monkey” to find out whether photography competitions were ready for the impact of AI. “They are not,” he said. AI’s extraordinary recent progress is driven by scale: Ever-larger networks, ever-greater computing power, ever-larger datasets. But Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, says we have reached the “end of the era” of progress involving “giant, giant models”: “We’ll make them better in other ways.”

Global hopes on China growth

China’s economy grew faster than expected in the first quarter, bolstering hopes for global growth. The 4.5% expansion year-on-year was driven by the increase in shopping, traveling, and eating out by Chinese consumers, a direct consequence of Beijing abandoning years of draconian zero-COVID restrictions. China’s growth stands in contrast to slowing economies in the West, where governments and central banks are grappling with stubbornly high inflation and fears of a banking crisis. Yet the news for the world isn’t entirely buoyant: More of China’s expansion is driven by domestic factors than in previous years, so “anyone looking for China to save the global economy this year might be somewhat disappointed,” one economist told The Wall Street Journal.

US arrests alleged Chinese agents

U.S. officials arrested and charged two men over Beijing’s alleged efforts to pressure critics outside China. The pair were accused of conspiring to act as agents of the Chinese government, using a New York outpost of China’s public security bureau to harass opponents. Charges were also unveiled against 34 Chinese police officers for targeting Chinese nationals in the city, and against Chinese officials pressuring Zoom to bar dissidents from the video-conferencing platform. The American efforts are the latest international response to a report last year into Beijing’s apparent use of such overseas police stations. China’s foreign ministry accused Washington of “concocting the so-called transnational repression narrative.”

Moscow jails dissident for treason

Moscow sentenced Vladimir Kara-Murza, an opposition activist who holds dual Russian-British citizenship, to 25 years in prison. He was officially jailed for treason, spreading misinformation, and his ties to an “undesirable organization” — but in reality, his conviction is tied to his criticism of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Moscow has been cracking down on dissent over the war, increasing both how many people it has detained, and how long it has jailed them for, according to Meduza, the Russia-focused outlet. “Today’s government rules by means of signals,” Alexander Cherkasov, the Russian human-rights campaigner, said, “and repression is the signal they’re sending to society.”

US debt ceiling breach feared

A senior Republican lawmaker offered to increase the U.S. debt ceiling for a year in return for curbs on federal spending. The U.S. is expected to breach the debt ceiling, a legal cap on its borrowing that is unusual globally, this summer and officials have warned of catastrophic consequences — “a major, major disaster,” in the words of the European Central Bank president — for the world economy if it is not increased. The proposal from House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy represents something of a softening in Republicans’ hardline stance, but its short-term horizon would bring the issue back to the forefront again in the summer of 2024, just months before a presidential election.

VC funding dries up

Silicon Valley venture capital investors toured the Middle East in recent weeks to woo the region’s sovereign wealth funds amid a cash crunch in the industry. The reckoning is so profound, some VCs have even reversed earlier decisions to shun Saudi money, the Financial Times reported. “The tech correction has humbled the industry,” an Abu Dhabi-based investor said. VC investment in startups fell 55% in the first quarter of the year compared to the same period of 2022. Meanwhile, IPOs raised just $19.7 billion through March 24, down from $199 billion two years before.

Chebet wins Boston Marathon, again

Evans Chebet won the Boston Marathon again, forcing his fellow Kenyan Eliud Kipchoge to settle for sixth place. Boston is the world’s oldest annual marathon, held each year near the anniversary of the battle of Lexington in the U.S. War of Independence, when Paul Revere rode 13 miles in two hours to warn of British troops’ arrival. Chebet ran twice that distance in two hours and five minutes, with no visible horse. Modern elite marathon runners’ pace is close to a constant two-hour sprint: Kipchoge’s marathon world-record time was run at 4:37 a mile, equivalent to a 100-meter pace of 16 seconds.

• Ukraine’s infrastructure minister visits Turkey for talks with the Turkish defense minister on issues including the Black Sea grain deal.
• Former U.S. President Bill Clinton speaks at an event in Northern Ireland to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.
• Symphony of Secrets, a new novel about musical legacy and privilege by Brendan Slocumb, is published.

Extra cases of blood clots per million people given COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S. Concerns over vaccine-induced clotting gained significant attention in early 2021. But a huge new study found 1.3755 cases of clots, or ‘venous thromboembolism’ (VTE), per 1,000 vaccinated patients, compared to 1.3741 among unvaccinated, a “trivial” difference of 1.4 cases per million. This was true both for mRNA vaccines such as Pfizer’s and “viral vector” vaccines like the Johnson & Johnson/Janssen jab. “The rate of VTE with COVID-19 is several orders of magnitude greater,” said one of the study’s authors, so the research “reinforces the safety and importance of staying current with COVID 19 vaccinations.”

A Pakistani song with more than half a billion views on YouTube — 2022’s most-searched track — stunned crowds at the U.S. music festival Coachella. Ali Sethi’s Pasoori, a stirring Punjabi-language song about forbidden love, has become a global phenomenon since its release last year. It struck a particularly strong chord of unity with Indian and Pakistani listeners as a “melodic metaphor” for the conflict between their respective governments. “The theme of prohibition is such an eternal theme in South Asian love songs,” Sethi said after his weekend performance. “So I wanted to write a song that was sort of a flower bomb hurled at nationalism and heteropatriarchy.” 

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