Flagship

Unpopular G7 leaders begin summit

The G7 summit of the world’s leading industrialized nations began Thursday. But it featured “arguably the weakest gathering of leaders the group has mustered for years,” Politico EU wrote. The UK’s Rishi Sunak is heading for a major defeat at the polls; France’s Emmanuel Macron called a snap election after being clobbered in the European parliamentary contest; Japan’s Fumio Kishida is facing calls from his party to step down. Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer captured their struggle through their net disapproval ratings. “Inflation, migration, and algorithms: it’s a tough time to be an incumbent,” he told Semafor. A notable exception was Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a winner in the European elections and who, as a Guardian editor described, greeted the “procession of dead men walking.”

G7 trip previews Modi’s foreign policy

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first international trip of his third term, to the G7 summit in Italy, will provide a glimpse into his foreign policy approach. Analysts expect Modi to take a more assertive stance on his vision of India as an infrastructure and high-tech export powerhouse, but he will be challenged by a global environment “more chaotic and unpredictable than anything seen in almost a century,” a geopolitical analyst wrote in Nikkei. Perhaps ironically, Modi’s underwhelming election performance and his weakened position as the head of a new coalition government is “the best thing that could have happened to Indian foreign policy,” Hindustan Times’ US correspondent argued, since it bolsters India’s image as a robust democracy with a diversity of opinion.

SCOTUS rejects bid to restrict abortion pill

The US Supreme Court on Thursday declined to limit access to one of the two pills used in nearly two-thirds of all abortions last year, in a win for reproductive rights advocates. In a unanimous decision, the justices said a group of anti-abortion doctors did not have standing to bring the suit, but the ruling leaves the door open for future legal challenges or legislation targeting the pill mifepristone. That could galvanize efforts to protect access to the pill ahead of the US presidential election in November; Democrats and abortion rights activists see Project 2025, a collection of conservative policy proposals for a potential second Donald Trump administration, as a grave threat to abortion access, and hope to mobilize voters against it.

China has big head start in robot taxis

China offers a test case for what the future of driverless cars could look like. No other country is moving as fast to put autonomous vehicles on the roads, with at least 16 cities testing them publicly. Tech giant Baidu has deployed 500 “robot taxis” in Wuhan, and plans to add another 1,000, The New York Times reported. Chinese drivers generally have more trust in the technology, and Beijing’s tight control of data makes it hard for foreign automakers to gather research from China. Despite safety concerns, the sector receives “far less public and official scrutiny” in China compared to the US, the Times’ Beijing correspondent wrote. Posts about an apparent autonomous vehicle crash in Shanxi province earlier this year disappeared from the Chinese internet.

Musk’s Tesla pay package approved

Tesla shareholders approved a pay package currently worth $46 billion for CEO Elon Musk, one of the largest compensation deals in history. The vote followed a tense legal fight, after a judge ruled in January that Musk’s pay deal — which said he could only be paid in stocks that could not be sold for five years — was invalid. Supporters of the package argue Musk has done a good job managing the company and growing its profile in the face of Chinese competition. But the pay dispute only highlights the “corporate-governance problem” at Tesla, The Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Wilmot wrote: Musk’s management style suggests he wants to use money from minority investors to invest in his other businesses, like xAI and social media platform X.

Soccer unions take on FIFA

Soccer unions accused FIFA of violating players’ rights by creating an “overloaded and unworkable” match calendar. In a legal complaint Thursday, the groups criticized FIFA’s decision to expand competition in the Club World Cup by increasing the number of teams from seven to 32; unions said the move would cause “economic harm” to national leagues and push players “beyond their limits.” But expanding tournaments can have its benefits: The growth of the European Championship, which begin Friday in Germany, has allowed for a sporting renaissance in Eastern European countries that struggled to qualify when the tournament was smaller, The Guardian’s sports writer argued.

Men like meat more than women

Men eat meat more than women, and the difference is starkest in rich countries with greater gender equality, a new study found. Researchers testing gender differences in meat consumption of about 28,000 people in 23 countries found that the trend held everywhere except China, India, and Indonesia. Despite having greater food freedom in wealthier countries, women still chose to eat less meat, suggesting that meat consumption may be more to do with gender norms than food availability. The researchers hoped the findings could help efforts to reduce diet-related greenhouse gas emissions, a massive contributor to climate change. “Anything that one could do to reduce meat consumption in men would have a greater impact, on average, than among women,” one researcher said.

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Startup aims to hunt asteroids

A US startup wants to find 10 million near-Earth asteroids every year. So far astronomers have identified 34,000 space rocks with orbits that come near Earth, but because the rocks are dim and fast-moving, ground-based telescopes struggle to spot them: At least 1 billion are estimated to be undetected. Spotting more would reduce the risk of dangerous impacts, and also could provide potential space bases and resources for humanity. The Sutter Ultra space telescope project would be able to track dimmer objects. Its designer, California startup TransAstra, said it could detect 19 a minute, and is seeking $400 million in funding. TransAstra says the system could also detect space junk, a growing problem for low-Earth-orbiting satellites.

The case for awarding future achievements

The Oscars and the Nobel Prizes honor past achievements, but one astrophysicist makes the case for rewarding future successes. Martin Rees, the UK’s Astronomer Royal revived the 18th-century Longitude Prize for innovation in 2014 to mark the third centenary of a British government prize for the inventor of a method to establish longitude for ships at sea. The 21st-century version offers $10 million for inventions in six major scientific challenges, including dementia and sustainable food. This year’s prize went to a company that developed a tool for detecting antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Rees argued in New Scientist that such challenge prizes “can inspire myriad potential solutions to a problem,” and help solve the world’s “most pressing problems.”

Robots make rare squid discovery

Underwater robots discovered a species of large deep-sea squid that looks after its eggs. Squid are a ubiquitous and vital part of deepwater ecosystems, but are often poorly understood because they rarely come near the surface: Scientists have never observed mature females or eggs of most species. Maternal care is common in closely related octopuses, but squid usually release their eggs or leave them on the seafloor. Over 37 years, researchers in the Gulf of California have seen just 17 instances of brooding squids. The latest sighting was twice the size of any previously seen brooding specimen, and is believed to be a new species: Robotic advances are “helping us better understand the lives of deep-water squids,” one researcher said.

Friday, June 14:

• Donald Trump celebrates his 78th birthday in Florida.

Saturday, June 15:

• A two-day Ukraine peace summit starts in Switzerland.
• Li Qiang arrives in Australia in the first visit by a Chinese premier since 2017.

WeChat is the center of the Chinese internet — powering everything from messaging to payments — and the main portal where China’s news outlets and bloggers publish their work.

Out of odor

Two years after China finally allowed imports of Vietnamese durian, the giant, custard-like fruit known for its pungent odor, Vietnamese farmers are still “growing durian like crazy” since it brings in more income than other crops like rice and grain, according to Yuǎnfāng Qīngmù, a geopolitics blog about Asia.

But economists are now worried that China’s demand for Vietnamese durian could have long-term consequences for the Southeast Asian country. Farmers are destroying rice paddies to accommodate durian, “an uneconomical behavior” that threatens Vietnam’s food security. “Durian is just a kind of fruit, while rice is the foundation of [Vietnam],” Yuǎnfāng Qīngmù wrote.

Holiday fatigue

China celebrated the annual Dragon Boat Festival on June 10. While families flocked to rivers and lakes to watch dragon boat races, many younger workers were experiencing “holiday fatigue” and instead chose the day to recuperate from grueling work hours, according to Vizion Zine, a socioeconomic blog.

China’s May 1 Labor Day this year also saw a huge surge in “foot massage” searches online, according to data obtained by Vision Zine, and many of those booking appointments were born after 1995. Massage parlors have taken note of the trend and have transformed their studios into one-stop shops of food, movies, and sleeping rooms. Here, young workers can “live a lazy life, without having to use [their] brain to think,” Vision Zine wrote.

Wholesale love

Nanjing has become China’s wholesale hub: Three new wholesale warehouses — including a Sam’s Club and Costco — have opened since January, according to Yilan Business, a retail blog. Nanjing’s prime geographic location can draw customers from major satellite cities, and its infrastructure allows for the transport of massive amounts of goods to stock warehouse shelves.

Nanjing’s economic prospects offer “huge potential” to wholesale businesses: Disposable income in the city grew by 4.1% year-on-year in 2023, Yilan reported. Nanjing also has the most university students in China after Beijing and Shanghai; brands hope to “cultivate this group of potential consumer groups in advance” to turn them into loyal customers of cost-effective products.

Richard Fontaine is the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security and the co-author of a new book, “Lost Decade: The US Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power.”

A new movie about a businessman from Tokyo on an American cattle ranch reverses traditional film tropes about foreigners and Japanese culture. Typically, in fish-out-of-water stories about the country, “the fish is Western; the strange land is Japan,” The Japan Times wrote. But Tokyo Cowboy, which is out now in Japan and comes to US theaters in August, is told from the perspective of a salaryman whose company looks to Montana to supply beef to Japanese customers, and his experience in the US “propels his coming-of-middle-age journey into selfhood.” The movie holds promise that Japan will no longer be “typecast as the exotic other.”

• Immigration activists are starting to miss Bob Menendez.
• G7 agrees outline of $50B deal to fund Ukraine using frozen Russian assets.
• Renewable energy alone can’t save Ukraine’s faltering grid.