Flagship

Ukraine talks lack India, China backing

The leaders of India and China were notably absent at this weekend’s Ukraine peace conference, which critics said lacked clout and enthusiasm. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi skipped the summit, sending an emissary in his stead, and India, along with Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and South Africa, declined to sign the final peace communique. India remains sympathetic toward Ukraine, but “it obviously cannot go against Russia because of its dependencies,” a former Indian diplomat told Nikkei Asia; Russia is India’s largest weapons supplier and a key energy provider. Meanwhile, China declined to attend the conference. Beijing’s risky strategy is to “sabotage Western-led peace proposals” and then “swoop in and use its leverage over Russia” to broker its own peace deal, an expert wrote in Foreign Affairs.

China, Australia warm up with panda promise

Chinese Premier Li Qiang’s visit to Australia, the first by a senior Chinese leader since 2017, reflects warming ties between Beijing and Canberra. The now-cordial relations, which follow years of diplomatic strife, were on display as Li visited a winery — to mark China’s lifting of tariffs on Australian wine imports — and promised to send two more pandas to Australia. “In China’s view, pandas are a perfect way to say you want to be pals,” The Economist wrote. But the positive symbolism masked lingering tensions, Bloomberg noted. Australia is an increasingly important part of the US’ vision of security in the Indo-Pacific that counters China, and Canberra has blocked some Chinese investment in its lucrative rare-earth minerals mining industry.

The rate cut summer that wasn’t

Major central banks from the UK to Australia are likely to leave interest rates steady this week, contrasting an earlier outlook that predicted a summer full of global rate cuts, beginning in June. While Canada and the European Central Bank cut rates this month, delays elsewhere this week could “reaffirm how June … may increasingly turn out to be a widespread display of hesitancy,” Bloomberg wrote. Economists predict cuts are still on the way, just a little later in the year. But Taylor Swift may get in the way of a September rate cut for the Bank of England, according to strategists at TD Securities: Her sold-out London shows in August could cause hotel prices to surge and increase inflation.

Heat waves exact death toll

Extreme heat is exacting a death toll across the globe. Fourteen Jordanians died, and more than a dozen went missing, during the Hajj pilgrimage in the Saudi Arabian city of Mecca. And Greece’s back-to-back heat waves in the last two weeks have led to a hiker’s death, while six other tourists are missing. “The problem of missing hikers is not new,” a police official said. “But this year, it seems more people became disoriented during the heat wave.” The Eastern US is also bracing for an oppressive heat wave this week; New York officials warned that “feels like” temperatures could exceed 37°C mid-week. Scientists recently said that global warming could make 2024 the hottest year on record — breaking last year’s milestone.

Bangladesh is drowning rapidly

Bangladesh’s coast is disappearing underwater faster than almost anywhere else in the world. A government report said that 1 million Bangladeshis will be displaced by 2050, as sea levels rise 60% faster than the global average. An estimated 20 million people live in the coastal regions of the South Asian country, much of it just a few feet above sea level, and storms regularly bring seawater inland, killing crops and turning lakes and wells salty. One fisherman left his storm-damaged home in 2007 and moved inland: Now, his former property is under water. “The fish are swimming there in the water on my land,” he told AFP. “It is part of the advancing ocean.”

Mbappé warns against ‘extremes’ in France

Star soccer player Kylian Mbappé called on his fellow French citizens to vote against “extremes” in the country’s upcoming national elections. Mbappé didn’t directly mention Marine Le Pen’s nationalist party in his remarks ahead of France’s first match in the men’s European Championship. But his comment was widely interpreted as a stand against the far right, which placed first in the recent European parliamentary elections in France. With a major soccer tournament unexpectedly overlapping with a national election, the players have been inundated with questions about their political stances, prompting the French soccer federation to request that the media respect the team’s “neutrality” and avoid politicizing it. Mbappé’s comments followed mass protests in France on Saturday opposing Le Pen’s party, which leads in the polls.

US needs more bird flu tests

A shortage of bird flu tests could hide a potential future pandemic. The US has only authorized the Centers for Disease and Control Prevention to conduct testing of the H5N1 virus currently rampant in birds and some US cow herds, and the tests are only available for livestock workers. Three cases have been identified in humans, but researchers believe this is a significant undercount. Scientists worry about the US Food and Drug Administration repeating its “catastrophically slow” testing response when COVID-19 struck, only allowing CDC tests — which didn’t work — for several months. One warned Scientific American: “We’re making the same mistakes today.”

‘Furiosa’ puts tax rebates under scrutiny

Australian authorities likely shelled out more than $100 million of taxpayer money for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga — an example of how the country’s tax rebates can spiral out of control, a Brisbane-based media professor argued. The film — which had a $220 million budget, making it the most expensive movie ever made in Australia — received taxpayer funding through tax rebates aimed at luring productions to boost Australia’s economy. Lawmakers are debating whether to approve unlimited 30% rebates on local spending for productions filmed there. But “uncapped location offsets are risky,” Amanda Lotz wrote in Nikkei, and the provision doesn’t require the use of local talent. “This will not deliver Australian stories and will likely make it harder to tell such stories as local producers compete with deep Hollywood pockets.”

Climate change impacts sub detection

NATO scientists are researching how climate changes the cat-and-mouse game of hunting hostile Russian submarines. How sound waves travel through water — the main way of detecting submarines is by listening for them — is affected by temperature, salinity, and pressure, all of which are changing as seas warm and ice sheets melt. Researchers are placing underwater microphones around the Arctic and then transmitting sound — stopping when marine mammals are nearby, to avoid disturbing them — to see how the waves propagate. ”Everything needs to be re-evaluated,” one scientist told AFP, “especially in terms of salinity and temperature in the ocean.”

Proponents plan US cricket stadiums

Investors are pouring money into cricket in the US. Proponents say this year’s Men’s T20 World Cup, which is partly hosted by the US and has drawn massive crowds, shows there’s a domestic audience for the sport, which is huge in South Asia and considered the second-most popular sport in the world. American backers are now looking to build permanent cricket stadiums for a new professional league in places including Texas and San Francisco. “We’ll have samosas, and we’ll also have hot dogs,” Major League Cricket’s tournament director said. Team USA is also making headlines for its shocking defeat of Pakistan, thanks in part to a rising star, Saurabh Netravalkar, who works full-time as an engineer at Oracle.

June 17:

• European Union leaders meet to negotiate who will be given the organization’s top jobs.
• New Zealand’s prime minister visits Japan to meet with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
• Malawi vice president Saulos Chilima, who was killed in a helicopter crash last week, is buried.

The Western literary canon is filled with “a cavalcade of what we’d now call dysfunction…especially from the dads,” author Garth Risk Hallberg wrote in honor of Father’s Day. Hallberg revisited the classics in search of fatherly themes, and possibly productive lessons for fatherhood, and instead found a laundry list of what not to do. He recapped the worst dads in literature for Literary Hub, including Laius, the father of Oedipus Rex, Pap Finn from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and “Pretty Much Any Dad in Shakespeare.” Novels “remained obsessed with questions of procreation and legacy and inheritance, yet the quotidia of actual parenthood appear to have fallen into the same blind spot as those of marriage.”

• The Black sports icons shaping Donald Trump’s take on race.
• Microsoft’s star AI chief peers into OpenAI’s code.
• Biden’s UN ambassador criticizes the media.