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Israel hints at end to ‘intense phase’ of Gaza war, Taiwan’s president hits out at China, and statis͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌ 
 
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June 24, 2024
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Flagship

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The World Today

  1. Israel hints at Gaza halt
  2. Lai hits out at China
  3. S Leone bans child marriage
  4. Consumers reject EVs
  5. Milei in Germany
  6. Boeing may face charges
  7. Dobbs, two years on
  8. Robotic camera pill
  9. Web library deletes books
  10. Data-illiterate lawmakers

The London Review of Substacks, and Flagship recommends a film which somehow makes drum solos not boring.

1

End to Gaza war ‘intense phase’ close

Smoke rises on the Israeli side of the border with Lebanon. Avi Ohayon/Reuters

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the end of the “intense phase” of his country’s war with Hamas was “very close,” adding that forces would be redeployed to the country’s northern border with Lebanon. Although Netanyahu had vowed to pursue a war in Gaza until Hamas is completely destroyed, near-daily exchanges with Hezbollah, a Lebanese militia backed by Iran, have forced Israel to shift its military capabilities north. Experts have warned that a war with Hezbollah — the world’s best-armed non-state group — would be devastating, with some forecasting Israel’s Iron Dome defense system could be overwhelmed. In response, tens of thousands of people on both sides of the border have fled, CNN reported.

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2

Taiwan president’s China remarks

Ann Wang/Reuters

Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te called autocracy “evil” after China threatened independence campaigners with the death penalty. Beijing sees Lai as a separatist, and staged threatening war games off the island’s coast after his inauguration last month. On Friday China issued new guidelines for punishing those who support Taiwanese independence, although it has no legal jurisdiction in Taiwan. In response, Lai said: “Democracy is not a crime; it’s autocracy that is the real evil,” adding that China had “no right to sanction Taiwan’s people” across borders for their political beliefs. Taiwan said there had been a sharp increase in Chinese military activity in the region, with some aircraft reaching just 31 miles from the island’s southern tip.

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3

Child marriage ban in S Leone

Sierra Leone outlawed child marriage, a major victory for rights activists in the country. According to data from UNICEF, the UN’s children agency, as many as a third of all girls in the West African country are married before their 18th birthday. Under the new law, offenders could face jail terms of up to 15 years, Africanews reported. Child marriage has declined for decades, but slowly: According to a 2023 UNICEF report, at the current speed, it would take 300 years to eliminate the practice globally, and rates have even increased in some of the world’s poorest regions.

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4

Used EV prices collapse in US

A used electric vehicle in the US now costs less than a gas equivalent, as consumers turn away from EVs over concerns about range and infrastructure. A survey found just 18% of drivers said they would be likely to buy an EV, a multi-year low: They were more likely to be interested in gas/electric hybrids. Shifting consumer attitudes have hit the market: The EV manufacturer Fisker filed for bankruptcy last week, while the rental firm Hertz sold 20,000 of its Teslas, partly because requests were lower than anticipated. Analysts told Business Insider, however, that despite the slowdown, a complete rejection of EVs was unlikely: US emissions regulation will keep pushing the market towards zero-carbon vehicles.

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5

Milei’s controversial Europe tour

Argentinian President Javier Milei met with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Hamburg, part of a European tour that has been greeted with protests. During the meeting, the two leaders discussed the importance of “critical minerals,” likely a reference to Argentina’s vast stores of lithium, a metal that is key to the green transition. Since his election in November, Milei has vied to decrease his country’s dependence on Chinese companies to exploit its lithium reserves, the world’s fifth largest. US firms have in turn ramped up interest in Argentina, with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying it offered an “extraordinary” investment opportunity. However an expert told El País that Chinese firms may have as much as a 10-year advantage on US ones.


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Plug

Tired of one-sided political news? Tangle is the solution. An independent, non-partisan politics newsletter that gives nuance and perspective while summarizing the best arguments from the left, right, and center on one big debate each day. Get a 360-degree read this election season. Sign up for free.

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6

Boeing may face criminal charges

Boeing’s chief engineer Howard McKenzie. Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

US prosecutors will decide whether to press criminal charges against Boeing over safety issues. Last month, the Justice Department said the company had failed to make good a 2021 pledge, part of a deal to avoid prosecution, to overhaul its systems following two fatal crashes. Charges would add to Boeing’s considerable woes: The aircraft manufacturer has seen losses of $24 billion since 2019 thanks to a dropoff in orders, and seen its rival Airbus catch it up in terms of market value, The Economist reported recently. In 2017, Boeing was 2.5 times as valuable as Airbus. To add insult to injury, its Starliner space capsule, which took astronauts to the International Space Station on June 5, is again delaying its return thanks to concerns over helium leaks.

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7

Democrats mark two years since Dobbs

Two years after the court decision that overruled constitutional protection for abortion in the US, Democrats are making reproductive rights a key focus of their campaign. The Biden campaign is hosting more than 50 events across the country focusing on today’s anniversary of Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Vice President Kamala Harris will make appearances in Maryland and Arizona, arguing that the decision to overturn Roe v Wade was driven by Donald Trump-appointed justices. First Lady Jill Biden, meanwhile, made two similar appearances in Pennsylvania on Sunday. “We are still fighting the battles that were settled so many decades ago,” she told crowds. “We are the first generation to give our daughters fewer rights than we had.”

For more on the presidential election, subscribe to Semafor’s daily US politics newsletter. →

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8

Pill-sized robot could diagnose cancers

Endiatx

A swallowable robot the size of a pistachio could reduce the need for endoscopies. PillBot, powered by tiny thrusters and controlled by a smartphone app, can send images of the gastrointestinal tract to doctors with minimal patient preparation and no intrusive tubes. Its makers hope the robot, which is beginning clinical trials, will improve stomach cancer diagnoses, many of which are missed because of a shortage of endoscopy staff and facilities, Interesting Engineering reported. The initial models are manually controlled by doctors, but future versions may be fully autonomous, guided by artificial intelligence.

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9

Internet library removes books

Flickr

Publishers forced the Internet Archive to delete 500,000 books from its public library. The Archive stores old websites for posterity, but lately expanded into a library role: It bought and digitally scanned more than 20 million physical books, each of which can be borrowed by one customer at a time. But publishers sued, and a US court said the Archive had to remove books if those publishers asked. Readers cited in an Internet Archive blog post said the books’ removal hampered their access to information. The tech writer Mike Masnick, writing in Techdirt, argued that publishers “are very much using this case as an attack on the fundamental principle of lending books” to protect ebook profits.

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10

Lawmakers’ data illiteracy hurting UK

Catherine Bebbington/Flickr

Britain’s Royal Statistical Society called for government ministers to be given training in interpreting data. With the UK election looming, a new government is expected imminently. Two years ago, the RSS surveyed British lawmakers to test their statistical skills, and found that barely half could answer a simple probability question — what is the probability of getting two heads on two tosses of a fair coin? — correctly. The society’s president said that the pandemic “showed the real-life consequences” of the statistical illiteracy of British politicians, and said that it would be happy to provide training to help them interpret statistical evidence.

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Mixed Signals

In the latest episode of Mixed Signals from Semafor Media, presented by Think With Google, Ben, Nayeema, and Max report from Cannes, decoding the year ahead for the ad business amidst the panels and parties. While enjoying the Côte d’Azur, they discuss Washington’s move to ban TikTok and the company’s denial of what’s unfolding. Then, they weigh in on whether Will Lewis, CEO of The Washington Post, will survive the controversy over his alleged unethical methods.


Listen to this episode of Mixed Signals wherever you get your podcasts.

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Flagging
  • EU foreign ministers meet in Luxembourg.
  • The US ambassador to Mexico is expected to speak about the avocado trade with Mexico’s agriculture minister during a visit to the state of Michoacán.
  • The World Surf League is under way in Rio de Janeiro.
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London Review of Substacks

The unpredictable game

Soccer is the most unpredictable of major sports. Goals are rare — some games have none at all, lots have just one or two — meaning that a single bounce of a ball can determine the entire contest. Compare to tennis, where each match involves hundreds of points. If a player is sufficiently dominant to have a 51% chance of winning each one, they will very likely be the victor. Soccer’s strong random element means that while the winners of soccer leagues are moderately foreseeable — expert predictions correlate somewhat with actual outcomes — for a long time it seemed there was an inherent limit to how predictable individual matches were, writes the epidemiologist Adam Kucharski in Understanding the unseen.

That changed somewhat in the 1990s, when two statisticians came up with a simple model based on the number of goals each team conceded and scored on average, and which predicted results well enough to at least be a profitable betting strategy — for a while, until bookmakers caught on. But football remains far less predictable than other sports — especially big international tournaments like the ongoing European Championships in Germany, where the on-paper best teams by no means always win. Just ask fans of Belgium and England.

The normal curve

It is a simple fact of history that history is speeding up. The “most important graph of all time,” writes the econ writer Maxwell Tabarrok, is that of world GDP over the last 2,000 years: It is, essentially, a flat line for 1,800 years or so, then a massive exponential zoom to vertical. Economic activity increased by more in the average year in the 20th century than in the average century in the first millennium AD.

It’s very possible that will continue, and that’s not all good news. “The 20th century brought incredible progress but also terrible risk,” Tabarrok writes in Maximum Progress. “The world wars, the rise of authoritarianism, and of course nuclear weapons. Doubling all of this and compressing [it] into a decade is almost impossible to imagine.” But we already stand “at the tippy top of the hyperbolic growth curve in the fastest changing world ever,” so it’s possible that even the insane rates of change we’re going to see in future will “feel normal the whole time.”

En busca del tiempo perdido

A particular Basque bistro in Manhattan’s East Village has closed. For most readers, that may mean little: For Bess Stillman and her husband Jake, who used to sit, “foreheads touching, at a high top looking out the window at the people hustling up and down the avenue” during the couple’s time in New York, it is a small heartbreak. They no longer live in the city, and more devastatingly, cancer led to Jake having his tongue removed, which “rendered most restaurants irrelevant” — but still, they meant to go back, and now they never will.

There is a Welsh word, hiraeth, Stillman writes in Everything Is An Emergency. It means a longing for a home to which you can never return. Jake’s cancer returned and metastasized: It is terminal. “It’ll be hard returning to New York one day without Jake,” says Stillman, “but harder still if the places that once welcomed us, aren’t there to welcome me back.” She had been “clinging to the idea that I’ll sit at our high-top, taste the croquetas we ate together, and smell the red vermouth we drank together,” evoking memories “during which Jake can briefly return to me again. Proust had his madeleines. I’d have my tapas.”

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Recommendation
Flickr

Whiplash (2014), in which Miles Teller plays a young drummer at an elite music school who wants to be a jazz great, and who in order to do so must impress his temperamental, and indeed abusive, band conductor, played by JK Simmons. It is “a sadomasochistic battle of wills between teacher and pupil,” noted Mark Kermode in The Observer at the time, with a “splashy, impressionist energy.” Most impressive of all, it manages to make a drum solo — “that most unforgivably indulgent of musical breaks” — into a “dramatic set piece that sets the heart racing.”

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