Flagship

Democrats panic after debate debacle

US President Joe Biden alarmed Democrats with a raspy-voiced and confused performance in the first debate of the presidential campaign against former President Donald Trump. Trump leapt on the president’s at times incoherent display: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” he said at one point, “and I don’t think he did, either.” Political pundits were startled: “The president came into the debate with a low bar to clear,” the BBC’s Washington correspondent said, “and he stumbled.” Semafor’s Dave Weigel and Shelby Talcott noted that Biden “picked up some steam” as the debate went on, getting some hits on Trump’s character, but that “the damage was done.” Biden’s performance — which his team blamed on a cold — had Democrat partisans such as CNN’s Van Jones openly suggesting that the president should step aside.

Calls for Biden to step down

Joe Biden, “a good man and a good president, has no business running for election,” wrote The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, after a debate that put the president’s fitness for office center stage. His was one of several voices saying that it was time for Biden to go: “There is no shortage of Democratic talent,” wrote Edward Luce in the Financial Times, and the party must ask itself “who Trump would fear more: Biden, or a younger opponent?” The risk, should he step aside, is that the party “descends into civil war.” The stakes are high: During the debate Donald Trump refused to unequivocally commit to accepting the result. On social media, debate moderators were criticized for failing to correct false statements, particularly those by Trump, The Washington Post reported.

Russia’s bloody May

More than 1,000 Russian soldiers in Ukraine were killed or wounded every day in May, NATO figures showed. The death toll underscores Moscow’s brutal tactic of trying to overwhelm Ukrainian forces with numbers, which Russian troops have likened to being “put into a meat grinder,” The New York Times reported. The losses have pushed officials in Moscow to recruit migrants living in Russia for its operations in occupied Ukraine. According to the head of the Russian Investigative Committee, as many as 30,000 migrants who didn’t register for the military will be forcibly sent there to dig trenches. Meanwhile, Russia said increased numbers of US drones over the Black Sea were a “provocation” and warned of the risk of “direct confrontation” with NATO.

Xi’s corruption crackdown

Beijing announced corruption investigations into two former defense ministers. The unprecedented move, which included expelling both from the Communist Party, comes months after the abrupt dismissal of former Defense Minister Li Shangfu after he disappeared from public view for two months. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has ramped up his anti-graft drive, leading to a record number of corruption probes, and used it to purge political rivals, including within the armed forces: Over the past year, authorities have removed more than a dozen senior generals, many of them over alleged corruption. “The gun barrel must always be grasped by people who are loyal and reliable to the party,” Xi said earlier this month.

Von der Leyen faces tricky vote

European Union leaders endorsed Ursula von der Leyen for another term as European Commission president. “Now comes the tricky part,” said Politico: She must win 361 votes out of 720 in the European Parliament. Her coalition holds just under 400, but about 10% are expected to defect in the secret ballot, meaning she is on course for almost exactly 361. Some of the parties that supported her in 2019 no longer do, meaning she must decide whether to stick with her centrist backers, turn left toward the Greens, or offer an olive branch to the more right-wing group that includes Italy’s Giorgia Meloni. All three options have risks, and if she falls short by even a single vote Europe could face a political crisis.

Hot off the debate stage, and into the podcast studio, Ben, Nayeema, and Max dig into who gets to decide who “won” the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Joining them, statistician Nate Silver, founder and former editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight, discusses election predictions and why people are so skeptical of polls these days. On Wednesday, Silver released his Silver Bulletin Election Model showing Trump with a 66% chance of heading back to the White House. Plus, Nayeema calls out Americans’ blindspots by taking us on a quick tour of elections around the world.

Rift in South Africa’s uneasy coalition

South Africa’s main government coalition partners clashed just days after agreeing to share power. President Cyril Ramaphosa accused the head of the Democratic Alliance, a pro-business party that is part of a government for the first time, of creating a “parallel government.” In response, markets — which soared after the coalition was announced — slumped over worries of a deepening rift. Ramaphosa’s African National Congress was forced into a coalition with longtime rivals after it failed to secure a majority for the first time since 1994, largely on its mismanagement of the economy.

No longevity benefit from multivitamins

A huge study found no benefit for healthy adults taking multivitamin supplements. The research looked at 400,000 people over 20 years, and found no evidence that those taking vitamins were at less risk of cancer or heart disease, and in fact were slightly more likely to die during the study period, although that could not be shown to be causal. Around one in three Americans regularly use vitamin supplements, but there has never been good evidence showing that they have a health benefit outside of people with a specific vitamin deficiency: The new study adds weight to the suggestion that vitamin buyers are mainly acting as a middleman between health-food stores and the sewage system.

Sacklers to face further litigation

The Sackler family, owners of the OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma, will not be protected against civil claims as part of the company’s bankruptcy deal. OxyContin, a painkiller, is considered a major driver of the prescription opioid crisis. Purdue promoted it as safe despite knowing it was highly addictive: In 2019 it declared bankruptcy after a series of lawsuits, and pleaded guilty to criminal charges. The Sacklers had agreed to pay $6 billion in exchange for protection against further litigation, but the US Supreme Court said that the deal would allow wealthy owners to hide behind their companies’ bankruptcy to protect their own wealth. The Sacklers have not put “anything approaching their full assets on the table for opioid victims,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote.

Haiti PM asks gangs to put guns down

Haitian Prime Minister Garry Conille called on gangs to “lay down” their guns and “recognize the authority of the state.” Conille’s comments came after a contingent of Kenyan police soldiers, part of a US-backed security mission, arrived to help pacify the island nation. The deployment will initially focus on wresting control of key infrastructure such as ports and airports from armed gangs, but as the force grows with support from other countries, it will become more “dynamic,” working alongside local police to pacify neighborhoods, The Washington Post reported. However some in Haiti are worried the international mission will prove a temporary fix. “A few months or a year is not enough because the country will fall into the same problem,” a Port-au-Prince resident told Reuters.

$5M reward for Cryptoqueen

US authorities offered $5 million for information leading to the arrest of the “Cryptoqueen” Ruja Ignatova. Ignatova conned thousands of people out of $4.5 billion by setting up a fake cryptocurrency known as “OneCoin,” in what the State Department called “one of the largest global fraud schemes in history.” She is the only woman in the US Most Wanted list. She has not been seen since 2017, and was convicted in absentia in a US court in 2019: Reports in 2022 suggested she was dead, murdered by a Bulgarian drug lord four years earlier, but the FBI believes she is still alive.

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• Mongolia’s parliamentary election takes place.
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• US rock band Kings of Leon play in London’s Hyde Park on Sunday.

The age of Lucy, who at her discovery in Ethiopia 50 years ago was the oldest and most complete human ancestor ever discovered. The female Australopithecus afarensis was about the size of a chimpanzee and had an ape-like small brain, but stood on her hind legs and walked and ran like a human. Her discovery revealed that upright, bipedal gait was “our first step in becoming human,” an evolutionary anthropologist wrote in The Conversation, predating large brains by over a million years: “Her impact on scientists’ understanding of human origins has been immeasurable.”

White Lies, from NPR. In this Pulitzer-nominated, two-season investigative podcast, reporters Andrew Beck Grace and Chip Brantley explore stories from their native state of Alabama. In season one, they retrace the events of the murder of James Reeb in Selma, one of the most notorious of the Civil Rights Era — and they solve it. In season two, they tell the story of the 1991 takeover of a prison in Talladega by Cuban detainees — how they got there, what caused the unrest, and what happened next. A must listen for fans of narrative storytelling.

• Calls for Ruto’s resignation grow as Kenyan protests continue.
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