Flagship

Pressure piles on Biden

US President Joe Biden faced mounting pressure from within his own party over his candidacy to remain in the White House. Multiple Democrats openly called for him to step aside, Democratic polling obtained by Puck showed Biden’s favorability numbers plummeted the most in a single week in years, and critics piled on him for blaming his poor debate performance on a foreign trip several days prior: The New York Times reported that aides built afternoon naps into his debate prep. Biden’s campaign sought to calm angry donors, and ABC News will broadcast an interview with him on Friday, partially addressing concerns that he rarely faces difficult questions. Betting sites now put Biden’s chances of being the Democratic nominee below 50%.

France parties move to block far right

Hundreds of candidates have dropped out of France’s legislative elections, a coordinated push by multiple parties to consolidate support and keep the far right from power. The efforts will culminate today when parliamentary hopefuls declare their official intent to stand in the second round of polls, due this weekend: Left-wing parties and the centrist bloc of President Emmanuel Macron are withdrawing candidates from three- and four-way contests to ensure the remaining challenger to the far right in each constituency has the best chance of winning. The result, one Le Monde columnist said, has been a faceoff between voters seeking to “counter what they fear most” and those who want to “put an end to those they can no longer stand.”

UK votes amid malaise

Britons go to the polls tomorrow feeling more downbeat about their economic prospects and standard of living than almost any other rich country, factors likely to drive a widely expected electoral wipeout of the ruling Conservatives after 14 years in power. The opposition Labour Party is set to win a hefty parliamentary majority, and though analysts doubt it can end the UK’s economic malaise — limited by sluggish growth, a heavy debt burden, and flailing public services — Deutsche Bank’s chief UK economist pointed to improving consumer and business sentiment to project “an economic dividend” for the next government. Still, he warned, “2024 is not 1997,” referring to the last time Labour came to power, during what ultimately became a historic economic boom.

Older voters’ growing power

Aging populations across the West are entrenching the power of older voters, tilting political priorities towards issues like pensions and away from ones the young prize such as climate change. Though older voters have long been more reliable when it comes to showing up at the polls, their growing numbers have increased their influence, The Wall Street Journal noted, with the results visible in election campaigns underway in the US, UK, and France, while Croatia, the Netherlands, and Norway have newly established political parties whose explicit goal is promoting older voters’ interests. “Older people,” a former British cabinet minister told the Journal, “have the money and the power.”

Ukraine and Europe’s ‘profound chasm’

Ukrainians and their European backers are growing apart over their belief in Russia’s military defeat, new polling showed. The research by the European Council on Foreign Relations came with questions mounting over the impact on the war of Donald Trump’s return to the White House — a growing worry in Europe following US President Joe Biden’s poor debate performance last week — as well as the possibility of a far-right victory in the second round of France’s legislative election this weekend. As Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard wrote for ECFR, a “profound chasm” exists between Ukrainians and Europeans: “Ukrainians want weapons in order to win, while most Europeans send weapons hoping this will help lead to an acceptable eventual settlement.”

EU targets China retailers

The European Union looked set to impose new restrictions on the Chinese online retailers Shein and Temu. The move, reported by the Financial Times, comes with concern increasing in Western capitals over the companies’ cut-price products crowding out local competitors: The two firms’ reliance on air cargo has sent freight costs skyrocketing and driven fears of a squeeze on transport capacity when the shopping season peaks around the end of the year, The Wall Street Journal said. China’s Asian neighbors may soon join the West’s protectionist push, a senior economist at the Japanese bank Nomura warned in Nikkei: “In the end, it boils down to protecting domestic companies and jobs. While many Asian policymakers will face difficult decisions, the path is clear.”

China spy bases identified in Cuba

Satellite images showed suspected Chinese electronic spying bases in Cuba. One new construction is just 70 miles from the US Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies suggested, while two other sites include large dish antennae. Havana and Beijing are developing increasingly close defense and intelligence ties, The Wall Street Journal reported, using the Caribbean island’s proximity to the US mainland to eavesdrop on electronic communications from military bases, space facilities, and shipping. China is also expanding its influence elsewhere in Latin America, notably with a huge megaport in Peru, while ally Russia has sent naval forces including a nuclear submarine to Cuba.

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Sierra Leone bans child marriage

Sierra Leone’s president signed a new law banning child marriage. Anyone involved in the marriage of a girl under 18 will face up to 15 years in jail, a $4,000 fine, or both. Under the country’s patriarchal society, fathers often give daughters away in marriage without their consent — the government estimates a third of girls are married off before they turn 18, and says that accounts for the country’s high maternal mortality statistics. The law would punish even wedding attendees. One university student, who fled her family home to avoid forced marriage, told the BBC: “I really wish it had happened earlier. I could have at least saved my sister and my friends.”

SpaceX to retire ISS

NASA will pay SpaceX up to $843 million to destroy the International Space Station. The ISS has been continuously occupied since 2000, but its service will end in 2030. Officials contemplated salvaging parts of it, or even moving it into a higher orbit as a kind of museum, but decided instead it should be safely de-orbited and crashed on Point Nemo, a region of the Pacific Ocean more than 1,550 miles from land often used as a satellite graveyard. Elon Musk’s SpaceX will launch a spacecraft that guides it to Nemo and brings it down from orbit, avoiding the risk of it adding to the growing space-junk problem.

German rail system on its knees

European visitors to Germany for the men’s soccer European Championships have been shocked by how bad the national railway system is. Deutsche Bahn has long been admired across Europe for its punctuality and value for money, but when it took journalists on a demonstration trip from Berlin to Frankfurt, the train was 45 minutes late. Last year, a third of all trains were behind schedule, while Switzerland is considering banning German trains from its network over bad timekeeping. Decades of underinvestment — Germany spends less than almost any other European country on rail — have left the system in shambles, the Financial Times reported: A huge overhaul is planned but will mean closing major lines for months.

• Chinese leader Xi Jinping arrives in Kazakhstan for a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
• Egypt’s president swears in a new cabinet following a government overhaul.
• Japan begins circulating its first new banknotes in 20 years.

The fifth “Busy Beaver” number. Alan Turing proved in the early days of computing that it is impossible to determine just from the instructions of a program whether that program will run forever in an infinite loop or halt. This “halting problem” led in 1962 to a Hungarian mathematician, Tibor Radó, setting a puzzle: Finding the longest-running non-infinite program with one, two, or more rules, the “Busy Beaver” number. BB(1) is 1. BB(2) is 6. BB(3) was eventually shown to be 21. Then it got harder: A US mathematician, Allen Brady, found BB(4), 107, in 1983. Mathematicians suggested in 1990 that BB(5) would be 47,176,870, but have only now proved it — sadly, shortly after Brady died, the quantum scientist Scott Aaronson noted.

Shell Game, a podcast by Evan Ratliff. The investigative journalist — who has a track record of technology-related stunts — spent months tricking people into talking with an artificial intelligence clone of his voice, based on OpenAI’s GPT-4o model, for the podcast, which “will make us think about the implications of this technology,” Semafor’s Reed Albergotti noted. But “the game Ratliff is playing today will soon be trumped by a new one and it’s hard to know whether the questions he raises will still be as salient five or ten years from now.”

• Democrats weigh ‘comatose or dead’ Biden and alternatives.
• Biden’s biographers and defenders reckon with the debate.
• The RNC will decide its platform behind closed doors.