Flagship

NATO’s Kyiv support on shaky ground

NATO will pledge $40 billion for Kyiv even as its most important members face turmoil that could undermine their support. The 75th NATO summit starts today in Washington, with Ukraine at the center of discussions after Russian missile attacks on major cities yesterday killed at least 41 people. But the Ukraine-skeptic far right’s relative success in the French elections, the potential election of Donald Trump — who has threatened to withdraw the US from NATO — and divisions within the alliance, such as Hungary’s apparent support for Moscow, shine a light on “the fragility of continued Western aid,” the Financial Times reported. The bloc’s outgoing Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that “in democracies we can never provide guarantees,” but remained hopeful, saying “the glass… is more than half full.”

See below for Flagship’s One Good Text with a former US ambassador to NATO ahead of the summit.

China’s massive grid investment

Beijing will invest $800 billion in its electricity grid over the next six years to facilitate the shift from coal to renewable energy. China’s grid is “creaking,” wrote the Financial Times, and is slowing its green transition: At least 12 of the country’s 34 provinces have demanded solar operators use battery storage to ease pressure on local grids, and more than 100 municipalities have suspended solar projects, demonstrating that limits have been reached. China has already expanded its grid enormously — it has the world’s highest proportion of power lines under 10 years old, and accounts for more than a third of the world’s grid expansion in the last decade — but its generation capacity and demand, notably for data centers, electric vehicles, and AI, have all gone up even faster.

Beryl hits US energy

Tropical Storm Beryl left more than 2.4 million homes and businesses without power in Texas. Beryl, which weakened from a hurricane to a tropical storm after it made landfall, hit part of the Gulf coast that is home to about half the country’s oil-refining capacity. Some refineries were forced to flare off oil or reduce output, major ports were closed, hitting exports, and oil markets dropped 1% as investors worried about the impact. Utility-level electricity was also damaged, and one major provider said it was trying to get mobile generation units in place to provide power for health care, police and fire stations, and schools.

South Africa keeps lights on

Eskom, South Africa’s state-owned power utility, went 100 days without a power cut. The country has seen increasingly regular blackouts since 2008, and last year there were 280 days when the power went down. The problem is a significant part of why the South African economy has grown at less than 1% a year for a decade. Eskom’s CEO told the Financial Times that it was a measure of how broken the company was that the 100-day mark was such an achievement, but he hoped it was the start of rebuilding trust with investors and consumers. Eskom is expected to make another loss this year, but it hopes to return to profitability in 2025 for the first time in nine years.

Biggest ever leaked-password trove

A trove of more than 10 billion passwords were discovered in what appears to be the largest password breach ever. The file, called “rockyou2024.txt,” was posted on July 4. Not all the passwords are brand new, but by placing them all in one searchable file, it enormously increases the chance of a “credential stuffing” attack, in which someone takes a user’s known password and uses it in other services — so they might take a password from your email service and see if it works on your bank account. The recent wave of cyberattacks which brought down the websites various auto dealerships, AT&T, Ticketmaster, and others were the result of credential stuffing. Cybernews warned readers to use unique passwords on all their accounts.

Thawing Everest gives up its dead

Climate change is revealing the bodies of climbers who died in Mount Everest’s “death zone.” Hundreds of people climb Everest each year, and more than 300 have died, including eight this season. The thinning snows mean more of them are visible — as is trash and human waste left by climbers. The Nepalese army has begun a clean-up operation, with its team retrieving five as-yet unnamed dead so far this year, a difficult and dangerous task in the thin oxygen at high altitudes. One took the team 11 hours to free with hot water and axes, and bringing a body down takes up to eight people. An army officer said the mission was necessary, or “our mountains will turn into a graveyard.”

Israel ups Olympic team security

Israel doubled its security budget for its Olympic team ahead of the Paris Games this month. The International Olympic Committee has been clear that Israel can compete at the event despite calls for it to be excluded over its war with Hamas, but the team has received heightened security since the 1972 Munich Games when 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were murdered by terrorists. The conflict in Gaza has pushed security into especially sharp focus this year. Athletes have worries beyond their physical safety, though. One told Jewish Insider that he has seen a change in attitude from other competitors: “Many of the athletes who used to be my friend do not want to talk to me anymore or shake my hand.”

Messi’s last dance

Lionel Messi, in many people’s view the greatest soccer player who ever lived, is battling age and injuries to get to what would surely be his last international final. The Argentina captain faces an unfancied yet overperforming Canada in the semifinal of the Copa America. Messi, now 37, “has not taken off,” said El País, scoring no goals so far, and is more celebrity than player now. His great rival for the title of soccer’s GOAT, Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal, was knocked out of the European Championship by France — he is also too famous to be taken off even when he is not playing well. But the era of these two giants is coming to an end: This is likely to be both men’s last international tournament.

Milan’s Brera Modern to open at last

An art museum in Milan will open this year after 52 years of delay under 39 Italian governments. In 1972, the famous Brera Painting Gallery — established in 1809 and home to masterpieces by Caravaggio and Raphael, among others — bought a site in the nearby Palazzo Citterio to house its 20th-century collections. But the project was delayed repeatedly, most recently by discovery of asbestos in the building. The Brera’s former British-Canadian director had pushed the program, but has now been replaced under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s plan to put Italians in key cultural positions. The Brera Modern will open on Dec 7, and is expected to boost visitor numbers to the museum as a whole to over 500,000.

Roman rule’s economic dividends

Roman conquest made British people wealthier, research suggests. The usual understanding of pre-industrial economic growth was that it was mainly about expanding populations: More people did more work, but individual people were no richer. Since the industrial revolution, improved technology has increased productivity. The new study looked at archaeological findings, New Scientist reported, including building size and the number of lost coins, to estimate population and wealth over time, and found that Britain at the end of Rome’s rule had a GDP per capita 2.5 times what it was at the start, perhaps driven by safer, more extensive trade, infrastructure including roads and ports, and technology like grain mills and stronger plough animals.

• Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva meets his Bolivian counterpart Luis Arce in Santa Cruz de la Sierra.
• The UK’s new members of parliament are sworn in after the general election.
• US film star Tom Hanks turns 68.

The 75th NATO summit is under way in Washington. Semafor’s Senior Editor Prashant Rao asked Ivo Daalder, who was Barack Obama’s ambassador to NATO, how the alliance is holding up after three-quarters of a century.

No Country for Love, by Yaroslav Trofimov. The Wall Street Journal’s chief foreign affairs correspondent’s fourth book, and his first novel, is set in 1930s Ukraine. Young Debora Rosenbaum arrives in Kharkiv, the capital of the new Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, to build a new life. She meets and falls in love with a young officer, and the two become part of the country’s cultural intelligentsia. But as Nazism approaches and the country gets caught between two totalitarian ideologies, Debora has to make hard choices and try to protect her loved ones. The book is “a captivating sweep of a novel about love, resilience and impossible choices,” The Sunday Times’ chief foreign correspondent Christina Lamb wrote.

• NATO summit to focus on Kyiv despite shadow of Biden’s campaign.
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• Senate Democrats haven’t turned on President Biden — yet.