Flagship

Musk backs Trump

Elon Musk reportedly said he would commit as much as $45 million per month to a political action committee backing former US President Donald Trump’s campaign. Even before Musk and other tech billionaires announced their support for Trump, the mood was sour for Democrats: Despite being overshadowed by an assassination attempt against Trump, worries over President Joe Biden’s fitness for office persist within broad segments of the party, with many fretting an election wipeout that could hand the GOP a congressional majority. “I haven’t talked to a single Democrat who is like, ‘Things are fine.’ It’s universal,” the head of a progressive think tank told The New York Times.

US politics bodes ill for Kyiv

US political developments augured poorly for Ukraine’s hopes of upping its fight against Russia. Ex-US President Donald Trump’s selection of JD Vance — a prominent critic of aid to Kyiv — as his running mate for his bid to return to the White House is a particular blow: “We can say now what Trump wants” when it comes to Ukraine policy, the military analyst Phillips P. O’Brien wrote, “and it’s not good.” Handelsblatt, meanwhile, noted that during this year’s Munich Security Conference, Vance called for Washington to “focus more on East Asia.” And the Financial Times reported that Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán told fellow European leaders following talks with Trump that the former president has “well-founded plans” for talks between Moscow and Kyiv.

Korean tensions boost nuclear support

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s sister said South Korea would pay “a gruesome and dear price” for sending propaganda leaflets over the border. Seoul launched balloons carrying the leaflets, along with bags of rice, dollar bills, and K-pop music, in response to trash- and excrement-filled balloons sent the other direction. Tensions are high on the Korean peninsula, and recent increases in cooperation between Pyongyang and Moscow as well as the growing probability of a second Donald Trump presidency in the US has raised concern in Seoul: A growing percentage of South Koreans now support the country developing an independent nuclear deterrent, with 66% now backing the idea, up 11 percentage points from a year ago.

AI weapons’ ‘Oppenheimer moment’

Autonomous weapons are increasingly being used in combat. Ukraine’s military employed artificial intelligence-driven drones to strike Russian targets, the US worked with AI systems to identify targets in Syria and Yemen, and Israel’s forces used AI targeting to label suspected Palestinian militants. The US alone has more than 800 AI-related defense projects in the pipeline, and diplomats and manufacturers said the technology has reached its “Oppenheimer moment,” referring to the development of the atomic bomb in World War II. “There’s a risk that over time we see humans ceding more judgment to machines,” one analyst told The Guardian.

AI predicts Alzheimer’s

Artificial intelligence methods outperformed human clinical judgment in predicting the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. About 55 million people worldwide have dementia, the majority of the cases caused by Alzheimer’s. Early detection is helpful but the disease is hard to distinguish from normal age-related cognitive impairment. The new methods used non-invasive, routine patient data, such as MRI scans and cognitive tests, to predict whether mild impairment would remain stable or progress into dementia around three times more accurately than standard methods. The use of AI in bioscience and medicine is growing, improving drug discovery and diagnostics among other areas.

EU’s hasty AI regulation

The European Union and the UK are setting new rules for artificial intelligence development. The EU’s AI Act comes into force next month, while the new British government will set out its legislative proposal tomorrow. The EU says its new law will protect citizens from the risks of AI while allowing new technologies to flourish, but critics say it could damage the use of AI itself: A parliamentary aide told the Financial Times that the law is “vague” because time-pressured regulators rushed the debate. One startup boss said the legislation could be “hard to bear for a small company that can’t afford it,” although EU officials said lobbyists are “scaremongering.”

Xi stays the course

A new article suggests Chinese leader Xi Jinping is unlikely to drastically change his country’s economic trajectory at a high-profile Communist Party meeting this week. His piece in Qiushi, a prominent party journal, argued Beijing should maintain “self-confidence and self-reliance,” indicating the country’s push to increase its economic independence from the West is unlikely to abate. Economists have argued that a growing focus on security and rising global trade barriers — along with a heavy domestic debt burden and low levels of consumption — are largely to blame for China’s slowing economic expansion: GDP growth figures released this week fell well short of analysts’ expectations.

Kagame solidifies hold on power

Rwandan President Paul Kagame was on track to win more than 99% of the vote in an election that will extend his 24-year rule by another five. At least three aspirants were banned from running against Kagame, whom rights groups accuse of curtailing freedoms since taking power shortly after Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. Although supporters say he has presided over an unprecedented stretch of economic growth and stability, the United Nations argues he has stoked chaos abroad, allegedly arming a militia in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo in a bid to control swaths of the country. The ensuing conflict has displaced millions, and put at least a million children at risk of malnutrition.

Costs of India vulture collapse

The near-extinction of India’s vultures led to half a million human deaths and $70 billion in economic damage, research suggested. In 1994, Indian farmers started using a new livestock drug which turned out to be poisonous to vultures. Populations fell rapidly from 50 million to around 2,000. Bodies of cattle and other animals piled up in fields, spreading disease: The government ordered them to be destroyed with chemicals which leached into waterways. The study found that areas which had had large vulture populations before the collapse saw a 4% increase in all-cause mortality after 1994, while places which had had fewer saw little jump. The drug was banned in 2006 but it is unlikely India’s vultures will ever fully recover, researchers told Science.

Worries over 2026 World Cup

Chaos at this year’s Copa America, a pan-American soccer tournament hosted by the US, has spurred worries over preparations for the 2026 men’s World Cup to be held across North America. The “party almost became a tragedy,” the Argentine newspaper Olé said. Despite the US having previous successful experiences hosting major soccer tournaments — including the 1994 World Cup — several players and coaches criticized the organizers for the poor state of pitches and half-empty stadiums. Sunday’s final in Miami was delayed by 80 minutes after ticketless fans forced their way into the stadium. The best fans can hope for is that “this will be a warning sign” for the US and soccer’s governing body, an expert wrote in Forbes.

• US President Joe Biden is due to deliver a speech in Las Vegas.
• Tokyo hosts an offshore wind and hydrogen summit.
• The Spanish football club Real Madrid unveils its latest superstar signing: French striker Kylian Mbappé.

The speed in miles per hour (635,266 in km/h) of the Parker Solar Probe on June 29. The spacecraft equalled the record for the fastest-ever human-made object — a record set in 2018 by, in fact, the Parker Solar Probe. That is 500 times the speed of sound in Earth’s atmosphere and fast enough to travel from Washington, DC, to Tokyo in under a minute. It gained its extraordinary speed by doing flybys of Venus, stealing a tiny fraction of the planet’s momentum each time. The probe is repeatedly flying close to the sun, gathering plasma samples and measuring its magnetic field.

The Commandant’s Shadow by Daniela Volker. Volker’s “careful, startling” documentary offers a kind of postscript to The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning re-enactment of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf ​​Höss’ family life, the Financial Times wrote, following his now elderly son, Hans-Jurgen Höss, as he returns to his family home 80 years later. Perhaps most striking is Hans’ cognitive dissonance as he waxes nostalgic about childhood years spent next to a site of mass murder, IndieWire noted. But when Hans sits down with Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch for tea and pie, she is the person who most seems to understand that “people do what they must to protect themselves,” The Wrap wrote.

• Trump says he was saved ‘by luck or by God.’
• Biden implores nation to ‘lower the temperature.’
• Liberal media outlets are questioning Biden’s fitness. Their audience is furious.