Flagship

Harris in Democratic driver’s seat

US Vice President Kamala Harris was the frontrunner to win the Democratic nomination after President Joe Biden’s withdrawal opened up an election that had favored Donald Trump. Biden and party grandees endorsed Harris, potential challengers fell in line, and big-money donors backed her. Focus quickly shifted to her policies: The Information said that she is seen as a moderate by Silicon Valley — much of which has supported Trump — and Bloomberg noted she had more ambitious climate policies than Biden’s. On foreign policy, she has rebuked Israel, and would likely remain tough on Russia and China, Politico reported. Yet she is no shoo-in: Major figures such as Barack Obama have not yet backed her, and a centrist senator is mulling a challenge.

GOP scrambles to face Harris

Former US President Donald Trump’s campaign, geared to defeat Joe Biden, is scrambling to reorient for a likely Kamala Harris run. The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta said that Trump’s confidantes believed Biden to be holding the Democratic Party back, and that they went from “cocky” to “fearful” to “stunned” as the situation changed: “This is exactly what the Trump team feared,” Alberta wrote. Many top Republicans initially called for Biden to resign from office immediately — House Speaker Mike Johnson, the most powerful elected Republican, said if he “is not fit to run for president, he is not fit to serve as president” — but Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, quickly focused on Harris’ ties to Biden and accused her of having “lied for nearly four years about Biden’s mental capacity.”

Biden’s sprawling legacy

History will be kinder to US President Joe Biden than politics was, analysts wrote as they assessed his legacy. Axios described his term as “more ambitious and progressive” than expected, pointing to infrastructure, climate, and tech spending, as well as the appointment of more than 200 judges. “His record includes legislation that will rebuild the country in ways that will likely be seen over the next dozen years,” the Associated Press noted, “even if voters did not immediately appreciate it.” Abroad, Biden “played a central role in reimagining the international order,” a Chatham House expert said, adding that he “sought to restore US leadership.” Yet, “ultimately… his legacy will also rest on the outcome of the 2024 election.”

CrowdStrike still grounding flights

Flights, banks, and other services worldwide were still recovering days on from a global tech outage. The cybersecurity company CrowdStrike said “a significant number” of the 8.5 million Windows devices knocked out by its faulty update were back up, although that implies that many are not: More than 1,600 flights into, out of, and within the US were canceled and another 8,500 delayed yesterday. Microsoft said that fewer than 1% of machines were affected, but that was still enough to cause what Fortune called “the most catastrophic IT failure the world has ever seen.” One country largely unaffected, however, was China, which has replaced foreign IT systems with domestic ones, in part to avoid US sanctions and in part for security reasons.

Curiosity finds pure sulfur on Mars

The Curiosity rover found pure elemental sulfur on Mars, an “unexpected” discovery that could rewrite the geological history of the Red Planet. Curiosity has been climbing a Martian mountain for 10 years, examining a ravine that seems to have been made by an ancient river. Its wheels crushed a rock revealing sulfur, which is naturally reactive and rare in its pure form: “On Earth we mostly find it in places like hydrothermal vents,” one NASA researcher told CNN. “Think Yellowstone!” Scientists as yet do not know how the sulfur formed, but the discovery could go towards answering the big question Curiosity is there for: Determining whether Mars once had an environment suitable for life.

Maduro threatens Guyana

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s threats to annex an oil-rich region of neighboring Guyana have forced some Guyanese to flee to other areas. The latest tensions — part of months of intimidation by Caracas towards Georgetown — come with Maduro seeking to increase flagging support ahead of Sunday’s presidential election, which polls show the opposition leading by roughly two-to-one. Meanwhile many in Venezuela are also considering fleeing their own country should Maduro remain in power, adding to the almost 8 million Venezuelans who have left in recent years. “Everyone says the same thing,” an opposition activist told The New York Times. “If Maduro wins, they are leaving.”

China moves to combat deflation

China announced a cut to interest rates, a move that caught markets by surprise just days after the Communist Party vowed to reform the economy. Beijing has repeatedly attempted to buoy flagging consumer spending amid a wider economic slowdown that has seen growth rates fall to their lowest in more than three decades, besides a pandemic slowdown. Although analysts expect the new rate cuts to raise demand, they warned the impact would be moderate as fears of deflation sink in. Neither the reforms nor the rate cut “are the big bang the market wants,” Bloomberg said.

Paris steps up security

Artificial intelligence surveillance systems, fighter jets, and 55,000 police and soldiers are in place ahead of the Olympics opening ceremony in Paris this week. The vast security apparatus is intended to make good the organizer’s promise that the French capital will be “the safest place in the world” during the Games, despite a string of recent knife attacks alongside concerns over events being spread around the city rather than in a single, easily secured Olympic park. Violence in the French territory of New Caledonia forced authorities to redeploy security equipment to the South Pacific, so France has borrowed large amounts of ordnance — including camouflaged armored vehicles that have raised eyebrows in central Paris — from Qatar, Le Monde reported.

S Sudan nearly slays hoops giant

South Sudan — a country that has only existed for 13 years — came to a near-standstill as its upstart basketball team almost defeated the US, the Olympics gold-medal favorites, in a warm-up game. In the country’s capital city of Juba, “packed bars, restaurants, cafes, social clubs, and homes were preparing to celebrate,” Akol Nyok Akol Dok wrote for Semafor Africa, and “even though they didn’t do it, the Bright Stars’ performance gave everyone a great sense of pride.” The team’s near-success mirrors the growth of basketball in Africa: Forty years ago, the Nigerian basketball prodigy Hakeem Olajuwon was selected as the first overall pick in the NBA draft; now, the NBA is itself backing a 12-team league across the continent.

Rebirth of physical tickets

Nostalgia for the pre-digital world is driving the growth of souvenir physical tickets. People of a certain age may remember keeping the stubs of tickets for sporting events or gigs, but now that’s all on our phones. US Major League Baseball, though, is offering paper tickets — with no actual utility — for $25 as souvenirs of major games, Sportico reported. Physical media is resurgent elsewhere: Vinyl purchases reached a 30-year high in April, and Blu-ray sales rose in the first quarter of 2024. Old tickets are valuable as well: A ticket stub for Michael Jordan’s 1984 NBA debut sold for $500,000 recently, and a company that checks the authenticity of old stubs says demand for its services is up 80%.

• Taiwan holds annual military drills simulating how to repel a Chinese invasion.
• The aid group Doctors Without Borders holds a news conference in the Jordanian capital Amman about the war in Sudan.
• Serendipity’s Embrace, a new South Korean drama series, premieres.

Crime writing

Kamala Harris could well be the next US president, as you’ll have read in the items above. So maybe it’s a good time to read this review, from last year, of her 2009 book Smart on Crime. Matthew Yglesias, who was skeptical of her appointment as vice president, said he “was really pretty impressed by this book.” It’s not the greatest book on crime control, but given that it was written by a high-profile politician on a hot-button issue, “it’s remarkably good.”

Crucially, it was written during the then-prosecutor’s run to be California’s attorney general, and she had to reassure voters she wasn’t “some Bay Area lunatic.” So “the book reflects an old-school, tough-on-crime ethic,” advocating zero tolerance for gang activity and talking about the impact of crime on low-income neighborhoods. Opponents quoted from it as evidence she was an awkward fit for a progressive candidate, but those sentiments are popular with voters: “She would do well to re-read it and have all her current advisors read it,” Yglesias said, “and think about how to tap into these ideas and the place they came from.”

London calling

You may remember there was an election in Britain a few weeks ago. No one really does, even in Britain, because it was very low drama: The opposition was obviously going to win heavily; it won heavily; the end. The US election is a lot more exciting and everyone’s looking at it, like the distracted boyfriend meme. But it does mean the country has a new government with a strong mandate and a lot of political capital, and it has swiftly begun making changes. In particular, Prime Minister Keir Starmer wants to get Britain building to fire up its lagging economy.

The economics-focused writer Sam Bowman is impressed, so far. The Labour Party “grasps how important it is to fix housing,” he writes — which represents a remarkable victory for the nascent YIMBY movement. It will build more infrastructure, too. But he worries that the government lacks ambition in just trying to build 1.5 million new homes: “Cambridge and Oxford … could probably grow by 10-20 times. London might double in population size if we let it.” He calls for the government to take the shackles off and end up with 20 million Londoners.

Wiki wiki wild wild west

Maybe not everyone gets very excited about Wikipedia edit histories. But the site is the closest humanity has to a repository of all its knowledge, and the ins and outs of what counts as a Wikipedia fact may be boring, but it matters. The pseudonymous writer Tracing Woodgrains examines the influence of one man, David Gerard, on deciding what counts as a “reliable source” — “Few people have had more of a hand than him in shaping the site.” Some news sources are banned, and others are not, on the strength of his say-so.

Gerard describes himself as the Forrest Gump of the internet, present at every major event, “and honestly, I can’t particularly disagree,” says Woodgrains. But his story is a “tragedy,” in which a once bright-eyed enthusiast for the power of internet truth and openness ended up with him “launder[ing] his grudges into the public record,” filtering his opinions via other people’s work to circumvent Wikipedia’s ban on original sources. “Gerard had found the most Reliable Source of all: himself.”

Pay As You Go, by Eskor David Johnson. A 500-page “surrealist picaresque,” Johnson’s debut novel follows Slide, a trusting young man whose quest to find the perfect apartment in the sprawling fictional megacity of Polis sees him scramble from one bizarre adventure to another, encountering a series of madcap characters — and potential friends — along the way, Shondaland wrote. Slide’s journey is defined by the people he comes across and reads like “love letter to cities everywhere and the nooks and crannies that make each one unique,” Our Culture wrote.

• Democrats detail ‘blitz primary’ options to replace Biden.
• California pollster makes case for Gavin Newsom.
• Global reaction to Biden stepping down.