Flagship

Israel to vote on judicial overhaul

Tens of thousands of protesters massed in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem ahead of today’s parliamentary vote on limiting the ability of Israel’s supreme court to strike down government decisions. Supporters say the move would give greater powers to democratically elected governments. Critics — top Israel security officials and major Western leaders among them — argue the proposed law impinges on judicial independence. “We are standing in the streets, because we cannot do otherwise if we are to save Israeli democracy,” the historian Yuval Noah Harari wrote. The crisis is among a series of factors shifting public opinion in the U.S. over relations with Israel, with Americans less likely to describe their ally as a democracy, and more expressing sympathy for Palestinians.

Sydney close to eradicating HIV

HIV transmission rates in central Sydney are down 88%, a record drop in an AIDS hotspot. There were just 11 diagnoses in 2022, compared to around 100 annually between 2008 and 2012. Sydney, home to Australia’s biggest gay community, was the epicenter of the country’s AIDS crisis, but a “non-ideological” approach combining regular testing, rapid treatment, and preventative drugs led to an “astonishing” drop, an expert told the Financial Times. Meanwhile, a Geneva man appears to have been permanently cured of the virus, following a bone-marrow transplant. After 20 months without antiretroviral drugs, the HIV has not returned, suggesting he may be the sixth person to achieve long-term remission.

Putin grapples with frustrated friends

Russian President Vladimir Putin faces increasingly frustrated allies. This week, he hosts African leaders at a St. Petersburg summit, a week after withdrawing from a deal allowing Ukrainian food exports via the Black Sea, a move one Kenyan official called a “stab in the back.” It comes after he met with Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, who is now seeking to restrain Wagner fighters keen to use his territory as a launchpad, potentially even into Poland. As for Moscow’s most important ally, Beijing, relations for now appear stable, but when it comes to China’s view of the world, “There are no ‘good feelings’,” the Cold War historian Sergey Radchenko wrote in The New York Times, “just cold calculation.”

Kyiv swaps conflict data for arms

Arms companies are offering Ukraine equipment in exchange for battlefield data. Modern artificial-intelligence-based weapons systems need to be trained on large amounts of data, just like ChatGPT, but focused on recognizing tanks and landmines, not writing text. “Ukraine is the only place in the world where you can get that data at the moment,” one academic told WIRED. Kyiv is aware of the value of its data and is leveraging it, both for the use of the firms’ systems and services, and to build its own, tech-led arms industry after the war. Kyiv will be able to “offer solutions that probably nobody else has,” a Ukrainian minister said.

Taiwan practices for Chinese aggression

Taiwan began live-fire military and air-raid drills amid growing shows of strength from Beijing. The exercises are the island’s most comprehensive thus far, aimed at preparing for defense of its international airport, maintaining naval lanes, repelling amphibious landings, and carrying out evacuation procedures. They come with Chinese forces testing Taiwan’s defenses, gradually but consistently nearing the island in their own exercises, all the while falling short of outright provocation. Over the weekend, Beijing sent 37 aircraft and seven naval vessels towards Taiwan, the island’s defense ministry said. “They want to intimidate us, test our capabilities, and wear down our defenses,” a Taipei-based analyst told the Financial Times.

DeSantis battles surging rivals

Ron DeSantis is struggling to head off challengers to his status as the only serious alternative to Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination. New polls show several candidates threatening to leapfrog the Florida governor, whose campaign has been beset by a series of struggles, into second place behind ex-President Trump for the party’s 2024 nod. Among the most concerning, according to Semafor’s Shelby Talcott: Senator Tim Scott, who is well-financed and appears poised for a breakout. Major Republican donors, meanwhile, are rethinking plans to back DeSantis, concerned that he has pivoted too far to the right, the Financial Times reported.

— To read Shelby’s story, subscribe to Principals, out shortly. Sign up here.

Chile signs EU lithium deal

Chile’s President Gabriel Boric signed a cooperation agreement on lithium with the European Union in a bid to wean his country’s economy away from Beijing. Chinese companies have made inroads across Latin America’s booming lithium industry, often outmuscling European rivals through opaque agreements. At a recent EU-Latam summit in Brussels, European leaders sought to turn back that tide. Chile’s production of lithium — a mineral of which Chile holds 40% of the world’s reserves and which is essential for electric-vehicle batteries — will be key to make up a demand shortfall that could reach 500,000 tons a year by 2030.

Separatists could be kingmakers in Spain

Spain’s general election ended in an unexpected stalemate, leaving pro-independence Catalan and Basque parties holding the balance of power. Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s ruling Socialist party was expected to face a tough challenge from a coalition of the center-right People’s Party and the far-right Vox. But the two fell short of a predicted majority. PP, as the largest party, will get the first opportunity to form a government. Sanchez has been criticized for relying on separatist movements in the past, notably the hardline Catalan group Junts. They could now be kingmakers, propping up his government, since the right-wing groups are loudly anti-independence.

Barbie breaks records

Greta Gerwig, director of Barbie, broke the record for the largest opening-weekend box office take for a female director. The movie took an estimated $155 million at the U.S. box office, beating the prior high set by Captain Marvel, co-directed by Anna Boden, which took $153 million. Both halves of the Barbenheimer double release outperformed expectations: Oppenheimer took $80 million, not bad for a “three-hour-long period piece with little action,” noted Variety. Barbie’s success led to wild overexcitement on the part of at least one studio exec, who called it a “pink unicorn” and said “this doll has long legs.”

Drones showcase mundane shark life

Drones are revealing more and more about how sharks live. The growth in drone photography has shown large sharks hunting in packs, like wolves, off the coast of Long Island: Laws outlawing harmful fishing practices have revived fish populations and brought dusky, sand tiger, sandbar, and great white sharks to hunt them. Often the sharks come close to surfers and swimmers, entirely uninterested in them. Joanna Steidle, a photographer, told the BBC that the drones revealed, “We’re not alone here. We share the space.” Some worry that the drone footage will scare people unnecessarily, but others say that showing sharks in their natural habitat reveals them as not “hungry monsters” but “just chillin’.”

• The U.N. Food Systems Summit begins in Rome.
• Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. delivers his second state of the nation address.
• Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine, a documentary about NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, is released on Netflix.

The price of knowledge

Clinical trials cost a lot — perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars per subject. It means that while there are amazing theoretical breakthroughs in treatment of all sorts of diseases, actually testing the treatments is prohibitively expensive and holds progress back. Why are trials so costly?

The medical blogger Milky Eggs has experience running clinical trials. Going through the process, they say, is an “exercise in sheer absurdity,” involving multi-hour meetings, 10-page questionnaires to fill with “paragraphs of meaningless bloat,” and endless “One Weird Tricks … to get around the FDA’s catch-22s.”

Land of no hope and little glory

The U.K. is falling behind. Since 2010, its economy has grown 19% — the U.S. has grown 28%. “Americans could stop working each year on September 22nd and they’d still be richer than Britons working for the whole year,” writes the economist Sam Bowman. A car wash manager in Alabama earns triple the U.K. median salary. And, to add insult to injury, British costs are higher too: The median square foot of housing in the U.K. is double that in the U.S.

Britain is no longer a “frontier economy,” Bowman argues, in which its growth is determined by technological progress: It is more like a developing country, in which growth is determined by mundane factors of supply and demand. That’s hopeful in one sense, he says. “The UK has a policy problem, not a fundamental scientific one.” But no British policymakers are seriously addressing the issue.

Mittens, Whiskers, Smudge, Embroidered Tiger

How should you translate cats’ names from classical Chinese? Translators don’t, on the whole, translate human names: The characters of a name might literally mean Wisdom or Morning, but English readers will be offered them as “Zhihao” or “Chen”.

Pet names are different, though, writes Brendan O’Kane, a translator. “Socks” or “Snowball” carry information about the cat itself in a way that “John” or “Lucy” doesn’t about a human. If a cat in a 11th-century Chinese poem is called Five White, perhaps its feet and tail-tip were white, analogous to how we call white-footed cats “Mittens”. Calling it “Wubai” feels inadequate, but “Five White” doesn’t work without explanation — what’s the solution?

A “remarkable” new exhibition at London’s Tate Modern showcases African photography from the continent’s own perspective. British-Ghanaian curator Osei Bonsu has attempted to capture the diversity of Africa through the work of 36 artists, looking at identity and tradition, alternate histories, and potential futures. It takes the viewer on “a thrilling journey from Kinshasa’s bustling streets to the deserts of Mauritania,” writes the BBC’s Ismail Einashe, using “photography, video and installation to map out the possibilities of Africa in exquisite, complex, revealing ways.”

• Artificial intelligence created his job — and it might one day take it away.
• Why the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. boomlet is over.
• Tensions are rising in the GOP as NY lawmakers threaten to hold up a major tax bill, Joseph Zeballos-Roig and Kadia Goba reported.