Flagship

Netanyahu gives fiery speech to US Congress

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a fiery, defiant speech before US lawmakers, even as several of them boycotted it. The divisive address drew thousands of protesters outside the Capitol building calling on him to accept a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. Netanyahu, however, said “Israel will not relent” in its military campaign against Hamas and suggested that the White House was dragging its feet on assisting the country. He also criticized the protesters as “Iran’s useful idiots.” Netanyahu’s visit “has slipped wildly out of joint” as public opinion has turned further against Israel, argued Slate columnist Fred Kaplan. He only has official plans to meet Donald Trump, and may meet US President Joe Biden, but “it’s no longer clear” where he has leverage in Washington, Kaplan argued.

Rushdie attacker linked to Hezbollah

The man who attacked and severely injured novelist Salman Rushdie in 2022 has been linked to Hezbollah. Federal prosecutors in New York indicted Hadi Matar on terrorism charges, alleging that he intended to provide material to support the Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon. US authorities had been probing the 26-year-old’s ties to Hezbollah, as Semafor’s Jay Solomon first reported last year. Matar pleaded not guilty to separate state charges of attempted murder, and recently rejected a plea deal. The case hasn’t generated much media attention, Solomon wrote last month, but the terrorism charges could heighten the attack’s geopolitical implications: The US recently warned Hezbollah to ease strikes against Israel to avert a regional conflict in the Middle East.

India’s market catches up to China

India is quickly catching up to China as the world’s largest emerging market. Indian stocks now comprise close to 20% of an MSCI index that tracks the stock performance of companies in fast-growing economies, while China has dropped to a quarter from 40% in 2020. “The narrowing gap has become one of the biggest issues for investors in emerging markets this year,” The Financial Times wrote, “as they debate whether to put capital into an already red-hot Indian market, or into Chinese stocks that are relatively cheap, but are being hit by an economic slowdown.” Foreign investment has continued to shrink in China as businesses are increasingly wary of its sluggish economy and geopolitical risks.

IT outage costs companies billions

US Fortune 500 companies, excluding Microsoft, are facing a $5.4 billion loss due to the world’s biggest IT outage, a cyber insurer estimated. Within 90 minutes, a glitch in CrowdStrike’s security software update last week crashed millions of computers running on Microsoft Windows, disrupting hospitals, banks, and airports. The outage’s global financial cost could be $15 billion, insurer Parametrix told Reuters, and it could well be “the biggest accumulation event” in cyber insurance history. CrowdStrike on Wednesday vowed to improve its internal testing and introduce staggered releases of future updates. One games developer predicted that governments should expect IT companies to notify them of updates since “there will probably be many more situations like this” as automated systems proliferate.

Earth sees two hottest days ever

July 22 was the hottest day on Earth, breaking the previous day’s new record. Monday’s average global temperature reached 17.15°C (62.87°F), just 0.06°C above Sunday’s record-breaking temperature, according to Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. It puts humanity into “truly uncharted territory,” the Copernicus director said, as temperatures will continue to rise. While human-driven emissions are accelerating global warming, scientists are unsure why temperatures since 2023 have been “starkly higher” than previous years, Axios reported. Even factoring in the El Niño climate cycle, researchers cannot fully account for the extent of warming observed so far.

Japan sees record foreign residents

The number of foreign residents in Japan hit an all-time high, even as its overall population fell for the 15th year in a row. More than 3.3 million foreigners now live in the country, according to government data released Wednesday, up 11% from last year. While they are mostly of working age, economists warn that Japan needs mass migration to meet its growth targets: A recent study estimated it will still be short 970,000 foreign workers by 2040 under current rates. Despite the surge in overseas workers, xenophobia has discouraged some from settling there, and many locals still see them “as units of labor to fill gaps rather than as human beings,” a tourism official told Bloomberg.

AI models risk collapse

Artificial intelligence models could “collapse” within just a few generations if trained on data they generate themselves. A new study in Nature modeled what happens to several different kinds of AI, including large language models like those underpinning ChatGPT, if they run out of human-produced information and start training on data they make themselves. Researchers found that models degenerate fast, losing their original abilities and triggering a “cascading effect” of compounding errors. As more of the internet becomes AI-generated material that is then fed back into the models, there could be a tipping point where online content becomes “poisoned,” the researchers warned, and it becomes harder or even impossible to access real, original information.

HIV infections and deaths are falling

The number of people infected with HIV annually has plummeted almost 40% since 2010, to 1.3 million last year, while deaths have halved. The UN’s goal of a 90% reduction in both metrics by 2030 “seems unlikely,” The Economist argued, “but the numbers are, mostly, heading in the right direction.” The progress is in large part because people using antiretroviral therapy (ART) as instructed have negligible viral loads making them unlikely to pass the virus on, and because of the growth of “pre-exposure prophylaxis,” which involves treating at-risk but uninfected groups with ART to make them resistant to infection. A new form of PrEP requiring just once-yearly injections could be available around 2030.

Deserts are turning green

Rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are turning some deserts green. Climatologists have repeatedly warned of desertification caused by climate change, owing to changing rainfall patterns. But deserts in Australia, Africa, China, and India have seen increasing vegetation as plants take advantage of the extra carbon allowing more photosynthesis and growth. The “supercharging of plant growth seems unlikely to be short-lived” if greenhouse gas emissions continue rising, Yale Environment 360 reported, but it’s not an unambiguously good thing: “Desert plants and animals will often lose out, and the extra vegetation may soak up scarce water supplies” for people in the region.

High cocaine levels in sharks

Sharks off Brazil are testing positive for cocaine. Researchers are concerned that sea life could be affected by drugs dumped in the water by smugglers — several tons of cocaine have been picked up in the waters off Florida and South and Central America. Some sharpnose sharks, which live in coastal waters, had 100 times the level of cocaine reported in other sea creatures. Cocaine production in Latin America is way up: In 2022, Colombia saw a 24% increase in manufacturing on the year before. The UN said in a report that year that Brazil is the global distribution hub for the drug.

July 25:

• French President Emmanuel Macron meets Israeli President Isaac Herzog in Paris.
• Climate activists gather in Paris to protest the Olympics on the eve of the opening ceremony.
• The Polish parliament votes on a bill that would allow soldiers to use weapons on the Belarus border.

A now-extinct Olympic sport described as the weirdest, least strenuous, and “eye-glazingly dull,” deserves a little more respect, a BBC journalist argued. The distance plunge, which debuted at the 1904 Olympics only to be canceled four years later, involved the competitor doing a casual 18-inch dive, and then slowly, without moving a muscle, gliding along the water. The winner was whoever could glide the farthest without lifting their face or achieve the longest distance within a minute. The sport was excoriated in the press, but advocates said spectators were just unable to see the “subtle finessing” it required.

• Here’s what JD Vance told me about his ‘childless cat ladies’ attack on Democrats.
• Wall Street money machine whirs back to life for Harris.
• Kenya’s Ruto ropes opposition into his cabinet amid protests.