Flagship

Biden-Xi meet signals warming ties

A long-awaited meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in San Francisco today will likely signal an improvement in ties. The two countries will reportedly agree a deal on combating the fentanyl trade, establish a working group on the use of artificial intelligence, improve military-to-military communications, and restart climate talks. China has also just upped purchases of U.S. soybeans, raised the cap on daily flights between the two countries, and is apparently considering ending a de facto ban on purchases of new Boeing planes. Xi will meanwhile try and woo U.S. business leaders to bolster what has been a flagging economic recovery following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Beijing has also markedly changed its tone towards the U.S., to the extent that Chinese social-media users have begun joking about the sudden U-turn: “Going forward, do we or don’t we need to hate America?” one wrote, The New York Times reported. Analysts cautioned, however, that along with tangible disputes between the two countries — such as the U.S.’s semiconductor restrictions on China, or fears Beijing will seek to overrun Taiwan — Chinese state media was still negative overall towards Washington. As one Chinese academic put it, any warming in relations is “more akin to a detente than to an improvement.”

IDF troops enter al-Shifa hospital

Israel said its troops entered the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, in what it called a “precise and targeted operation against Hamas.” It accuses the militant group of running a command center in tunnels beneath the hospital, a claim the U.S. has backed, but which Hamas denies. Fighting has raged around the hospital, Gaza’s largest, for days. The Israeli military said it had provided evacuation routes for civilians, while an official from the Hamas-run health ministry said he had seen “big explosions” in the hospital. The battles came as Israel’s foreign minister acknowledged the country had just weeks before international pressure on his country intensified. That may have been an overestimate: Canada’s prime minister called for Israel to end the “killing of women, of children, of babies” in Gaza.

Climate change’s economic impacts

A series of reports pointed to the growing impacts of climate change worldwide. Heat stress wiped out 4% of Africa’s GDP last year, a Lancet report found. Economic forecasts are bleaker still: The continent could lose 15% of annual GDP by 2030 to climate change. A U.S. report meanwhile found climate change cost the country $150 billion a year, disproportionately hitting poorer people. Extreme weather is also having a destabilizing impact in South America. Temperatures soared above 100 degrees Fahrenheit across swathes of Brazil, causing thousands of fires across the country and straining its electric grid. The number of fires in the Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland, broke the monthly record less than two weeks into the month.

Somalia faces climate disaster

Floods and droughts have left a quarter of Somalis facing “crisis-level” hunger, the U.N. said. A lengthy drought this year killed millions of livestock and ruined farmland, and was followed by devastating floods which have killed at least 32 people and displaced 450,000. Much of Dolow, a district near the Ethiopian border, is under water, and no supplies are coming in: One resident told Reuters that some areas are off-limits because of the water levels and dangerous animals such as crocodiles. “Livelihoods and lives are at risk,” said a U.N. spokesperson: “4.3 million people are forecast to face crisis-level hunger or worse by the end of this year.”

Inflation falls in the West

U.S. inflation fell to 3.2%, the first drop in four months, boosting Wall Street stocks. The fall was mirrored in the U.K. and the eurozone. The Financial Times cautiously welcomed it as good news: The numbers “were as close as you get to a neon sign flashing the words, ‘hey, idiot, soft landing imminent,’” it reported, while the chief U.S. economist at Goldman Sachs said “the hard part of the inflation fight now looks over.” JPMorgan’s chief executive, however, warned against “overreacting to short-term numbers.” The fall led to speculation that central banks could stop increasing interest rates.

US nears deal on shutdown

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a short-term spending bill to avert a government shutdown for a few more months. The effort — which does not include any spending cuts but also lacks funding for Ukraine and Israel — passed thanks to Democrat support, with large numbers of Republicans defecting, voting patterns that signaled growing divisions within the GOP. In what analysts worried signaled worsening polarization in Washington, meanwhile, members of Congress appeared to get increasingly tense with one another: One congressman accused a former House speaker of intentionally elbowing him, while a senator publicly challenged a witness to a fight during a hearing. “This place is a pressure cooker,” the new House Speaker acknowledged.

AMLO to rename Sea of Cortéz

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the Sea of Cortéz, which separates the Baja peninsula from the rest of Mexico, would be renamed the Gulf of California. The decision follows the renaming of other sites across Mexico which have ties to the country’s colonial past, opting instead to name them after feted figures of pre-Hispanic Mexico. Critics, however, have criticized López Obrador for “politicizing history.” Early in his administration, he sent a letter to Spain and the Vatican asking both to atone for historic abuses, a move celebrated by his supporters. Both states rebuffed the request, with Spain’s then foreign minister saying it would amount to Madrid “asking France to apologize for Napoleon’s troops … or Italy to apologize for Caesar’s conquests.”

Gene editing reduces cholesterol levels

Three patients with dangerously high cholesterol caused by a genetic defect were apparently successfully treated with a groundbreaking gene-editing system. A mutation prevents some people’s livers from clearing low-density lipoproteins, so-called “bad” cholesterol, from their bloodstream. The new system changes the faulty DNA “letter” without, as most gene editing does, snipping the whole DNA strand, which can have negative side effects. Six months after a single treatment, the patients’ LDL levels were half what they had been, comparable to results from regular treatment with frontline drugs. Questions remain over safety and expense, but the result is a “proof of concept” both for the new technique and for gene editing for common health problems, Science reported.

AI forecasting outperforms humans

Google DeepMind’s new artificial intelligence weather-forecasting tool outperforms conventional methods, and is far faster. GraphCast was trained on 40 years of weather data, and produces more accurate forecasts than benchmark predictions in 90% of metrics, including temperature, pressure, and wind speed. Traditional forecasting involves crunching numbers in long equations, which takes powerful computers many hours: GraphCast can produce a working forecast in under one minute on a standard desktop computer, at a fraction of the energy cost. It was able to predict Hurricane Lee in September nine days ahead, compared to six days for traditional approaches.

Rob, Ryan return to Wrexham

Welcome to Wrexham will return for a third season. The documentary series tracks the soccer club Wrexham AFC after it was bought by the Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney. The show has become an unlikely global success, with fans from around the world visiting the working-class Welsh city and supporting its historic, but down-on-its-luck, football team. In Season 1, Wrexham tried and failed to reach promotion to the bigger leagues; the finale of Season 2, released last night, reveals whether they made it second time around. Season 3 will debut in spring 2024, and hopefully will maintain the warm-hearted, if slightly midlife-crisis-y, tone of the first two.

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• Russian President Vladimir Putin meets representatives of election committees across Russia ahead of presidential elections in March.
• Pro-Palestinian demonstrations are expected outside the U.K. Parliament.
• Winners of the U.S. National Book Awards will be announced in New York.

The cost of a kilo — 2.2 pounds — of frozen chicken in one shop in Lagos, Nigeria. That’s 26% higher than it was three months ago, the BBC reported: The naira, Nigeria’s currency, has fallen sharply against the dollar and the pound, reducing the country’s purchasing power and increasing the price of goods. Much of sub-Saharan Africa has seen weakening currencies, but Nigeria and Angola, Africa’s biggest oil producers, were the worst performing, according to a World Bank report last month. Their currencies have lost almost 40% of their value compared to the dollar since the start of the year. The World Bank said that was partly due to global trends such as reduced energy prices, but also due to the countries’ own decisions.

The woman behind a viral Twitter account showcasing odd art from the Middle Ages has turned her findings into a book. The U.S.-born Olivia Swarthout first started collating illustrations she found humorous in 2019, catapulting them from little-read medieval manuscripts into the social media feeds of millions. She has become known for her quippy posts, Artnet reported: One recent image, captioned, “normal cow, france, 11th century,” shows a flying cow whose wings are dotted with eyeballs. In Weird Medieval Guys: How to Live, Laugh, Love (and Die) in Dark Times, published this month, Swarthout delves deeper into this bygone era.

• What happened to ‘woke’? How the right’s rallying cry faded away.
• A little-known Miami firm has gone on a buying spree for financially strapped sports teams and is trying to buy Everton football club. Where does its money come from?
• South Africa’s ruling party is drawing up plans to close Israel’s embassy in the country and suspend regular diplomatic relations in response to the military operation in Gaza.