Flagship

Kyiv crash kills children, minister

Eighteen people, including a government minister, died in a helicopter crash in eastern Kyiv. The helicopter apparently fell near a kindergarten in the suburb of Brovary in dark and foggy conditions. Three children were among the dead, as well as interior minister Denys Monastyrsky, his deputy, and another official. A further 29 people were hurt, including 15 children now in hospital. The helicopter belonged to Ukraine’s state emergency service and may have been on its way to the front lines: The BBC’s weapons analyst speculated that it was flying low to avoid enemy radar. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called it “a terrible tragedy.”

US dips into ammo stocks for Ukraine

The U.S. will supply Ukraine with ammunition from stockpiles it keeps abroad. Western political support for the war remains strong despite hardship at home, and countries are sending Kyiv more military hardware than ever: Britain will soon send battle tanks, and Germany appears close to doing so. But Ukraine is using shells faster than the West produces them. The U.S. will dip into its large stockpiles in Israel and South Korea, The New York Times reported. But if the war continues for years, the West will have to move to a war footing and increase production, as Russia already has.

Philippines Nobel winner cleared

The Nobel Peace laureate and journalist Maria Ressa was acquitted of tax evasion in a Philippines court. Ressa’s news outlet Rappler, which was repeatedly critical of former President Rodrigo Duterte, was accused in 2018 of not declaring $2.5 million in taxable income. Duterte’s government also tried to shut Rappler down twice. But a Manila court said the prosecution failed to prove charges. Ressa, who faced up to 34 years in prison, declared the allegations an “abuse of power” but said “today, facts win, truth wins, justice wins.” She and Rappler face three other cases, including an appeal against the site’s closure order last year.

Powering the world with gravity

“Gravity batteries” in disused mines could store enough energy to run the world’s electricity system for a day, researchers estimate. Wind and solar provide cheap electricity, but are intermittent, requiring storage until the energy is needed. Gravity batteries use excess energy to lift a heavy weight. When supply is low, the weight falls and drives a generator. Similarly unusual methods are already used: Norway pumps water up a valley when electricity is plentiful and releases it when it’s not. Others are innovating: A California project will store energy in the form of compressed air, the Los Angeles Times reported.

US treasury chief starts Africa trip

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen kicks off a 10-day tour of Senegal, Zambia, and South Africa today. Her visit follows an Africa-U.S. summit in Washington, D.C., last month, and comes ahead of an expected trip by President Joe Biden this year. Yellen is ostensibly going to expand trade and investment flows. But the Biden administration’s grander — if unstated — goals extend to its global competition for influence with China. “They’re trying to reinforce that there is a different model for how to develop” than Beijing’s, Razia Khan, Standard Chartered’s head of research for Africa and the Middle East, told the South African outlet News24.

Global economic optimism

A growing number of indicators suggest the global economy’s prospects are not as dire as once feared. Germany’s chancellor said his country would not fall into recession this year, British inflation slowed again, and though the International Monetary Fund’s second-in-command said that 2023 would be a “tough year,” she also suggested the multilateral lender would soon upgrade its growth forecasts. Much of the optimism is driven by less-than-expected fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, huge U.S. spending on climate investments, and China’s unexpected reopening after years of zero-COVID restrictions. Investors have responded by piling into stocks, fueling a $700 billion rally in Chinese tech in particular.

Europe takes on the behemoths

Europe announced its efforts to compete with the U.S. and China over green technology investment. European governments have criticized Washington and Beijing for increasing state spending on fighting climate change as undermining free trade and incentivizing foreign companies to base more of their operations in the U.S. or China. Still, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced moves designed to compete with the two behemoths, from funding for green investments to a loosening of the bloc’s own restrictions on how much member governments can support homegrown businesses. Europe “fears it might be left behind as the world’s economy transforms,” Politico reported.

Apple turns to India

India could produce half of all iPhones by 2027. Apple is urgently diversifying its supply chains to reduce its dependence on China, moving assembly plants to India and Vietnam especially. India makes just 5% of iPhones, but a recent JPMorgan report suggested that figure could reach 25% by 2025, and the Taiwanese analysts DIGITIMES said it could be 50% within five years, the South China Morning Post reported. Apple is deeply reliant on China, the Financial Times said: More than 95% of devices including iPhones, AirPods, Macs and iPads are made, and a fifth of its goods sold, in China.

Migration surges via Darien Gap

Almost 250,000 people migrated through Panama’s “once-impenetrable” Darien Gap last year. According to Panamanian migration authorities, the number of people traveling through the mountainous Darien Gap — the only stretch of land between Alaska and Patagonia without a road — grew tenfold between 2019 and 2022, with most attempting to reach the U.S.-Mexico border, more than 2,000 miles away. The vast majority of migrants are from Venezuela, where GDP has collapsed by almost 85% since 2015. However, the number of Ecuadoreans attempting the journey northward has surged: almost 30,000 crossed the Darien Gap after Mexico imposed visa restrictions.

AI in teaching and in cheating

Students are using artificial intelligence chatbots such as ChatGPT to cheat in U.S. schools and universities, forcing major overhauls to teaching. The New York Times reports that students regularly use AI to write essays, so teachers increasingly require work to be written in the classroom, and set more specific, less open-ended questions. AI companies are aware of the problem. OpenAI, ChatGPT’s creator, hired the quantum computing pioneer Scott Aaronson to work on “watermarking” its output. If it’s successful, all ChatGPT writing would seem natural, but be distinguishable by statistical methods. Essays could be run through a detection algorithm, and cheats unmasked.

Sentiment at Davos is “a little more downcast than usual,” Lazard’s Peter Orszag told CNBC yesterday. The thing about sentiment at Davos, though? It’s almost always wrong, as Semafor’s Liz Hoffman reported from the World Economic Forum. As she noted, Davos missed the 2008 financial crisis, Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, slowing global growth in 2018 and 2019, and the pandemic. The crowd is “too optimistic ahead of crashes,” and is “vulnerable to groupthink.”

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• The NATO Military Committee, the defense organization’s highest military authority, meets in Brussels.
• Volker Turk, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, visits Peru.
• TidalWave Comics releases Female Force: Brittney Griner, a new title about the U.S. basketball star recently freed from a Russian prison, as part of its Female Force series.

QAnon’s hold on its European followers is loosening, and they are instead turning their beliefs to a financial conspiracy dating from the 1990s. Data compiled by the open-source investigative outfit Bellingcat shows that social-media posts containing references to the GESARA conspiracy theory — founded on the notion that the global financial system will soon be reset, with huge amounts of money handed out to people across the globe, all debts erased, and low-value currencies revalued. The conspiracy theory, sometimes referred to as NESARA, has driven users to invest in Iraqi dinars and Zimbabwe dollars, in particular.

The GESARA/NESARA theory is “especially recursive,” Bellingcat reported, with influencers heralding an imminent financial reset, only for deadlines to pass and new ones to be announced. Still, it is winning over followers. “NESARA is offering something that Q isn’t — hope that things will get better and that the good, oppressed people of the world will finally triumph over their globalist controllers,” the author of a book about QAnon told Bellingcat.

Year of the mandolin

The mandolin was chosen as Germany’s instrument of the year, part of a tradition started by the State Music Council of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s northernmost state, 15 years ago. Israeli mandolinist Avi Avital — who has been credited with putting the mandolin back in the spotlight in classical, jazz, and folk music worlds — was named as the patron. Avital said he was “thrilled his instrument was being crowned in this way,” ZEIT ONLINE reported, saying that 10 years ago “he would have considered this science fiction.”

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