Flagship

Biden’s surprise Kyiv visit

U.S. President Joe Biden announced additional military assistance to Ukraine on a surprise visit to Kyiv today, his first as president, days before the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion. Biden, speaking alongside his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy, noted Ukraine’s resilience through the conflict: “One year later, Kyiv stands. And Ukraine stands. Democracy stands.” Zelenskyy, meanwhile, said the pair discussed long-range weapons “that may still be supplied to Ukraine.” The president’s trip — “one of the decisive moments of his presidency,” Sen. Lindsey Graham earlier said — comes as the top U.S. general in Europe advocated sending the most advanced weaponry feasible, including long-range missiles, Politico reported.

US-China tensions flare again

The United States and China threw angry accusations at one another over the weekend, killing off hopes that a recent high-level meeting would lower tensions. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken — who held talks with China’s top diplomat Wang Yi at the Munich Security Conference — and Vice President Kamala Harris warned Beijing against deepening relations with Moscow, while Blinken said China was “strongly considering providing lethal assistance to Russia” in the Ukraine war. Beijing is already providing some technology and equipment, including drones used to target Ukrainian forces, The Wall Street Journal reported.

China, for its part, hit back at the U.S. with Wang dubbing the shooting down of a Chinese balloon that entered American airspace “hysterical.” Beijing imposed sanctions on two U.S. defense firms that supplied the missiles used in the downing, a symbolic move, but indicative of the worsening atmosphere between the two powers. China has instead strengthened ties with Russia: Wang is in Moscow today, as China opens joint naval drills with Russia and South Africa.

Global South avoids picking sides in Ukraine

Western efforts to win the support of developing countries against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine made little progress. German, French, and American leaders all argued at the Munich Security Conference that Moscow’s war threatened the world beyond Europe, but their counterparts from the so-called Global South demurred. Namibia’s prime minister said the funds dedicated to the conflict “would be better used to promote development,” while Colombia’s vice president called for greater attention towards climate change. The narrative has shifted markedly: Almost exactly a year ago, Kenya’s ambassador to the United Nations argued the invasion risked “new forms of domination and oppression.”

Russia’s economy holds up

Almost a year after its invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s economy has proven surprisingly resilient. GDP fell only 2.2% in 2022, despite forecasters — even Russian ones — predicting it would shrink up to 12% under pressure from Western sanctions. The IMF now forecasts it will grow 0.3% this year. Embargoes on Russian oil exports have proved underwhelming. Russia exported 3.7 million barrels per day in January, the highest level since June, with most going to China and India, which have not imposed sanctions. Still, there are challenges: export revenues are likely to decline further this year, and budget deficits could worsen. “2023 will more closely resemble a typical international crisis,” a UCLA economist wrote.

Meta’s New Zealand experiment

Facebook’s parent company is launching a paid subscription service. Meta’s new offering will include user verification and improved access to customer service. Tech companies including Twitter and Snapchat have taken similar steps as Silicon Valley looks to reduce reliance on advertising revenue and combat complaints of inauthentic users. The new service will debut in Australia and New Zealand, the latter of which is a frequent trial site: A small, English-speaking country with clear tax rules and laws, and sufficiently distant that news of failed launches rarely makes waves. “In medicine, trials are conducted on guinea pigs, rats, mice and rabbits,” The Economist wrote. “In digital businesses, tests are performed on New Zealanders.”

Rewriting Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl’s books are being rewritten to remove apparently offensive or exclusionary language. Among the hundreds of edits by Puffin, the books’ publisher, are the removal of gender-specific language — Oompa Loompas are now “small people” rather than “small men” — and changes such as describing a character as “enormous” instead of “fat.” Entirely new lines and verses have been added, too. The celebrated British children’s author openly described himself as antisemitic.“The problem with taking license to re-edit classic works is that there is no limiting principle,” Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive of the free speech organization PEN America, wrote. “Literature is meant to be surprising and provocative. That’s part of its potency.”

Rio’s Carnival is back in full swing

Rio’s famously colorful Carnival kicked off. It’s the first time since 2020 that the week-long celebration is being held without pandemic-related restrictions. “The Carnival is the face of Brazilian culture,” a minister told Folha. “It gathers all our cultural expressions, it’s a beautiful thing.” Some 2 million people are expected to attend the festivities where they’re forecast to spend a record $1 billion in Rio’s businesses. “The happiness is double,” a Samba dancer preparing to join the parade told AFP. “With this carnival we can celebrate the end of [ex-President Jair Bolsonaro’s] government and leave behind the horrors of the pandemic.”

Nigeria’s cash crisis

A shortage of bank notes in Nigeria raised tensions ahead of Saturday’s presidential election. Fights have broken out at banks, businesses have been forced to close, and protests have erupted in some cities, Semafor’s Africa Managing Editor Alexis Akwagyiram wrote. The shortage could make people vulnerable to vote buying and ratchet up election tensions, International Crisis Group warned. The three main candidates to succeed Muhammadu Buhari are locked in the closest contest in a generation with some analysts predicting there may not be a clear winner, which would prompt a run-off vote for the first time.

— For more on the Nigerian election, sign up to Semafor’s Africa newsletter.

India retaliates over Soros remarks

Indian officials said billionaire investor George Soros’s recent criticism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi was “dangerous” and “nefarious.” Soros had said an ongoing crisis at a major Indian conglomerate whose owner is close to Modi would weaken the latter’s grip on power and trigger a “democratic revival” in the country. The comments came as Modi’s government faced criticism for a tax raid on the BBC’s offices that has further chilled India’s media landscape. “All criticism of Mr. Modi is labelled anti-India, and those making the criticisms are called anti-national forces,” a senior editor at The Hindu wrote. “Far from threatening Mr. Modi,” Soros “reinforces him.”

Female scholars getting the fellowships

Female scientists are much more likely than male ones to be elected fellows of prestigious U.S. academies. A study found that since 2019, 40% of psychologists, economists, and mathematicians elected to the National Academy of Sciences or the American Academy of Arts and Sciences have been female: Since scholars are predominantly male, a given woman’s chance of election is three to 15 times that of a comparably credentialed man. The historical bias towards men ended by the 1990s. The authors of the study suggested that “women who succeed in publishing may … be better scholars than men with a similar record,” or that academies were redressing “past underrepresentation.”

• Thousands of Israelis are expected to gather outside parliament to protest against planned judicial reforms that critics say will damage the country’s democracy.
• A vote on whether to strike by Britain’s junior doctors closes. They are expected to become the latest health care workers to take industrial action over a pay dispute with the government.
• Barbadian singer Rihanna, the richest musician in the world, turns 34.

Why clever people believe stupid things

“While unintelligent people are more easily misled by other people,” writes Gurwinder Bhogal, a researcher of extremism, “intelligent people are more easily misled by themselves.” People who score highly on tests of intelligence and numeracy, he writes, are more likely to correctly interpret data when it relates to some practical outcome such as a skin-rash treatment, but when the same data is presented as “regarding a polarizing subject –– gun control — those who scored highest on numeracy actually exhibited the greatest bias.” That was true of liberal and conservative, atheist and Christian.

That’s because, he argues, our brains aren’t simply trying to find accurate truths about the world. We’re also trying to maintain social status and tribal belonging, and we can signal membership of groups with beliefs — and the more irrational the belief, the stronger the signal that you’re in the group. “Since we’re a social species,” says Bhogal, “it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well-being.”

Tolkien business

In Oxford, the ancient English university city (and childhood home of Flagship’s Tom), there is a pub called The Eagle and Child, known to patrons as The Bird and Baby. Those patrons included, in the mid-20th century, fantasy authors J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. They had a little literary club called the Inklings, where the two men would read poetry and Icelandic literature to one another.

Ozy Frantz writes about a little drama in this tweedy environment. One day, Lewis met a poet called Charles Williams, decided he was brilliant, brought him along to the Inklings, and immediately annoyed Tolkien: “Suddenly Williams was there every single time, and they kept talking about boring things like English literature that came out after Chaucer.” T.S. Eliot makes an appearance, Williams accidentally starts a heretical cult, and Tolkien writes a three-page poem about how incomprehensible Williams’s writing is. The Bird and Baby must have been quite a pub. Currently closed, it’s looking for someone to reopen and run the place.

A call for a Butlerian jihad

It’s time to panic about artificial intelligence, says Erik Hoel. People panicked about nuclear war, and about climate change — things that could, in theory, have escalated into runaway catastrophes that threatened the human race. They panicked and campaigned for change. As a result, the world took notice, and while neither problem has gone away, we’re on less dangerous courses than we were.

ChatGPT and similar products should spark a similar response, he says. Homo sapiens exterminated all other species of humans simply by being a little more intelligent. A much more intelligent AI could easily do the same for us. “If you think you and your children can’t cough to death from AI-generated pathogens,” he writes, “or get hunted by murderbot drones, you haven’t been paying attention to how weird the world can get.” People panicking about climate change throw soup over artworks, Hoel says; it’s time to throw soup on Bing.

Running the table at the BAFTAs

A German-language adaptation of the seminal anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front swept Britain’s version of the Oscars. Im Westen nichts Neues, based on the 1928 book by Erich Maria Remarque, explores the horrors of World War I from the perspective of a German soldier. The film, directed by Edward Berger, has become one of the most recognised non-English language movies in the history of the BAFTAs, Reuters noted, winning seven awards. The protagonist, “poisoned by right-wing political nationalist propaganda, goes to war thinking it’s an adventure, and war is anything but an adventure,” producer Malte Grunert said in his acceptance speech, adding that this message from the novel was still “relevant” today.

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— Prashant, Tom Chivers, Preeti Jha, and Jeronimo Gonzalez