Flagship

Russia gains as Ukraine courts US

Russia made gains against Ukraine as Kyiv sought to persuade Washington to restore intelligence support and military aid to the war-battered nation. The US and Ukraine were due to open negotiations in Saudi Arabia to revive a flailing relationship following a disastrous Oval Office meeting between the two countries’ presidents last month, but the impact of an American pullback was already being felt on the battlefield with Moscow’s forces regaining ground won by the Ukrainians in western Russia. Kyiv has sought to win back US favor by convincing Washington that it, too, wants a swift end to the war, and will reportedly propose a partial ceasefire this week. “The tactics have changed,” one Kyiv-based analyst told the Financial Times.

Carney takes charge in Canada

New Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney vowed to resist US President Donald Trump’s threats of annexation and to fight Washington in a trade war. Though untested politically, the former central banker is well suited to handling economic crises: He headed the Bank of Canada amid the global financial crisis and the Bank of England during Brexit. His rise underscores the tumult engulfing Western nations — only two G7 leaders from the bloc’s last summit remain in office — as well as how Trump has unified his rivals’ oft-fractious domestic politics against the US: Carney’s once-languishing party is now surging. Though Carney comes across as a mild-mannered technocrat, Trump should perhaps tread carefully: The banker’s nickname in high school was “carnage.”

Trade war risks grow

Chinese retaliatory tariffs on the US took effect, as a brewing global trade war threatens to expand. Washington imposed sweeping duties on its three biggest trading partners — Canada, China, and Mexico — in a bid to reverse a yawning trade deficit, only to backtrack with temporary reprieves and exemptions, sowing chaos among businesses. Beijing targeted its levies against American farm products after the US imposed across-the-board tariffs, a strategy that analysts said left open the possibility of bilateral negotiations. Still, even if an accommodation is found and trade disputes are short-lived, US President Donald Trump’s actions could have “unintended consequences extending far beyond his time in office,” The Wall Street Journal noted.

Signs of a ‘Mar-a-Lago accord’

US President Donald Trump may be seeking a grand global bargain to depreciate the dollar, Wall Street executives believe. The “Mar-a-Lago accord” would see Washington offer allies defense guarantees and respite from tariffs in exchange for help in weakening the US currency, in order to make American exports more competitive. Analysts noted the nominee to be the president’s chief economic adviser wrote in November of “a path by which [Trump] can reconfigure the global trading and financial systems to America’s benefit.” Though variously dubbed “outlandish” and “utterly mad,” financiers are increasingly taking such a plan seriously: Apollo’s chief economist reviewed it on Sunday, and MarketWatch reported that “major banks and research shops” are evaluating its feasibility and impact.

GOP unveils spending plan

Congressional Republicans unveiled a federal funding bill that bolsters defense spending but cuts all other expenditure, setting up a showdown with Democrats as a government shutdown looms. Typically, the two parties craft compromise plans that can make it through both houses of Congress in order to keep the US bureaucracy functioning. But GOP lawmakers have largely shut Democrats — who argue defense and non-defense spending should move in the same direction — out of the drafting process this time, with House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson “betting that Republicans can muscle the legislation through,” The Associated Press said. That will mean Senate Democrats have “little choice but to back his measure or shut the government down,” Semafor’s Principals newsletter noted.

China’s peaking oil demand

China’s demand for oil is showing signs of peaking, a moment with far-reaching consequences. Barring the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, last year was the first in which the country saw an annual drop in petroleum imports, The Wire China noted. Forecasts of Chinese demand peaking are already dragging oil prices down, but the consequences extend further, affecting Russia and Iran, which are hugely dependent on selling crude to China, as well as efforts to curb carbon emissions: The country is the world’s biggest polluter. “If China manages to reduce its oil consumption by a third, where else in the world are we going to make up… demand in the future?” the energy expert Nat Bullard said recently.

Africa’s telecom riches

European telecoms firms are looking to Africa to boost growth as restrictive merger rules slow their expansion at home. Although mobile connectivity rates have surged in recent decades, Africa remains a global laggard, with just 51% of adults having access to a smartphone, while just a quarter is connected to mobile broadband. Many who do have mobile phones rely on outdated 3G and even 2G networks, which are significantly slower than those used in much of the West. With the continent’s population forecast to rise by a billion by 2070 and grow significantly in wealth, Africa offers opportunities “for scale,” the CEO of Vodafone told the Financial Times.

Latam protests for Women’s Day

Hundreds of thousands of people protested to mark International Women’s Day across Latin America, one of the world’s most dangerous regions for women. Although Latin America has made progress on gender equality in recent decades — four of its five most-populous nations have been led by women this century — more than 4,000 women are victims of femicide every year, the highest recorded figure globally. Meanwhile Latin American women make just 70 cents for every dollar a man earns, with an even bigger gap in the vast informal sector, a World Bank study showed. “The region with the most inequality, discrimination and violence on the planet,” continues to hold back the progress of millions, the United Nations’ agency for children wrote.

Tennis players get maternity pay

Saudi Arabia’s move to fund a year’s paid maternity leave for pregnant professional tennis players led to accusations of sports washing. The program is the first in women’s sports, the Women’s Tennis Association said. Riyadh has funneled billions into the world’s biggest sports leagues to diversify its economy away from oil, though critics say the true aim is to launder its reputation: The kingdom ranks 126th out of 146 nations for gender inequality, according to a widely used index. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has dismissed such allegations, saying in a 2023 interview: “If sports washing [is] going to increase my GDP by way of one percent, then I will continue doing sport washing.”

Japan’s robot workforce

Robot waiters have become a common sight in Japanese restaurants grappling with a growing labor shortage. Japan’s population is the second-oldest in the world behind Monaco and has seen its labor force stagnate over the past three decades: Its unemployment rate is the lowest in the OECD. Forecasts show Japan could face a shortage of up to 11 million workers by 2040 as people age and retire, with the hospitality and caregiving industries likely to be particularly affected. One restaurant chain uses 3,000 cat-eared robots, complete with dozens of facial expressions, to deliver plates of food: “The service robot market is only just getting started,” the president of the International Federation of Robotics told Bloomberg.

• Jack Teixeira, accused of leaking classified US documents online, is set to face a court-martial.
• Tibetans in India mark the anniversary of the uprising against Chinese rule, while the Dalai Lama penned an op-ed in The Washington Post urging dialogue with Beijing.
• Italian authorities unveil a mikveh, or Jewish ritual bath, discovered during excavations in an ancient Roman port city.

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Grafted on

Is the US corrupt? By most metrics, the answer is no: It isn’t the cleanest country in the world, but analysts and NGOs largely say it is largely free of corruption. To some extent, the China expert Rory Truex argues, that is down to how the issue is defined, however. Americans don’t fear petty graft as residents of many other countries do, but “we do have a lurking issue with grand corruption” in the form of the poor regulation of campaign finance, and more examples of abuse of power than first assumed.

This is a longer-term issue than alleged conflicts of interest surrounding US President Donald Trump, and the consequences will last beyond his term in office. “Corruption tends to beget more corruption,” because “there is a positive feedback loop at work,” Truex writes: Corrupt politicians, by the wider definition he lists, weaken calls for accountability, thus raising the tolerance for corruption, and on and on. But with Trump, he continues, “it’s quite clear that we are entering a new equilibrium.”

Hollywood scores

To learn about frustration with elites in American politics, it can be useful to scroll through data on… Rotten Tomatoes? That’s the argument made by Gonzalo Schwarz, head of a right-leaning Washington, DC, think tank: The film-review aggregator lists critics’ ratings alongside those of the audience, and discrepancies between the two scores can be illuminating. For example, She Hulk received a 79% rating from critics but its 32% score by moviegoers came down to it being “a paternalistic, moralizing show.” Super Mario Bros saw a similar effect in the opposite direction — panned by professionals, despite viewers enjoying it.

The biggest discrepancies appear to affect films that critics believe “should have specific messages, narratives, or ways of looking at the world.” In Schwarz’s telling, movies rated worse by professional reviewers than ordinary filmgoers overlap with those that downplay or criticize the US. “It now seems to be a national hobby of the elites to hate on the American Dream,” he writes.

Technological marvels

Technological gulfs between generations shape how parents and children interact with each other, and the world. But just because a technology becomes commercially obsolete does not mean it can’t bring joy. Kevin Maguire writes in The New Fatherhood of finding an iPod Shuffle in a storage box which he had used to listen to music while exercising in his 20s. Instead of throwing it away, he checked that the tracks were child-friendly, and handed it to his kids.

During a road trip across Europe, the device was a triumph: With hundreds of songs, all played at random, Maguire’s kids would “oscillate between delight and despair as they encountered tracks they would learn to love and hate.” The trip served to tell a broader tale, offering his children algorithm-free curation of their father’s favorite music. “The limitations become the feature, not a bug; our histories transform into their futures. One generation’s withered technology becomes another’s magic.”

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy. Set on an island between Australia and Antarctica where researchers have been studying climate change, a father and his three children come upon a woman who has mysteriously washed ashore. “Readers won’t want to leave behind the imagined world of pain and beauty that McConaghy has conjured,” Kirkus wrote in its starred review. Buy Wild Dark Shore from your local bookstore.