Flagship

Xi and Putin set for talks

Chinese leader Xi Jinping headed to Moscow for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin amid Western fears Beijing is considering supplying its ally with weapons to use in Ukraine. China has denied those claims, which come with the war bogged down: The Institute for the Study of War said a much-trumpeted Russian spring offensive already appears over, while shortages of explosives threaten a European effort to better arm Kyiv’s forces. Beijing claims to be neutral, but Xi’s actions — visiting Moscow, while only set to hold online talks with Ukraine’s leader — suggest otherwise.

Xi’s visit allows Moscow to say it is not isolated, but highlights its dependence on China, The Bell, a Russia-focused outlet, said. “The price of this ‘non-isolation,’ though, is a growing political and economic dependence on China, which sometimes runs counter to Moscow’s own interests.” The meeting comes soon after Putin visited Mariupol, the battered city annexed by Russia last year, a visit which immediately followed the International Criminal Court issuing a warrant for the Russian leader’s arrest for war crimes.

Markets dip after Swiss rescue

UBS’s cut-price deal to rescue Swiss rival Credit Suisse failed to assuage worried markets. The weekend agreement orchestrated by Swiss regulators — “a purchase no one really wanted, but which ultimately became necessary,” as Handelsblatt put it — came as major central banks moved to increase the flow of U.S. dollars, which officials hoped would stave off concerns of an impending financial crisis. But shares in major banks fell this morning, as traders bet that a huge haircut taken by Credit Suisse bondholders could affect other lenders’ debt. Investors are also worried about the state of the U.S. financial system, with the Federal Reserve set to raise interest rates this week.

Court hears Internet Archive case

A U.S. court today begins hearings over a case in which four publishing companies are suing the Internet Archive to stop it lending digital copies of books. The nonprofit digital library, which keeps a publicly accessible record of the web, also has three million scans of physical books that it owns. The public can borrow digital copies for free, one user per book at a time. The Archive says this is fair use, and that owning a thing entitles them to lend it. But the publishing industry wants libraries, and the Archive, to pay publishers for licensed e-books. An increasingly digital society is having to work out new rules over what it means to “own” something.

— Tom’s forthcoming book will be published by an imprint of Hachette, one of the four publishers involved in the case.

Trump faces hush-money charge

Republicans mostly circled the wagons around former U.S. President Donald Trump, who faces probable indictment over hush money payments to an adult-movie star. Trump said on social media he would be arrested on Tuesday, although that timeline seems to be invented. He allegedly slept with Stormy Daniels after a celebrity golf tournament in 2011, then paid $150,000 in 2016 for her silence. Even former vice president Mike Pence, very much now Trump’s critic, called it “another politically charged prosecution.” Trump’s main rival for the 2024 Republican nomination, Ron DeSantis, has said nothing, though: The Trump campaign said, “Some people are still quiet. History will judge their silence.”

Macron faces no-confidence vote

The French government faces two votes of no confidence after forcing an unpopular pension reform bill through parliament. France was already riven with strikes and protests, with 10,000 tons of garbage left uncollected in Paris’s streets. The weekend saw more than 100 arrests after those protests turned violent. If the votes are successful, which is unlikely but plausible, President Emmanuel Macron’s government must resign. The more likely to succeed of the two votes is brought by a little-known centrist, Charles de Courson, whose family has form: His ancestor voted to execute King Louis XVI.

Freddy death toll passes 500

The exceptionally long-lived Cyclone Freddy has killed more than 500 people across southeast Africa. Malawi has been worst hit, with 438 reported dead by Saturday and about 350,000 people left homeless. Mozambique and Madagascar were also affected. Much of Malawi is inaccessible to humanitarian aid, the World Food Programme told Al Jazeera, making rescue efforts difficult. The situation will likely get worse: Both Malawi and Mozambique were already facing a cholera outbreak, and the flooding caused by Freddy is expected to help the water-borne disease to spread.

Mexico’s likely next leader

Mexico City’s mayor, a respected climate scientist, is the runaway frontrunner to succeed the country’s president in elections due next year. Claudia Sheinbaum has key differences to Mexico’s leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador — a proponent of fossil fuels and someone who downplayed the threat of COVID-19 — but positions herself as his ideological successor: “I’ve been there [with López Obrador] in the good times and the bad,” she told Reuters last year, and recently blamed earlier neoliberal economic policies for Mexico’s worsening inequality. A new poll has her nearly 20 percentage points ahead of her nearest rival for her party’s nomination.

China’s worldview

Two new turns of phrase by Chinese leader Xi Jinping indicate how Beijing intends to frame its rivalry with the United States. One, the Global Civilization Initiative, argues that countries should respect “the diversity of civilizations,” critiquing the assumption that Westernization and modernization are synonymous, which analysts interpreted as indicative of how China will appeal to Global South nations. The second, an apparent update to a 24-character Chinese phrase coined by one of his predecessors, Deng Xiaoping, does away with Deng’s guidance that Beijing should maintain a low international profile in favor of greater assertiveness and preparation for struggle.

— For more on the history of Chinese Communist Party phrases, scroll down to this week’s London Review of Substacks.

Pro cricket comes to the US

The first-ever professional cricket league in the United States had its player draft. Major League Cricket begins in July, using the shortened Twenty20 format of the game. South Africa and the UAE also recently launched leagues, and the Indian Premier League is the game’s economic powerhouse, as befits a cricket-mad nation of a billion people. MLC will have a ready-made fanbase, its tournament director told Al Jazeera: “There’s … expat or first- and second-generation Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Afghans here,” among others. Meanwhile, in more world-turns-upside-down news, Great Britain got its first-ever win at the World Baseball Classic.

Antarctica’s meteor treasure map

Glaciologists published a “treasure map” for finding meteorites in Antarctica. The southern continent is Earth’s greatest meteorite-hunting spot, with 62% of all known space rocks found there, El Paīs reported. That’s not because they fall in Antarctica more often, but because, having fallen, they eventually end up in glaciers under the snow, and after thousands of years come to the surface. The scientists used machine-learning techniques to describe the flow of those glaciers and predict where to look: They estimate 340,000 rocks lie in the areas the model suggests. Meteorites are an insight into the early solar system, and may even give evidence of life on other planets.

• A groundbreaking ceremony for a new U.S.-Philippines defense pact project in a province northwest of Manila.
• Norway’s Supreme Court is expected to deliver its verdict in the so-called snow crab case, a decision that may determine who has the right to explore for oil and minerals in the region.
• Clowns attend the annual World Clown Association Convention in Florida.

Seeking the cure for addiction

About 15,000 people die of prescription opioid overdoses in the U.S. every year. Most of those are caused by fentanyl, a highly effective pain management drug which has the unfortunate attributes of being extremely addictive and also extremely easy to overdose on. Addiction to opioids is usually treated with other opioids: Methadone or buprenorphine, which are themselves addictive, but which have lower overdose risk.

Ben Westhoff, author of Fentanyl, Inc., points out that there’s another treatment — naltrexone. Unlike methadone, it doesn’t just replace the high. It’s an opioid antagonist: It stops your body from absorbing the drug, so the fentanyl or heroin or whatever just doesn’t work. But doctors rarely prescribe it. Westhoff is making a documentary asking why. The answer is, he says, a story of money and special interests, but also of philosophical differences, between people who believe addiction can never be cured, and people who believe it can.

The slogan is dead, long live the slogan

Chinese politics is highly slogan-dependent. Managing a political party with 90 million members requires packages of information that are “small enough to circulate throughout the propaganda system,” in order to give lower-ranking party members a steer on the leadership’s direction, says the political scientist Tanner Greer. These slogans are known as tifa. Since Deng Xiaoping in 1987, the most important tifa had as its main motif “taking economic construction as the center task.” Deng’s tifa also said “peace and development are the theme of the times.”

Xi Jinping has issued his own tifa. The central task is no longer simply economic development: Now, “development is the foundation of security, and security is the prerequisite for development.” And “peace and development” have been replaced by “potential dangers … worst-case scenarios … dangerous storms.” Xi’s slogans have not yet taken root in the party like Deng’s did, but they show the more paranoid, more aggressive direction in which he wants to take China.

D-D-Don’t Don’t Stop the Boat

Last year, about 45,000 people crossed the English Channel illegally in what is known as the “small boats crisis.” Most of them are refugees from countries like Iran, Syria, and Afghanistan. It’s a dangerous crossing over cold, rough seas, and there have been deaths. The Conservative government is behind in the polls, and has gone big, says the political scientist Rob Ford, on “a pledge to ‘Stop the Boats.’”

Stopping the boats would very likely be popular, says Ford. The British public is OK with immigration per se but keen on rules: Since Brexit immigration has been high but through a well-defined framework, and concern has been low. Illegal channel crossings are unpopular and hardline responses poll well. There’s just one problem: The government almost certainly can’t deliver what it’s promising. It “focuses public and media attention on a pledge that can’t be delivered,” says Ford: “If the government sees this as the best possible use of its agenda setting power, it is truly in deep trouble.”

A Harry Potter studio tour will open in Tokyo in June, the first in Asia, allowing fans to go behind-the-scenes of the movies based on J.K. Rowling’s bestselling book series. Visitors can step onto film sets including the Great Hall at Hogwarts, Diagon Alley, and the Forbidden Forest. Costumes and props will also be on display. Unlike the first studio tour, launched in London in 2012, Warner Bros. Studio Tour Tokyo will additionally feature The Great Wizarding Express, the train that appeared in the Harry Potter spinoff Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. The Tokyo tour “expects to draw “Harry Potter” devotees from abroad,” Nikkei reported.

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— Tom, Prashant Rao, and Preeti Jha.

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