Flagship

Russia claims bloody victory in Bakhmut

Moscow claimed its forces took Bakhmut, although Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that the city was “destroyed” but “not occupied.” Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wagner mercenaries, supported by regular troops, had won the apparent victory, although Wagner’s chief said it was “a total lie” that regular forces helped. Zelenskyy compared the city’s destruction to that of the 1945 atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, where he was speaking at the G-7 summit. If confirmed, Moscow’s victory in Bakhmut — a strategically unimportant, devastated place won at huge cost — would nevertheless represent “a powerful symbolic success,” as The New York Times’s veteran Ukraine correspondent Andrew Kramer put it, marking the first Ukrainian city captured by Moscow since last summer.

West nuances China rhetoric

U.S. President Joe Biden said he expected Sino-American ties to thaw “very shortly.” Biden’s remarks at the G-7 summit over the weekend came after talks between his national security adviser and China’s top diplomat this month, suggesting Washington and Beijing are beginning to establish more direct lines of communication. The G-7 itself also adopted more nuanced language towards China in its final communique, calling for “de-risking and diversifying” away from China, rather than the harsher “decoupling” that had been gaining traction in Washington.

Yet tangible signs of change are far off. China, which hosts Russia’s prime minister this week, does not look to be abandoning its implicit backing for Moscow’s war against Ukraine. The U.S.-China semiconductor battle also appears unlikely to abate. And Washington has for weeks been gathering support for proposed new restrictions on foreign companies’ high-tech investment in China. Even the newlynuanced G-7 language is still harsh: Mentions of China have risen markedly in G-7 communiques over the years, with the latest one referring to Beijing’s “malign practices” and “coercion.”

Zelenskyy skips Lula meeting

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy played down missing a scheduled meeting with his Brazilian counterpart Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva during the G-7 summit. “I think it disappointed him,” Zelenskyy said of the missed meeting, smirking and drawing laughs from reporters, Reuters reported. “He’s an adult, he knows what he’s doing,” Lula said in response. The Brazilian president has attempted to mediate peace talks, but has failed to condemn Russia and claimed Ukraine shared responsibility for the war. His is among a number of Global South countries that have frustrated the West for their insistence on neutrality over the war, which the U.S. and its allies see as in effect backing Moscow.

First Saudi woman in space

A rocket carrying the first Saudi woman to go to space left for the International Space Station. Rayyanah Barnawi, a stem cell researcher, took a privately funded SpaceX mission alongside a U.S. racing-team owner and a Saudi fighter pilot. Axiom, the company organizing the flight, did not say how much the Saudi government paid, although it has previously cited $55 million per passenger. The rocket will arrive at the ISS this morning and remain for a week. They are the first Saudi astronauts since a Saudi prince flew on Space Shuttle Discovery in 1985, CNBC reported. Until 2018, women in Saudi Arabia were not allowed to drive.

Debt ceiling worries mount

Investors and businesses are girding themselves as U.S. debt ceiling negotiations flounder. U.S. President Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, meet today to revive talks that stalled over the weekend, with Biden labeling Republican demands “unacceptable,” and McCarthy saying negotiators were far apart on terms. Companies with investment-grade credit ratings have brought forward debt deals, pushing U.S. corporate bond issuances to the highest level in seven years, the Financial Times reported, while traders are betting on a rise in an index known as the fear gauge, according to The Wall Street Journal.

New ceasefire agreed in Sudan

Warring forces in Sudan are due to begin a seven-day ceasefire tonight, although analysts expressed doubt that the two sides could enforce it. U.S. and Saudi diplomats brokered a deal between the Sudanese military and the RSF paramilitary group, declaring a pause in conflict to allow humanitarian aid delivery. At least 705 people are dead and over a million displaced by the six-week conflict. Previous truces have failed to hold, and fighting continued even as the rival forces affirmed their commitment to the ceasefire. Sudan’s people are skeptical that this latest agreement will be any more successful, Al Jazeera reported.

The mainstreaming of Sinn Fein

Sinn Fein became the largest party in Northern Ireland local elections. The nationalist group, once the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, is now a respectable political force. Two representatives of the party attended King Charles III’s coronation in London. Their predecessors had tried to kill his mother, the late Queen Elizabeth II, and did kill her cousin Lord Mountbatten. But when Elizabeth visited the Republic of Ireland in 2011, Sinn Fein’s boycott was out of step with the public, who cheered her. The party changed its position. Gerry Adams, Sinn Fein’s former leader and allegedly once an IRA soldier, met and shook Charles’s hand in 2015.

Epstein’s alleged Bill Gates blackmail

Jeffrey Epstein allegedly threatened to reveal that Bill Gates was having an affair. The Wall Street Journal reported that in 2017, after failing to convince Gates to invest in a charitable fund he was setting up, the financier and convicted sex offender Epstein emailed Gates about the Microsoft co-founder’s relationship with a Russian bridge player. The “tone” was that he “could expose” the affair in “a retaliatory move,” sources told the WSJ. Epstein, who was convicted of soliciting minors for prostitution in 2008 and had many rich and powerful clients, died by apparent suicide in a poorly supervised New York jail after his arrest in 2019.

China’s comedy crackdown

Comedians fear a growing Chinese crackdown on standup. A British-Malaysian performer’s Chinese social media accounts, which have a combined 400,000 followers, were suspended after he made fun of the government. It came after a Chinese comedian in Beijing was arrested and the company that hired him fined around $2 million over a joke making fun of China’s army. The apparent clampdown comes with Chinese standup booming in New York City, according to The Wall Street Journal: A recent gig sold out within a minute. At another, a Chinese performer attending university in the U.S. compared Chinese nationalism with marijuana use on American campuses. “When you finally realize it’s harming your body and want to quit, you may experience withdrawal symptoms,” she said. “We call this political depression.”

Martin Amis dies

Martin Amis, the novelist, died aged 73. He was part of a set of young, spiky late-20th-century British writers — including Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens, and Ian McEwan. His own father, Kingsley, was also a novelist, winning the Booker Prize. Rushdie, in a tribute in The New Yorker, praised his friend’s “low comedy … high intellectualism [and] brilliant paragraph-long, sometimes page-long, rants.” The Times noted that his transition from enfant terrible to grand old man was not smooth: His best work was done by the time he was 40. But Money and London Fields were two of the defining novels of the 1980s.

• The World Health Organization chief will address the body’s annual assembly in Geneva.
• EU foreign ministers meet in Brussels to discuss Ukraine and tensions in the Balkans.
• NASA launches a second batch of storm-tracking satellites from New Zealand.

Where’s my flying car?

Between 1903 and 1969, humanity went from its first, tentative, wobbly, 12-second heavier-than-air flight to landing on the moon. And then, some people think, technology stagnated. If you look around now, cars, buildings, jet airliners, all look roughly how they did then. The age of radical technological change, these people say, is over.

That’s not true, argues the economics writer Noah Smith. The world has changed enormously in the last 40 years. We meet our partners online, we work online. We no longer get lost — our phones won’t let us. It just feels normal because we’ve lived through it. “Technology weirds the world,” says Smith. “People living decades ago would think our modern lives bizarre, even if we find them perfectly normal.”

What’s the odd tpyo between frineds

Have we all got worse at typing? The internet writer Kate Lindsay thinks so. “My efficient writing and clean copy was something I prided myself on,” she writes. “Until about three years ago.” Now everyone she knows faces a “decline in their digital dexterity, both on their phones and at a keyboard.”

Partly, she says, it’s the false promise of autocorrect — its bloodyminded refusal to learn that no one ever means “ducking” — but it’s probably also because of a growing acceptance of typos: We all type fast, on instant chats and DM groups, and typos are inevitable. We just decipher them and move on. “Correcting our typos has become a waste of time.”

I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob

The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (later the Royal Society for etc) was established in Britain in 1824. The equivalent society for the prevention of cruelty to children, human ones, took another 60 years to arrive, and even today only receives three-quarters as much funding.

Britain is weirdly sentimental towards animals, writes the political commentator Ed West, as long as they’re not safely out of sight in factory farms. Probably it’s because all the dangerous ones were eradicated a millennium ago. But that sentimentality has surprising impacts: The country’s 2017 election was won and lost partly over the issue of fox-hunting, and in one seaside town, “a walrus turned up and started masturbating in front of everyone, and instead of just getting it to move on they cancelled New Year’s Eve.”

A new book chronicles the rise of Britain’s South Asian pubs in a story of resistance and multiculturalism. Journalist David Jesudason interviews dozens of British-Indian pub landlords who have marked their own identity on Britain’s favorite institution, serving up curries and naan alongside beer, catering to football matches as well as bhangra nights. The trailblazers set up the first “desi” pubs in the 1960s, a time when people of color could still be refused a drink or forced to sit in separate rooms in Britain’s boozers. Today there are hundreds. “Pubs create social cohesion … that’s the best thing about them,” Jesudason told the BBC. “We don’t often talk about the success stories of multiculturalism, and I think that’s what desi pubs really are.”

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— Tom, Prashant Rao, Preeti Jha, and Jeronimo Gonzalez.