Flagship

Supreme Court bans affirmative action

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that race can no longer be used as a factor in university admissions sparked uproar among progressives. But while President Joe Biden said he “strongly” disagreed with the decision, most Americans do not: A majority say race should not be a factor in college admissions. The move is therefore unlikely to cause the “long-lasting mass outrage” seen after the court’s recent abortion ruling, the politics writer Noah Smith noted. Loopholes exist: Students’ stories of how racial discrimination affected their lives could be considered, even if race itself cannot. The New York Times argued that the decision will lead to “more subjective and mysterious” application processes as colleges try to admit diverse classes without breaking the law.

UN causes diet drinks scare

A U.N. body will classify aspartame, the artificial sweetener used in diet soft drinks, as a possible carcinogen. The news, reported by Reuters, led to a series of alarming headlines, but there is no reason to believe aspartame is dangerous: An epidemiologist pointed to hundreds of studies finding no meaningful link, and Cancer Research UK baldly states “No, artificial sweeteners such as aspartame don’t cause cancer.” The U.N. agency categorizes a strange selection of things, including hairdressing work and putting talc on your perineum, by whether there’s evidence showing they raise cancer risks. But it says nothing about their level of risk — plutonium is in the same category as bacon — and the “possible” bucket means “insufficient evidence.” In the same way, aspartame “possibly” causes meteorite strikes: Statistically, we can’t rule it out.

Business as usual for Putin

Russian President Vladimir Putin attempted to project a business-as-usual image in the aftermath of the Wagner mercenary uprising. Since the short-lived rebellion, Putin has appeared repeatedly in front of cameras and mingled with crowds, trying to give an impression of stability, and Wagner itself is still recruiting, a BBC investigation found. But behind the scenes, the Russian elite is expecting a purge: A top general, who reportedly knew about the uprising in advance, has apparently been arrested, and rumors abound over whether Wagner’s leadership had high-level support within Putin’s regime, The Washington Post said. Flash polls conducted by the Kremlin found trust in Putin had dropped by between 9-14%, according to Meduza.

Ethiopia aims to join BRICS

Ethiopia applied to join the BRICS bloc of emerging economies. The grouping — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — has little in common, pulling together differing political systems, economic styles, and security profiles, but has persisted for nearly 15 years. Ethiopia’s membership spotlights China’s efforts to “slowly transform the bloc into a China-led alliance,” the Brazil-based expert Oliver Stuenkel wrote in Foreign Policy. There is no formal application process to join, but India in particular is likely to be opposed: New Delhi has grown increasingly hawkish towards Beijing, and would probably try to block efforts to remake the BRICS into what the political analyst David Rothkopf described as “The China Club, satellites of a single superpower.”

Hundreds of Hajj pilgrims die in heat

More than 230 people died as extreme heat hit Hajj pilgrims in Saudi Arabia. Temperatures in Mecca reached 48 degrees Celsius (118 degrees Fahrenheit), as nearly 2 million Muslims gathered outside in the heat of the Saudi summer. AFP said that many are elderly, after a pandemic-era age limit was scrapped, and more than 2,000 cases of heat stress were reported. Most of the dead were Indonesian. Extreme heat in Mexico and the southern U.S. also led to deaths — 69 Mexicans died in a single week, bringing the total for heat-related causes to 112 so far this year, almost triple the toll for the whole of 2022.

China learns Russia lessons

China should further increase its defense spending, improve its military chain of command, and ensure no private-security forces are allowed to develop: Those are some of the lessons Chinese experts have taken from the short-lived Wagner uprising in Russia, and Moscow’s struggles in its war in Ukraine. The recommendations were made by a former Chinese defense executive and an array of Chinese foreign-policy and security experts in recent months, including in the days following the weekend mutiny, according to translations of their articles by the China scholar Thomas des Garets Geddes and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Notably, China’s relations with Russia were rarely mentioned explicitly.

Inflation targets under debate

Economists are increasingly debating the merit of Western countries’ 2% inflation target. Major central banks have ratcheted rates higher in the past year, but inflation has stubbornly remained well above their respective 2% targets, a figure derived in part from a New Zealand minister making an off-the-cuff TV remark 35 years ago. The target “was a realistic one in the era of the ‘great moderation’,” the economist Adam Tooze wrote in the Financial Times. “The question we ought to be asking is: is it fit for purpose in an age of polycrisis?” In Bloomberg, Tyler Cowen argued against raising the target: “It was always a fantasy that such policies would offer an extra layer of protection.”

Bolsonaro faces ban from politics

A Brazilian court was on the brink of ending former President Jair Bolsonaro’s political career. Bolsonaro is being tried over abuse of power and misuse of the media after he attempted to sow distrust in Brazil’s electoral process last year. If convicted, he would be suspended from running for office for the next eight years. That, however, may feel like a win: “His greatest concern is not so much losing his political rights, but rather being put behind bars,” a Brazilian analyst wrote in Americas Quarterly. Bolsonaro will remain a strong presence in Brazilian politics in any case: His wife and two lawmaker sons all harbor presidential ambitions of their own.

A bad year for honeybees

U.S. honeybees suffered the second-deadliest year on record, with 48% of colonies dying in the year to April 1, a study found. A certain number of hives die every year — an acceptable figure is around 20%, according to beekeepers — but now the average is 30%. Bees pollinate hundreds of crops, but have been under pressure lately, notably from a parasite called the varroa mite. While losses are high, the overall prognosis is not as bad as it was 15 years ago, the Associated Press reported. Beekeepers have learnt to deal with hive deaths: Colonies can be split or new ones founded, meaning the total number of hives is roughly steady. But it is expensive and time-consuming, driving up costs for the industry.

Euclid to search sky for dark energy

Euclid, the European Space Agency’s latest space telescope, launches tomorrow, looking for clues about the missing 95% of the universe. Galaxies spin too fast — judging by visible stars, they don’t have enough gravity to stop themselves flying apart — so there must be some unseen mass, and the universe’s expansion is accelerating, implying some force driving it. We call these unknowns “dark matter” and “dark energy,” and they make up the vast majority of the known universe. Euclid’s very wide lens will study an entire third of the sky, unlike others which look at tiny areas in great detail, New Scientist reported. It’s hoped that this breadth of vision will show interactions between distant galaxies, or gravitational effects on light, which will help explain the missing matter and energy.

• A new Chinese anti-espionage law comes into effect on Saturday. Foreign businesses voiced worry that the new rules were poorly defined and put companies’ staff and work at risk.
• The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is expected to make a decision on the use of BioMarin Pharmaceutical’s gene therapy for the blood disorder hemophilia A.
• Anthology, an album of jazz recordings by the Rolling Stones’ late drummer Charlie Watts, is released.

The profits reaped by the U.K.’s monarchy in the last financial year from the Crown Estate, public land belonging to the royals which includes almost all the seabed within 12 miles of the shore. In recent years, that’s filled up with wind farms: Britain is second only to China in offshore wind-power output. Leasing the land to build wind farms has helped boost the Crown’s earnings by 42% over the previous year. King Charles III said that he will redirect his share of the profits to “the wider public good.”

A Peruvian singer inspired by K-pop is pioneering his own musical genre in Quechua, the language of the former Inca Empire that is still spoken by several million people across the Andes. Q’pop is a “protest” for Indigenous visibility, Lenin Tamayo Pinares told AJ+. “It’s also embracing the hope that you can maintain your identity and at the same time engage with world trends.” The 23-year-old has built up a fan base on TikTok and is working on his first album, Amaru, which fuses Inca mythology with Andean instruments.

• TikTok is working on a dedicated shopping tab featuring products bought from Chinese merchants, Louise Matsakis reported.
• “It was bravado,” Donald Trump told Shelby Talcott in an interview, insisting he was not actually holding up classified documents in a meeting referenced in his federal indictment.
• What a Chinese heat wave means for the world.