Flagship

Nahel’s family urge end to violence

Relatives of Nahel Merzouk called for calm after a sixth night of violent protests sparked by the 17-year-old’s killing by a French police officer. “We never called for hate or riots,” one told the BBC. France is in uproar: President Emmanuel Macron left an EU summit early and canceled a state visit to Germany to deal with the crisis. Race and religion in France are taboo topics. The state is explicitly secular, founded on ideals of universal rights and equal treatment. A sociologist told The New York Times that the French position is that “the best way to solve the problem is to not talk about it,” leaving many minorities feeling that as well as facing discrimination, “the problem is denied.”

Price cuts boost Tesla sales

Tesla delivered a record 466,000 cars in the second quarter of 2023, beating expectations, off the back of price cuts in January. The figure is 10.4% above the last quarter and 83.5% above Q2 2022. It is surpassing what the Financial Times called an “already ambitious” target of a 50% sales increase year-on-year. The company’s market value is $820 billion, several times the next biggest carmaker’s. Its increased value is also driven by several major companies signing up to use Tesla’s charging standard, providing the firm with a long-term source of revenue from licensing. BYD, China’s biggest car manufacturer, also posted record sales, delivering more than 700,000 electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles in Q2.

Complaints over Swift snubs

A Canadian lawmaker filed a parliamentary complaint over Taylor Swift skipping Canada in her Eras world tour. Swift’s failure to venture north of the border would not only disappoint fans, but leave Canada “out of the economic opportunities her shows generate,” he said. It’s not just Canadians who are disappointed. The only Southeast Asian nation to receive a Swiftian blessing on the tour is Singapore: Swifties in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia blamed a lack of infrastructure, religious conservatism, and unnecessary bureaucracy for their snubbing. Taylor Swift is an industry on her own — one analysis suggests that her tour will generate $5 billion for the U.S. economy.

Ukraine writer killed in Russian strike

A prominent Ukrainian writer and war-crimes researcher was killed in a Russian strike on eastern Ukraine. Victoria Amelina’s death spotlights the huge costs Moscow is exacting on Ukraine even as Kyiv pushes its counteroffensive. Ukrainian officials said today they recaptured 14 square miles of territory from Russia, but have acknowledged that Moscow’s forces were advancing in some areas. Rather than the counteroffensive being viewed as a decisive push, the security-studies scholar Phillips O’Brien wrote, it should be seen as illustrating the current state of play: Fighting is brutal, but calculated, and Ukraine appears to be systematically trying to weaken Russian positions rather than pressing aggressively. “Battles reveal,” O’Brien wrote, “they don’t cause.”

A push for UN reform

Western powers are increasingly voicing support for the reform of major international institutions in what analysts described as a strategy to isolate China. The U.S. has for weeks been working on plans to overhaul and expand the U.N. Security Council, while Britain’s foreign secretary has called for India, Germany, and Japan to be added. Germany, separately, has pushed for the African Union to be added to the G-20. Though the moves are aimed at boosting confidence in the bodies, they also put pressure on Beijing, which is opposed to Japan and India joining the Security Council. “The new, forward-leaning U.S. stance … has put China and Russia on the defensive,” an expert at the Carnegie Endowment wrote.

Solomon Islands battles disinformation

A purported Chinese disinformation push in the Solomon Islands offers insight into the relationship between Beijing’s foreign-media strategy and its security priorities. The Pacific island has seen surges in pro-China social-media posts in recent months, particularly during periods of increased negative sentiment towards Beijing, such as when the Solomon Islands was negotiating a security pact with China or when regional leaders were debating a security deal, Nikkei reported. The push is part of Chinese government strategy to target local elites through a variety of methods, including by “creating pro-PRC narrative echo chambers,” a new report on Chinese information strategy in the Pacific noted.

UN boss calls for Haiti aid

Haiti has received less than a quarter of the humanitarian aid it needs, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on a visit to Port-au-Prince. Haiti has suffered a string of crises in recent years, including the assassination of its president in 2021, resulting in instability that gangs have capitalized on to take control of swathes of the country. Tens of thousands have fled the Caribbean nation, and nearly half of its population requires humanitarian assistance. The U.N. last year called for an international military intervention, but despite interest in contributing, no country has agreed to lead a deployment.

Zulu king ‘poisoned’ in South Africa

Misuzulu kaZwelithini, the Zulu king, was treated in hospital for suspected poisoning, his prime minister said. One of the king’s advisers recently died suddenly, also of apparent poisoning. The Zulu monarchy is largely ceremonial, having no formal political power within South African society, but influential. A power struggle between factions of the royal family has raged since Misuzulu’s coronation in October, the BBC reported, with some backing one of his brothers for the throne. The king recently fell ill and “suspected he … may have been poisoned,” although an official spokesman said that he is now in “perfect health.” Misuzulu’s father was the Zulu nation’s longest-serving monarch, holding the throne for almost 50 years until his death in 2021.

Fiery day at the Ashes

Cricket saw one of its most “rancorous” days ever during a tense series between historic rivals. It would take too long to explain why Australia’s Alex Carey knocking over the stumps of England’s Jonny Bairstow was seen as unsportsmanlike, but it caused anger: One English player told Carey that the incident was “all he’d ever be remembered for.” The “Ashes” series between the two countries goes back 140 years, to when a visiting Australian team defeated England: English cricket was declared “dead” and its “ashes” sent to Australia. Cricket, despite occasional scandals — Australia’s Steve Smith, a star of the current series, was banned for a year for tampering with a ball — has a self-image of utmost sportsmanship, hence the phrase, “It’s not cricket.”

Indy flick fizzles at box office

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny took a disappointing $60 million in domestic box office sales in its debut weekend. The $295 million film is a major investment for Disney — Harrison Ford’s fee was $25 million, more than the entire budget of Raiders of the Lost Ark. But it has struggled to pull in younger audiences. Reviews have been lackluster, although the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is high. The movie may have “no path to profit,” IndieWire reported: A massive turnaround is “unlikely, given its initial trajectory and with Mission: Impossible opening July 12.” Its underperformance is a shock, given that all four of its predecessors were big box-office performers. The film’s overseas take added a further $70 million.

• Thailand’s Parliament is set to convene as the progressive Move Forward Party, which won the general election six weeks ago, tries to form a government.
• The first supermoon of the year, known as the Buck Moon, reaches peak illumination.
• Haute Couture fashion week begins in Paris.

Freighted with meaning

As the world economy staggers, there’s been a lot of focus on transport infrastructure as a way of boosting growth. In Britain and the U.S., certainly, building new rail lines has become prohibitively expensive. Visitors to Japan look at the gleaming, futuristic bullet trains with envy.

When we think of the impact of transport on growth, we usually picture passenger transport. Historically, though, it’s been the less glamorous freight transport which has made the difference, the historian of technology Anton Howes writes. In early modern Britain, the ability to get bulky coal and wheat cheaply to cities kickstarted the industrial revolution, not the commuter 08:27 to King’s Cross.

Sweet charity

Slight deviation from the usual LRS format here — a post from last year, newly relevant. Last week Reuters reported that the International Agency for Research on Cancer would soon declare aspartame to be a “possible carcinogen.” Aspartame is the sweetener in diet drinks.

It’s a ludicrously unhelpful decision (or Flagship’s Tom, who’s written about the IARC before, thinks so, anyway). Luckily, the science-y blogger Dynomight addressed the topic last year: Our understanding of human biology and the vast preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that aspartame, at the doses humans might plausibly intake, is clearly safe. As Dynomight notes, the FDA calls aspartame “one of the most exhaustively studied substances in the human food supply.”

Affirmative, sir

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, making it illegal for selective colleges to use race as a factor in admissions. At Slow Boring, Matthew Yglesias and his team put together some thoughts on the decision. Yglesias thinks colleges’ support for affirmative action is more cynical than most progressives believe.

On the other hand, it’s considered rude to point to individuals — like Yglesias himself — who benefited from affirmative action: “You don’t see people saying ‘look at all these great affirmative action success stories’ because it’s considered demeaning and insulting to characterize a person that way.” That makes the policy harder to defend publicly.

The plot of a new Thai thriller revolves around a mobile phone with the power to erase people from existence. Delete, an eight-episode series by Parkpoom Wongpoom, the writer-director of horror hit Shutter, dropped on Netflix last week. With it, he returns to his interest in the power of the lens and the supernatural. “The allure of the (literal) plot device, and its mythology is gripping,” film critic Hidzir Junaini wrote in NME. But “the pedestrian dialogue and predictable beats don’t do the actors any favours.”

• While OpenAI takes the spotlight, another AI CEO is becoming increasingly influential. He’s charming lawmakers in Washington — and warning about risks posed by China.
• RFK Jr. once considered a run for New York attorney general. Eliot Spitzer sheds light on a surprising possible reason why he opted against it.
• Belarus’s leader-in-exile has a warning for the West: Yevgeny Prigozhin and his men won’t stay quiet or contained in Belarus.