Flagship

Trump indicted over election aftermath

Former U.S. President Donald Trump was again indicted, this time over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The four charges represent the first legal attempt to hold him criminally liable for the aftermath of the vote, accusing him of promoting false voter-fraud claims, demanding his vice president subvert Joe Biden’s certification, and pressuring the Justice Department to support his efforts. The latest allegations come with the former president holding a commanding lead in the race to win the 2024 Republican nomination.

Analysts variously painted the indictment as a “moment that will decide our future as a democracy,” as Tom Nichols put it in The Atlantic, and “the trial America needs,” in the words of the conservative writer David French. Semafor’s Dave Weigel summed up the politics thus: “A decent number of Republicans do want to move on from Trump, but they’re outnumbered by MAGA conservatives; persuadable Republicans are divided between their alternatives; and all Republican voters are told every few days that Trump is an innocent man being attacked by the deep state’s legal apparatus because Democrats fear him the most.”

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US debt downgraded

Fitch cut its rating on U.S. government borrowing, pointing to repeated debt-ceiling clashes, resolved only by last-minute deals, coupled with a rising debt burden. Republicans and Democrats blamed each other for the downgrade, but its impact was limited: U.S. Treasury yields fell slightly. A prior downgrade, by S&P in 2011, actually increased purchases of U.S government bonds as traders fled riskier assets for safe havens, ultimately illustrating investor confidence in American debt. “If I were a ratings agency my rating on US government debt would not be a semi-arbitrary collection of As,” the finance writer Matt Levine wrote. “My rating would be ‘this is US government debt.’ For good and for ill, people mostly know what that means!”

Niger coup highlights new atomic age

The coup in Niger is spotlighting the world’s growing embrace of nuclear power. The Financial Times noted that since the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan, uranium prices have languished. But the coup, and subsequent suspension of Niger’s uranium exports, comes as demand for the yellow metal, used to fuel nuclear plants, grows: Global demand outstripped supply by 25,000 tons in 2022, and prices have gone up 16% this year. Mining companies, which slowed production when prices were down, are announcing plans to boost it again, and Canada is looking to build its first new nuclear plant in decades. Niger’s coup will not cause immediate uranium shortfalls — the world’s stockpiles are large — but it will push up prices, said the FT.

Voyager 2 signal detected after loss

NASA detected a signal from Voyager 2 after accidentally losing contact with the venerable space probe. The two Voyagers launched 46 years ago: Both have now passed the “heliosphere” which marks the edge of the solar system, making them the only human-made objects in interstellar space. Amazingly, they still send information back. But a mistaken command told Voyager 2 to angle its main antenna slightly away from Earth, and its signals were lost. A faint “heartbeat” signal was detected Tuesday: The spacecraft is not receiving commands from Earth, but it is programmed to realign regularly, so NASA hopes full communication will be reestablished in October. Signals from the Voyagers, 12 billion miles away, take 18 hours to reach Earth even at light speed.

China pushes counter-espionage

Chinese security authorities called on all of the country’s citizens to join counter-espionage work. The announcement, made by the Ministry of State Security in its first post on a newly created WeChat account, follows the expansion of China’s counter-espionage law last month and comes amid a growing focus on internal security. Western analysts worried that the move could both lead to arrests of Chinese or foreign nationals accused of espionage, and place suspicion on Chinese nationals living abroad. “Mobilising the entire nation for anti-espionage measures won’t make Chinese students’ lives abroad any easier,” one noted.

El Salvador’s latest gangs crackdown

El Salvador’s government deployed 8,000 soldiers and police officers to seal off an entire province and hem in criminal gangs. “No gangster will be able to escape,” Nayib Bukele, the country’s president, wrote on Twitter after announcing that the province of Cabañas had been “completely fenced in.” The raid is the biggest since Bukele unleashed a widespread crackdown on gangs last year that has made El Salvador the country with the highest share of its population in prison. Rights groups have said close to 70% of those detained may be innocent.

First operating profit for Uber

Uber reported its first operating profit after years of losses. The gig-economy taxi firm burned through huge amounts of venture capital in its early years, registering $31.5 billion in losses since 2014, as it established itself in markets around the world. But in the second quarter of 2023, with revenues up and costs steady, it reported a $326 million after-tax profit on its operations. Commentators had been skeptical that Uber would ever show a profit, arguing that its business model relied on undercutting competitors with cheap VC cash. But the company’s forecasts show improved earnings for the current quarter as well: Its share price has nearly doubled this year.

Indian lottery win reveals stark poverty

Eleven Indian women who pooled their money to buy a lottery ticket won $1.2 million. The women, sanitation workers in Kerala, each earn about 250 rupees — $3 — a day. Most borrowed money to pay for their children’s education, one’s husband died of kidney failure because a transplant was unaffordable, and another lost her house five years ago in a flood and can only now, with the lottery money, rebuild it. The women work together collecting waste and constructing toilets, and say they will carry on doing so, but the life-changing money — roughly $76,000 each after tax, equivalent to 10 times their annual earnings — will go to paying for surgeries, school fees, and homes.

US bans incandescent bulbs, finally

The U.S. implemented a ban on incandescent light bulbs. Consumers will only be able to purchase LED lights, which use less power to produce the same brightness. The U.S. is behind the times: The European Union banned the bulbs in 2012. Improved energy efficiency has been an underrated success in the U.S., which uses about as much electricity as it did 20 years ago, despite a growing population and economy. As the world electrifies, however, electric vehicles, data centers, heat pumps, and other new devices will drive growing power consumption. “Energy efficiency will continue to be the cheapest way to accommodate that growth,” a Biden administration official said.

Implant gives paralyzed man feeling back

An artificial-intelligence-powered brain implant gave a paralyzed man sensation and movement back in his limbs. Keith Thomas severed his spinal column in his neck in 2020. In March this year, surgeons placed five microchips in his brain which convert brain signals to electrical impulses, and connected them to the spinal cord below the break. For the first time in three years, Interesting Engineering reported, his arms can feel and move. The work raises hopes of improving conditions for some of the 5 million paralyzed people in the U.S. alone. “I didn’t know if I was even going to live or if I wanted to,” Thomas said. “Now, I can feel the touch of someone holding my hand. It’s overwhelming.”

• Portuguese police officers strike and protest over working conditions during a visit by the pope to Lisbon.
• U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris meets with Mongolian Prime Minister Oyun-Erdene Luvsannamsrai.
• Poisoned: The Dirty Truth About Your Food, a documentary about deadly foodborne illness in the U.S., drops on Netflix.

The number of children who could die from malnutrition in South Sudan alone after the U.K.’s overseas aid is cut this year, according to the British Foreign Office. British aid is a success story: Much of it is targeted at global health and development, and is very effective at reducing deaths, illness, and poverty. But in 2021 the governing Conservative party dropped its pledge to spend 0.7% of GDP on aid and has since made cuts. The Foreign Office’s report said it expected an extra 1,500 maternal deaths in Africa, while people would also be affected in Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Myanmar, Ethiopia, and elsewhere.

Irish authors made up nearly a third of the Booker Prize longlist. Sebastian Barry, Elaine Feeney, Paul Lynch, and Paul Murray were among the 13 novelists nominated for what is arguably the world’s most prestigious award for fiction written in English. It makes Ireland the country that “has produced the most nominees, relative to population size, in the history of the prize,” The Irish Times reported. The chair of the judging panel said all the longlisted books “cast new light on what it means to exist in our time … in original and thrilling ways.”

• Big investors are banding together to fight Wall Street fees and chip away at the power held by the finance titans that manage their money.
• ‘This belongs in the Smithsonian’: Inside the meme video operation that swallowed Ron DeSantis’ campaign.
• Africans applying to study in the U.S. face higher rates of visa refusal than people from other regions, a new report showed.