Flagship

Blinken visits Ukraine

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Kyiv, the first visit by a top American government official since the start of the Ukrainian counteroffensive. It’s a sign of Washington’s continued support — the White House is expected to announce a further $1 billion in military aid — but a State Department official said Blinken will also want to discuss the progress of the push. Recent days have seen promising news, but some U.S. Republicans are increasingly opposed to further backing. With the specter looming of another Donald Trump presidency, and the international-relations chaos it would cause, Ukraine’s allies want to move fast, “anticipating that Trump might turn his back on Kyiv as the war with Russia rages on,” one expert wrote in Foreign Affairs.

Africa summit looks at offsets

A major climate summit in Nairobi highlighted carbon offsets as a possible solution to both rising emissions and Africa’s climate finance shortfall. An Emirati investor group committed to buy $450 million in carbon credits from Africa-based carbon-cutting projects, while Kenya’s president heralded offsets as a potentially “unparalleled economic goldmine.” But carbon credits are a controversial solution. “The existing carbon market is riddled with accounting and social justice problems,” Semafor’s Tim McDonnell notes, “and requires more stringent oversight to avoid becoming a contributor to the climate crisis rather than a solution to it.”

— To read Tim’s story, out later today, subscribe to Semafor’s climate and energy newsletter, Net Zero. Sign up here.

Contextualizing climate change

Despite climate change, many aspects of human wellbeing are expected to improve over the coming century, a climate scientist argued. His piece in Nature Climate Change pointed out that while U.N. projections show that human-caused warming will cause deaths and hunger, other factors — such as economic and technological development — are expected to mean that people will still, on average, live longer and have more food. “Climate change risks are important,” the piece said, but concerns such as food security are “overwhelmingly determined not by climate change but by … other factors.” In The Free Press, another climate scientist said scientists tend to ignore non-climate factors affecting issues such as wildfires or heat-related deaths, because big scientific journals are more likely to publish the climate-led stuff.

Questions over criticism of Xi

A much-discussed piece claiming Chinese Communist Party elders criticized Xi Jinping over the country’s worsening direction was met with skepticism by China watchers. The Nikkei article cited anonymous sources saying retired Party leaders had “reprimanded the top leader in ways they had not until now.” But analysts pointed to the columnist’s mixed track record in terms of predictive accuracy, and the low likelihood that Xi — seen as China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong — would have allowed for such criticism to even be discussed privately, let alone expressed to him. “There seems to be a lot of wish casting in such stories, which often circulate among more liberally minded figures willing to talk to foreign reporters,” Foreign Policy’s James Palmer wrote.

Venezuela and China boost relations

Senior Venezuelan officials traveled to China seeking investments to revive their country’s moribund oil industry. Beijing and Caracas have been strengthening ties recently, with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro intent on boosting his country’s flagging economy — which has contracted by 75% since he took power — ahead of a presidential election next year. Beijing, meanwhile, is keen to secure oil supplies as its rivalry with the U.S. intensifies. The White House has also been engaging with Caracas, offering to ease sanctions in return for fair elections in 2024. Despite Venezuela having the world’s largest reserves, oil revenues have collapsed in recent years because of mismanagement, corruption, and U.S. sanctions.

India name change sparks outrage

New Delhi’s decision to refer to India as “Bharat” on invitations for this weekend’s G20 summit sparked outrage among liberals. Bharat is a Sanskrit word often used in Hindi, and is included in India’s constitution, but its reference on the dinner invite sparked speculation Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government would change India’s official name, either to do away with a colonial vestige, provide succor to its Hindu nationalist supporters, or undermine an opposition coalition that goes by the acronym INDIA. But making such a change would be hugely challenging. Though the word India is attributed to British colonizers, it has increasingly entered the lexicon of the country’s many languages, and imposing the Hindi-language word Bharat on populations that do not speak Hindi could be politically toxic.

Proud Boys boss gets 22 years

Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys far-right group, was sentenced to 22 years in prison for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. It’s the longest sentence so far handed down in connection to the riots. Tarrio, who took control of the Proud Boys in 2018, organized a gang of his pro-Trump militia to march on the Capitol in an attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of political power to Joe Biden. His situation was “unique,” The New York Times reported, in that he was not in Washington but in Baltimore that day: He was “watching events unfold from a distance” and coordinating them by text. The Proud Boys have been “all but decapitated” by the Justice Department, the Times said.

2,000 rhinos to be rewilded in Africa

A conservation NGO bought the world’s largest private rhino farm and plans to release 2,000 southern white rhino into the wild. That would represent a roughly 11% increase in the total wild population. They will be released into reserves across Africa. Rewilding — returning living things and land to their wild state — is having a moment. Bison in the American West and beavers and red kites in Britain are among the charismatic fauna returning to their old habitats. Wolves’ return to Europe has been so successful that the European Commission president is calling for an end to the rules protecting them. Although, since her pet pony was killed by a wolf last year, she has a dog in the fight, so to speak.

Great Wall damaged for ‘shortcut’

Two workers who dug a “shortcut” through the Great Wall of China were arrested. The wall segment in Shanxi province dates back to the Ming dynasty, 1368-1644. The two locals, who worked on a nearby construction project, used an excavator to dig through the wall in order to shorten the journey to the site, according to the state-run China Daily, damaging the segment “beyond repair.” The Great Wall, a UNESCO World Heritage site, was built in stages over thousands of years, some sections as early as the 7th century BC, although the best-known are the Ming-era ones. Contrary to popular belief it cannot be seen from space with the naked eye.

The slow death of long-wave radio

Long-wave radio, once the way the world talked to itself, is dying out. In the 1970s, there were dozens of long-wave stations, many — at times, depending on atmospheric conditions — audible across the world. Now there are just a handful, reported the BBC, and fewer each year. By 2025 just five countries will have stations, plus the BBC itself, which plans to reduce its scheduling: Test Match Special, the BBC’s flagship cricket program, will end long-wave broadcasting from March. The BBC began its long-wave programming in 1925 — one long-wave transmitter could serve the whole U.K. — but the rise of digital broadcasting has made it less valuable. “The band is basically almost dead,” one enthusiast said. “It all feels a bit sad, really.”

• A Nigerian tribunal is expected to deliver its ruling on challenges to President Bola Tinubu’s election victory.
• SEMICON Taiwan 2023, a major global semiconductor conference, opens in Taipei.
• The live-action remake of The Little Mermaid is released on Disney+.

Kristen Lipton is the host of Thriving, a new podcast about how the global workplace is changing by our partners at Gallup.

A film about a forgotten fishing town tricking a doctor into staying in the community topped Netflix’s non-English movie charts. The Great Seduction is a “funny, charming, and light-hearted comedy” that at times feels “like a toned down Wes Anderson movie” in which the residents of Santa Maria will do almost anything to keep their forgotten home from falling into bankruptcy and disaster. As one reviewer put it, the film will “put a wholesome smile on your face.”

• The Bongo family that controlled Gabon for 56 years loved music so much that they likely spent millions of the oil-rich country’s dollars on courting international artists.
• Invasive species cost the world more than $400 billion every year, a U.N. report found. That amount has quadrupled each decade since 1970.
• The crisis in Niger is driving a wedge between the U.S. and France — and that could have major ramifications for Africa as a whole.