One 12 months of battle

Ukraine is bracing for potential Russian assaults timed to the anniversary of the battle immediately. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has warned of a symbolic “revenge” assault from Russia across the one-year mark of Moscow’s invasion.

Faculties throughout Ukraine are holding lessons remotely, individuals have been suggested to keep away from giant gatherings and extra safety measures are being put in place. We’ve updates right here.

One 12 months on, nearly nobody in Ukraine has averted the violence, destruction and bloodshed of the battle, which has killed tens of 1000’s, left thousands and thousands homeless and turned whole cities into ruins. However the foreboding that gripped Ukraine within the days earlier than the invasion has lengthy light.

Now, many individuals in Ukraine stated that they’d discovered energy within the shared sacrifice and the collective wrestle for survival. Some have turn out to be accustomed to the air-raid sirens and warnings. One 30-year-old Ukrainian stated these issues had turn out to be part of on a regular basis life, “like brushing my tooth.”

A world look: The U.S. tried to isolate Russia by imposing sweeping sanctions together with its Western companions. However the remainder of the world has taken a extra impartial strategy to the battle, together with India and China, as our graphic reveals.

The most recent on weapons: Poland stated that it was near finalizing a deal value $10 billion to purchase extra U.S.-made HIMARS rocket launchers and associated gear, as a part of a speedy army buildup. Because the West scrambles to search out munitions for Ukraine’s Soviet-era weapons, it’s turning to arms factories throughout Jap Europe.

China: Janet Yellen, the U.S. treasury secretary, warned Beijing in opposition to serving to Russia evade sanctions, at a gathering of G20 finance ministers in India. She additionally stated that the U.S. deliberate to unveil extra sanctions on Russia.

Within the lead-up to voting day, a choice by Nigeria’s authorities to switch its foreign money brought about chaos. Voters are livid on the governing social gathering over a scarcity of recent financial institution notes, and protests might disrupt voting in elements of the nation.

Lynsey Chutel, our Briefing author based mostly in Johannesburg, spoke with our West Africa bureau chief, Ruth Maclean, who’s in Abuja to cowl the election. Right here’s what Ruth stated about what’s at stake.

“Once I interviewed Peter Obi, one of many three primary candidates, the opposite day, he described this as an ‘existential election.’ I feel that’s what number of Nigerians really feel, significantly younger Nigerians who had been concerned within the EndSARS motion a few years in the past, protesting in opposition to police violence, but in addition in opposition to all the pieces they noticed going fallacious in Nigeria. Lots of them have left or are attempting to depart the nation. If their chosen candidate wins, perhaps some will keep, or come again,” Ruth stated.

As populations in rich international locations get older, Africa’s median age is getting youthful. In Nigeria, half of the inhabitants of greater than 200 million is eighteen and below.

“If Nigeria is secure and affluent, it brightens life for a complete era of Africans,” Ruth stated.

Well being care protests in China

Hundreds of seniors in China are protesting abrupt cuts to their medical insurance. The modifications had been enacted by native governments, and spotlight their wrestle to get well from the prices of implementing the central authorities’s costly “zero Covid” insurance policies for practically three years.

One of the crucial speedy issues is that municipal insurance coverage funds are operating out of cash. To unencumber money, municipalities have began contributing a lot much less to non-public well being accounts, the insurance coverage that middle-class individuals use to pay for drugs and outpatient care. Seniors are most weak to the modifications, which embrace greater prices and diminished advantages.

Protests have taken place within the northeastern metropolis of Dalian, in Guangzhou, and in Wuhan in central China, the place the Covid pandemic started on the finish of 2019. Wuhan’s hospitals responded with an efficient however costly effort to comprise the outbreak, and at the moment are implementing a few of the sharpest cuts to non-public well being accounts.

Context: The cuts are a symptom of China’s overlapping financial struggles. The nation is growing older quickly, and extra retirees imply extra well being care wants. But the principle supply of municipal income has shriveled as actual property builders purchase much less public land due to a housing shakeout.

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ARTS AND IDEAS

ChatGPT’s scary banality

When the flicks imagined A.I., they pictured the fallacious catastrophe, our critic A.O. Scott writes. As a substitute of the chilling rationality of HAL in “2001: A Area Odyssey,” we obtained the drearier, very human awfulness of Microsoft’s Sydney. As a result of when actual chatbots lastly took place, they realized from what people have expressed on-line, which may usually be deceitful, irrational and plain previous imply.

“We’re kind of reconciled to the fact that machines are, in some methods, smarter than we’re,” Scott writes. “We additionally benefit from the fantasy that they could become extra delicate. We’re due to this fact not ready for the chance that they could be chaotic, unstable and resentful — as messy as we’re, or perhaps extra so.”

In China: Tech corporations making chatbots are going through hurdles from the federal government.

And within the arts: Science fiction magazines are being flooded with tales written by chatbots. They’re “dangerous in spectacular methods,” one editor stated.

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