Your Monday Briefing: The End of Roe

Good morning. We’re protecting the top of Roe v. Wade, a G7 summit on Ukraine and an investigation into China’s surveillance state.

President Biden mentioned the international locations would ban imports of Russian gold. Leaders are additionally anticipated to debate attainable makes an attempt to tighten sanctions on Russian oil.

Power: The scramble to switch Russian fossil fuels could jeopardize hard-won local weather targets. E.U. leaders are scrambling to organize for a winter of gas shortages.

Combating: Ukrainian forces will retreat from the important thing jap metropolis of Sievierodonetsk, the place about 90 p.c of town’s buildings have been destroyed. And the mayor of Mykolaiv, an embattled southern metropolis that has embodied Ukraine’s never-say-die spirit, urged residents to depart.

Diplomacy: The G7 leaders detailed a brand new plan designed to counter China’s increasing affect from its Belt-and-Highway Initiative. Additionally they invited 5 nonmember nations to attend, an effort to bolster relationships with international locations that they worry may drift into China’s and Russia’s orbits.

For over a yr, they analyzed over 100,000 authorities bidding paperwork, which element the surveillance expertise and software program and clarify the strategic pondering behind the purchases.

The reporters discovered that China’s ambition to gather a staggering quantity of digital and organic knowledge from its residents is extra expansive and invasive than beforehand recognized. Listed below are 4 takeaways from the investigation, and a 14-minute video.

Cameras: These are the muse of China’s surveillance state, feeding knowledge to analytical software program that may inform somebody’s race, gender and whether or not they’re sporting glasses or masks. All of this knowledge is saved on authorities servers.

Telephones: Authorities use telephone trackers to hyperlink individuals’s digital lives to their id and bodily actions.

Profiles: DNA, iris scan samples and voice prints are collected indiscriminately from individuals with no connection to crime as a way to construct complete profiles for residents.

Synthetic intelligence: The most recent expertise guarantees to foretell or detect crimes, reminiscent of signaling officers when an individual with a historical past of psychological sickness will get close to a college, or alerting authorities if a wedding is suspicious.

Beijing just isn’t recognized for its pure refuges — or its rule-bending. However “wild swimming” within the metropolis’s lakes and waterways has continued to draw cussed bathers, regardless of makes an attempt by authorities to limit the observe. In the course of the pandemic, curiosity solely grew.

ARTS AND IDEAS

Japan’s advanced heroines

At a time of widespread debate over the depiction of ladies in movie, prime Japanese animators work in a protracted custom of advanced and layered heroines.

Engaged on smaller budgets than their American counterparts, administrators like Mamoru Hosoda provide private visions. His movie “Belle,” out there on main platforms, attracts inspiration from “Magnificence and the Beast,” however its heroine writes deep, advanced music about her grief at shedding her mom. The protagonist of the Disney model by no means mentions her mom. Nor does Jasmine in “Aladdin.”

The auteur Makoto Shinkai broke field workplace data in Japan in 2016 with “Your Identify,” which begins as a body-swapping teen rom-com however develops right into a meditation on the trauma many Japanese nonetheless undergo after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami and the worry of displacement these tragedies introduced.

And Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away” — maybe Japan’s most well-known animated movie — grew out of his dissatisfaction with the superficial leisure supplied to adolescent ladies. “I wished the principle character to be a typical lady in whom a 10-year-old may acknowledge herself,” Miyazaki mentioned.

“She shouldn’t be somebody extraordinary, however an on a regular basis, actual particular person — although this type of character is harder to create,” he continued, via a translator. “It wouldn’t be a narrative during which the character grows up, however a narrative during which she attracts on one thing already inside her that’s introduced out by the actual circumstances.”

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

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