June 3 update

At least 280 people were killed and more than 900 were injured after trains collided in Odisha, a state in eastern India. It is India’s most deadly rail crash this century. Some local reports said a passenger train had collided with a stationary freight train—and that carriages from the freight train then hit a separate passenger train. The death toll is expected to rise.

Lloyd Austin, America’s defence secretary, said he was “deeply concerned” that China was unwilling to engage on “mechanisms for crisis management between our two militaries”. Speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue, a security summit in Singapore, Mr Austin also said America would not stand for “coercion and bullying” of its allies by China. Li Shangfu, China’s defence minister, declined an invitation for talks with Mr Austin at the gathering.

America added 339,000 non-farm jobs in May, almost twice as many as economists had predicted. The unexpectedly strong figures reflect the country’s remarkably resilient labour market. However, the unemployment rate rose by more than expected, from a 53-year low of 3.4% in April, to 3.7% in May. Wage growth, a key driver of inflation, slowed to 0.3% month-on-month, but remained high at an annual rate of 4.3%.

Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, backtracked on a contentious law that he approved just four days ago. The legislation created a committee to hunt Russian agents; critics—including the European Union and America—argued that it could be misused to harass the opposition. Mr Duda, allied to the ruling party, said he would propose amendments to curtail the panel’s powers to bar citizens from politics.

NATO announced that Jens Stoltenberg, its secretary-general, will meet Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, this weekend to discuss Sweden joining the military alliance. Turkey has delayed the expansion—it accuses Sweden of harbouring terrorists. Sweden expects that a harsher anti-terror law, which came into effect on Thursday, will have satisfied Mr Erdogan’s demands.

Josep Borrell, the EU’s chief diplomat, urged Kosovo to hold new local elections after a disputed vote triggered weeks of violent unrest. In April, Kosovo’s Serbian minority boycotted an election in the north of the country, allowing the Albanian majority to elect a new slate of mayors on a turnout of less than 4%. Subsequent protests have injured 30 NATO peacekeepers and over 50 demonstrators.

Japan’s fertility rate fell for a seventh consecutive year in 2022, reaching a new low of 1.257 births per woman. The pandemic exacerbated the country’s woes of an ageing and shrinking population: deaths shot up by 9% to a record 1.57m last year, and marriage rates have slowed. The government plans to spend 3.5trn yen ($25bn) a year to support parents in the hope of reversing the trend.

Word of the week: guochao, meaning “national wave” in Chinese, applied to goods that appeal to nostalgic consumers. Read the full story.

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PHOTO: EPA

Asia’s big security gathering kicks off

This weekend the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore is bringing together defence officials, military chiefs, diplomats, journalists and weapons-makers from around the world to discuss security in the Asia-Pacific region.

Tensions between America and China will dominate discussion. But there won’t be much dialogue between the world’s two largest economies. China declined a request from the Pentagon for a meeting in Singapore between Lloyd Austin, America’s defence secretary, and Li Shangfu, China’s new defence minister (pictured). China has demanded that America lift sanctions imposed on Mr Li in 2018—when he oversaw arms purchases from Russia—before a meeting can take place. Speaking at the summit, Mr Austin said he was “deeply concerned” that China was unwilling to discuss “mechanisms for crisis management between our two militaries”.

President Joe Biden now faces a difficult choice: risk appearing soft on China by lifting the sanctions, or keep them and forfeit military talks. Relations between the two countries are at a low ebb. If China and America do not start a dialogue, the risks of miscommunication and accidental confrontation will only grow.

PHOTO: AP

America’s mayors meet

At least 200 mayors from cities across America are gathering this weekend in Columbus, Ohio, for an annual shindig, the United States Conference of Mayors. Violent crime is likely to dominate the conversation. Though murder rates seem to be dropping again in many of America’s biggest cities, they remain far higher than they were before the pandemic. Homelessness and mental health, intertwined challenges that have prompted new policies to compel treatment in New York City and in California, will also be big topics of discussion.

The meeting will probably conclude with a demand for policy changes from the federal government: in particular, for stricter rules on the purchase of guns. In this realm and others, America’s mayors—most of whom are Democrats—are in lock step with the Biden administration. Last month, the largest city with a Republican mayor, Jacksonville in Florida, voted him out. Of America’s 40 biggest cities, only five have Republican leaders; not one city with a population of more than 1m is run by a Republican.

PHOTO: AP

The UAE’s next steps into space

The United Arab Emirates Space Agency is only nine years old, but it had an auspicious start when its probe Hope reached Mars in 2021. Now the Emiratis want to go farther, beyond the red planet to the rock-strewn hinterland called the asteroid belt. Their mission, announced earlier this week and to be launched in 2028, will take the form of a grand tour of seven asteroids in seven years, none of which has yet been explored.

The MBR Explorer (named after Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, UAE’s prime minister) will be made mostly at home by local startups. Its final destination, in 2035, will be the curiously red asteroid Justitia, thought to harbour ice below its surface, and—maybe—clues to the origins of life. As well as solving the mystery of Justitia, the mission represents a new player betting big on space.

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

Women’s Champions League is Barcelona’s to lose

Which European football team can claim to have won all but two of its league matches this year? For all of Manchester City’s success this season, it cannot match the dominance of Barcelona Femení, who on Saturday play in the Women’s Champions League final against VfL Wolfsburg.

Barcelona, as with its all-conquering men’s team of the late 2000s, has achieved success in its own way. Though the club could afford to recruit any player it would like, Spanish footballers dominate the squad. The emergence of talents like Vicky López and Cláudia Pina from the club’s youth system suggests a desire to build from within. When coach Lluís Cortés resigned in 2021, he was replaced by his 29-year-old assistant, Jonatan Giráldez. Wolfsburg will not be a pushover: it won 19 of its 22 matches in the Frauen-Bundesliga, coming second to Bayern Munich. But Barça is the heavy favourite, poised to deliver a win to its own blueprint.

PHOTO: EPA

Weekend profile: Alberto Núnez Feijóo, Spain’s potential next prime minister

Many Spaniards could be forgiven for heading to Google last weekend, after Alberto Núnez Feijóo led the centre-right People’s Party to sweeping regional-election success. The result prompted Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s socialist prime minister, to call early national elections. About Mr Sánchez, everyone in Spain seems to have a firm and unmovable opinion. The same can hardly be said of Mr Feijóo, who has been on the national political scene for just over a year.

The previous PP leader, Pablo Casado, was young, clever and fiery. The party’s other biggest figure, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, leader of the Madrid region, is a polarising attention-machine. The wry Mr Feijóo might be the first to acknowledge he is not known for these qualities. For 13 years he ran the north-western region of Galicia. Long known for isolation and poverty, it has gradually approached Spain’s national average in GDP per person. He won four absolute majorities for the PP in the region. So when Mr Casado was ousted last year during a tussle with Ms Ayuso, the party quickly rallied around the adult-seeming, quietly victorious Mr Feijóo.

Born in 1961 in Os Peares, a town in Galicia, he lived with his parents and grandparents in a house with no bathroom. His father, a construction foreman, was unemployed when Mr Feijoo graduated in law from university. Aspirations of becoming a judge went by the wayside; he got a job in the civil service before climbing the ranks of the PP.

In his year-and-a-bit of party leadership he has mostly employed a moderate tone rarely heard in today’s toxic Spanish politics. He has been pragmatic on policy, promising that his (traditionally Catholic-affiliated) party would peacefully accept the Constitutional Court’s ruling guaranteeing a right to abortion. He swears off dealing with the political heirs of ETA, a Basque separatist group that inflicted decades of terrorism on Spain. A Galician speaker, he promotes Spain’s regional languages, calling for “cordial bilingualism”. This may have helped him boost the PP’s usually dismal vote in Catalonia.

Unlike the smooth-talking Mr Sánchez, Mr Feijóo does not speak English (a handicap that will be all the more noticeable if he becomes prime minister during Spain’s European Union presidency, which begins on July 1st). Asked if he was taking classes in the language last year, he said with a self-deprecating laugh that he was “taking classes in everything” since assuming national leadership. He may have to hurry his studies further still.