Feb 18 Update (05:37 GMT / 13:37 Hong Kong)

Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, urged Western leaders to speed up weapons deliveries to his country. In a virtual address to the Munich Security Conference, an annual diplomatic event, Mr Zelensky said any delays would help Russia as it prepares to launch a new offensive. Meanwhile, Britain’s defence ministry estimated that Russia has lost up to 60,000 soldiers and private military contractors in the war against Ukraine. It asserted that the casualty rate had “significantly increased” after Russia introduced a partial mobilisation in September.

America said it had successfully recovered all the sensors and debris from the suspected Chinese spy balloon it shot down earlier this month. Officials will now analyse the “guts” of the recovered objects. However, the search for two of the unidentified objects also shot down this month was called off as investigators had “discovered no debris”.

Militants stormed a police station in Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city, killing at least four people. Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan took responsibility for the attack. It is the latest in a series of assaults since November when the TTP ended a ceasefire with the Pakistani government. The TTP want to oust the government and impose sharia (Islamic law).

EDF, the French energy giant, reported its largest ever annual losses of €17.9bn ($19.1bn) in 2022. Financial debt rose by 50% to €64.5bn. It was a bruising year: the government forced the state-controlled company to cap prices to protect households and businesses, while scheduled repairs shut down more than half of the country’s nuclear reactors.

The chairman of a Qatari bank bid for Manchester United. A spokesperson declined to confirm the bid’s value, but the team’s owners, the Glazer family, are asking for around £5bn ($6bn). The nonbinding, debt-free offer by Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad bin Jaber al-Thani follows only one other public bid, from Sir Jim Ratcliffe, a British billionaire.

The five former police officers in Memphis, Tennessee, accused of second-degree murder in the death of Tyre Nichols pled not guilty. They also face charges of aggravated assault and official misconduct, among others, and are out on bail. They stopped Nichols’s car and beat him on January 7th; he died in hospital three days later, prompting nationwide protests. The officers were subsequently fired.

A group of British and Iraqi archaeologists led by the British museum discovered a 4,500-year-old palace in Tello, in southern Iraq. The Lord Palace of the Kings is believed to have been built by the ancient Sumerians, the earliest-known civilisation in the region. Archaeologists also found a temple to the deity Ningirsu, an ancient god of agriculture and healing.

Word of the week: Recusancy, the act of refusing to attend Church of England services after the English Reformation. Read the full story.

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The African Union meets

PHOTO: ALAMY

When the African Union begins its annual summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, on Saturday two items will top the agenda. The first is security. Although Africa is not the war-torn hellscape imagined by some Western commentators, there are many parts where conflict is raging, such as the Sahel, eastern Congo, northern Mozambique and parts of Somalia. The West is becoming increasingly reluctant to send its own soldiers to enforce peace, so the continent’s leaders will discuss how they can raise more money to put African boots on the ground.

The second topic is a lack of food, especially in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, where Somalia is at risk of famine. Drought and the war in Ukraine, which has driven up global food prices, have made things worse, but political dysfunction and poverty are largely to blame. African politicians have historically been unable to rise to the continent’s myriad challenges. The least they can do is take steps to prevent them from getting worse.

Carnival returns to Brazil

PHOTO: AP

Brazil’s first post-pandemic carnaval officially starts on Saturday. Most of the 26 state capitals will host parades of escolas de samba, the associations of dancers and revellers that compete every year for the title of best performance. More than 450 street parties, or blocos de rua, are scheduled in Rio de Janeiro.

It is also the first carnival since President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office for a third term in January. He is popular among artists. His right-wing predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, dissolved the ministry of culture and defunded artistic organisations. Lula, by contrast, has allocated a record 10bn reais ($1.9bn) to the reconstituted ministry.

In 2019 carnival revellers wore orange, the word for which—laranja—also refers to someone who facilitates fraud. It was a jibe at Mr Bolsonaro, whose son, also a politician, was embroiled in financial scandals. This year, at a pre-carnival bloco in São Paulo, partygoers chanted Lula’s name and wore red, the colour of his Workers’ Party. The party’s past scandals have, for now, been forgotten.

Bangalore gets a new museum

PHOTO: COURTESY OF MAP MUSEUM OF ART &

The Indian government treats its museums quite shabbily. Money and resources are in short supply and leadership, in some cases, is non-existent. The new Museum of Art and Photography (MAP), which opens in Bangalore on Saturday, promises to show up the authorities. Founded by Abhishek Poddar, an industrialist, with a gift of $7m—as well as 7,000 artworks—MAP will bring together paintings, textiles, sculpture, tribal art, Bollywood memorabilia and an extraordinary collection of photography that dates back to the mid-19th century.

Appropriately for a museum in India’s techiest city, MAP’s reach will extend far beyond its state-of-the-art building and bright exhibition spaces. Virtual visitors can expect digital tours, podcasts of artists’ talks and a multimedia gallery where the whole collection can be viewed even when it is not on display. MAP is a museum not just of and for India but for the world.

A step towards a contraceptive pill for men?

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

Women may pick from a range of contraceptive options. Men, by contrast, have thus far had just two choices: condoms and vasectomy. For decades none of the injections, gels and hormonal pills developed for men has so far advanced beyond clinical trials.

In a new paper researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine, a medical school in New York, put forward a new candidate: a fast-acting pill. In mice it works within half an hour, making the animals temporarily infertile by stopping their sperm from swimming. It has no perceptible effects on their behaviour or sexual performance. Within a day their fertility returns. More animal tests will be needed before trials on people can go ahead.

Generally men have less control over family planning than women do, and sometimes feel little responsibility for it. The breakthrough, said one of the authors, “gives men the ability to be a partner”. Who knows? Some of them might even give it a try.

Weekend profile: Peter Obi, the man shaking up Nigeria’s presidential race

PHOTO: AP

“What do I offer you: coffee, tea, water?” asks Peter Obi, the minor-party candidate leading the polls to become Nigeria’s president. Such hospitality is de rigueur among African politicians. But usually the Big Man barks out an order; a flunky proffers the drinks. With Mr Obi, things are different. He fetches tea for your correspondent himself and asks, “Do you need honey?”

In the egotistical world of Nigerian politics, Mr Obi’s humility is refreshing. The army of young supporters hoping to see him elected on February 25th, dubbed “Obidients”, delight in the fact that he often flies economy class, carries his own suitcases and claims to own just two pairs of shoes. They view Mr Obi, aged 61, as a sprightly outsider shaking up Nigeria’s venal, sclerotic political class. By contrast, the two big parties’ candidates—Bola Tinubu and Atiku Abubakar—are in their 70s. America’s government has accused both of corruption (and both deny wrongdoing).

In fact, Mr Obi is no political neophyte, having served two terms as governor of his home state, Anambra, in the south-east. He then stood as Mr Abubakar’s vice-presidential candidate in 2019. Before entering politics he worked as a trader and banker, becoming wealthy—unlike lots of Nigerian politicians—before holding office. But he, too, has faced questions about his finances. He appeared in the Pandora Papers, a leak of the records of financial companies, for owning an undeclared offshore company. He insists there was no deliberate wrongdoing.

The pragmatic Mr Obi seems above all to be selling competence. In conversation he refers to the Human Development Index and the money supply. As governor he left a fiscal surplus to his successor—a rarity. His economic instincts appear to be liberal.

Rival campaigns scoff that Obidients are a paper army that is only influential on Twitter. Many pundits concur. At the previous presidential election the candidate from his Labour Party won just 5,074 votes out of nearly 29m cast.

Still, Mr Obi has energised young, urban voters across Nigeria’s main divisions of geography, ethnicity and religion. (The country is divided between a largely Christian south and Muslim north; Mr Obi is Christian.) By making this election about competence, character and perhaps even ideas, he promises to upset the old electoral calculus based on horse-trading. When asked what distinguishes him most from the other two major candidates Mr Obi replies: “Who can people trust?”