Mar 12 update

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, an American tech-focused lender, plunged startups into uncertainty globally. American regulators took control of SVB’s $175bn-worth of deposits and said insured depositors would have access to their money on Monday. Meanwhile, over 200 British chief executives pleaded with Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, to protect their firms, saying the insolvency of SVB’s British arm was an “existential threat” to Britain’s tech industry.

Signs of the stress at SVB are spilling over into other parts of the financial world. USDC, a stablecoin, lost its peg to the dollar and hit an all time low on Saturday. Circle, the payments company which manages USDC, confirmed that around $3.3bn of its $40bn in reserves was deposited with SVB. USDC rebounded after Circle said it would recover any shortfall in reserves.

Protests in Israel, now in their tenth week, continued across the country. People are demonstrating against the government’s plans for a radical overhaul of the judicial system. Under its plans, Israel’s parliament would in nearly all cases be able to override Supreme Court rulings and the government could stack the judicial appointments committee with government representatives.

France’s senate voted to approve President Emmanuel Macron’s plans to reform pensions, which have faced furious nationwide protests for five consecutive days. The centrepiece of Mr Macron’s plan is raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. A committee will now come up with a final draft of the reform, before the senate and national assembly vote again on passing it into law.

More than 1,300 migrants were rescued by Italy’s coastguard in three separate events on Saturday. Around 17,000 migrants have reached the country so far in 2023, compared with 6,000 over the same period in 2022. The sharp increase causes a headache for Italy’s right-wing government, which had promised to reduce the flow of crossings from North Africa and Turkey.

A Hong Kong court jailed three organisers from a group that ran the city’s annual vigil in remembrance of the Tiananmen Square protests each June. The activists were sentenced to four-and-a-half months in prison for not co-operating with a police request for information. Hong Kong’s authorities have suppressed any commemoration of the pro-democracy demonstration of 1989 since China imposed a draconian national security law on the city in 2020.

Iran agreed to buy Su-35 fighter jets from Russia to bolster its ageing air force, according to Iranian state news. Iran has emerged as an important military ally to Russia since its invasion of Ukraine. Western officials accuse the country of selling the kamikaze drones to Russia used to target Ukrainian power plants–although Iran denies this allegation.

Word of the week: Prata, a folded fried bread of South Indian origin. Read the full story.

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PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

A hostile reception for Bezalel Smotrich in Washington

Senior Israeli ministers are usually on friendly turf when visiting Washington. But not Bezalel Smotrich, the new finance minister. Mr Smotrich will be in America’s capital on Sunday for the annual conference of Israel Bonds, a fundraising operation that sells government bonds on behalf of the Israeli state. No one from the Biden administration will attend the conference or meet the minister, who also leads the far-right Religious Zionism party. Indeed, America has condemned his call for Israel’s government to “wipe out” an entire Palestinian town that was rampaged by Israeli settlers on February 26th.

In a calculated insult, the State Department waited until the last minute to authorise Mr Smotrich’s diplomatic visa. And once in America, he will probably face protests from Jewish-American groups and Israeli expatriates furious at his extreme positions, as well as the Israeli government’s plans to weaken the country’s Supreme Court. Perhaps Israel could have sent a better salesman for its bonds.

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

A very good year for Saudi Aramco

Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company, will announce its annual results on Sunday. Expect no surprises. Analysts forecast a net income of $35bn for the fourth quarter of 2022. That would be lower than the past two quarters, but only because they were so extraordinary: Aramco’s $48.4bn profit in the second quarter was its highest ever. If estimates are correct, the company’s full-year net income will be around $165bn, up 50% from 2021.

2023 should be another good year, with Brent crude hovering around $80 a barrel. OPEC, a cartel of oil-producing countries, thinks demand will rise by around 2m barrels a day, to 102m. Worried about sluggish growth in rich countries, Saudi Arabia will probably be reluctant to boost supply. That is likely to annoy the neighbouring United Arab Emirates, which is keen to sell higher volumes, even at a lower price. But the Saudi government, Aramco’s largest shareholder, will not mind. It needs eye-popping oil takings to fund its ambitious economic programme.

PHOTO: REUTERS

Another calamity at the Oscars?

At this year’s Oscars, which take place on Sunday, the frontrunner for the best-picture award is “Everything Everywhere All At Once”, a universe-jumping comedy adventure with ten other nominations. (Two of its stars, Jamie Lee Curtis and Stephanie Hsu, are competing for best supporting actress). Other big winners could include “The Banshees Of Inisherin”, Martin McDonagh’s black comedy set in rural Ireland, and “All Quiet on the Western Front”, a German adaptation of a classic novel about the first world war. Both movies have nine nominations.

Prizes aside, the big question is whether the 95th Academy Awards will be as disastrous as last year’s ceremony, when Will Smith, an actor, slapped Chris Rock, a comedian who was presenting a gong. At least this year’s master of ceremonies, Jimmy Kimmel, is a safe pair of hands, having hosted twice before. That said, during Mr Kimmel’s first outing in 2017, the best-picture award was accidentally given to the wrong film. A happy ending to film’s glitziest evening is never guaranteed.

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

A canine-health crisis at Crufts

Britain’s Kennel Club, a society for dog lovers, has a penchant for pseudo-scientific terms like “pure-breed”, “pedigree” or “bloodline”. In the pursuit of creating aesthetically pleasing puppies, its members often take a special interest in the genealogy of elite pooches. Crufts, an annual dog show, is the club’s chance to parade its members’ collection of breeds. On Sunday seven dogs battle it out in Birmingham, a city in central England, for the coveted best-in-show trophy.

Yet decades of in-breeding have taken their toll. Behind the cameras canine-health problems, such as epilepsy and heart disease, are common. Crufts is determined to change things. This year a team of DNA testers will offer health checks to 78 breeds for 80 different conditions. “We recognise the problems that can result from breeding closely related dogs,” says Bill Lambert, a Kennel Club spokesperson. After 150 years, a much-loved British institution is trying to wash its paws of the past.

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

Weekend profile: Laura Poitras, documentary filmmaker

Laura Poitras appreciates the risks that her subjects take. They are, in some cases, jeopardising their lives or careers. When she was making “Citizenfour”, a film about Edward Snowden, the American security contractor who went rogue, she backed up footage and entrusted it to a third-party, then destroyed the original files. Her portrayal of Mr Snowden—with its famous shot of the bespectacled leaker, sitting in a mirrored hotel room in Hong Kong—won Ms Poitras an Oscar for best documentary feature.

“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”, for which she is up for a second Oscar on Sunday, has nothing to do with matters of national security. But she treats Nan Goldin, a photographer and the film’s subject, with the same care that she showed Mr Snowden. The documentary is about Ms Goldin’s campaign to strip the name of the Sackler family, the owners of the company that makes OxyContin, from the world’s largest museums, many of which house her work. It is a bracing look at Ms Goldin’s own history of addiction, domestic abuse and sex work. Ms Poitras told Ms Goldin that she could excise anything that felt too intimate. Ms Goldin, she said, wanted only to go “deeper”.

Ms Poitras, aged 59, grew up in Boston and previously worked as a chef. But she abandoned that for film school in San Francisco: cooking was about pleasing, rather than challenging, guests. Her training was largely in experimental filmmaking—her first teacher opened his course with what she described as “a 23-minute structuralist meditation on a hallway”.

Ms Poitras’s documentaries are more accessible: portraits of people at a crossroads, filled with old-fashioned human drama. Her subjects’ struggles, she told an interviewer, should make viewers interrogate how powerful people and institutions operate. Her goal is to “re-wire the audience” and get them “questioning”.

She favours presenting events as they unfold, rather than lining up talking heads to opine on past achievements. The protagonist of her 2006 film, “My Country, My Country”, is a doctor running for office in Iraq. The outcome of the race—like the result of Mr Snowden’s gambit and the success of Ms Goldin’s campaign—is far from assured. And the risks are real.