Mar 18 update

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights. The warrant alleges that the pair bear responsibility for the “unlawful deportation” of people from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia, notably children. Russia does not recognise the court’s authority; if it ignores the warrant, the issue could be referred to the UN Security Council. President Joe Biden said the charges were justified as Mr Putin had “clearly committed war crimes”.

UBS is reportedly considering acquiring all or part of Credit Suisse at the request of Swiss regulators seeking to restore confidence in the country’s banking sector. The boards of Switzerland’s two biggest banks are expected to meet separately over the weekend to discuss the possible merger, according to the Financial Times. Credit Suisse’s stock fell by 8% on Friday amid widespread investor anxiety.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, said that his country would start the process of ratifying Finland’s bid to join NATO, adding that he hopes Turkey’s parliament will approve the matter before elections scheduled for May. Hungary, another holdout, may acquiesce soon too. But there is little indication as to whether Sweden’s bid will gain approval from either country.

President Joe Biden asked Congress to expand regulators’ power to claw back compensation and capital gains from executives of failed banks. He cited stock sales worth $3.6m by the former boss of Silicon Valley Bank in February. SVB Financial Group—the bank’s former parent company, which no longer includes the deposit-taking business—filed for bankruptcy in an attempt to salvage value from the technology-investing and brokerage divisions.

America’s Justice Department has reportedly been investigating TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, since late last year for tracking American journalists who cover the company. ByteDance revealed last year that its employees inappropriately obtained the data of American TikTok users, including two reporters. The Biden administration recently asked ByteDance to sell the social-media app, which is banned on government phones in America.

The OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, said that central banks should continue raising interest rates as there needed to be “clear signs” that inflationary pressures had eased amid a “fragile” global economic recovery. The intervention comes amid concerns that worries about the stability of the banking system will encourage central bankers to ease back on efforts to tackle inflation.

Meta launched a subscription service for Facebook and Instagram in America. For $15 a month, mobile-phone users of the social-media platforms can verify their accounts and receive a blue badge along with other perks. The subscription is the latest example of a growing trend in the industry. Last year Snapchat and Twitter launched similar services to diversify revenues away from advertising.

Word of the Week: vihta, bouquets of birch branches used to slap the backs of enthusiasts in Finnish saunas, which are growing in popularity in Britain. Read the full story.

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PHOTO: AP

Macron bets it all

Facing a knife-edge vote in parliament, Emmanuel Macron’s government on Thursday forced through his controversial plan to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64, in effect linking the measure to a vote of no confidence. The move ends six weeks of parliamentary debate—but few consider the matter closed. Thousands protested against Mr Macron’s decision on Friday and unions have called for a bumper turnout at demonstrations this weekend.

Inside parliament, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen, leaders of parties of the hard left and right respectively, called for a no-confidence vote. If successful, that would annul Mr Macron’s measure and probably prompt fresh parliamentary elections less than a year into the lower house’s five-year term. Support for Mr Macron from the centre-right the Republicans party makes that unlikely. Still, Parisians hoping for their rubbish to finally be collected by striking binmen seem out of luck. Even Mr Macron’s watered-down pension proposals—diluted from an earlier plan—have caused a stink worthy of a Parisian cul-de-sac.

PHOTO: EPA

Crimea’s uncertain fate

Saturday marks nine years since Russia illegally annexed Crimea, a strategic peninsula jutting into the Black Sea. Rumours abound that President Vladimir Putin will speak at a large rally in Moscow to commemorate what he calls Crimea’s “reunification” with Russia. In truth, the annexation was a shameless land grab from Ukraine on the back of a bogus referendum. All but a handful of countries refuse to recognise it.

Nearly a decade after those events, Crimea’s fate again looks uncertain. Publicly, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, says his country can and will retake the peninsula, a position largely backed by his people. But the odds of a successful military assault on Crimea are steep. And many of Ukraine’s Western allies are reluctant to support any such attempt, worrying that it may lead Russia to escalate the conflict. Mr Putin has suffered numerous setbacks during the war; losing Crimea would be a humiliation from which his authority may not recover.

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

Republicans walk a tightrope on abortion

America’s primary system means that presidential hopefuls must energise their base without repelling moderate voters. On abortion, Republicans used to have it both ways: they talked up pro-life values, but, in a country where a majority favours abortion access in most cases, Roe v Wade conveniently constrained them from doing much about it. No longer.

On Saturday the Palmetto Family Council, a conservative Christian group in South Carolina, will host a forum with Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, two Republican candidates for president in 2024, among others. They will be pressed about how tightly to regulate the procedure. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe and allowed states to set their own limits, pro-lifers have called for a federal abortion ban. Donald Trump has not endorsed that; it is unclear if others will. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor and a likely contender for the nomination, supports a six-week ban. Fully 75% of voters in his state, however, oppose that.

PHOTO: ©️ 2022 KEHINDE WILEY. COURTE

Kehinde Wiley reckons with racism

On Saturday Kehinde Wiley, an African-American artist, opens an extraordinary exhibition memorialising victims of state violence. “An Archaeology of Silence”, at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, is at once transcendent and a punch to the gut. In darkened galleries, spot-lit statues of black bodies lie recumbent like the fallen Christ. The walls, meanwhile, explode with vibrant colour and figures painted at billboard size. That tension—between death and life, mistreatment and resistance—is Mr Wiley’s way of forcing viewers to grapple with racism in America and elsewhere.

The work responds to the police killing of George Floyd and other black people, and the disproportionately high toll that covid-19 took on minorities. Mr Wiley, famously chosen to paint Barack Obama’s presidential portrait, is known for his lush images of African-Americans in art-historical poses. This show, he says, is a “kind of celebration that you see surrounding people who were fallen heroes, fallen gods”.

PHOTO: EYEVINE

Weekend Profile: Barney Frank, bank reformer

Of all those caught out in the recent banking crisis, the most surprising must be Barney Frank. As a Democratic congressman during the financial crisis of 2007-08, he helped craft the Dodd-Frank reforms designed to prevent another implosion. Yet there he was, 15 years later, sitting on the board of the failed Signature Bank, which regulators took control of last weekend. Mr Frank was supposed to have ensured that there be no more banking crises.

Mr Frank thinks New York regulators acted too hastily in closing down Signature. He argues it was specifically targeted to discourage other banks from getting too involved in cryptocurrencies. (Signature had served lots of crypto firms.) The authorities, meanwhile, say that the bank could not have opened “in a sound and safe manner” last Monday. The episode reminded anxious observers of Lehman Brothers, which failed to open on a Monday morning in September 2008.

Mr Frank says he was less interested in Signature’s crypto dealings than in its business of writing loans to developers building affordable housing, one of his life-long passions as a liberal Democrat. Born into a Jewish family in New Jersey in 1940, he got his start in Boston politics, then represented Massachusetts’s fourth congressional district from 1981 until 2013.

The rumpled, mumbling, often overweight congressional candidate was never going to win any votes for presentation, so an early campaign slogan was “Neatness isn’t everything”. In 1987, he became the first congressman to voluntarily “come out of the room”, as the House speaker at the time put it. Mr Frank has since campaigned strongly for gay marriage; he tied the knot in 2012, the first congressman to marry someone of the same sex while in office. His wit has both helped his causes and ruffled opponents. On abortion, he once quipped that “conservatives believe life begins at conception and ends at birth”.

The renegade reformer has argued that having a tough regulator sit on a bank board is a good thing. Critics are unpersuaded, but his track record suggests that he is unlikely to quiet down. On his first day of high school he was sent to the vice-principal’s office for speaking too much. Why stop now?