April 15 update

Fighting broke out in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, between the ruling military junta and the Rapid Support Forces, a militia that supported coups by the armed forces in 2019 and 2021. The militia claimed it had control of Khartoum airport. Civilian casualties have been reported. Last week the junta and the RSF failed to agree on a transition to a civilian government. The absorption of the RSF into the army was a stumbling block.

Japan’s prime minister, Kishida Fumio, was evacuated from an event at which he was due to give a speech, following an explosion. Mr Kishida was reportedly unhurt after what appears to have been a smoke bomb was hurled at him in a venue in Saikazaki. A man was arrested at the scene. The incident stoked painful memories of the assassination nine months ago of Abe Shinzo, Japan’s longest-serving post-war prime minister.

A Boston court charged Jack Teixeira, the man suspected of leaking hundreds of intelligence files, with the unauthorised removal and transmission of classified documents and materials. According to papers filed by the American government, Mr Teixeira’s work for the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard meant he had held top security clearance since 2021. On Thursday the FBI arrested Mr Teixeira, who allegedly ran the server on Discord, a messaging platform, where the classified documents were leaked.

France’s Constitutional Council validated pension reforms that were pushed through parliament by President Emmanuel Macron, sweeping away the final obstacle to their implementation. Mr Macron’s plan to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 has triggered huge protests throughout the country. The court’s decision is unlikely to put an immediate end to those, or to the political crisis that ensued.

America’s Supreme Court temporarily blocked restrictions placed on mifepristone, a pill used for abortions. The hold expires on Wednesday. A lower court had earlier ruled that the drug could stay on the shelves, but in effect reintroduced some more onerous rules about how it can be obtained. Mifepristone has been at the centre of a complex legal battle, which began when federal judges in Texas and Washington state issued conflicting rulings over the drug’s approval last week.

Elon Musk plans to launch an artificial-intelligence start-up, according to the Financial Times. He is said to be recruiting engineers and seeking investments. On March 9th Mr Musk incorporated the name X.AI and is also believed to have bought thousands of high-powered processors from Nvidia, of the type required to build a language model. Last month he called for a pause on AI development because of safety concerns.

The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer blasted off from French Guiana, beginning an eight-year journey to the gas-giant planet in search of water. The spaceship, run by the European Space Agency, was meant to take off on Thursday but was delayed because of bad weather. It will use photography, radar and magnetic readings to investigate Jupiter’s icy moons for water, and thus the possibility of life.

Word of the week: minilateralism, the use of alliances by non-aligned countries for particular ends, rather than joining a bloc (as opposed to multilateralism). Read the full story.

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PHOTO: REX SHUTTERSTOCK

China’s rebounding property market

Last year China’s vast housing market was caught in a vicious circle. Tight borrowing limits and weak sales left over-indebted property developers with too little cash to finish building homes they had sold in advance. These construction delays then put off prospective homebuyers, further weakening sales.

But the sector seems on the brink of a remarkable recovery. Sales rose by 44% year-on-year in March in 30 big cities. New figures out on April 18th will reveal whether that turnaround is spreading to the rest of the country. The government has relieved pressure on property developers’ financing and increased pressure on them to finish building pre-sold homes. Households now seem more confident that purchased properties will actually be delivered. They also seem more confident that house prices will increase, according to a recent survey by the central bank. Indeed, figures released on Saturday showed that the price of a new home rose in 65 out of 70 cities in March, compared with the month before.

PHOTO: REX SHUTTERSTOCK

Germany’s nuclear nighty-night

The lights will go out at Germany’s last three nuclear power plants on Saturday. When a deadline to close them was set in 2011, following a deadly nuclear blow-out at Fukushima in Japan, most Germans expected to be cheering the demise of a “dangerous and dirty” industry. But war in Ukraine has yanked up energy prices, throttled natural gas supplies and forced Germany back to using far filthier coal. Polls show that 68% of Germans now want nuclear plants to stay open. So why is Germany bucking the global trend of reappraising nuclear energy as a good thing?

The answer is coalition politics. It may look daft to scrap 6% of your power capacity—which is what the three plants still provide, down from 31% when Germany’s nuclear industry peaked in the 1990s. But nuclear exit is a trigger issue for the Greens. If the two parties with which they share power touch that, Germany’s government might melt down.

PHOTO: EMAHOY TSEGE MARIAM MUSIC FOUNDA

An Ethiopian nun’s divine music

The 1960s and 1970s were a golden age for Ethiopian music. Among the musicians of “Swinging Addis”, as the capital became known, was a prolific pianist called Emahoy Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou, who was also a nun in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. This month, Mississippi Records is reissuing two of her albums, recorded during the 1960s, in addition to a new LP called “Jerusalem”. It features three tracks that the nun wrote around 1970 and several from the 1980s, which were only recently discovered.

Ms Guebrou’s uplifting compositions blend Western classical traditions with jazz and Ethiopia’s holy music. The songs feel at once ancient and modern, and in many ways reflect her extraordinary life. Born in 1923, she studied piano in Switzerland as a girl, and was later imprisoned during Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Afterwards, she joined a monastery and eventually moved to Jerusalem in 1984. Ms Guebrou died in March, at the age of 99, but in each meandering piano solo, her spirit lives on.

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

A strikingly open playoffs

This year’s NBA playoffs are anyone’s to win. The post-season tournament begins on Saturday, with the Philadelphia 76ers tipping off against the Brooklyn Nets and the Boston Celtics playing the Atlanta Hawks. Pundits judged this season to be unusually open before it began: the tipsters at FiveThirtyEight, a data-journalism site, gave 11 teams at least a 5% chance of winning the title, the most since they started forecasting eight years ago. For the first time in more than two decades, no team managed to win 60 of their 82 regular-season games.

This may be because the top players are more evenly dispersed. There is not a single side this year who can put up three superstars, as did the Golden State Warriors when Steph Curry, Kevin Durant and Draymond Green were in their prime. The 20 players rated most highly by FiveThirtyEight represent 14 different teams. This increased parity will make for an unpredictable nine weeks.

Weekend profile: the two men at the heart of Yemen’s peace talks

It is not the end, but perhaps the beginning of the end. On April 9th a delegation from Saudi Arabia flew to Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, to meet representatives of the Houthis, a Shia militia that controls much of the country. At the Yemeni president’s request, a Saudi-led coalition stepped in to help topple the Houthis. They have been at war for eight years.

At the centre of this month’s talks were two men who probably never expected to be. The first, Muhammad Ali al-Houthi (pictured), is a senior figure in the militia that bears his family name. A forty-something cousin of the group’s leader, he has said the Saudis are a satrap of America and a stalking-horse for Israel. He has been a target of coalition airstrikes; one reportedly wounded him in 2015. He is third on Saudi Arabia’s most-wanted list in Yemen, with a $20m bounty on his head.

Yet there he was, shaking hands with an emissary of the enemy: Muhammad al-Jaber, the Saudi envoy to Yemen since 2014. Little is known about Mr al-Jabar, but well-connected Saudis describe him as a fearsome member of the Mukhabarat, or intelligence service.

The meeting of these two men is a mark of how dismal conditions have become in Yemen. The war has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis: more than 200,000 people have died, and two-thirds of the population need foreign aid to survive. But it has not dislodged the Houthis from power. The Saudi-backed “legitimate government” of Yemen has been feckless and prone to infighting. The Houthis, backed by Iran, have lobbed thousands of rockets and drones across the border into Saudi Arabia.

After eight years of failure, the Saudis want out. Months of negotiations were given a boost by last month’s unexpected rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran. On Friday the Saudis and Houthis began to exchange nearly 900 prisoners, the biggest such swap in two and a half years. Next may come a permanent ceasefire, extending the temporary truce that was agreed in April 2022. The truce is unlikely to end Yemen’s civil war, which predates Saudi involvement. But it should herald more uncomfortable meetings between two longtime foes.