April 21 update

The Rapid Support Forces, a militia warring with Sudan’s ruling military junta, announced a 72-hour ceasefire to mark the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr. It said the truce would “open humanitarian corridors to evacuate citizens”. There was no immediate response from the army. Several attempts at a ceasefire have failed since fighting erupted on April 15th. Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, was bombed and shelled overnight, before the ceasefire was announced.

Dominic Raab resigned as Britain’s deputy prime minister and justice secretary after the release of a bullying probe. Britain’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, ordered the inquiry in November after civil servants complained about Mr Raab’s intimidating behaviour towards subordinates. In his resignation letter, Mr Raab said that the report created a “dangerous precedent” by setting a “low” bar for bullying.

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced it would merge its two AI labs, DeepMind and Google Brain. Google acquired DeepMind—famous for developing an AI that beat the world’s Go champion in 2016—nine years ago but had allowed it to remain autonomous. It is falling behind in the race to develop generative AI: its chatbot, Bard, failed to impress when it launched one month ago.

A Russian Su-34 warplane accidentally bombed the Russian city of Belgorod, near the border with Ukraine, injuring two people and damaging several buildings. The country’s ministry of defence said it would investigate the “emergency release of an air ordnance”.

Rakuten Bank, Japan’s largest internet lender by customer numbers, raised around ¥83.3bn ($622m) in Tokyo’s biggest IPO since 2018. The bank’s share price rose by 33%. U Power, a China-based electric-vehicle startup, also had a bumper IPO in America. The firm’s shares soared by 620% during its debut, the biggest such rise among companies to list there this year.

Gabriel Boric, Chile’s president, announced plans to nationalise the country’s lithium industry in order to boost its economy and protect its environment. Mr Boric said that future contracts for lithium exploration and extraction would be issued as public-private partnerships with state control. Chile has the world’s largest lithium reserves and is the second-biggest producer of the metal, which is essential for electric-vehicle batteries.

Twenty countries in the EU, led by Slovenia, are lobbying for more regulation to prevent impure honey being sold in the bloc. Exporters, mostly from China, have been undercutting European beekeepers by selling cheaper products mixed with sugar syrup and water—a practice one official calls “honey laundering”. The group wants tighter rules around labelling and more stringent checks on imports.

Fact of the day: 3.9%, the chance that AI experts assign to the technology causing an existential catastrophe (where fewer than 5,000 humans survive) by 2100. Read the full story.

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PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

Horror and hope in Yemen

This weekend is the Eid al-Fitr holiday which marks the end of Ramadan. Festivities in Yemen will be muted by a stampede in Sana’a, the capital, on Wednesday: at least 78 people were killed in a crush to collect donations.

Before the tragedy, however, the country had seemed somewhat hopeful. Almost 900 former prisoners will celebrate Eid at home, having been freed as part of a detainee swap between the Houthis, a Shia militia that controls much of the country, and their Saudi-led foes. The exchange suggests both sides want to end their eight-year war.

After the holiday, negotiators will try to hash out a deal. The Houthis want the Saudi-backed government of Yemen to pay the salaries of civil servants in areas they control, among other demands. The Saudis, eager to exit the war, are willing to make concessions. But sadly even the departure of the Saudis would not end a longer conflict over how to share power in the fractious state.

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

The West assesses damage from the Pentagon leaks

On Friday Lloyd Austin, America’s defence secretary, must confront his country’s discomfited allies for the first time since top-secret Pentagon documents were leaked on social media. The “Ramstein group”, named for the American air-force base in Germany where they are meeting, includes officials from the 50-odd countries that arm Ukraine. In private they will want reassurances that America is acting to prevent future breaches. In public they will signal determination not to let the fiasco divert them from supporting Ukraine.

They would do well to carry a copy of one leaked page: a slide marked NOFORN (Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals) summarising Ukraine’s acute shortage of air-defence missiles. Drawn up in February, it predicted that Ukraine would run out of medium-range air-defence missiles in May. That could allow Russia to use its powerful air force to foil Ukraine’s looming counter-attack. Ukraine’s backers will argue that now is the time to scour Western armouries for precious missiles—and to start giving Ukraine advanced fighter jets.

PHOTO: ALAMY

P&G is pinched and gloomy

Procter & Gamble, one of the world’s biggest consumer-goods companies, reports its earnings on Friday. The figures will give a sign of how companies are navigating stubborn inflation and rising interest rates. Higher prices annoy consumers, but for some businesses steady inflation can be a quiet blessing: when matched with falling input costs, it can yield fatter profits on lower volumes.

P&G, which makes Pampers diapers, Tide laundry detergent, Gillette razors and other premium home brands has been struggling with higher outlays and freight costs. P&G also had a disappointing previous quarter, as inflation-driven price increases failed to offset declining volumes. Customers, feeling the pinch, may have been “trading down” to discount brands. Similar results this time will send an ominous signal about consumer confidence. Combined with troubling signs from the property market, they may, yet again, suggest a looming recession.

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

The sorry state of the climate

On Friday the World Meteorological Organisation will publish the “State of the Global Climate” for 2022, one of its annual assessments of the impacts of global warming. The contents—unsurprisingly—will not be positive. Provisional estimates from the WMO have already suggested that the past eight years were the warmest on record for the globe as a whole. This was confirmed by Copernicus, the EU’s Earth-observation programme, in its own analysis, first published in January.

Within those eight years 2022 itself was among the coolest, with temperatures partially suppressed by La Niña, a global weather pattern. Even so, 2022 saw record-breaking heat across America, Asia and Europe. Catastrophic flooding in Pakistan affected some 33m people; a series of tropical storms battered countries in south-east Africa. All these extreme weather events, which impacted millions of people and cost billions of dollars, were worsened, to some degree, by climate change. And further warming is now inevitable, meaning that even more lives and money will be lost in the years to come.

PHOTO: EDWARD BISHOP

Everything But the Girl offer softness and spikes

It’s not like Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt have been idle in the 24 years since “Temperamental”, their last album as the English musical duo Everything But the Girl. Both have made several successful solo records, and Ms Thorn has written four acclaimed books. They got married—their accountant’s idea, Mr Watt claims—and raised three children together. Still, there’s something right about their recording as a pair again, the result of which is released on Friday.

“Fuse”, Everything But the Girl’s 11th album, is stark and yet soft. Ms Thorn’s voice is warm and comforting while Mr Watt’s accompaniments, usually electronic, are imaginative without being obtrusive. The mood is encapsulated in “Lost”, a track about the death of Ms Thorn’s mother, which opens: “I lost my mind today.” The raw pain of the lyric is contrasted with a song as pretty as a narcissus. Adventurous yet familiar, “Fuse” is the rare comeback album that might be better than its predecessors.