May 6 update

World leaders and assorted dignitaries gathered in London for the coronation of King Charles III in Westminster Abbey. He will swear to govern the people of the United Kingdom and his other “realms and territories” and to maintain in the first of these “the Protestant Reformed Religion”. Festivities to follow the service will include a flypast of 60 aircraft and a military parade featuring 4,000 troops. Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, called the crowning a “moment of extraordinary national pride”. Not everyone agrees. Anti-monarchists from Republic, a campaign group, were arrested at a protest in central London.

American employers added 253,000 jobs in April, exceeding forecasts. The unemployment rate dropped slightly to 3.4%, down from 3.5% in March. On Wednesday the Federal Reserve raised interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point, but indicated it may be reaching the end of its tightening regime. The labour market’s resilience may complicate the Fed’s decision-making.

The head of Ukraine’s air force claimed that the country had downed a Russian hypersonic missile. The Kh-47 Kinzhal appears to have been intercepted by a US-provided Patriot air-defence system during an attack over Kyiv on May 4th. Ukrainian officials had originally denied the claim.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, said that covid-19 is no longer a global health emergency, but would remain “a global health threat”. The virus was first given emergency status in January 2020, two months before it was declared a pandemic. It has officially killed over 6m people. Warning against complacency, Dr Tedros said that the virus is “still killing, and it is still changing”.

Sudan’s warring military factions sent delegations to Saudi Arabia for ceasefire talks. America and Saudi Arabia hope the meeting will ease tensions between Sudan’s army and the Rapid Support Forces militia. But both sides said they would discuss only humanitarian issues and not an end to the conflict. All previous truces have been violated.

America’s Department of Justice is investigating whether Binance was used by Russians to illegally skirt American sanctions, according to Bloomberg. The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange insisted it complies with American and international sanctions. The company has faced similar allegations in the past. Documents released on Friday revealed that Israel has seized nearly 200 Binance accounts with alleged ties to terrorist groups.

The foreign ministers of Afghanistan and China arrived in Pakistan for trilateral talks to discuss regional stability and trade. The Taliban is hoping to attract Chinese infrastructure investment and improve its connectivity with its neighbours, such as Pakistan. Last month China’s foreign ministry said it “supports Afghanistan’s integration” into the region.

Word of the week: Yunarmia, “Youth Army” in Russian, and an organisation launched by Russia’s defence ministry in 2016, which teaches kids military skills at jolly summer camps. Read the full story.

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PHOTO: REUTERS

Tradition reigns at Charles’s coronation

On Saturday Charles III will be formally crowned king in Westminster Abbey in London. The ceremony will be rich in history, tradition, kings, queens and people with improbable titles. Among those present in the abbey will be the Rouge Dragon Pursuivant; the Garter King of Arms; the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of this realm; and His Most Godly Beatitude Theophilos III, Patriarch of Jerusalem and All Palestine.

The ceremony itself is even more baroque. Charles will be anointed with oil using a special Coronation Spoon and sit on a chair inside which lies an ancient “Stone of Destiny”. Whether he will be enjoying his own destiny is unclear: he once said the realisation that he would be king dawned upon him “with the most ghastly inexorable sense”.

In one nod to modernity, however, members of the House of Lords may wear their “usual” parliamentary robes—which is to say, red robes lined with silk and trimmed with ermine—rather than fancier coronation ones. It’s almost street style.

PHOTO: ALAMY

Billionaires have had a bumpy ride

This year, according to the latest stocktake from Forbes, there are 2,640 dollar billionaires. Their collective wealth amounts to $12trn, or 12% of global GDP.

The Economist’s crony-capitalism index classifies the sources of their wealth into rent-seeking and non-rent-seeking sectors. Rent-seeking is common in sectors close to the state, including banking, construction, and natural resources. Rent-seekers sometimes gain favourable access to land, form cartels or lobby the government for advantageous regulations. Most billionaires do not operate in rent-seeking sectors. But we find that crony-sector wealth has increased from 1% of global GDP in 1998 to 3% today. Some two-thirds of that rise comes from four countries: America, China, India and Russia.

Yet plutocrats in all four countries—whether rent-seekers or not—have taken a hit recently. America’s tech founders have been pummelled by falling valuations. China has continued to shake down much of its capitalist class. And Russia’s plutocrats, many of them close to the Kremlin, have been hit by sanctions that have frozen their bank accounts, homes and yachts overseas.

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

Uffizi’s masterpieces travel beyond Florence

The “Madonna of the Baldacchino”, painted by Raphael in the early 16th century, has had an adventurous life. The painting travelled around Italy, and even to Paris, before settling in the Pitti Palace in Florence, part of the Uffizi galleries. Itinerant again, it will be unveiled on Saturday in the cathedral of the Tuscan town of Pescia, where it was housed for around 150 years until the late 17th century.

The temporary relocation of Raphael’s early masterpiece is part of a project to show works from the Uffizi's vast collection in places where they are particularly relevant. The galleries’ director, Eike Schmidt, calls his programme the “Uffizi Diffusi”, or “Scattered Uffizi”. It has held more than 30 exhibitions since 2021. Mr Schmidt is planning a second phase, in which works that would otherwise languish in the Uffizi’s storerooms will be exhibited permanently at newly restored sites around Tuscany. Visitors to Pescia can see the “Madonna of the Baldacchino” from next week to the end of July.

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

Sexual harassment in Indian sport

Over the past fortnight India’s best wrestlers, including Olympic medallists, have been training on the streets of Delhi. But this is no outdoor camp; it is an act of protest. The grapplers are hoping to pin down Brijbhushan Sharan Singh, the president of India’s national wrestling federation, whom they accuse of sexual harassment. Mr Singh, a member of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, denies all allegations, and accuses the protesters of playing a “political game”.

In January, when the claims first surfaced, the government promised an inquiry. But the wrestlers are demanding more—including Mr Singh’s arrest. (Delhi’s police have launched an investigation.) Support for the wrestlers’ cause is swelling, especially among fellow athletes. Indeed, sexual wrongdoing is a problem in other sports. And efforts to protect athletes are poorly enforced: 16 of India’s 30 sporting bodies do not have internal committees to deal with harassment issues, as the law requires.

PHOTO: RYAN LASH / TED

Weekend profile: Eliezer Yudkowsky, AI champion turned critic

“Shut it all down.” Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist and co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California, pulled no punches in a recent op-ed in Time magazine. For years Mr Yudkowsky, now 43, has warned, in relative obscurity, of the threat that a runaway artificial intelligence (AI) could pose to humankind. But since late last year, when services such as ChatGPT have become capable of giving human-like answers to all kinds of questions, many more have started to listen.

An autodidact, Mr Yudkowsky has a loyal following in the AI-research community. In his 20s, influenced by science-fiction writers such as Vernor Vinge, he yearned for a “singularity”—a superintelligence, to solve all human problems—and he put his many talents to creating it. But he realised that he was wrong: such a superintelligence was likely to develop a mind of its own, not aligned with the interests of humans. His goal became to further the development of a “friendly AI”, one that would not harm mankind.

Mr Yudkowsky does not mind being somewhat wrong. He started the blog “LessWrong”, which was once the main organ of the “rationalist” intellectual movement. Contemporary rationalists seek “to move our beliefs closer to reality”, as another leading light of the movement put it, in particular by making mistakes and using probability and logic to deal with uncertainty.

In the early 2000s Mr Yudkowsky was a prolific blogger, writing not just about the risk of AI, but about everything sci-fi-influenced geeks might be interested in, from cognitive biases and quantum physics to transhumanism and zombies. Today, the “Sequences”, as Mr Yudkowsky’s collected posts have come to be called, are required reading for rationalists. He has also published his ideas in a popular form, a fan-fiction novel called “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”.

Mr Yudkowsky’s critics say his approach is less rational than it is religious. Meta’s chief AI scientist recently called on him to stop his alarmism. Mr Yudkowsky retorted that it was “silly to claim that you’re not risking anyone’s life”.