June 3 update

Claudia Sheinbaum claimed to have won a landslide victory in Mexico’s presidential election. Exit polls put her at 56% of the vote, compared with 30% for her main challenger, Xochitl Galvez. Ms Galvez has not yet conceded. Ms Sheinbaum would become Mexico’s first female president. It remains to be seen whether she will continue with the populist policies of her mentor and predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or break with him to tackle Mexico’s deep-rooted problems.

America has “every expectation” that Israel will agree to a ceasefire in Gaza, said John Kirby, the White House’s national-security spokesman. Mr Kirby said the proposal is awaiting “an official response from Hamas”. Israel’s war cabinet met late on Sunday to discuss the plan. Two far-right Israeli ministers have threatened to quit if the deal goes ahead, which would jeopardise the country’s governing coalition.

The African National Congress said that it would not replace Cyril Ramaphosa, its leader and South Africa’s president, in order to form a coalition. Having lost its parliamentary majority in its worst electoral performance in 30 years, the ANC must reach a deal with opposition parties to retain power. The ANC won 159 seats in the 400-member national assembly and received just over 40% of the vote.

Shein, a Chinese fast-fashion seller, is reportedly planning an IPO on London’s stock exchange. According to Sky News, the firm will file for listing approval with British regulators later this week. It is expected to be valued at £50bn ($63.7bn). Last year Shein’s plans to go public in New York were stymied by regulators—the victim of sour relations between America and China.

OPEC+ agreed to prolong cuts to oil output in an effort to shore up prices amid weakening global demand. The oil cartel and its allies had promised to cut production in 2024 by 5.9m barrels per day, or 5.7% of global demand. At its biannual meeting on Sunday, it decided to extend some of the reductions through to the end of 2025. The group produces 40% of the world’s oil.

Nvidia unexpectedly unveiled its new generation of artificial-intelligence processors at a conference in Taiwan. It will begin shipping them in 2026. AMD, an American rival, also revealed new processors as it seeks to challenge Nvidia’s dominance of the AI semiconductor market. Both firms have said they want to release a new family of AI chips every year.

North Korea said that it would “temporarily” stop floating balloons full of rubbish—including cigarette butts, scrap paper and plastic—into South Korea, which claims it has received nearly a thousand since Tuesday. North Korea described the balloons as “sincere gifts” sent in retaliation for “propaganda” criticising its regime dropped over the border by South Korean activists.

Figure of the day: 1.6%, the proportion of placental mammal species, including humans, that menstruate. Read the full story.

 

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photo: ap

Hunter Biden goes on trial

Some extraordinary criminal defendants—a former president and a sitting senator, for example—have recently had a turn in America’s courtrooms. Hunter Biden will join their ranks on Monday, becoming the first child of a sitting president to stand trial for criminal charges. He is accused of lying on federal forms in order to buy a gun. Prosecutors say that Mr Biden claimed that he did not have a drug problem, when in fact he had a serious one. (Mr Biden denies any wrongdoing.)

Mr Biden’s troubles are no secret. He revealed shocking details about his crack-cocaine addiction and misguided affairs to the New Yorker in 2019. Those confessions, he later wrote, were intended to “inoculate everybody else from my personal failings”. The trial may well unearth more revelations and will probably garner considerable attention at a time when his father’s re-election campaign is struggling. Republicans have been trying for years to use Mr Biden’s faults to take down his father. But these ones—addiction struggles—could elicit more pity than condemnation.

photo: afp

America extends Ukraine’s leash, a little

For the first time, Ukraine’s armed forces can now deploy American systems—such as satellite-guided munitions and powerfully accurate rockets—to disrupt the Russian offensive against Kharkiv, an eastern city just 20 miles (30km) from the countries’ shared border.

That is thanks to the Biden administration’s decision to partially lift its ban on Ukraine using American weapons against targets in Russia, announced last Thursday. Ukrainians will be glad of the chance to hit concentrations of Russia troops and equipment. But they are also frustrated by Mr Biden’s obvious fears about Russian escalation: the new exemption only applies to certain types of equipment, and they can only be used for defending Kharkiv.

In occupied Crimea, Ukraine is already showing what it can do when given a longer leash. With newly delivered American ballistic missiles and its own sophisticated drones it is systematically destroying important targets and degrading Russian air defences. It wishes that Mr Biden would give them more leeway to do more of the same elsewhere on the front.

 

photo: ap

Is Turkey’s inflation summit in sight?

Shortly after Recep Tayyip Erdogan was re-elected as Turkey’s president in May 2023, he made a dramatic monetary U-turn. Having spent years slicing interest rates—bizarrely believing that this would lower consumer prices—he appointed a new team at the country’s central bank to do the exact opposite.

Ever since, investors have watched Turkey’s inflation figures carefully for signs that this return to economic orthodoxy is working. In the latest, released on Monday, annual inflation was 75.45% for May, up from 69.8% in April. Though slightly above investors’ predictions, that is expected to represent a peak, before falling to 42.6% by the end of 2024.

The central bank has spent the past year frantically trying to fight inflation, principally by raising the interest rate to 50%. That has meant an uphill struggle for Turks, whose incomes have stagnated and credit options narrowed as prices have continued to rise. They must hope it is all downhill from here.

photo: ap

The Panamanian island sinking beneath the seas

Throughout this week Guna indigenous people will bid farewell to their homes on Gardi Sugdub—a tiny low-lying island off the Caribbean coast of Panama, with a population of 1,300—as they move to a government-built settlement on the mainland, a short boat ride away.

The relocation is a response to rising sea levels, which have exposed the island’s inhabitants to increasingly frequent flooding since the 1990s. In both Latin America and elsewhere, such planned migration projects will probably become more common as the impacts of climate change worsen and melting ice further swells the oceans. It is predicted that most of the 38 islands inhabited by the Guna will be fully submerged by 2100. Panama is expected to lose 2% of its territory to higher seas by 2050. Across the region, more than 40m people are thought to live in coastal areas exposed to heavy storms and flooding. The long goodbye has begun.

photo: saatchi gallery, london

Fashion photography goes on show

The images are everywhere: in the pages of glossy magazines, on your television screen and Instagram feed. An impossibly beautiful woman (or man) clutches a handbag, shows off a killer pair of shoes or sports a natty suit. The raison d’être of these images—and of fashion photography in general—is to sell you that handbag, those shoes, that suit.

A few photographers, however, have sought to elevate high fashion into high art. A new show at the Saatchi Gallery in London brings together more than 100 photographs that avoid “the simple presentation of product lines”. Some of the images are abstract, as with a close-up of a tracksuit, while others are surreal. A few do not seem to have anything sellable at all: in Kent Baker’s image, “Strip” (1999), a pile of clothes lies in the foreground, leaving a nude woman with her arms joyously outstretched. With fashion photography, as much as with fashion itself, there are endless creative possibilities.