Insecurity Council – Eli

Long stories short

• Richard Sharp resigned as chairman of the BBC (more below).
• The US Navy has announced that Iran has seized an oil tanker in the international waters of the Gulf of Oman.
• The UK is set to unveil plans to scrap 4,000 EU laws by the end of the year.

Security Council

This week, Russia discussed the principle of self-determination in the United Nations’ founding charter, which Putin’s military is trying to crush in Ukraine with high-explosive mines.

so what? This is not the first time that Russia has been ridiculed on the Internet. She assumed the role of acting president of the UN Security Council last year when it violated its charter by invading Ukraine. On Monday, the foreign minister blamed “Western minorities” for the “confrontation between the major powers reaching a historic high”.

Darkness at noon. Russia is free to change the reality due to the current presidency of the UNSC

• His permanent seat on the council; And
• His right to challenge council decisions.

The council After World War II, it was easily closed and established as unfair to the defeated Axis powers. There is a growing consensus that the United Nations and the Council in particular need fundamental reform.

The catch. Russia does not share this agreement. He has a veto (see above), and he has allies around the Global South who bear the brunt of the war’s food and fuel prices, but refuse to join the West in the war.

hope. Russia backed a new law passed last year at the behest of Liechtenstein that would have used the UNSC veto to allow any power to declare it to the UN General Assembly. The law does not bind any member state to anything, but it is a start.

Options.

• The Biden administration has supported a plan to reform the UNSC to include permanent members from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.
• In particular, African leaders accepted the plan at the summit held in New York last September.
• Article 109 of the UN Charter allows the Charter itself to be amended by the General Assembly of member states by a 2/3 vote of the Assembly and the approval of nine of the 15 members of the UNSC.

But there is no mechanism for expelling rogue members, nor the prospect of delinquent members taking one. In the meantime, Russia has reformed its foreign policy doctrine to make the United States its main adversary, as in the Soviet era. And it reserves the right to use its military to prevent defensive attacks against any country deemed to threaten Russia or its allies.

Chinese whispers. China, which has no hope of peacemaking at the United Nations, wants to fill the breach. An hour-long phone call between Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and Xi Jinping reached an agreement this week.

• China will try to reach a ceasefire as soon as possible.
• China would send a special representative to Ukraine and “other countries” to organize peace talks; And
• Ukraine to send ambassador to China after two years

The call appeared to be partly damage limitation after Beijing’s ambassador to France slipped the view that no new post-Soviet borders were set in stone. And Zelensky then said that regional agreements are off the table. But China wants to project the image of a peace broker to distract from its focus on Taiwan. He persuaded Iran and Saudi Arabia to restore their relations and invited Brazil to join the “peace club” to negotiate an end to the war.

Right or wrong, in the vacuum left by the paralyzed United Nations, China will have a role to play.

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Capital Economy, trade and finance

Cereal crazy
Two numbers correspond to 40,000 percent and 156 million euros. The first is to increase the amount of Ukrainian wheat Imported. to Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia in 2022 compared to last year. The second is the amount of money the EU is offering to fix the problem. When Russia invaded Ukraine and closed key Black Sea ports, the European Union lifted tariffs on Ukrainian agricultural exports and set up “Solidarity Lines” to transport goods across neighboring countries for good measure. However, due to transportation problems, the production has been stuck, causing price hikes for local farmers. Now the countries of Eastern Europe – except Romania – have imposed a ban on the import of Ukrainian products and are against the criticism of the group. As elections in Poland and Slovakia approach, the voices of farmers will continue to be heard. The danger is that they drown Ukraine.

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Technology AI, science and innovation

Reference wars
Last week, “Heart on My Sleeve,” featuring Drake and The Weeknd, racked up 10 million TikTok views and hundreds of thousands of streams. The problem: the artists didn’t write the song. The AI ​​did. Another problem is that technology companies are now moving quickly to compete with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, creating AI programs, but all of them are based on a wide range of other people’s creative and intellectual property that has been infringed on the Internet. Governments and creative industries are being forced to move at the same pace and thorny legal disputes are emerging. Historically an early mover on the technology, the EU is looking to add AI-generated content controls to its broader AI regulation bill. of WSJ it has Early view New language requiring companies to provide a “sufficiently detailed summary” of copyrighted material used in their systems for tools like ChatGPT. Not everyone is so concerned: Canadian singer Grimes says she’ll pay 50 percent of royalties on any successful AI-generated track featuring her voice.

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100 years of life Health, education and government

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Our planet Climate and geopolitics

The collapse of mining
This year’s Goldman Prize winner for environmental activism is Alessandra Corap Munduruku – a Brazilian-born leader who fought to drive the Anglo-American mining giant out of her home in the Amazon. Munduruku trained as a lawyer Honored To organize a successful campaign in my native states on company applications. Anglo-American finally gave in and withdrew their application in 2021, leaving 400,000 hectares of rainforest intact. Indigenous lands are home to 80 percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity, and their protection is essential to combating climate change. what did he do Letters and petitions instead of lying in front of the bulldozer.

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The identity and identity of the cultural community

Disagreement flows
Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman, was sitting on his mother’s porch April 13 reading a Bible moment before he was arrested for allegedly leaking classified documents, his attorneys said. But an 18-page file Released State prosecutors painted a less sane picture yesterday. Teixeira has a “disturbing” history of making racist and violent comments and was suspended from school in 2018 for comments about a Molotov cocktail. On Discord, the messaging platform where the classified information was leaked, he “had regular conversations about violence and murder, and kept several weapons in a gun locker two feet from his bed.” The local police rejected his application for a gun ID card in 2018 because of his behavior. It is not yet clear how he obtained a top secret security clearance that would later allow him access to classified documents.

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Number of days: 38 – The percentage of visits to the NHS website’s sexual health clinic search tool increases after bank holidays.

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Thanks for reading. Please ask your friends to register, send us an idea and tell us what you think. Email [email protected]

Giles Whittell
@GWhittell

Nina Curiata
@NinaKuryata

Additional reporting by Jess Winch, Catherine Nilan, Phoebe Davis and Anna Scott.

Photographs by Getty Images, Goldman Environmental Award, DCMS

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