Good morning. We’re talking about the end of Roe v. Wade, a G7 summit on Ukraine, and an inquiry into China’s surveillance state.
President Biden said the countries would ban the import of Russian gold. The leaders are also expected to discuss possible attempts to tighten sanctions against Russian oil.
Energy: The battle to replace Russian fossil fuels could jeopardize hard-won climate goals. EU leaders rush to prepare for a winter of fuel shortages.
To fight: Ukrainian troops will withdraw from the main eastern city of Sievierodonetsk, where about 90 percent of the city’s buildings have been destroyed. And the mayor of Mykolaiv, a ravaged southern city that has embodied Ukraine’s never-say-die spirit, urged residents to leave.
Diplomacy: G7 leaders have devised a new plan to counter China’s growing influence from its Belt-and-Road initiative. They also invited five non-member states to attend, in an effort to strengthen relations with countries they fear could end up in the orbits of China and Russia.
For more than a year, they analyzed more than 100,000 government bidding documents, detailing the surveillance technology and software and explaining the strategic thinking behind the purchases.
The reporters found that China’s ambition to collect a staggering amount of digital and biological data from its citizens is more extensive and far-reaching than previously known. Here are four takeaways from the survey and a 14-minute video.
cameras: These form the basis of the Chinese surveillance state, which passes data to analytical software that can tell a person’s race and gender and whether they are wearing glasses or masks. All this data is stored on government servers.
Phones: Authorities use phone trackers to link people’s digital lives to their identities and physical movements.
Profiles: DNA, iris scan samples, and voiceprints are randomly collected from non-crime individuals to build comprehensive citizen profiles.
Artificial intelligence: The latest technology promises to predict or detect crimes, such as alerting officers when a person with a history of mental illness approaches a school, or alerting authorities if a marriage is suspicious.
THE LAST NEWS
Asia-Pacific
Beijing isn’t known for its natural refuges – or bending the rules. But ‘wild swimming’ in the city’s lakes and waterways continues to attract stubborn swimmers, despite attempts by authorities to curb the practice. Interest only grew during the pandemic.
ART AND IDEAS
The Complex Heroines of Japan
At a time of widespread debate over the portrayal of women in film, top Japanese animators work in a long tradition of complex and layered heroines.
Directors like Mamoru Hosoda work with smaller budgets than their American counterparts and offer personal visions. His film Belle, available on major platforms, is inspired by Beauty and the Beast, but the heroine writes deep, complex music about her grief at the loss of her mother. The main character of the Disney version never mentions her mother. Neither does Jasmine in ‘Aladdin’.
Author Makoto Shinkai broke box office records in Japan in 2016 with “Your Name,” which begins as a body-swapping teen rom-com but evolves into a meditation on the trauma many Japanese still suffer after the earthquake and tsunami of 2011 and the fear of displacement that those tragedies brought with them.
And Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away” — arguably Japan’s most famous animated film — grew out of his dissatisfaction with the superficial entertainment offered to teenage girls. “I wanted the main character to be a typical girl that a 10-year-old would recognize themselves in,” Miyazaki said.
“She shouldn’t be an extraordinary person, but an everyday, real person – although this kind of character is harder to create,” he continued via a translator. “It wouldn’t be a story in which the character grows up, but a story in which she draws on something already inside her that comes out through the special circumstances.”
