👋 Sawubona!*
Welcome to Wednesday, where the U.S. has paused some weapons shipments to Israel as the CIA director tries to seal a ceasefire, Russia strikes Ukrainian energy facilities and the death toll in floods in southern Brazil keep rising. Elsewhere, we feature a long read on the many benefits of smiling, which some researchers say boosts life expectancy.
[*Zulu - South Africa]
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🗞️ FRONT PAGE
The Jiefang Daily, the official daily newspaper of the Shanghai committee of the Chinese Communist Party, dedicates its front page to the ongoing European tour of President Xi Jinping. After a session of meetings in Paris dominated by trade disputes and Russia's war in Ukraine, this second day saw French President Emmanuel Macron taking Xi to the Tourmalet Pass in the French Pyrenees mountains near the Spanish border, where he spent time as a child visiting his grandmother. They tasted local delicacies such as cheese, ham and armagnac liquor. Xi described this day as “unforgettable.” The Chinese leader arrived in Serbia on Wednesday, ahead of a visit to Hungary. Here’s a French analysis of Xi’s attempts to conquer and divide in Europe.
🌎 7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW
• The U.S. interrupted arms shipments to Israel to try to limit Rafah attack. The administration of President Joe Biden is trying to avoid a full-scale assault on the southern Gaza city, a day after a targeted Israeli incursion there. Meanwhile Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is meeting CIA director William Burns, who is in the region to try to seal a ceasefire deal.
• Russia launched its biggest air strike on Ukraine in weeks. The pre-dawn attacks Wednesday targeted energy facilities, inflicting serious damage to three Soviet-era thermal power plants, Kyiv officials said. Ukraine also reported that its intelligence agency had uncovered a network of Russian spies who were plotting to assassinate President Volodymyr Zelensky and other high-ranking officials in Ukraine. Two Ukrainian colonels were detained, suspected of leaking classified information to Russia.
• North Macedonia holds national elections that may determine its future in Europe. Polls predict a victory for nationalist party VMRO-DPMNE, which could spark tensions with neighboring Greece and Bulgaria, both European Union member states, and further slow North Macedonia’s longstanding ambition to join the EU.
• TikTok has sued the U.S. government over the new law forcing its Chinese owner to sell. The holding company ByteDance has been targeted by a new ban in the United States that cites national security concerns. TikTok said the law violated the First Amendment by forcing the removal of an app that millions of Americans use to communicate freely. Legal experts say the case is likely to end up in the Supreme Court.
• AstraZeneca is taking its COVID-19 vaccine off the market. Citing declining demand and surplus of newer vaccines, the UK-Swedish pharmaceutical giant has begun the worldwide withdrawal of the jab that was among the first to market after the global pandemic began.
• A security guard was shot outside Drake’s Toronto home, amid feud with rival rapper. Police have not provided a motive in the non-fatal shooting early Tuesday, though speculation is linking it to an ongoing feud between the Canadian artist and another rapper, Kendrick Lamar.
• King Charles doesn’t have time to meet Prince Harry. The U.S.-based second-born son of the British monarch is visiting the UK on Wednesday for the 10th anniversary celebrations of the Invictus Games. His father’s appointments agenda is apparently too full to meet Harry, whose office released a statement: “The duke of course is understanding of his father’s diary of commitments and various other priorities and hopes to see him soon.”
#️⃣ BY THE NUMBERS
1.58°C
Last April was the hottest on record worldwide, according to new data from Copernicus, the European Union’s climate monitoring service. Last month was 1.58 degrees Celsius (34.84 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the average April in the era before industrialization. This new high marks the 11th consecutive month of unprecedented global temperatures and some scientists are already predicting that 2024 could beat 2023 as the warmest year on record.
📰 STORY OF THE DAY
Smile, it may help you live longer
Even more so than laughter, smiling is the human trait par excellence. It’s a real language — but can we learn to understand it? Or to cultivate it? The rewards could be high, and not just to boost morale: Smiling could increase life expectancy, writes Stefano Lupieri in French daily Les Echos.
😁 This expression can translate many emotions other than joy and benevolence. Just think of all the adjectives that can be attached to a smile: innocent, mysterious, knowing, pinched, ironic, mocking, toothy, murderous, seductive, smug and the list goes on! “It’s a real language. At the same time sober and subtle,” anthropologist David Le Breton says. Far from being less important than laughter, smiling deserves, even more than laughter does, to be considered a human attribute.
🔍 If we accept that a smile is polysemous, we can also understand that it can be equivocal. Can we learn to decipher its meaning? The hard sciences, which took an interest in the subject long before the social sciences, claim that it is. A pioneer in the therapeutic use of electricity, the French neurologist Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne even drew up a catalog of 19 smiles in the 19th century. According to him, only six of these conveyed a feeling of pleasure or happiness.
🧠 We now know that smiling stimulates the areas of the brain associated with reward circuits. And that it lowers levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. It slows the heart rate and lowers blood pressure. Two recent studies have even shown that this beneficial effect holds true even when we smile mechanically, though more modestly — it’s as if the simple act of mobilizing one of the 15 muscles involved in smiling sends a positive signal to the brain.
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📹 THIS HAPPENED VIDEO — TODAY IN HISTORY, IN ONE ICONIC PHOTO
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📣 VERBATIM
“Young girls, young boys, there’s nothing about the Scout oath or a law that is inherently masculine or inherently feminine.”
— During a press conference, Bob Brady, a New Jersey attorney and father of two female Eagle Scouts, saluted the historic decision of the Boy Scouts of America organization to change its name to “Scouting America” in an effort to be officially more inclusive — and boost recruitment. Brady founded a local all-girls Scouting troop as soon as the organization announced girls were allowed to join the program in 2018. Currently under a $2.4 billion bankruptcy reorganization plan, the organization currently services just over 1 million youths, including more than 176,000 girls and young women. For more, here’s a viewpoint from Portugal on the status of women’s rights in 2024.
✍️ Newsletter by Laure Gautherin
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