👋 Chào!*
Welcome to Friday, where a tech outage causes travel and business chaos around the world, Yemen’s Houthis claim responsibility for a drone attack in Tel Aviv and Volodymyr Zelensky says Ukraine is prepared for a possible Trump return to the White House. Meanwhile, Marcelo Elizondo in Buenos Aires-based daily Clarín looks at the trade ramifications of South America’s increasing dependence on Asian exports.
[*Vietnamese]
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🗞️ FRONT PAGE
Colombian newspaper El Espectador discusses the role that the “La Niña” climate phenomenon will play in the next two months in intensifying the effects of Colombia’s rainy season. According to the Medellín-based daily, 5,000 floods are expected to hit the country in the coming months, as the probability of the phenomenon occurring between July and September is estimated by authorities between 75 and 85%. Colombia was hit by heavy rains in May for the first time this year, resulting in at least 13 deaths. Here’s a German article from last year that calls into question some of the links made between extreme weather and climate change.
🌎 7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW
• Global IT outage causes chaos. A massive technology outage has disrupted businesses and institutions in multiple countries, throwing airports, airlines, rail companies, government services, banks, stock exchanges, supermarkets, telecoms, health systems and media outlets into chaos. The cause of the outage was not immediately clear, but it came hours after Microsoft said it was addressing an issue affecting access to Microsoft 365 apps and services.
• Yemen’s Houthis claim responsibility for deadly Tel Aviv drone attack. The Yemen-based Houthi militant group said they had attacked Tel Aviv on Friday with a drone and vowed to continue targeting Israel in solidarity with the Palestinians in the Gaza war. One person was killed and 10 others were injured by shrapnel.
• Trump accepts Republican nominee, pressure increases on Biden. Donald Trump pitched a message of unity and strength as he accepted the Republican presidential nomination for the third time on Thursday night. He told the crowd in detail about the recent assassination attempt, suggesting he had been saved by divine intervention. Meanwhile, Joe Biden's campaign faced further pressure from Barack Obama about the presidential election, with polls suggesting Donald Trump was pulling ahead.
• Bangladesh issues high security alert as protests escalate. This comes as violent clashes between students and police continue against quotas for government jobs that have killed nearly two dozen people this week. The capital Dhaka is in the midst of a near-total internet blackout, with phone lines also down.
• South Korea makes North Korean defector vice minister. Former North Korean diplomat Tae Yong-ho has been named the new leader of South Korea's presidential advisory council on unification. This makes him the highest-ranking defector among the thousands who have resettled in the South, and the first to be given such a high-ranking job. Earlier this week, Seoul's spy agency confirmed another high-profile defection of a former diplomat most recently stationed in Cuba.
• Russian court to rule on U.S. reporter Gershkovich. A Russian court unexpectedly said on Friday it would pronounce its verdict in the espionage trial of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich within hours after state prosecutors demanded he be jailed for 18 years for spying. He is the first U.S. journalist arrested on spying charges in Russia since the Cold War.
• Journalist told to pay damages for mocking Italian PM's height. An Italian journalist has been ordered to pay Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni damages of €5,000 ($5,440) over social media posts making fun of her height. A judge ruled that two tweets by Giulia Cortese, who was also handed a suspended fine were defamatory and amounted to “body shaming.” It followed an exchange in which Cortese described Meloni as a “little woman” and told her: “I can’t even see you.”
#️⃣ BY THE NUMBERS
17.78 million
Foreign entries in Japan over the first six months of 2024 passed by 1 million the number of visitors recorded in 2019, offering a much needed boost to the East Asian country’s economy. A driver of this renewed tourism wave is a weak yen vis-à-vis other currencies, especially the euro and the dollar: this makes goods in Japan cheaper to foreigners, increasing their purchasing power. For more about tourism — and risks of overtourism! — check out this recent Worldcrunch piece.
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📰 STORY OF THE DAY
Why trade with China weakens Mercosur — and how South Americans only make it worse
Asia and above all China, have shown how the size of a market can drive state relations, and nowhere is this truer than in the Mercosur bloc's increasing dependence on Asian exports. But regional integration in South America is stalling, as Argentina and Brazil are in another nasty spat, writes Marcelo Elizondo in Buenos Aires-based daily Clarín.
🇦🇷🇧🇷 The current strained relations between Argentina and Brazil may hide a problem about the region that goes deeper — and wider. Argentina's scarce participation in the July 8 Mercosur summit is the latest sign of the South American trading bloc's precarious state. The absence of the Argentine president, Javier Milei, and resurgent political divisions between the two neighbors are part of a bigger and so far irreversible reality: That Mercosur is more a source of discord than unity.
📉 Over the past decade, Argentinian exports to Mercosur countries have fallen in value by $10 billion (dropping from $23 billion in 2023 to $13 billion today). In 2013, 28% of our exports were to Mercosur states, compared with 20% more recently. As the mathematician William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) observed, if you can say it in numbers, you're closer to the answer. The bloc has effectively lost its treaty provision of the “free circulation of goods, services and productive factors between [members] by means including the elimination of customs rights and non-excise restrictions.”
⚖️ Bloc members have likewise forgotten their commitment to harmonize their laws “in pertinent areas, to [help strengthen] the integration process.” The bloc is riddled with restrictive customs, technical and administrative norms, not to mention taxes inside countries that hamper trade. Add to this the failure to impose a single, external tariff and forge a single external trade policy (with members implementing their own rules as they ramp up external trade)
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📣 VERBATIM
“Trump would be hard work, but we are hard workers.”
— In an interview with the BBC, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signaled his country’s readiness to work with whoever is at the helm of the U.S. “Maybe [Trump] really doesn’t care, but we have to work with the United States,” Zelensky said, despite public disagreements between the two leaders on how to bring an end to the war with Russia.
👉 MORE FROM WORLDCRUNCH
• Christian Salafism? What Egypt's Fundamentalist Copts Share With Radical Islam — AL-MANASSA
• What The Ancient Sanskrit "Yayati Syndrome" Says About Why Old Men Cling To Power — THE WIRE
• How Grown Children Of Narcissist Parents Can Break Free, Finally — CLARÍN
✍️ Newsletter by Emma Albright and Fabrizio La Rocca
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