👋 Konta!*
Welcome to Tuesday, where Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan is sentenced to 10 additional years in jail over the leaking of state secrets, Gazans are forced to flee more Israeli bombings and Toyota holds onto the No. 1 slot. Meanwhile, for French business daily Les Echos, Gabriel Grésillon digs into the roots of the farmer revolt that has engulfed France.
[*Papiamento, Dutch Caribbean]
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🗞️ FRONT PAGE
“Fasten your seatbelts,” titles Rosario-based daily El Ciudadano, featuring a photoshopped image of Argentine President Javier Milei to depict his efforts to pass the so-called “omnibus law,” i.e. sweeping economic reforms which sparked massive protests across the country last week. While changes have been made to soften the proposed deregulation package, the bill is expected to be discussed at the Chamber of Deputies on Wednesday. Read more about Javier Milei here.
🌎 7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW
• Israel says commandos kill 3 militants in Jenin hospital raid: Israeli authorities said that commandos disguised as Palestinians killed three gunmen on Tuesday in a hospital in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin. Meanwhile in the northern Gaza Strip, Israeli and Hamas forces fought battles, forcing more Palestinian residents to flee to safer areas, as southern parts of the coastal enclave were also hit by Israeli air strikes.
• Pakistan former Prime Minister Imran Khan sentenced for leaking state secrets: Imran Khan, Pakistan’s former prime minister who is already serving a three-year jail term for corruption, has now been sentenced to 10 years in prison over the leaking of state secrets. The conviction under the secrets act comes the week before general elections in which the popular former cricket player is barred from standing.
• North Korea fires cruise missiles in third test in less than a week: North Korea has fired multiple unidentified cruise missiles into the sea off its west coast, South Korea said Tuesday. It is the third such test in less than a week. North Korean cruise missile activities, unlike their ballistic counterparts, aren't directly banned under current UN sanctions, but the tests are another sign of rising tensions in the region in recent months.
• Hong Kong to create own national security law: Four years after China imposed a strict national security law on Hong Kong, the territory’s leader says the time has come for the city to pass its own version. Current Chief Executive of Hong Kong John Lee, known for his pro-Beijing stance, said the new laws will cover treason, insurrection, espionage, theft of state secrets, foreign influence and interference, and sabotage, including the use of computers and electronic systems to conduct acts that endanger national security.
• Northern Ireland political party agrees to end 2-year boycott that brought down government: After a late-night meeting, Democratic Unionist Party leader Jeffrey Donaldson said that the party’s executive members have agreed to end a boycott that left the region’s people without a power-sharing administration for two years.
• Most and least corrupt countries revealed: Transparency International’s latest country rankings on corruption levels reveal that Western Europe has dropped drastically in its regional average score, due to checks and balances weakened and political integrity eroded. Still, according to the report, the world's least corrupt country remains Denmark, while Somalia is ranked the most corrupt for the second straight year.
• Russian ice-skating Olympic gold doping drama: The Court of Arbitration for Sport has banned Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva from the sport until 2025 over doping violation, and stripped her of any awards she won since late 2021 — including the gold medal Valieva earned in the team event at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, where she’d been allowed to compete while her failed drug test was being investigated. Meaning that nearly two years after the competition, the gold medal will be re-awarded to Team USA who had placed second.
#️⃣ BY THE NUMBERS
11.2 million
Toyota Motor announced it sold a record 11.2 million vehicles in 2023, keeping its crown as the world’s top-selling automaker for the fourth consecutive year thanks to a recovery in demand and easing semiconductor shortages. The Japanese automaker, which reported an increase of 7.2% in global sales last year, is followed by Germany's Volkswagen Group and South Korea's Hyundai-Kia. The announcement came as Toyota Motor’s chairman issued an apology for “successive irregularities” at three group companies.
📰 STORY OF THE DAY
At the source of France's farmer revolt: drought, butterflies, marginalization
Haute-Garonne is the starting point of the movement that is now engulfing the entire industry. For French business daily Les Echos, Gabriel Grésillon reports on farmers on the front line of a crisis that has gone national.
🚜 In the improvised conversations between the tractors blocking the highway, the same words come up again and again. Topics that have since been the subject of commitments from the new French Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal. They complain about the price of farm diesel, which is putting a strain on budgets. CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) subsidies from the European Union that are being eroded. The explosion in production costs, while grain prices have eased — and no shortage of rants against supermarket profits.
💧 But certain issues take on a particular resonance in this department of Haute-Garonne, where the average income of farmers, at around 5,000 euros a year, is among the lowest in France. First and foremost, the question of irrigation. The region has a front-row seat to global warming, experiencing not only rising temperatures but also a shift towards a much drier climate. The year 2022, in particular, resulted in a serious drought and a drop in yields for many crops. Water shortages and the rising cost of water are a direct impact of climate change on the viability of running a farm in France today.
🌾 Are environmental regulations putting French agriculture at risk? According to François Purseigle, professor of sociology at the Toulouse School of Agronomy, the current crisis is driven by “those who see themselves dying.” He says the region’s enthusiasm for organic farming production may have backfired: “Occitanie was the first region in France to invest in this transition.” By 2021, the Occitanie region will have almost 20% of its farmland in organic production, around twice the national average. It's a costly intervention that is not paying off.
➡️ Read more on Worldcrunch.com
📹 THIS HAPPENED VIDEO — TODAY IN HISTORY, IN ONE ICONIC PHOTO
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📣 VERBATIM
“The first human received an implant from Neuralink yesterday and is recovering well.”
— Tech billionaire Elon Musk claimed in a post on X that his company Neuralink has successfully implanted one of its wireless brain chips in a human, adding that “initial results show promising neuron spike detection.” The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had given the startup clearance last year to conduct its first trial to test its implant on humans. With its first product called Telepathy, Neuralink ambitions to connect human brains to computers to help tackle complex neurological conditions as well as allowing users to control electronic devices “just by thinking.”
👉 MORE FROM WORLDCRUNCH
• Radicalized Balochs, And The Risk Of An Iran-Pakistan Conflagration — DARAJ
• Charges Against The UN In Gaza Are Grave — But The West's Response Is All Wrong — FRANCE INTER
• Kindergarten And Separation: A Father’s Account Of A Difficult Week — RECALCULATING
✍️ Newsletter by Agnese Tonghini and Anne-Sophie Goninet
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