Your Wednesday Briefing: E.U. Leaders Visit Kyiv
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Your Wednesday Briefing: E.U. Leaders Go to Kyiv

Posted on by Marc Barman

Good morning. We’re protecting a go to by three European leaders to Ukraine, the ripple results of China’s surge of Covid circumstances and a once-perilous highway in Afghanistan.

The prime ministers of the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovenia traveled by train to Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, on Tuesday to precise the European Union’s help for Ukraine. Subsequent week, President Biden will travel to Brussels to attend a particular NATO assembly concerning the warfare.

The Tuesday go to comes as preventing raged across the metropolis. Blasts shook Kyiv at daybreak, killing at least four people, the mayor stated. Follow live updates here.

Russia’s advance stays stalled on a number of fronts as Ukrainian forces repel assaults in components of the east and the south. However the Russian Protection Ministry claimed to have captured the entire Kherson region, after seizing the primary metropolis two weeks in the past.

Ukrainian resistance: The transfer probably strengthens Russia’s capability to push west towards Mykolaiv, a strategic port metropolis the place the morgue is already overflowing. Our correspondent and photographer reported from Mykolaiv on a “refusal to succumb” by Ukrainian fighters and residents.

The regional governor, Vitaliy Kim, predicted that any Russian effort to take Mykolaiv would result in a bloody firefight. Residents have piled tires and incendiary bombs on each road nook. It could be apocalyptic, Kim stated.

Extra updates:

Oil costs dropped below $100 a barrel on Tuesday, the bottom costs in weeks, as a coronavirus outbreak in China threatened to sluggish the nation’s economic system and reduce international demand. Over the previous week, crude oil costs have plunged by greater than 20 p.c, reversing a lot of the surge that got here after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The worldwide financial hurt attributable to China’s rise in Covid circumstances — and the federal government’s robust response — may quickly worsen. Quite a few lockdowns and mitigation techniques have disrupted the production of goods like automobiles, iPhone circuit boards and pc cables.

Context: China’s strict measures come as another nations within the Asia-Pacific area are easing pandemic rules, regardless of seeing a few of the world’s steepest spikes in Covid circumstances.

Listed here are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic.

In different developments:

Earlier than the Taliban took management of Afghanistan, a visit alongside the highway from Kabul to Kandahar was harmful. Gunfire, roadside bombs, extortion and dying had been as soon as rampant.

Not anymore. The freeway between the nation’s two largest cities, nonetheless dotted with destroyed autos and bullet-ridden houses, has come back to life. Grape farmers dig their fields in what was one of the crucial violent provinces within the warfare. Younger males snigger and play volleyball close to the highway.

However the price of U.S. sanctions is clear alongside the freeway, which is half-paved and half-gnarled nonetheless. In Ghazni, a metropolis alongside the highway, costs for gadgets like cooking oil have skyrocketed. Persons are touring to Pakistan, looking for medical care. And outdoors Kabul, a 12-year-old boy pried aside previous obstacles to make a rooster coop. “We’re hungry,” he stated.

Because the world warms, Switzerland’s glaciers are melting. A workforce of cartographers are racing to correct the ever-changing mountain maps — a activity they usually must do by hand.

In March 2021, the school basketball participant Sedona Prince posted a TikTok video.

“That is our weight room,” she stated, pointing at a sorry stack of hand weights on the N.C.A.A. ladies’s basketball match. “Let me present y’all the lads’s weight room,” she says, panning throughout a state-of-the artwork gymnasium for the lads’s match, full of machines and benches.

Prince’s video instantly went viral. It additionally led to a gender-equity review in school basketball and to modifications within the ladies’s occasion, together with branding the match with the moniker March Insanity. The N.C.A.A. had beforehand resisted such a transfer.

“Each funds line is in contrast and contrasted,” stated Dan Gavitt, the N.C.A.A.’s senior vp for basketball. “The place there are variations, they’re resolved within the title of fairness.”

Prince completed final March what generations earlier than her couldn’t: She confirmed the disparity between the tournaments in a means that couldn’t be defined away.

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