Inside politics
Xi and Trump in Beijing in 2017. Thomas Peter/Pool/Getty
The perils of superpower summits
At a secluded estate outside San Francisco in 2023, Xi Jinping had scarcely finished his lunch of herbed ricotta ravioli when his security detail âsprang into actionâ, says Lingling Wei in The Wall Street Journal. Their mission? To prevent any trace of the Chinese presidentâs DNA from falling into foreign hands. The dark-suited agents grabbed Xiâs plate and utensils and sprayed them down with an unidentified liquid. This is merely the sharp end of great-power diplomatic visits. As Xi prepares to welcome Donald Trump to China later this month, hundreds of government officials on both sides are racing to make sure the two leaders say the right thing, go to the right place and donât get poisoned.
A motorcade of presidential limousines â the heavily armoured âBeastsâ â will be shipped ahead and the Secret Service will arrive early to sweep venues for bugs, set up âeavesdrop-proof roomsâ and negotiate how many armed Americans can operate on Chinese soil. Menus will be pre-agreed down to the smallest ingredient. But there are some things no amount of planning can anticipate. When Barack Obama arrived in Hangzhou in 2016, he had to exit Air Force One via the planeâs own fold-out steps rather than the red-carpeted rolling staircase â the driver of the stair truck didnât speak English, so the Secret Service wouldnât let him pull alongside. And on Trumpâs last visit in 2017, his security detail got into a fistfight with Xiâs men in a corridor of the Great Hall of the People while the leaders were meeting inside. An American diplomat and his Chinese counterpart had to prise the combatants apart.
đ¨đłđާ During Xiâs 2023 visit to California, pro-China demonstrators with ties to Beijing lined the motorcade route waving Chinese flags the size of bedsheets. Behind them was âone of the largest groups of anti-Xi demonstrators in recent American memoryâ. Every time they waved one of their protest banners, up went the oversized flags to obstruct the view from Xiâs car, or any passing cameras.
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Heroes and villains
A robot releasing a treatment-resistant pathogen, as imagined by ChatGPT
Villain
An AI chatbot that gave a biosecurity expert detailed instructions on how to create a lethal superbug. David Relman, a Stanford microbiologist tasked with testing the unidentified large language model, says it told him how to modify an infamous pathogen so that it would become resistant to all known treatments, and even identified a security lapse in a large public transit system to help him release it. The company behind the bot added some safety guardrails, says The New York Times, but Relman âfelt they were insufficientâ.
Villains
Gloomy scientists, for putting a downer on everything with a study showing that the universe may end trillions of years sooner than expected. The astronomers, from the Donostia International Physics Centre in Spain, say the cosmos is already 41% through its lifespan and will eventually collapse in on itself in an implosion called the âBig Crunchâ. Though it wonât happen for another 19.5 billion years, so, as they say, âno need to cancel your summer holiday plansâ.
Thomas Samson/ AFP/Getty
Villain
A trainee bus driver in France who lost control of her vehicle and drove it straight into the Seine. The four people on board were rescued unharmed from the river 11 miles south of Paris. No word on whether the driver has been given her licence.
Villains
Online gamblers, who appear to have tampered with weather stations in France to make money from bets on the temperature. Three unidentified digital âwalletsâ made more than $280,000 wagering that the mercury would hit 19C on 15 April, which it did after the reading at Parisâs Charles de Gaulle airport unexpectedly spiked by 5C that evening. âWhat did you do to the temperature sensor?â one user asked another on a gambling social media channel. âWas your weapon of choice a hairdryer or a lighter?â
Inside politics
Jeff J Mitchell/Getty
The racist nutters standing for the Green Party
Support for the Green Party has doubled since Zack Polanski became leader in September, says John Rentoul in The Independent. Now itâs looking forward to making âstunning gainsâ in next weekâs local elections. YouGov projects that the Greens will take over four Labour strongholds in London â Hackney, Lambeth, Lewisham, Waltham Forest â and is within just five points of a majority in seven more. Polanskiâs party could match Labour in seat and vote share nationwide. The problem they face is that, like Reform UK, they have grown so fast they havenât had time to weed out the nutters and build a deep bench of competent administrators. Polanski might be buoyed by the results next week, but when his dodgy candidates start running actual councils, âthe air will come out of the Green balloonâ.
Dodgy is an understatement, says Andrew Gilligan in The Spectator. A shocking number of Green candidates have been found posting extremist content online without facing party censure. Saiqa Ali, whoâs running in Streatham, believes the government includes too many âZionist Jewsâ and that Donald Trump is âowned by Jewsâ. Not even bothering with the Z-word. âJust⌠Jews.â Another, standing in Blackheath, says we must âburn Zionism to the groundâ. A Lambeth candidate said recently that a terror attack on a synagogue was ânot anti-Semitismâ, but rather ârevengeâ against Israel. A candidate in Hackney says the mass murder, rape and abduction of innocent Israeli civilians on October 7 was just Palestinians âinevitablyâ trying to âdefend themselvesâ. A candidate in Bournemouth claims Zionists have âkilled 20 million Christiansâ. The Green Party claims it can prevent the rise of the far right. Yet parts of the Greens are the far right.
The Knowledge Crossword
On the money
Stanfordâs finest: Google founders Larry Page (L) and Sergey Brin. Kim Kulish/Corbis/Getty
Yacht parties, lavish dinners and âpre-idea fundingâ
For most students, says Theo Baker in The Atlantic, Stanford is a normal university where people go to lectures, drink coffee, fall in love and fear exams. But a select few experience something else: a âStanford inside Stanfordâ, where Silicon Valley investors ruthlessly pursue the teenagers with the most potential from the day they set foot on campus. They hand out mentorships, hard cash, and invitations to yacht parties and lavish dinners, with access determined by who you know and CV âstatus symbolsâ such as top summer fellowships. Once youâre in, things move quickly. Three days after one third-year student briefly chatted with a guy from a $150bn company, he was having coffee with the firmâs CEO and being offered a minimum $600,000 salary if he dropped out.
Sorting the students who can make it big from the âwantapreneursâ is the investorsâ main challenge. There are those who talk a good game and those who are actually âdoing cool thingsâ: building a robot that serves drinks at parties; developing technology to track space junk. These students know that even the most lighthearted exercise in creativity â a project theyâre tinkering with in their dorm, a corporate-sponsored hacking session â can be their ticket to earning epic riches before they can legally rent a car. The best of the best are handed âpre-idea fundingâ â hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions â even if they have no clue what they want to create. In this cosseted milieu, itâs âactions first, questions laterâ.
Weather
Quoted
âSeveral excuses are always less convincing than one.â
Aldous Huxley
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