World in Brief - The Economist Roundup

 

World in Brief

The Economist Roundup

Marching for Gaza, and against Biden

Buses from as far as Minneapolis and Houston are heading to America’s capital on Saturday. They will ferry protesters to the “March on Washington for Gaza”, which will end near the White House. Organisers expect more than 10,000 people to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to American military aid to Israel.

In Congress the vast majority does not approve of a ceasefire. But as civilian casualties and suffering in Gaza reach ever ghastlier levels, patience with Joe Biden’s administration is wearing thin within his own party. This week more than a dozen Democrats in the Senate vowed to block the president’s request to send arms to Israel without alerting Congress. Democratic voters are also among Mr Biden’s harshest critics. A Gallup poll published on January 5th found that 40% of them believe that America supports Israel too much. Nearly half (against just 16% of Republicans) thought it supported Palestinians too little.

Taiwan chooses a new leader

Polls closed in Taiwan on Saturday, following elections for a new president as well as lawmakers for its 113-seat parliament, the Legislative Yuan. The result will have global repercussions. An increasingly belligerent China claims Taiwan as its own and refuses to rule out the use of military force to retake it, while America sells the diplomatically isolated democracy weapons to defend itself.

If the presidency goes to the current frontrunner, Lai Ching-te of the independence-minded Democratic Progressive Party, the prospects for peaceful unification would look remote. Beijing might stage new military exercises to threaten Taiwan. In contrast, Mr Lai’s rivals, Hou Yu-ih of the Kuomintang and especially Ko Wen-je of the Taiwan People’s Party, want to restart dialogue with Beijing, which would superficially smooth tensions. All three candidates, however, agree that Taiwan’s defences must be strengthened and American ties kept strong. Whoever wins faces a high-stakes balancing act.

The world is heating up

Several datasets released this week agree that 2023 was the hottest year on record by a large margin. It was probably a record for the last 100,000 years.

Britain’s Met Office found that the world was 1.46°C warmer in 2023 than the average for 1850-1900. Berkeley Earth, a research organisation, found a value of 1.54°C. The differences are largely down to how the preindustrial average was calculated. Accounting for data and analyses from these and three other climate agencies and research groups, the World Meteorological Organisation landed on an overall temperature increase of 1.45°C, give or take 0.12°C. Governments say they do not want to exceed an average rise of 1.5°C average over one or two decades.

Greenhouse-gas emissions caused by humans are responsible for most of the increase. El Niño, a natural climatic cycle, amplified the trend. There was also unexplained “weirdness”, in particular an unusually hot North Atlantic, the drivers of which are still being studied. That weirdness makes projections for 2024 tricky.

To become great African football needs more competition

African football is doing well: in 2021 there were more than 500 African players in the top divisions of European leagues. Meanwhile, the Guardian rates two African players—Egypt’s Mo Salah (pictured) and Nigeria’s Victor Osimhen— among the world’s top ten. The continent’s finest will compete in the African Cup of Nations tournament, which begins on Saturday in the Ivory Coast.

But there is little sign of African national teams’ displacing the best sides from elsewhere in the world. Only two African countries rank in FIFA’s top 20, compared with 11 from Europe and four from South America. This is partly because so many players of African heritage opt to play for European countries. According to research from Harvard University, African teams also suffer from playing few matches against the world’s best. An expanded World Cup of 48 teams in 2026 will include at least four more African sides. But what they really need is more competitive matches outside the tournament.

Weekend profile: Gabrial Attal, France’s new prime minister

If Gabriel Attal’s precocious political ascent feels familiar to the French, then that echo is the point. On January 9th Emmanuel Macron, who in 2017 seized the presidency aged 39, appointed the 34-year-old Mr Attal prime minister. He is the youngest occupant of the top government job in modern French history. For Mr Macron, the move marks a return to the original spirit of his centrist political project to, quite literally, modernise and rejuvenate France.

Raised in leafy Paris quartiers, Mr Attal grew up in an arty bourgeois family. His father, who died in 2015, was a film producer of Jewish-Tunisian origins; his mother, who has Russian-Orthodox roots, also works in film. Mr Attal enjoyed the best of the capital’s elite education (Ecole Alsacienne, Sciences-Po university, Assas law school). Unlike Mr Macron, however, Mr Attal is not a graduate of the technocratic Ecole Nationale d’Administration. Fans call him smart, hard-working, a fast learner and pragmatic; critics say he lacks a solid ideological underpinning and is untested as a top-level manager. Re-elected as a member of parliament in 2022, and already a two-time cabinet minister, Mr Attal first became a household name in France when he was appointed government spokesman in 2020. Punchy in television studios, but with a simple charm and linguistic clarity that sometimes eludes his boss, Mr Attal is a product of la Macronie: the group of young, mostly centre-left reformists who gravitated to Mr Macron before he won power. He even shares his boss’s taste for a dark narrow-legged suit.

To understand Mr Attal, says a colleague, you need to realise that “he was born to be a politician”. In an archive TV interview as a student, in which Mr Attal speaks with preternatural fluency, a fellow student quips “Gaby, president!…He’s the future!” No sooner had Mr Attal been appointed prime minister than he was off to northern France to console flood victims. The new prime minister also happens to be gay, and last year recounted how he had been bullied at school over his sexuality, before he was even sure of it himself. The risk for Mr Attal, who enjoys far better poll ratings than his boss, is that he has been over-promoted. The risk for Mr Macron is that his protégé outshines him.

 

America launched further strikes against the Houthis, an Iran-backed Yemeni militant group which has been attacking cargo ships in the Red Sea. The new strikes targeted a Houthi radar facility. America and Britain carried out joint attacks against the group early on Friday. Mass demonstrations took place in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, in response and the Houthis promised to retaliate, saying there would be a “heavy price” for the strikes. They also said that the strikes had been ineffective.

 

Polls closed in Taiwan, after a day of elections for a new president and lawmakers for the country’s parliament. More than 19m people were eligible to cast their votes—which will be counted and tallied by hand over the next few hours. The presidential vote is expected to be close; it has been a tight race between the three candidates contesting the election.

 

Microsoft surpassed Apple to become the world’s most valuable public company. Microsoft was valued at $2.89trn as markets closed on Friday; Apple at $2.87trn. The iPhone-maker has been the most valuable listed firm for most of the past 12 years. But Microsoft’s investments in artificial intelligence have helped it catch up. The software giant last closed above Apple in 2021.

 

Israel delivered its defence at the International Court of Justice against a charge of committing genocide in Gaza. Israel said that the case put forward by South Africa on Thursday presented a “distorted factual and legal picture”, ignoring the lethal attacks which Hamas, a militant group, carried out on October 7th. Israel vehemently denies South Africa’s charge, arguing that it is fighting a war of self-defence.

 

The world’s biggest copper supplier, Codelco, reported a drop in output to the lowest level in a quarter of a century. Over the past year, Chile’s state-owned mining giant faced accidents and delays to key upgrades at its mines. Ruben Alvarado, who took over as chief executive last year, hopes that reforms to Codelco’s management will help reverse the company’s fortunes.

 

The World Health Organisation declared Cape Verde free of malaria. The country is only the third in Africa to rid itself of the mosquito-borne disease, after Mauritius in 1973 and Algeria in 2019. Cape Verde’s government launched its malaria action plan in 2007, to diagnose and treat the illness comprehensively, including by offering free services to travellers to the archipelago from mainland Africa.