Flagship

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won reelection, cementing an already tight grip on power. The opposition said the vote was not fair, but did not contest the result. Erdogan entering a third decade in office has huge implications abroad: The country is likely to “continue with its strategic semi-independence” between the West and Russia, but will probably lift its block on Sweden joining NATO, an Atlantic Council expert said. In his victory speech, Erdogan focused on Turkey’s economic malaise, labeling inflation his most urgent issue. It’s unclear whether he will stick with his unconventional — critics say illogical — economic strategy of keeping interest rates low to slow price rises. Markets were unimpressed, with Turkey’s lira falling to a record low this morning.

The White House and congressional leaders began selling a debt-ceiling deal they reached over the weekend to skeptical members of both parties. The two-year agreement raises the debt limit in return for curbs on spending and social-welfare programs, a compromise that allows U.S. President Joe Biden and House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy to claim victory while at the same time empowering progressives and conservatives to complain they each gave up too much. The deal is almost remarkable in its blandness, analysts said, with no significant reforms or concessions. The ultimate result, however, may “have been to make the U.S. look like a dysfunctional clown show in front of our allies,” the economist Noah Smith wrote.

U.S. patients face record drug shortages. Stocks of various cancer drugs, antibiotics, and other crucial treatments have been hit by a combination of supply-chain issues and economic problems. The challenge is especially acute with generic drugs, those for which the original patent has expired and can be made cheaply. Demand is high, doctors oversubscribe, FDA manufacturing licenses are difficult and expensive to gain, and three intermediary buyers dominate the market. Several U.S. manufacturers have shut down and the health care system is reliant on drugs from India and China.

Russian forces launched massive aerial strikes on Ukraine over the weekend, including the largest drone attack on Kyiv since the start of the war. Ukrainian officials said air-defense systems shot down the vast majority of the drones and missiles, but one person died after debris from a downed drone struck a residential building. Russia’s focus on Kyiv, rather than Ukraine’s infrastructure or military facilities, means Moscow has done little to degrade Ukraine’s offensive capabilities, the Institute for the Study of War said. The commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces posted a video on social media saying the time had come “to take back what belongs to us,” suggesting a highly-anticipated counteroffensive may be imminent.

Bola Tinubu took office as Nigeria’s president today, inheriting a complex set of problems in Africa’s most-populous country. Economic growth is slowing, unemployment is high, oil production has fallen, and security has worsened in recent years. Tinubu’s two main opponents are also challenging his election victory in court. Outgoing President Muhammadu Buhari “believes he is leaving the country better than he met it,” Premium Times wrote in an editorial. But “stark realities actually indicate the opposite.” There remains, however, huge potential: Nigeria’s population is young, its diaspora well-connected, and its natural resources plenty. “Nigeria’s position is not irretrievable,” analysts at the research firm Stears wrote. “But there is only a small window to begin the process.”

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s inauguration of the country’s new parliament building in New Delhi was mired in controversy. The building is part of a huge refashioning of India’s capital. The parliament’s lower chamber is designed in the likeness of a peacock, India’s national bird, and the upper chamber a lotus, the national flower. Opposition parties boycotted the event, arguing that Modi’s role was unconstitutional, and should have been performed by the president. Critics also said Hindu rituals conducted for the opening undermined India’s official secularism. “The starkly Hindu nature of the opening ceremony … points to one of [Modi’s] biggest successes,” the Indian journalist Shoaib Daniyal wrote: “The end of the multicultural secularism of Gandhi and Nehru.”

China’s first domestically-made passenger jet finally entered into commercial service, a huge step in the country’s protracted push to build a competitor to Boeing and Airbus. The C919, built by the state-owned company COMAC, carried more than 130 passengers from Shanghai to Beijing. “The C919 represents everything China wants to be,” The Wire China noted in a 2021 piece on the jet, ostensibly a rival to the Boeing 737 and the Airbus A320. “It’s big, powerful, high-tech, and capable of transporting the Chinese into the giddy heights of the global economy.” Yet it is not truly the home-built darling Beijing likes to portray: Many of its parts, including its engines, are produced and developed abroad.

U.S. and Mexican authorities asked the World Health Organization to declare a public health emergency triggered in part by Americans traveling south for cheap cosmetic surgery. Two people in the U.S. died of fungal meningitis and more than 200 others are at risk of infection, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. The outbreak is linked to two cosmetic surgery clinics in Matamoros, a city on the U.S.-Mexico border. According to Patients Beyond Borders, a consulting firm, some 1.2 million Americans traveled to Mexico for cheap cosmetic surgeries in 2019, often in border towns hotly contested by cartels. In March, two Americans traveling for cosmetic surgery were killed in Matamoros after they were mistaken for Haitian drug smugglers.

The director of the film awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival used her acceptance speech to criticize France’s president. Justine Triet’s prize-winning movie, Anatomy of a Fall, is a drama about a woman accused of her husband’s killing. On stage, she condemned French President Emmanuel Macron’s “shocking” response to protests against controversial pension reforms. She is the latest high-profile critic of Macron: A widely-shared comment piece in Le Temps this month argued France was “joining the camp of ‘illiberal’ democracies.” Macron was not as dangerous as Russian President Vladimir Putin or even Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it noted, but warned he was “laying the ground for their clone.”

A New York lawyer admitted to using ChatGPT for legal research, but only after he was found out thanks to mistakes the artificial-intelligence chatbot introduced. Steven Schwartz wrote a legal brief for a client suing an airline for personal injury, citing several prior cases that appeared to favor the plaintiff’s argument. But Schwartz used ChatGPT for legal research, and the chatbot — which offers warnings that the content it produces may “contain inaccurate information” — delivered examples that did not exist, and quotes that had never been uttered. "Six of the submitted cases appear to be bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations," the judge in the case said.