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In The News

Shinzo Abe Shot Dead, Ukraine-Dominated Bali Summit, Tiny-Armed Dino

A man walks past a destroyed residential area in the city of Borodyanka, northwest of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv

A man walks past a destroyed residential area in the city of Borodyanka, northwest of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv

McKenna Johnson, Lila Paulou, Lisa Berdet, Anne-Sophie Goninet and Bertrand Hauger

👋 Rojbaş!*

Welcome to Friday, where Japan’s ex-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has died after he was shot during a campaign speech, Derek Chauvin is sentenced to 21 years in jail for the murder of George Floyd, and there’s a new T-Rex-like dinosaur in town. We also have our latest edition of LGBTQ+ International, featuring (among other things) cross-border Indigenous Pride and a heartwarming airborne proposal.

[*Northern Kurdish]

✅  SIGN UP

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🌎  7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW

• Japan ex-PM Shinzo Abe shot dead at meeting: Japan’s former prime minister Shinzo Abe has died after he was shot at twice during a political campaign event in the southern city of Nara. The 41-year-old shooter, who used a handmade gun and is believed to have served in Japan’s navy, is being held in custody.

The war in Ukraine dominates G20 foreign ministers talks: At the G20 foreign ministers summit in Bali, Indonesia, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov condemned attendants’ “frenzied criticism” of the war in Ukraine instead of dealing with the world economy. His U.S. counterpart Anthony Blinken urged him to let Ukrainian grain out of the country, and Lavrov was criticized by Germany’s Annalena Baerbock for leaving sessions early or not attending, thus blocking dialogue.

• Race for new British PM begins: A dozen candidates, ranging from senior figures to lesser known members of parliament, have shown interest in replacing Boris Johnson as Conservative leader and Prime Minister following his resignation. While the process could take weeks or months, Johnson’s opponents have urged him to leave office immediately.

• Derek Chauvin sentenced to jail: Derek Chauvin, the U.S. police officer whose murder of George Floyd prompted the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, has been sentenced to 21 years in jail for violating Floyd’s civil rights.

• Beijing imposes vaccine mandate: Beijing has introduced a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for residents to enter public venues such as cinemas, museums, stadiums and gyms. The measure, which will be effective from July 11, is an attempt to contain a highly contagious Omicron subvariant and is the first mandate of this kind in a city in mainland China.

• Sepp Blatter and Platini not guilty: FIFA’s former president Sepp Blatter and French football legend Michel Platini have been found not guilty of corruption by a Swiss Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona. They faced up to five years in jail for fraud and forgery charges.

• New dinosaur species discovered: Archeologists in Patagonia, Argentina, have discovered a new species of dinosaur that they called Meraxes Gigas. The impressive specimen was 36-feet long and weighed more than four tons, but had tiny arms like those of a Tyrannosaurus rex.

🗞️  FRONT PAGE

Japan’s Hokkaido Shimbun has issued a special edition of its daily newspaper to report on the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The 67-year-old politician was shot twice while giving a speech at a campaign event, in the southern city of Nara.

#️⃣  BY THE NUMBERS

£1,482,000

A one-off recording, made in March 2021, of Bob Dylan’s hit song “Blowin’ in the Wind” sold for almost £1.5m ($1.75m) at auction by Christie’s in London on Thursday. It is the first new studio recording of the song since it was written in 1962, and it was made with T Bone Burnett, Dylan’s longtime collaborator. The recording was offered on Ionic Original, a new high-end audio medium consisting of lacquer painted onto an aluminum disc.

📰  STORY OF THE DAY

LGBTQ+ International: Lebanon crackdown, 50 years of London Pride — and the week’s other top news

Indigenous pride, a Ukrainian drag queen carpenter, an in-flight, same-sex marriage proposal, and plenty of other stories from around the world are featured in our latest edition of LGBTQ+ International.

🇧🇴🇦🇷 The first International March of Sexual and Gender Diversity was celebrated in the border cities of Villazón, Bolivia and La Quiaca, Argentina. Indigenous communities were front and center at an event demanding basic human rights. "We were all dark skinned marching and that was the most beautiful thing, breaking the borders with indigenous queerness," activist Alexis Méndez told Agencia Presentes. Rosalinda Ancasi, the first openly trans woman from La Quiaca and co-organizer of the event, said the aim of the weekend march on the border was to “help us achieve greater visibility and our demands gain strength.”

⚰️ Artur Ozerov from Kyiv is one of hundreds of thousands of volunteers helping the Ukrainian army and civilians during the war. The Ukrainian news outlet Novoe Vremya featured a profile of Ozerov, a Ukrainian civil servant, owner of an apiary near Kyiv, and a drag queen artist. About ten days after the full-scale invasion, Ozerov and his colleagues were called on by the army to help. Since he was good with wood and making frames and beehives for his apiary, it fell to Ozerov to begin making coffins. He soon realized that some of them were destined for Bucha, the suburb of Kyiv where an untold number of civilians were massacred in alleged Russian war crimes.

🎉 Last weekend, over 1.5 million people flocked to London for Pride celebrations, making it the most attended Pride in British history. This year’s celebrations also marked the 50th anniversary of London’s first Pride march. Labour member of Parliament Emily Thornberry took to Twitter: “50 years ago, to be at a demonstration like this was to take your life into your own hands. And actually, it was a protest, and it was also about just being proud of yourself, being confident, and looking the world in the eye and going ‘yeah, I’m different, so what?’”

➡️ Read more on Worldcrunch.com

📣 VERBATIM

Let them try.

— “We hear that they want to defeat us on the battlefield. Well, what can I say? Let them try,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a warning to the West and Ukraine on Thursday, adding that the war could last until the “last Ukrainian is left standing.” Putin was speaking during a meeting with the heads of the State Duma party factions which aired on state media television Russia-24.

✍️ Newsletter by McKenna Johnson, Lila Paulou, Lisa Berdet, Anne-Sophie Goninet and Bertrand Hauger


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Ideas

Look At This Crap! The "Enshittification" Theory Of Why The Internet Is Broken

The term was coined by journalist Cory Doctorow to explain the fatal drift of major Internet platforms: if they were ever useful and user-friendly, they will inevitably end up being odious.

A photo of hands holding onto a smartphone

A person holding their smartphone

Gilles Lambert/ZUMA
Manuel Ligero

-Analysis-

The universe tends toward chaos. Ultimately, everything degenerates. These immutable laws are even more true of the Internet.

In the case of media platforms, everything you once thought was a good service will, sooner or later, disgust you. This trend has been given a name: enshittification. The term was coined by Canadian blogger and journalist Cory Doctorow to explain the inevitable drift of technological giants toward... well.

The explanation is in line with the most basic tenets of Marxism. All digital companies have investors (essentially the bourgeoisie, people who don't perform any work and take the lion's share of the profits), and these investors want to see the percentage of their gains grow year after year. This pushes companies to make decisions that affect the service they provide to their customers. Although they don't do it unwillingly, quite the opposite.

For the latest news & views from every corner of the world, Worldcrunch Today is the only truly international newsletter. Sign up here.

Annoying customers is just another part of the business plan. Look at Netflix, for example. The streaming giant has long been riddling how to monetize shared Netflix accounts. Option 1: adding a premium option to its regular price. Next, it asked for verification through text messages. After that, it considered raising the total subscription price. It also mulled adding advertising to the mix, and so on. These endless maneuvers irritated its audience, even as the company has been unable to decide which way it wants to go. So, slowly but surely, we see it drifting toward enshittification.

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