Your Friday Briefing: The Destruction of Ukraine

Good Morning. We’re masking Russia’s floor advance, South Korea’s new strategy to the virus and Cambodia’s crackdown on opposition leaders.

Russian assaults hit civilians

In Ukraine, employees struggled to rescue survivors from a theater in Mariupol that had been sheltering as much as 1,000 civilians, together with kids, and was largely destroyed in an assault. It was unclear how many individuals survived.

Russia’s advance has slowed, and the Russian navy continues to undergo heavy losses: The Pentagon estimated that in three weeks of preventing, 7,000 Russian troopers died — better than the variety of American troops killed over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan.

However as Russians more and more purpose bombs and missiles at cities, the toll on civilians in Ukraine is worsening: Folks face the chance of loss of life within the streets and deprivation — of meals, water, warmth, safety — in bomb shelters. Here is the most recent.

Stop-fire talks between the 2 sides continued right into a fourth day, with unsure prospects. The UN Safety Council held an emergency assembly to debate the worsening humanitarian scenario and the standing of the greater than three million refugees.

Particulars: “No water, no gasoline, no mild”: Intense preventing drove residents of Irpin, a Kyiv suburb, to evacuate.

Harm: Unable to take management of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest metropolis, Russia has resorted to destroying it.

Debate: In nations pleasant to Russia, some suppose Putin has a degree.

Divided: Ukrainian and Russian vacationers are stranded in a classy Egyptian resort as considered one of their nations tears the opposite aside.

Different updates:

• A Russian court docket prolonged the detention of the basketball star Brittney Griner to Could 19.

• The battle for the skies above Kyiv raged in a single day by means of Thursday. The Ukrainian navy claimed to have shot down 10 Russian planes and missiles, the particles of which killed at the least one individual.

• Indian officers mentioned the nation’s wheat exports have been rising as international costs shot up within the invasion’s aftermath.

South Korea shrugs at Covid outbreaks

Circumstances are skyrocketing in South Korea, which as soon as had one of many world’s most aggressive coronavirus insurance policies. On Thursday, the nation reported its highest day by day an infection variety of all the pandemic: 621,328 instances in a rustic of fifty million individuals.

However the nation remains to be pushing forward with plans to ease social distancing measures, calm down border restrictions and be taught to stay with the virus’s danger in an effort to permit small companies to get better and regular life to renew.

Particulars: Docs fear that hospitals will probably be overwhelmed throughout the surge. Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of the nation’s grownup inhabitants is vaccinated, and about 90 % of these age 60 and older have acquired a booster. Their danger of changing into significantly ailing is low.

Listed below are the most recent updates and maps of the pandemic.

In different developments:

Cambodia convicts opposition leaders

A high court docket convicted 19 members of Cambodia’s predominant opposition celebration on Thursday on prices of “incitement” and “conspiracy.” They’d already been discovered responsible final yr of what the authorities mentioned was a plot to topple the federal government.

up to date

March 17, 2022, 4:43 pm ET

Critics known as the trial a “witch hunt” and the most recent effort by Prime Minister Hun Sen to remove the final vestiges of dissenting political voices in what has turn into primarily a one-party state. He has additionally eradicated just about all unbiased voices within the information media.

The Cambodia Nationwide Rescue Occasion, which had been the only real credible opposition, was dissolved in November 2017 by the nation’s Supreme Courtroom. For the previous 20 years, Hun Sen has been whittling down the democratic processes that the UN put in place within the early Nineteen Nineties .

Particulars: The court docket handed down sentences between 5 and 10 years, with the longer phrases imposed on seven leaders of the political opposition who had fled the nation to keep away from arrest.

Inhabitants: Two-thirds of Cambodians are youthful than 30. They have been born many years after the Khmer Rouge’s terror and the American carpet-bombing marketing campaign within the Vietnam Battle. However land mines proceed to disrupt lives, and corruption and inequality develop stronger.

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Russia-Ukraine Battle: Key Issues to Know

ARTS AND IDEAS

Australia’s scary-smart magpies

The Australian magpie is likely one of the most intelligent birds on earth. It has a lovely track of extraordinary complexity. It may well acknowledge and keep in mind as much as 30 completely different human faces.

Its newest brainy feat: outwitting scientists who wish to research it.

In 2019, researchers got down to research magpie social habits. They spent round six months perfecting a harness that will unobtrusively carry miniature monitoring gadgets and can be almost unattainable for magpies to take away from their very own our bodies.

They did not rely on teamwork. In a exceptional act of cooperation, one chicken snipped the clasp of one other chicken’s harness — serving to one other with none obvious tangible profit to itself. Inside half-hour, the primary tracker was off; the birds eliminated each 5 inside three days.

The magpies’ habits was, the lead researcher mentioned, “a particular mixture of serving to but additionally drawback fixing, of being actually social and having this cognitive capability to resolve puzzles.”

“It is in all probability partly why they’re so profitable in our altering surroundings on farms and in city areas,” she mentioned. “They’ve managed to determine issues out in a brand new method.”

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Let this sluggish cooker Guinness beef stew bubble all day lengthy.

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Rosalía, the Spanish pop singer identified for her reinvention of flamenco, has smashed collectively new sounds from the Latin world and past on “Motomami,” out at this time.