Global Street Smarts.
Happy Tuesday.
Here’s today’s ITK Daily.
To be ITK, know this:
Ructions | Problems come in battalions
On this episode of Ructions with Ross + Ashley, Marc Ross + Gerald Ashley discuss the Bank of England and the UK's mortgage madness, inflation and french fries, 2024 elections in the UK and US, Brexit's 7th anniversary, the history of 1848, the upcoming NATO summit meeting, Narendra Modi's state visit to DC, plus what they are reading and watching.
Caracal presents Ructions, a rundown of the global stories making headlines and insights on geopolitics. Plus, what Marc Ross + Gerald Ashley are reading and watching.
You can catch the discussion and show notes here.
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From today... It's only six months until Christmas.
Just how much trouble is Vladimir Putin in? Fourteen Russia experts on what we learned about Putin over the past few days, and what the attempted mutiny could mean for Russia and the West. Politico
+ ‘Putin is vulnerable and the Russian state is decrepit’
+ ‘Putin fears internal dissent more than he fears NATO and Ukraine’
+ ‘Putin’s image of invincibility has been tarnished’
+ ‘After so many years of crushing dissent from the left, Putin wasn’t prepared for a threat from the right’
+ ‘Putin has relied on his nuclear weapons to scare the West, but they didn’t help him here’
Prigozhin’s insurrection propels Putin’s reign into its final act: Russia cannot function without a strong hand at the wheel, and this president’s hand has been fatally weakened. Chris Donnelly
+ What next? Putin will find it difficult, perhaps impossible, to rebuild his image in the eyes of the Russian people.
+ Two decades of his rule have hollowed out Russia’s institutions; the system cannot function without a strong hand at the wheel, and Putin’s hand is no longer strong.
+ Prigozhin’s coup attempt will have seriously damaged Russia’s war effort. The general staff had begun to improve the army’s performance but they were unable to improve the morale of the Russian soldiers
+ Putin’s main problem is that he has no obvious successor.
+ If Putin cannot reestablish a firm grip on power, which seems unlikely, Putin will have to find a strong person who will guarantee his safe retirement.
+ Russia now faces a period of considerable uncertainty. Prigozhin’s insurrection may be over, but the drama is just beginning.
The Putin system is crumbling: After the march on Moscow, things cannot go back to normal in Russia. Gideon Rachman
+ The contrast between Zelenskyy and Putin was striking. On the one hand, courage, comradeship and a display of national unity. On the other, fear, isolation and division.
+ The reality is that there is no normal to go back to. The uprising happened because the Putin project is falling apart. That process is likely to accelerate after the events of this weekend.
+ It is now clear that Putin faces a two-front struggle for survival.
+ There is the war in Ukraine. And there is the internal stability of his regime. The two fronts are connected.
+ The events of the past weekend cannot be unsaid or unseen.
+ One reason Putin has survived for so long is that so many of the most powerful people in Russia know their fortunes are tied to him — and to the system he has created.
+ Sticking with Putin once seemed the safe option for the country’s elite. But, as the system crumbles, those calculations are changing.
Russian media appear as perplexed as everyone else over Wagner mutiny: Many outlets express support for Vladimir Putin but worry about Russian stability. WSJ
+ “Prigozhin will go, but the problems remain,” said a headline in Moskovsky Komsomolets, a privately owned Moscow tabloid, adding that “Russia displayed its vulnerability to the whole world and itself.”
+ “The choice was between bad and monstrous,” Margarita Simonyan, head of the Russian state broadcaster RT, wrote on her Telegram messenger channel. “There can be nothing more terrible than civil conflict.”
Wagner uprising unnerves Russia's partners across Asia: Some leaders left to parse how to prevent challenges to their own power. Nikkei
WSJ: Putin blasts mutineers as Kremlin tries to assert control
The Times: Russia shall not choke in bloody strife, vows Putin
Le Monde: Putin accuses West of wanting Russians 'to kill each other' in aborted rebellion
FT: Wagner chief hails march on Moscow as ‘masterclass’ but denies coup bid
UK ‘prepared’ for ‘range of scenarios’ in Russia, Rishi Sunak says: Politico reports it’s “too early to predict” what will happen after this weekend’s failed mutiny, the British leader said.
+ Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said the UK government was planning for ‘all scenarios’ in Russia after the country nearly plunged into civil war at the weekend.
+ UK “will not be distracted from our work to support Ukraine’s self-defense and subsequent recovery.”
+ "We sought to demonstrate our protest, not to overthrow the government of the country." -- Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin in his first recorded message after Saturday’s attempted coup.
+ @KuperSimon: Prigozhin must be sitting in Minsk thinking, "Where do I speak first? On Oprah?"
Alexander Lukashenko is the clearest beneficiary of Wagner’s mutiny: Economist reports his role in halting the march on Moscow is probably exaggerated.
AUS-RUS: Australia’s top court rejected Russia’s bid to hold onto a plot of land in its capital of Canberra, where Moscow planned to build a new embassy.
CNN: China throws support behind ‘strategic partner’ Russia after Wagner insurrection challenges Putin
Reuters: China expresses support for Russia after aborted mutiny
Xi weighs up support for Putin after rebellion: Beijing’s support for Moscow is based on pragmatism and ideology, with China’s most powerful ally damaged by recent events. Guardian
+ Beijing’s support for Moscow is based on pragmatism and ideology. It is the former that has been most damaged by the weekend’s dramatic events, which China has sought to downplay.
+ Having initially made no comment, on Sunday, China’s foreign ministry described the rebellion as Russia’s “internal affairs” and expressed its support for Russia in maintaining national stability.
+ On Sunday, the Xinhua Chinese state news agency published an article suggesting that Prigozhin had backed down because Russian public opinion was overwhelmingly against him. China Daily published a report from Moscow’s Red Square that said “the daily life of Moscow residents has not been disrupted and remains calm and orderly.”
+ Shen Dingli, a Shanghai-based international relations scholar, said the Wagner incident would lead to Russia’s increased dependence on China, while Beijing would take “a more cautious stance on Russia.” “Diplomatically, China needs to be careful with its words and deeds,” Shen said.
+ As Joseph Webster, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, has noted: “If Chinese security services share intelligence with their Russian counterparts on anti-Putin coup plotters, they face a high probability of discovery and risk long-term damage to bilateral relations if an ‘anti-Putin’ ascends to the power vertical in Russian politics.”
Putin’s struggles are a teachable moment for China: While Xi Jinping can’t be happy that his chief ally has been severely weakened, the Chinese leader is learning lessons too valuable to ignore. Minxin Pei
+ Xi can be confident that the Chinese state is much stronger than its Russian counterpart. The presence of private armies is a hallmark of state weakness, signaling the state’s loss of its monopoly on violence.
+ China, wrecked by regional warlords only a century ago, would never allow anything remotely resembling the Wagner Group to operate within its borders or alongside its armed forces in a conflict.
+ Compared with Putin’s personalistic rule, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) maintains much more direct and institutionalized control of the state.
+ While Putin’s political party, United Russia, functions mostly as an election machine and has at best a thin presence in the Russian military and other state organs, the CCP boasts a party cell in the smallest unit of any state bureaucracy.
+ The Wagner mutiny highlights at least three risks Xi will not want to ignore:
- The first and most important priority is to ensure the political loyalty of the Chinese military, in particular its senior commanders - In his decade in power, Xi has gone much further than his two immediate predecessors in asserting his personal control of the PLA. As soon as he assumed the chairmanship of the Central Military Commission in late 2012, Xi launched an anti-corruption campaign that purged more than 100 senior military commanders within five years.
- Second, China will want to head off rivalries among different branches of the military early.
- Third, Prigozhin’s antics are a reminder to Xi that nationalism is a double-edged sword. The Chinese leader has built public support in part as a tough-guy defender of China’s territorial claims, especially over the island of Taiwan. Yet excessive, “wolf warrior” rhetoric also builds up expectations that can be hard to meet.
+ Xi cannot be happy about Putin’s unending series of setbacks, which are weakening China’s key ally in its confrontation with the West. But the Chinese leader cannot be entirely ungrateful either: Putin’s woes are offering up lessons too precious not to learn.
Yellen plans July China trip while US preps investment curbs: Bloomberg reports US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen plans to visit Beijing in early July for the first high-level economic talks with her new Chinese counterpart, people familiar with the scheduling said.
The South Korean ‘master’ of chips accused of sharing secrets with China: Choi Jin-seok denies stealing Samsung technology. But the case underscores how the country is torn between geopolitical rivals. FT
+ Chinese efforts to acquire South Korean technology have become more aggressive in recent years, as Beijing seeks to mitigate the damage from Washington’s own moves to curtail Chinese access to American technology and expertise.
+ Beijing is also ramping up its defences against what it perceives as US-led efforts to acquire Chinese secrets. In recent months, authorities have launched a crackdown on foreign corporate due diligence groups operating in China. On 1 July, a new version of China’s anti-espionage law will come into force.
+ Prosecutors allege that Choi’s employees stole data from Samsung’s Hwaseong plant in Korea so they could build a plant in China
+ “Building a chip plant requires an enormous amount of exact data. It is impossible for them to memorise all of the detailed information needed.”
+ “Too many South Korean engineers still see going to China as a legitimate career move, as opposed to something that poses a threat to national security and an existential threat to their country’s most important industry.”
+ The candid words of one executive from a leading Chinese chip company, “stealing technology from South Korea has become a trend here.”
+ “It is a shortcut to weather the growing tension between China and the US,” the executive admits, while cautioning that China should not neglect developing its own indigenous expertise. “But we should realise that this is not a long-term solution.”
The Times: North Koreans vow to ‘pulverize the American empire into dust’
Wonderful...
AP: Germany offers to station 4,000 troops in Lithuania to strengthen NATO’s eastern flank
Reuters: US keeps up weapons shipments to Ukraine with new $500 mln package
Politico: West after Wagner rebellion: Talk softly and help Ukraine carry a bigger stick
Minefields and menace: Why Ukraine’s pushback is off to a halting start: WSJ reports the Ukrainian Army is encountering an array of challenges that has complicated the early stages of its counteroffensive, especially the large swaths of minefields. But its leaders are urging patience, insisting the main push is yet to come.
Belgium pitches EU agency to screen algorithms: Politico reports the bloc’s artificial intelligence and content-moderation rulebooks require beefed-up enforcement.
OTD: In 2007, Tony Blair resigned as British Prime Minister, a position he had held since 1997. His Chancellor, Gordon Brown, succeeds him.
Japanese Prime Minister Kishida's approval rating sinks to 39%: Nikkei reports ID card issues loom large, but 75% say Tokyo should talk with Beijing.
Bloomberg: IMF approves $1.8 billion in loans for Senegal to revive economy
Saudi Arabia sends top delegation to China’s ‘Summer Davos’: FT reports the world’s second-largest economy deepens co-operation with Middle East.
OPEC woos tiny nation that sits atop massive oil field: South American country Guyana doesn’t want to join the cartel and aims to pump oil rapidly. WSJ
+ For OPEC, enlisting Guyana would be its biggest catch in years. Guyana is aiming to boost its oil production by one million barrels a day by 2028, the same amount by which OPEC’s de facto leader Saudi Arabia has planned to increase its capacity in that period.
+ If Guyana joins, it would become OPEC’s first new member in five years. With less than one million residents, it would be the smallest country in the bloc by population and is expected to become one of the world’s largest oil producers per capita.
+ The entreaties were part of a broader push by the organization to bring in new members as it faces competition from producers that are outside its main sphere of influence, the delegates said.
+ In recent years, the Saudi-dominated OPEC has expanded its membership with African countries and struck an alliance with Russia and other producers in the former Soviet Union and Asia called OPEC+.
+ Guyana’s lofty aspirations for its oil discoveries have made it a bigger target than most. Exxon Mobil and its partners have sanctioned more than $40 billion in oil projects there, with five projects expected to pump more than one million barrels a day combined by the end of the decade.
+ That is roughly equivalent to U.S. plays like the Eagle Ford in South Texas or the Bakken in North Dakota currently produce. Since 2015, Exxon and its partners have made more than 30 big finds there, with output coming in at more than 360,000 barrels a day by the end of last year.
+ The companies estimate the Stabroek Block off Guyana has 11 billion oil-equivalent barrels. It has become the world’s most promising oil play, investors say.
+ As its oil production has grown, so has Guyana’s presence on the global stage. The country was elected a nonpermanent member of the United Nations Security Council earlier this month.
Fernández visits Brazil to celebrate 200 years of bilateral relations: Buenos Aires Herald reports Argentina’s president will meet Lula da Silva at the Planalto Palace.
Today: Mixed Race Day (Brazil)
Social democrats to go head-to-head in Guatemala's August election runoff: AFP reports a former first lady and the son of an ex-president – both social democrats – will go head-to-head in Guatemala's August runoff after no candidate secured enough votes to win Sunday's first round of presidential elections.
Today: Canadian Multiculturalism Day
WSJ: DeSantis, Trump and negativity dominate early GOP campaign ads
No Labels declines to reveal just who is funding its third party bid: Politico reports the group isn’t required under law to disclose its donors even as it takes on the look of a political party.
WP: Jesse Watters will take over Tucker Carlson’s former slot in Fox News prime-time shake-up
WSJ: NYC to move forward with congestion toll
Its promised land drying, Mormon Church works to save the Great Salt Lake WP
Landlines: About 73 percent of American adults lived in a household without a landline at the end of last year — a figure that has tripled since 2010.
AI's use in elections sets off a scramble for guardrails: Gaps in campaign rules allow politicians to spread images and messaging generated by increasingly powerful artificial intelligence technology. NYT
+ The 2024 election cycle “is poised to be the first election where AI-generated content is prevalent.”
+ The American Association of Political Consultants recently condemned the use of deepfake content in political campaigns as a violation of its ethics code.
The ultra-secret underwater spy system that might have heard the Titan implode: System of undersea microphones built to track Soviet submarines could have guided search for submersible headed to Titanic. WSJ
‘It’s not like science fiction any more’: NASA aiming to make spaceships talk: Researcher Dr Larissa Suzuki tells how NASA is developing a ChatGPT-style interface. Guardian
+ “The idea is to get to a point where we have conversational interactions with space vehicles and they [are] also talking back to us on alerts, interesting findings they see in the solar system and beyond,” Dr Larissa Suzuki, a visiting researcher at Nasa said. “It’s really not like science fiction any more.”
+ Speaking at a meeting on next-generation space communication at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in London on Tuesday, Suzuki outlined an interplanetary communications network with inbuilt AI to detect, and possibly fix, glitches and inefficiencies as they occur.
+ “It then alerts mission operators that there is a likelihood that package transmissions from space vehicle X will be lost or will fail delivery,” she said. “We cannot send an engineer up in space whenever a space vehicle goes offline or its software breaks somehow.”
+ The system also has a natural language interface that will allow astronauts and mission control to talk to it rather than having to scour cumbersome, technical manuals for relevant information. She envisages astronauts being able to seek advice on space experiments or on how to perform complex manoeuvres.
Google Pixel Fold review: Foldable phones are improving: Google’s new $1,800 gadget proves that phones with bendable screens are something people might want. Now they just need to get cheaper. NYT
Apple keeps trying to fix its users: The company’s guilty conscience is making it nudgy. John Herrman
+ Apple is helping users help themselves, giving them tips and tricks and tools for managing modern life.
+ Apple knows the modern world is getting you down, and is in fact literally destroying your eyes, and understands that it might bear some responsibility for the whole situation, so it would love to help and has some ideas.
+ Apple has, over the past few decades, become one of the most powerful companies in the world and not entirely in ways its leaders intended or predicted.
+ The sheer amount of time that Apple’s customers spend with its products — phones that never leave their sides, computers on their desks, watches and TV boxes and earbuds and home assistants — makes their full influence hard to account for.
+ Whatever your customer is going through, and however life is going, Apple’s products are present and frequently involved.
+ Apple isn’t identified with the most overtly predatory and alienating aspects of the 21st-century digital life — the data-driven advertising and social-media companies, which explicitly grind the stuff of humanity into monetizable units – but it is, at minimum, their vital accomplice.
+ Steve Jobs famously talked about nascent personal computers as “bicycles for the mind.” Now, for many of its users, the iPhone is a machine for looking at Instagram and watching TikTok.
+ It has become a de facto anti-empowerment device, a conduit for passive consumption, an interface through which identities and waking hours are continuously strip-mined by companies like Meta and Google and TikTok, a device with which users know they should probably spend a bit less time for their own good.
+ Apple’s products are thoughtfully designed with evidence of careful consideration in the smallest details, but a commitment to good design can only do so much if the product is a portal to the same greasy, exploitative, exhausting, stimulating digital economy in which the customer otherwise lives and works.
+ This has presented a vexing marketing problem for Apple, a company that has, historically, been pretty good at telling its own story.
+ It’s no longer the underdog it was in the ’90s, the smugly superior PC alternative poking fun at its stodgy rivals in the aughts, or a just company that makes nice gadgets, like the iPod, that you and millions of other people might want to buy.
+ The absolute success of the iPhone, now 16 years old, turned Apple into a symbol of queasy modernity — less a company that customers choose to patronize than an institution they’re a bit stuck with.
+ Apple, with its widely watched and covered product events, charts the future of human-machine interaction on a yearly schedule of not-so-secret and mostly unsurprising updates, its upbeat, upscale keynotes increasingly divorced from the complicated, conflicted experiences of the average smartphone user.
+ We see Apple employees and theoretical customers scheduling ski trips, powerfully manipulating gorgeous photos, and connecting tenderly and deliberately with other people. We don’t see them dismissing hundreds of notifications throughout their days, or answering work emails before bed, or drawing their phones from their pockets after the briefest lull in a real-life conversation, unsure what they’re looking for but unable to suppress the reflex.
+ To engage with virtually any modern software, and to be exposed at all to the online economy of 2023, is to be constantly guided by the thumb, induced into consumption, tipped into a sales funnel, and tricked by “dark patterns” or simple promises of more.
+ Apple’s various nudgelord tendencies differ in a number of ways.
+ Most of the health-tracking features are opt-in and focused on conscious self-improvement.
+ Screen Time crashes straight into the core dilemma here. Apple’s posture as an ally is narrowly tenable — it makes most of its money selling hardware, unlike Meta or Google, for example.
+ Because it doesn’t need to maximize users’ time spent or some other exploitative metric, Apple can provide users support in the form of data and insights to reclaim their own time. It’s using tracking – for good!
+ In practice, the connection between “understanding” how many many minutes you spend watching YouTube and doing anything about it is tenuous at best.
+ The company will acknowledge and address the emerging struggles of helmet life as they arise, with improvements to its product as well as suggestions to its users about how to use it responsibly, based on the underlying assumption that there is — has to be — a right way to use such a thing. Whether that’s actually true is a question Apple can never answer.
IBM agreed to buy Apptio, which makes software for managing information technology, for $4.6 billion.
The Telegram founder's mysterious French passport: Pavel Durov, the head of the controversial messaging app, was granted French citizenship in 2021 through an exceptional and highly political procedure, a surprising choice on the part of the authorities – all of whom declined comment. Le Monde
+ In August 2021, when the name of the Russian-born founder of Telegram was published in the naturalization section of France's government gazette, the information went largely unnoticed before being uncovered by the Russian media. Six months earlier, however, Durov had already obtained a new passport in the United Arab Emirates, taking advantage of a brand-new provision specially designed for wealthy foreign investors in a country that seldom grants naturalization.
+ Since 2017, Durov has been living in Dubai, where Telegram is also headquartered in a huge office building, but where no company employees appeared to be working when journalists from the German daily Bild visited the place.
+ Durov, who left Russia under complex circumstances after losing control of his company VK, had previously used a passport from the tax haven Saint Kitts and Nevis.
+ What additional need did he have for French nationality?
+ There is only one procedure by which Durov could obtain his naturalization, that of the "foreigner emeritus," a rare and unknown practice that grants French nationality at the initiative of the government "to a French-speaking foreigner who contributes through his or her outstanding work to the influence of France and the prosperity of its international economic relations."
+ The "foreign emeritus" procedure remains highly political and is sometimes requested directly from the president, as Les Echos reported.
MW: HSBC moving out of Canary Wharf into Central London
Advertising groups look to their own creative transformations at Cannes: The industry faces tougher economic conditions as well as challenges from the rising use of AI. FT
+ Kate Scott-Dawkins, global president of business intelligence at GroupM, said the industry had been a beneficiary of venture capital-fuelled tech spending running up to the pandemic, with a second burst of spending since after the lockdowns ended. But now, she said, “we’re coming down off of that . . . the cycle is at a point where we’re moderating and back to some sort of normalcy.”
+ AI is likely to be involved with at least half of all advertising revenue by the end of 2023, said GroupM. But while it has long been used extensively across media buying, the impact of generative AI technology in creating advertising has only started in practice.
+ Google plans to introduce generative AI into its advertising business over the coming months to help generate creative campaigns, while Meta is exploring similar tools.
+ “Computers can create things that look like they come from humans, it’s a pretty fundamental shift,” said one advertising boss, who predicted that this could hit jobs that were in effect the “plumbing” of the industry doing basic creative work. But he added: “The computer is not going to come up with that killer idea — they are going to tell you what’s been used before.”
+ Yannick Bolloré, chair of Vivendi’s supervisory board and boss of French agency Havas, compared the impact of AI on the industry to the invention of photography on painters.
+ “This did not kill the painters, but it killed the average painters. AI will never kill the great creative directors. But it could kill the average creative director.”
China’s ‘Tesla killer’ stumbles amid EV price war: WSJ reports NIO has become a symbol of the challenges automakers face in the world’s largest electric-vehicle market.
Gerson Lehrman Group, which connects clients with a network of industrial experts, is reportedly laying off employees in China as Beijing cracks down on Western consulting companies operating there.
The global race to industrialize is just what we need Andy Haldane
+ A global arms race to reindustrialise is under way, reversing long-established trends in many advanced economies. The forces driving this race — decarbonisation, deglobalisation, remilitarisation — are likely to have lasting implications for the global macroeconomy and may even help it break free from secular stagnation.
+ Manufacturing has been in secular decline in many advanced economies.
+ At its peak, manufacturing accounted for almost half of output and employment in the UK. Today it stands at less than 10 per cent.
+ Manufacturing in the US peaked in the 1950s at about 28 per cent share of the economy, but has since fallen to little more than 10 per cent. Even in Europe’s manufacturing powerhouse, Germany, the manufacturing share of the economy fell from 25 per cent to 19 per cent between 1991 and 2022.
+ Manufacturing companies have higher investment rates, especially in R&D, and higher rates of measured productivity than those in the services sector.
+ The loss of manufacturing thus contributed to falling rates of investment, productivity and economic growth in the west too.
+ The second global arms race under way is remilitarisation.
+ After a period of decline, heightened geopolitical tensions, amplified by the war in Ukraine, have caused governments globally to reinvest in defence.
+ Global defence spending rose sharply last year to well over $2tn and is set to rise faster still this year. This arms race, while decidedly less benign, is reigniting manufacturing in both east and west.
+ Third, there is an ongoing global race to re- or on-shore manufacturing. This has been motivated by the need for greater supply chain resilience in the wake of COVID-19, but also by a desire for local job re-creation as the economic and social costs of the loss of many millions of manufacturing jobs in the west have become transparent
+ This new industrial age is also beginning to reverse some of the secular macro trends of the past.
+ Fractured supply chains are raising global prices, causing inflation targets to overshoot and interest rates to rise.
+ Most arms races leave no one better off. Today’s race to reindustrialise is different. It may be just the impetus the world needs to break free of its economic and environmental torpor.
Gucci owner is buying perfume maker Creed to grow its luxury empire: WSJ reports the purchase marks a major step for Kering’s ambitions to build a new beauty division, dubbed Kering Beauté.
Jenna Lyons, unlikely housewife: The famously stylish former president of J. Crew has joined the rebooted “Real Housewives of New York City.” Why? NYT
Review: ‘The Bear’ changes course(s): Season 2 of the restaurant dramedy is more uplifting, more team-focused and more magnificent. NYT
+ “The Bear” is no longer a war story that takes place in a kitchen. It is now a sports story that takes place in a kitchen.
+ Like an old-school sports flick, it follows an underdog squad through a rebuilding season.
+ And as in a great sports story, the season sends its key players on journeys of skill development and personal growth.
+ “The Bear” is about the curse and blessing of having a calling.
+ In a way — to hit the sports metaphor one more time — “The Bear,” with its emphasis on teamwork and caring, is doing a version of what “Ted Lasso” did, albeit with less syrup and more acid.
+ It suggests that there’s a better way of playing this game. You can win without being toxic; you can be a genius without being a jerk.
+ “You’re going to have to care about everything more than anything.”
+ There’s also taking care, learning discipline, doing things the hard way because it’s the right way.
+ Every experience you ingest, every memory, every hurt becomes part of you, like it or not. You are what you eat.
+ Leave the trauma. Take the cannoli.
+ Ayo Ebebiri and Jeremy Allen White in the new season of “The Bear,” which tracks the effort to turn the family sandwich shop into a high-end restaurant.
The Bear is the best kind of workplace romance Roxana Hadadi
+ Questions about the balance between teamwork and self-worth are especially fruitful in fields where a job is not just a 9-to-5 but what you love and can’t live without.
HBO is putting “The Idol” out of its misery a week early.
AFP: Mel Brooks, Angela Bassett to receive honorary Oscars
WSJ: Will Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras Tour’ become the first $1 billion tour?
+ "We estimate $250-500 mn in medical costs attributable to pickleball in 2023" - UBS
WP: USOPC official says another Salt Lake City Olympics may be on the horizon
Saudi Arabia accelerates its footballing ambitions, setting sights on World Cup: By offering golden contracts to aging stars and investing in clubs in Europe and Africa, Saudi Arabia hopes to harness the soft power of football to shift focus from its human rights record. Le Monde
+ Following in the footsteps of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia is aiming to be football's new Eldorado.
+ Saudi football officials are determined to continue their European club tour, in a bid to attract seasoned football stars who are approaching the twilight of their careers by the end of the summer transfer window.
+ On June 16, MBS was received by French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris. The French capital is home to the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE), and MBS made the trip to promote Riyadh's bid to host the 2030 Universal Exhibition. But the Crown Prince has another event in his sights: the World Cup.
+ In May, the Saudi Arabian Football Federation signed a five-year agreement with the Confederation of African Football to support the development of African clubs and teams.
+ Riyadh is also in talks to sponsor the new Africa Super League to the tune of $200 million. As Chadwick points out: "Qatar won the 2022 World Cup [bid] thanks to African voices."
+ The 2030 winner is expected to be announced at the FIFA Congress in May 2024.
+ For many Saudis, the next decade will be an important one. "We'll have the World Cup in 2034," said Abdallah Al-Anassi, a 36-year-old civil servant from Riyadh. "It's a dream come true. The whole world will discover our culture and our kindness."
+ This strategy for influence is not limited to football. "MBS has made sport an element of language and a means of legitimizing himself on the international and regional scene," said Raphaël Le Magoariec, an expert in the geopolitics of sport in the Gulf countries at the Université de Tours.
+ In 2023, the petrochemical industry organized a Formula 1 Grand Prix, as well as the Dakar Rally (formerly the Paris-Dakar Rally) and the Saudi Tour cycling race. It has also secured the 2034 Asian Games and even – despite criticisms of an environmental aberration – the 2029 Asian Winter Games.
+ Among the €550 billion invested by the PIF, one of the world's biggest sovereign wealth funds, besides the purchase of Newcastle United and the new world golf circuit, are financial stakes in Disney, Tesla, Boeing and Uber.
+ Saudi Arabia has qualified for six of the last eight World Cups, although the growth of football has suffered from the strict rules imposed by Wahhabism, which has dominated the Kingdom since the 1980s, and does not encourage participation in leisure activities.
MLS Toronto club fires former US national team coach Bradley: AFP reports Bob Bradley, the former coach of the United States national team, was fired on Monday as coach and sporting director of Toronto FC after a weak Major League Soccer start.
+ The US will host the Club World Cup in 2025, one year before co-hosting the men's World Cup.
Blackhawks deal for Hall with Bedard likely top NHL Draft pick: AFP reports former NHL Most Valuable Player Taylor Hall was obtained by Chicago on Monday ahead of the Blackhawks being expected to pick teen star Connor Bedard with the NHL Draft's top pick.
Ineos hail crash victim Bernal ahead of Tour de France return: AFP reports Ineos Grenadiers hailed 2019 Tour de France winner Egan Bernal's "character and resilience" in battling back from a near-fatal road accident to make their team for this year's race announced on Monday.
+ @F1: BREAKING: Hollywood actor Ryan Reynolds is part of an investor group taking a 24% equity stake in Alpine
Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.
-Marc
Marc A. Ross | Chief Communications Strategist @ Caracal
Caracal produces ITK Daily.
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