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The World Today |  - Trump found guilty
- Musk-Trump bromance
- US shifts Ukraine stance
- Indian elections concluding
- Elite Indian engineers
- TikTok algorithm cloning
- OpenAI influence campaign
- Gantz proposes dissolution
- Transmissible mental health
- Star Trek disappointment
 A Korean opera is going to Europe, and our latest WeChat Window. |
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Trump found guilty on all counts |
 Seth Wenig/Pool via REUTERSDonald Trump became the first American president to be a convicted felon after he was found guilty on all 34 counts in his New York hush-money trial on Thursday. Trump was charged with falsifying business records to cover up payments made to an adult film star ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He will be sentenced on July 11, a week before he is set to officially become the Republican presidential nominee at the party’s national convention. Some legal experts say it’s unlikely he’ll face prison time, but the case is unprecedented, and the judge has wide discretion. Trump has cast himself as a martyr facing unfair persecution, and though polls have suggested a fifth of his supporters would reconsider or withdraw support if he is convicted, his base has “proved fiercely loyal to their favored candidate, felon or not,” The Los Angeles Times’ Washington columnist wrote. “That, too is a strange historic first: a presidential candidate convicted of felonies, but suffering little if any political damage in the process.” |
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 REUTERS/Jonathan ErnstDonald Trump is reportedly weighing an advisory role for Tesla CEO Elon Musk if he wins the White House in November, as the two men grow chummy. Such a move would give Musk — whose company SpaceX is the leading private launch service provider for NASA and the Pentagon, and the largest private carrier of satellites into orbit — even more influence over aspects of the public sector, The Wall Street Journal reported. Musk and Trump have had a tumultuous relationship: In 2022, Musk said Trump shouldn’t run for president again, while Trump called Musk a “bullshit artist.” Musk has since become more conservative, while Trump is courting the tech mogul, not so much for his money but for his clout with business leaders. |
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US shifts stance on Kyiv arms use |
 BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/Pool via REUTERSThe White House has reportedly allowed Ukraine to hit Russia with US-supplied arms in the area around Kharkiv, in an apparent shift from Washington’s position forbidding Kyiv from using American weapons to strike inside Russia. The move comes a day after Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the US may “adapt and adjust” its position, and follows comments from the NATO chief and several European NATO members that they would not stop Ukraine from using Western weapons to defend itself, including by striking military targets in Russia. The Kremlin has suggested this amounts to a direct provocation by NATO, and has warned that it would have “inevitable” consequences. |
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India economic future in spotlight |
 India’s six-week-long election ends Saturday, with its economic trajectory in the spotlight. Analysts expect India’s upcoming quarterly GDP results to show better-than-expected growth, after S&P Global Ratings signaled it would upgrade India’s sovereign credit rating, in a boost to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is expected to win a third term. But while investors are buoyed by the likely outcome and Modi’s infrastructure push, they are ignoring “an all-too-important speed bump: consumer debt,” argued Bloomberg columnist Andy Mukherjee. Families’ spending powers have weakened significantly, and while ice cream makers are satisfied that their trucks don’t get stuck in potholed roads anymore, “in a country where per-capita annual consumption is less than half a liter, surely people should also have the money to buy more ice cream?” |
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India’s elite engineers are jobless |
 Wikimedia CommonsIndia is facing an oversupply of elite engineers. Graduates of Indian Institutes of Technology — a network of public institutions with alumni like Google CEO Sundar Pichai — can’t find jobs, as companies downsize following a pandemic-induced hiring rush. Some fear the AI boom could exacerbate the job crunch for a talent pool that’s crucial to the Indian economy, Bloomberg wrote. The former chairman of Microsoft India, also an IIT alumnus, said India is good at producing engineers, but has failed at creating enough jobs for them, pointing to data that shows higher-educated young Indians are more likely to be unemployed than those without schooling. “IITs for a long time have just lived off signaling value,” said one recruiting company executive, but it’s “not enough anymore.” |
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TikTok tried to clone algorithm |
 TikTok worked to clone its prized recommendation algorithm to apply only to US users and operate independently of systems used by the app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance, Reuters reported. The work of sifting through millions of lines of code to effectively separate the US and Chinese versions of the algorithm reportedly began last year. It could lay the groundwork for a sale of the US version of TikTok, following a law that requires ByteDance to either sell the app or face a US ban. But TikTok, which is fighting the measure in court, has said it will not sell, and on Thursday reiterated that the mandated divestiture is “simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not legally.” |
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Bad actors used OpenAI tools |
 REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/IllustrationInfluence campaigns linked to groups from Russia, China, Iran, and Israel used OpenAI’s text- and image-generation tools to create, translate, and spread misleading content on social media. The company said it removed the accounts, some of which were run by state-affiliated disinformation forces, and that none managed to get much traction. But the episode shows the willingness of bad actors to exploit AI during a busy election year, a trend experts have warned about since tools like ChatGPT were publicly released. The disinformation groups used the same productivity features that AI companies have promoted to everyday users, including debugging code and researching public social media activity. |
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Netanyahu faces fresh threat |
 REUTERS/ Ronen ZvulunIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s main political rival, Benny Gantz, proposed a bill Thursday to dissolve the country’s parliament, which would trigger an early election. It’s unclear when lawmakers will vote on the bill, and Netanyahu likely has enough support to stay in office, but it reflects the growing strains in his government as its Gaza offensive faces international condemnation. Ties between Netanyahu and Gantz have also frayed; Gantz, who is in the war cabinet, gave an ultimatum in May that he would quit the coalition in the absence of a post-war Gaza plan. The new bill comes as Netanyahu’s domestic popularity rises: In a recent survey, he out-polled Gantz for the first time since the war began, with some analysts attributing the shift to Gantz’s threat to quit. |
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Teen mental health may be transmissible |
Mental health conditions among teenagers might be transmissible, new research suggested. Earlier studies have shown that anxiety and depression can cluster among friend groups, but that may be because anxious people choose anxious friends. A new study looked at whether this could happen in school classes, which would imply a causal relationship because students don’t choose their classmates. It found that if one student had a mental health condition, it led to a higher risk of a similar diagnosis for their peers. Such exposure to others’ diagnoses may lead to teens interpreting their friends’ normal stressors in a medical light, or becoming “envious of affected classmates for getting more attention,” NewScientist wrote. If the study holds up, it may mean our approaches to mental health “need to be re-examined.” |
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Mr. Spock’s home planet doesn’t exist |
 JPL-CaltechIn a huge blow to Star Trek fans, a planet believed to orbit the star that Mr. Spock’s fictional home planet of Vulcan famously orbited appears to be an illusion, according to new research. The planet was detected in 2018 using the “radial velocity” method, which looks for jitters in a star that indicate a planet’s gravity acting on it, but scientists weren’t sure if the wobbles they saw were just the star shimmying. Now, with more precise radial velocity measurements, researchers found that star 40 Eridani A’s planet seems not to exist at all. Scientists had doubted the planet’s existence in 2023, with one astronomer saying the case highlights the need to regularly reevaluate what we think we know about the universe. |
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|  May 31: - The annual Shangri-La Dialogue, Asia’s defense summit, takes place in Singapore.
June 1: - Voters head to the polls in Iceland’s presidential elections.
- LGBTQ+ Pride Month begins.
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|  WeChat is the center of the Chinese internet — powering everything from messaging to payments — and the main portal where China’s news outlets and bloggers publish their work. Difficult conversations A Beijing court recently sentenced a man to 15 years in prison for posing as a teenage girl on social media and sexually exploiting underage girls. But even as the Chinese government makes efforts to crack down on cases of online sexual harassment, the incident has highlighted how most teenagers are still ignorant about the dangers of the internet, the Southern Weekly magazine reported. Sex continues to be a taboo topic for Chinese families, and many in the country still hold sexual abuse survivors — particularly women — partly responsible for assailants’ crimes. For instance, in the recent Beijing case, several victims were reportedly beaten by family members after they were linked to the incident. Some parents also refused to cooperate with investigators for fear of themselves being prosecuted. There are likely hundreds of similar cases “hidden under the surface” because of the stigma, Southern Weekly wrote. Influencer tourism Heze — a city in Shandong province about halfway between Beijing and Shanghai — is China’s latest tourist hotspot. But visitors aren’t flocking to it for its ice sculptures or delicious barbecue, but because it happens to be the hometown of internet celebrity Guo Youcai. The influencer, who is in his 20s, recently released a music video featuring a lifeless Heze, driving curiosity about the town among his many followers, many of whom were also drawn to it in the hopes of running into him, according to Renwu magazine. However, local business owners are anxious that the city is only famous because “a person became popular,” and that the economic boom will be short-lived if Beijing limits his social media outreach, a situation not unheard of. Local vendors say tourism has already slowed this month after an initial surge. Pandemic flick Chinese director Le You made his debut at the Cannes Film Festival this month with his latest provocative movie: An Unfinished Film. The feature dramatizes Le’s own experience of a film crew trying to wrap up production of a movie in Wuhan in 2020, only for them to be quarantined at the start of the pandemic. The target audience for the movie is unclear, however: It was not approved for release in China — and social media has largely censored conversations around the film. According to Judge Cui’s Network, an influential WeChat blogger and socio-political commentator who summarized the discussion surrounding it, some reviewers said the movie was made for Chinese people, with whom its references to China’s harsh COVID-19 restrictions would resonate. Judge Cui argued, however, that Le made the movie “specifically for foreigners,” as a way to criticize China through art. |
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|  Korean National OperaThe Korean opera Tcheo Yong, which is based on Korean folklore about a heavenly ruler who descends to Earth and falls in love with a mortal, is going on its first international tour in June. The show, which will play in Paris, Germany, and Austria, is composed by Lee Young-jo, who is “known for skillfully blending traditional Korean musical elements with Western operatic structures,” The Korea Herald wrote. His use of leitmotifs — recurring musical themes associated with characters’ personalities — was considered a “novel approach” that won over Korean audiences in the 1980s. |
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Welcome to my geopolitics blog site. This is a Hawaii Island news site focusing on geopolitical news, analysis, information, and commentary. I will cite a variety of sources, ranging from all sides of the political spectrum.