Good morning. We’re overlaying a go to by three European leaders to Ukraine, the ripple results of China’s surge of Covid instances and a once-perilous highway in Afghanistan.
Three European leaders head to Ukraine
The prime ministers of the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovenia traveled by practice to Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, on Tuesday to specific the European Union’s help for Ukraine. Subsequent week, President Biden will journey to Brussels to attend a particular NATO assembly in regards to the battle.
The Tuesday go to comes as combating raged across the metropolis. Blasts shook Kyiv at daybreak, killing at the very least 4 individuals, the mayor mentioned. Observe stay updates right here.
Russia’s advance stays stalled on a number of fronts as Ukrainian forces repel assaults in elements of the east and the south. However the Russian Protection Ministry claimed to have captured your entire Kherson area, after seizing the principle metropolis two weeks in the past.
Ukrainian resistance: The transfer probably strengthens Russia’s means to push west towards Mykolaiv, a strategic port metropolis the place the morgue is already overflowing. Our correspondent and photographer reported from Mykolaiv on a “refusal to succumb” by Ukrainian fighters and residents.
The regional governor, Vitaliy Kim, predicted that any Russian effort to take Mykolaiv would result in a bloody firefight. Residents have piled tires and incendiary bombs on each road nook. It might be apocalyptic, Kim mentioned.
Extra updates:
China’s Covid surge hits oil costs
Oil costs dropped beneath $100 a barrel on Tuesday, the bottom costs in weeks, as a coronavirus outbreak in China threatened to gradual the nation’s financial system and reduce international demand. Over the previous week, crude oil costs have plunged by greater than 20 p.c, reversing a lot of the surge that got here after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The worldwide financial hurt attributable to China’s rise in Covid instances — and the federal government’s robust response — might quickly worsen. Quite a few lockdowns and mitigation techniques have disrupted the manufacturing of products like automobiles, iPhone circuit boards and pc cables.
Context: China’s strict measures come as another nations within the Asia-Pacific area are easing pandemic guidelines, regardless of seeing a few of the world’s steepest spikes in Covid instances.
Listed here are the newest updates and maps of the pandemic.
In different developments:
A once-deadly highway now bustles
Earlier than the Taliban took management of Afghanistan, a visit alongside the highway from Kabul to Kandahar was harmful. Gunfire, roadside bombs, extortion and dying have been as soon as rampant.
Not anymore. The freeway between the nation’s two largest cities, nonetheless dotted with destroyed automobiles and bullet-ridden houses, has come again to life. Grape farmers dig their fields in what was probably the most violent provinces within the battle. Younger males chortle and play volleyball close to the highway.
Up to date
March 16, 2022, 5:31 a.m. ET
However the price of U.S. sanctions is obvious alongside the freeway, which is half-paved and half-gnarled nonetheless. In Ghazni, a metropolis alongside the highway, costs for gadgets like cooking oil have skyrocketed. Individuals are touring to Pakistan, searching for medical care. And outdoors Kabul, a 12-year-old boy pried aside previous obstacles to make a rooster coop. “We’re hungry,” he mentioned.
Because the world warms, Switzerland’s glaciers are melting. A crew of cartographers are racing to appropriate the ever-changing mountain maps — a process they usually must do by hand.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict: Key Issues to Know
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A present of E.U. help. The leaders of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia headed to Kyiv to specific the European Union’s “unequivocal help” and supply monetary assist to Ukraine. The go to was stored secret till the final minute as combating rages across the Ukrainian capital.
ARTS AND IDEAS
The video that modified the sport
In March 2021, the school basketball participant Sedona Prince posted a TikTok video.
“That is our weight room,” she mentioned, pointing at a sorry stack of hand weights on the N.C.A.A. ladies’s basketball event. “Let me present y’all the lads’s weight room,” she says, panning throughout a state-of-the artwork gymnasium for the lads’s event, full of machines and benches.
Prince’s video instantly went viral. It additionally led to a gender-equity evaluate in school basketball and to modifications within the ladies’s occasion, together with branding the event with the moniker March Insanity. The N.C.A.A. had beforehand resisted such a transfer.
“Each funds line is in contrast and contrasted,” mentioned Dan Gavitt, the N.C.A.A.’s senior vice chairman for basketball. “The place there are variations, they’re resolved within the title of fairness.”
Prince completed final March what generations earlier than her couldn’t: She confirmed the disparity between the tournaments in a manner that couldn’t be defined away.
