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Students from the Covenant School in Nashville, Tenn., hold hands after getting off a bus to meet their parents at the reunification site following a mass shooting.

Reuters

Hard Numbers: Nashville school shooting, Rohingya flee to Indonesia, Deutsche disruption, America’s tumbling tolerance, white-collar AI wipeout

6: Six people, including three young children and three adults, were killed on Monday at the Covenant School, a private Christian primary school in Nashville, Tenn. Audrey Hale, a former student, was identified as the shooter. The 28-year-old was shot and killed by police during the attack, the 130th mass shooting in the US this year.

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A chart comparing countries with the largest Muslim populations with corresponding food inflation rates.

Luisa Vieira

The Graphic Truth: Ramadan celebrations now cost more

The holy month of Ramadan has begun for the world's roughly 1.9 billion Muslims. But for many, the joyous feasting with family before and after the Ramadan fast will be overshadowed by inflated food prices thanks to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Majority-Muslim populations in Asia and the Middle East, where many countries rely on food imports, will feel the economic pinch most. We take a look at countries with the largest Muslim populations and their corresponding food inflation rates.

Car drivers queue to fill their fuel tank at a TotalEnergies gas station in Nice as petrol supplies are disrupted by a strike of French refineries and depots, France, March 20, 2023.

REUTERS/Eric Gaillard

Hard Numbers: French oil refinery blockades, China’s mRNA milestone, Moscow comes to Bali, IMF tweaks rules for Ukraine, TikTok hearing

13: As French protesters continue to strike and block oil refineries in response to the government’s recently passed pension reform, 13% of petrol stations around the country are running short on gas. What’s more, a lack of shipments from LNG terminals is raising fears of shortages – and elevated prices – across Europe.

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Argentina's Vice President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner holds a party rally

Reuters

What We’re Watching: Argentina VP’s guilty verdict, NY goes after Trump, a Sudanese agreement, sex ban in Indonesia

Argentine VP guilty of corruption

In a verdict sure to deepen divides in an already highly polarized country, an Argentine court on Tuesday found Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner guilty of a billion-dollar graft scheme from during her 2007-2015 presidency. She has been sentenced to six years and banned from holding public office. It’s the first time a sitting Argentine Veep has been convicted of a crime. Kirchner – a formidable populist who is as despised by the right as she is loved by the left – has denounced the verdict as part of a political witch hunt by the media and the courts. The case has already prompted numerous street clashes between Kirchner’s supporters and opponents — at one of them, a man tried to kill her (the gun jammed). The big intrigue now? Kirchner has legal immunity since she is currently vice president, and she’s already pledged to appeal the verdict all the way to the Supreme Court. But a final decision from there is unlikely to come down before next year’s general elections, when she may just run either for Senate or, gasp, for president. Whatever the outcome, Kirchner’s fate will throw more gas on the raging fire of Argentine politics over the next year.

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Biden & Xi Cool Things Down | GZERO World

Biden & Xi cool tensions at G-20

This week at the G-20 in Bali, the first in-person meeting between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping as presidents of the US and China went ... rather well, Ian Bremmer explains on GZERO World.

There was tension on Taiwan and the US-China economic rivalry. But the two leaders agreed to cool things down.

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Damages from the hits in Przewodów, a village in eastern Poland near the border with Ukraine.

Reuters

What We're Watching: Missiles in Poland, Chinese anger at zero-COVID

Who fired those missiles into Poland?

Explosions apparently caused by rockets or missiles killed two people Tuesday in the Polish town of Przewodów, several miles from the Ukrainian border. The incident occurred amid a barrage of Russian missile attacks on critical infrastructure across Ukraine. Poland went on heightened military readiness as some Polish officials suggested the projectiles might be Russian. An investigation is underway.

But the plot thickened early Wednesday when US President Joe Biden said at an emergency meeting on the subject in Bali, where he’s attending the G-20, that preliminary info suggests it’s “unlikely” the weapons were fired "from Russia." This raises the prospect that malfunctioning Ukrainian air defenses could have been responsible, or that the missiles could have been fired from nearby Belarus, which has supported Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Russia, for its part, says it has nothing to do with the incident at all.

The big questions are: Was it in fact a Russian missile or not? If so, is there any evidence the attack was deliberate, as some Ukrainian officials have friskily suggested, or merely a mistake in the fog of war?

The implications are huge — Poland is a NATO member, so any deliberate attack by Russia would raise the prospect of invoking the alliance’s Article 5 collective defense mechanism, in which all members go on a war footing to respond. That, of course, could set in motion an escalation between the world’s two largest nuclear powers.

In the meantime, an Article 4 response is possible: a much mellower undertaking in which the alliance convenes a formal discussion on the incident but doesn’t take military action.

But a big question remains: Even if this incident was a Ukrainian own goal or a Russian mistake, what would NATO’s response be if Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to tweak the alliance with a bite along the Polish border?

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Biden & Xi Meet in Bali | Quick Take | GZERO Media

Biden and Xi meet in Bali

Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: The G-20 of course is in full swing in Bali, Indonesia, and the first face-to-face meeting that Biden has had with Xi Jinping as president. And we shouldn't underestimate this. It's quite unusual. I mean, really unheard of, unprecedented that the two most important leaders on the global stage would have not met in person for two years. And that is indeed the case for Xi Jinping and President Biden. And it's particularly important because these are two leaders that know each other quite well and for a long time. When Biden was vice president, he had a lot of face time in many different venues with then-Vice President Xi, and they got along quite well. They actually like each other, they respect each other. I wouldn't go so far as to say they have a strong relationship of trust, but they enjoy each other's company.

And that's something that you get from Biden when you talk to him. You get the sense that he actually finds that Xi is someone he can deal with. And Biden's perspective on the world is informed by this "great man theory" of international diplomacy, that if you spend enough time with another human being, usually you can improve the relationship. And certainly, I think a big part of this meeting, a three-hour meeting that these two leaders just had on the sidelines of the G-20 is going to make a difference in slowing the escalation and the deterioration of the relationship between these two countries.

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Kevin Rudd: Nobody Wanted Putin At the G-20 Anyway | Asia Society | GZERO Media

Kevin Rudd: Nobody wanted Putin at the G-20 anyway

Australia’s former PM says nobody at the G-20 – neither the host, Indonesia, nor Russia’s friends, China and India – wanted President Vladimir Putin to attend the summit.

By bowing out, Putin can’t detract from the main focus, which Rudd – president of the Asia Society – says is finding a way to stabilize the US-China relationship.

When Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping meet in Bali on Monday before the summit, Rudd says to watch for how the discussion formulates “guard rails” to stabilizing relations, which have been in “free fall” for three years.

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