Reuters World News - Cheap suicide drones, affirmative action and Sudan’s ethnic violence

Episode Date: June 30, 2023

The US Supreme Court has rejected race-conscious admissions – we look at what happens next. Sudan’s ongoing war sees spread of ethnic violence in the Darfur region. Plus, the cheap suicide drones that have become an increasing threat on Ukraine’s frontlines could upend global stability.  Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt-out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, the end of affirmative action in US college admissions after the Supreme Court's blockbuster decision. France's president holds crisis meetings after another night of riots. Sudan's military conflict risks spiraling into a broader ethnic war. And cheap suicide drones altering the battlefield in Ukraine become the terrifying new reality of war. It's Friday, June 30th. This is Reuters World News with everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes. Every weekday. I'm Kim Vennel in London.

The latest decades-old precedent has been overturned in the U.S., affirmative action. Top Republican leaders are celebrating the decision. Democratic President Joe Biden condemned it. We cannot let this decision be the last word. Because the truth is, we all know it. Discrimination still exists. in America. In their rulings, the conservative justices said, considering an applicant's race, the ways in which Harvard and UNC did, violate the Constitution. Joseph Axe has been covering

the story. Joey, what happens next? Universities around the country have submitted briefs to the Supreme Court saying, listen, if you get rid of these programs, we're going to really struggle to maintain the level of diversity that we'd like to have in our student bodies. And one of I think that's interesting here is there's a number of states that have already outlawed these kinds of programs, even before this decision, among them Michigan and California are two of the most prominent. And the big public universities in those states have documented that when those bans went into effect, they saw a precipitous drop in the number of minority students that were admitted on their campuses.

What was the constitutional argument for ending this practice? What Chief Justice Roberts is saying is racial classification in any form is essentially a form of discrimination, and that that violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The dissenting liberal justices don't see it that way. They view the 14th Amendment as designed in part to remedy the discrimination of the past. Roberts does say that universities don't have to pretend as though they don't know people's races. And if an applicant's race has played a significant role in shaping who they are, and that in turn makes them a more attractive candidate,

universities aren't barred from taking that into account. They simply can't give people a boost solely because of their race. So it'll be interesting to see how colleges interpret that section of the opinion. Now let's take a look at the other stories making headlines around the world. A third night of violence in the outskirts of Paris over the deadly police shooting of a team. French President Emmanuel Macron will hold an emergency meeting as his government tries to contain a mounting crisis. The shooting has fed long-standing complaints of systemic police racism within low-income racially mixed suburbs. More than 650 people were arrested overnight.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump tells Reuters that Russian President Vladimir Putin was somewhat weakened by Wagner's aborted mutiny. The longtime Putin admirer says now is the time for the United States to try and broke a peace between Russia and Ukraine. You can read the whole interview on the Reuters app or Reuters.com. Migrant survivors of a shipwreck in Greece, say it was the Coast Guard's attempt to tow the overloaded boat that caused it to capsize. Several statements submitted to Greek officials recount hellish conditions with no food and water

after being crammed into a trawler by North African traffickers. Hundreds of bodies are still trapped in the hold. Pakistan and the International Monetary Fund have agreed to a crucial $3 billion bailout. The deal is a lifeline to Pakistan as it teeters on the brink of default. The South Asian nation has had to make a number of policy reforms to meet the IMF's demands. Unbelievable, the acceleration, decline and suddenly the microgravity. Engineer Pantolione Calucci after soaring more than 50 miles above the New Mexico desert on a Virgin Galactic rocket plane.

It's the company's first flight of paying. customers to the edge of space. Ukrainian forces say Moscow is ramping up its use of low-cost lancet suicide drones. They're capable of destroying equipment many times their value, and these cheap weapons could transform the battlefield. Max Hunter is in the Donetsk region. Max, why are these Russian suicide drones so effective? They're effective because they are cheap and plentiful.

These lancets are estimated to cost about $35,000 each, and so you can just keep making them and keep sending them to hit the equipment that's worth several million dollars apiece. They also confuse traditional air defences, which are more set up to look for missiles rather than low and slow drones. Lancets and some other suicide drones are piloted in real time by a pilot through a camera. So they can actually chase down their target if it tries to run away. And what a drone expert I talk to thinks is happening here is that the Russians are copying a Ukrainian tactic, where Ukrainian drones appear to have been used to successfully hit lots of expensive Russian equipment and targets like Russian oil refineries, that sort of thing. Russia's looked at the success of that Ukrainian tactic and decided to ramp up its own domestic drone production.

which was existing before, but not at enough scale. Are these new tactics of sending these cheap drones in numbers transforming the battlefield? We're starting to see in the Ukraine war and in several other wars in the last few years what the battlefield of the future might look like. But actually, I think we can already probably assess that the increased proliferation of drones will, because of their cheapness, lots of states will be able to get drones. And if you get more and more non-state actors using them, that's probably going to contribute to global instability to some extent.

The humanitarian crisis in Sudan is getting worse. A months-long battle between the army and a rival military faction is inflaming ethnic tensions. In Darfur, the violence is ominously reminiscent of past mass atrocities. Aidan Lewis is in Cairo. Aidan, are we at risk of another genocide in Darfur? The situation now is deteriorating rapidly in several parts of Darfur.

It's not yet at the scale that it was in the previous conflict, but in the city of Elginina in particular, things have become extremely violent. We've heard from residents that these Arab militias are going from how. house-to-house, searching people out on the basis of their ethnicity, their tribal affiliation. And we've heard accounts of summary executions of people being rounded up and killed as they try and flee the city. If they can get out of the city, they then try to cross the border into Chad, which is about 30 kilometers away. But they face a kind of death run on the way because there are villages, which, again, are controlled by these militias where they can be shot at

or killed. You've reported that thousands of Islamists who worked as intelligence operatives under the former president Omar al-Bashir are now fighting alongside the army. How does that complicate things? Well, I think it could deepen the conflict. In general, this faction are dead set against any civilian transition. The other way it could complicate things is the fact that several regional powers have over the past decade or more been trying to push back Islamist influence. And so if you have Islamists emerging in Sudan, again, it could push Sudan back to the kind of isolation that it saw before Bashir was toppled. The week ahead is packed with some of the biggest sporting events of the summer.

To fill us in, we turned to Mitch Phillips, who's actually at Lord's Cricket Ground in London for a historic cricket rivalry. Always one of the great sporting occasions at Lords, the home of cricket. The sound of summer, Lords, England, Australia doesn't get any better. But if you're not into cricket, there is a ton of other events in the week ahead. Yes, the never-ending football season has finally ended. And stepping into the breach is Wimbledon, which starts on Monday, and the Tour of France, which kicks off for the weekend,

kicks off in Spain in Bilbaal, the birth stage of the tour, which goes on for three weeks with the Wimbledon for two weeks, with young Spaniard Al-Kalaz, the number one seed, hoping to be the man who can stop Jochovich's endless march. I'm Mitch Phillips, European Sports Editor at Lords for Reuters. That's it for today's episode of Reuters World News. We'll have a special weekend edition on the Legacy of Slavery in America. You can join us again on Monday for our daily briefing.

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