Reuters World News - Default avoided, NATO’s Ukraine divisions and poetry in space

Episode Date: June 2, 2023

The U.S. has passed a deal to lift its debt ceiling – avoiding a catastrophic default. The divisions in NATO on how fast Ukraine should join. South Africa’s diplomatic headache about inviting President Putin. Plus, a poetry odyssey to outer space and a Pink Floyd controversy in Germany. 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 United States avoids default after the Senate votes to raise the debt ceiling. Cracks appear in the NATO alliance over the speed at which Ukraine should be admitted as a member. An invitation to Vladimir Putin causes a stir in South Africa. And the US poet laureate tells me what it's like to create a poem headed to Jupiter. It's Friday, June 2nd. This is Reuters World News. bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes. I'm Kim Vennel in London.

On this vote, the aze are 63, the nays are 36, the 60 vote threshold having been achieved, the bill is passed. We start on the floor of the US Senate, where the vote to lift the government's $31 trillion debt ceiling was passed. Relief took hold in markets, with Asian stocks jumping after news that a catastrophic default had been averted. Also, lifting risk sentiment was changing expectations of the Fed's monetary policy, with traders steadily dialing back their bets on the central bank raising interest rates again this month. Now, for the rest of the headlines from around the world. In a Reuters exclusive, we can reveal the US is looking to secure supplies of TNT in Japan for Ukraine's artillery.

The efforts are a test of Japan's willingness to court. controversy to help Kyiv. Export rules ban Japanese companies from selling lethal items overseas. Riots broke out in Senegal's capital Dakar after opposition leader Usman Sanko was sentenced to two years in jail. The court ruling undermines his chances of running for the presidency next year. Twitter's head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, has resigned. The side has faced criticism for lax protections against harmful content since billionaire Elon Musk acquired it in October. Erwin declined further comment and Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment. An email to Twitter returned an automated reply with a poop emoji.

A celebrity white whale has been spotted near Sweden. Hvladimir the Beluga was first seen in 2019, wearing a harness and camera reading Equipment St. Petersburg, leading some to speculate that he was part of a Russian spy program. NATO promised Ukraine back in 2008 that they could one day join the alliance. Now, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg says that accession can't happen while a war is ongoing. Allies are split between his wait-and-see approach and countries who want Ukraine in ASAP. Sabina Seabold was at this week's meeting of NATO foreign ministers.

Sabina, what are the divisions exactly? You have basically a block of Eastern European allies of Ukraine, who are pretty much assertive, who've made bad experiences with Russia or the Soviet Union at the time, and who are very much calling for concrete steps to be taken at the NATO summit mid-July in Vilnius for Ukraine to join the alliance. On the other side, you have countries that are more reluctant. That would be countries such as the United States, so the military muscle of the alliance, but also other countries like Germany, because they see very much a danger of being drawn into an active war with Russia, with that step.

What would the process of Ukraine joining NATO look like? These kinds of processes in the past would include a thing called membership action plan. but for Ukraine, even though they don't have any kind of member action plan, obviously they're approaching NATO standards pretty quickly. NATO has been feeding them so many weapons in the past year since the war started. Ukraine is actually approaching Western NATO standards in terms of its military, and they are being supplied with very modern Western weapons. So I think what we are seeing there already is a transition to, NATO standards, which would make it definitely easier for the country to join NATO in the end. I speak in Russian to emphasize multipolarity.

Russia's foreign minister Sergei Lavrov at a BRICS meeting in Cape Town. The BRICS block, that's Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, asserted their ambition to rival Western powers at the gathering. But it was questions about South African presidents. Cyril Ramaphosa's invitation to President Vladimir Putin to attend a summit in August that had most people talking. Putin is the subject of an international criminal court arrest warrant for war crimes. As a member, South Africa would be technically required to arrest Putin if he entered the country. Joe Bavir is in Johannesburg. Joe, what is Ramaphosa up to here?

Well, South Africa is currently governed by the ANC and has been since 1994. And when they were fighting against apartheid, they received support from Moscow than the Soviet Union in the form of military training, in the form of education for senior ANC officials. Those loyalties still resonate today. They say they're neutral when it comes to the war in Ukraine. They say they're not aligned, but there's a feeling among Western powers that their actions are speaking louder than their words. And what they've been doing in recent months, including military exercises with Russia and China

earlier this year, those things have the West very worried that they're drifting towards the Russian camp. South Africa has been faced with this kind of dilemma before, right? Well, there is a kind of precedent. In 2015, Omar al-Bashir, who was president of Sudan at the time and was targeted by an ICC arrest warrant for crimes committed in Darfur, came to South Africa for an African Union summit. And there was a certain amount of condemnation in the aftermath, but no real punishment for South Africa. Now for some poetry in motion. Arching under the night sky, inky with black, expansive.

we point to the planets we know. U.S. Poet Lauderdielle, Aida Limon, unveiling her poem set to travel into deep space. It's going to be inscribed on a NASA spacecraft headed to Jupiter's icy moon Europa. She told me that the galactic destination inspired the work. It's really amazing. And they, you know, they believe that there could be signs of life. And so they say it has all the ingredients for life, which is a really wonderful thing to think about. It's an icy water world.

Water is the uniting element between the second moon of Jupiter and Earth. And it's also the uniting element of the poem itself. Did you stay up at night worrying that the etching might change the rocket's trajectory? I mean, these things get very specific, don't they? I love that you ask that. I have not yet worried that the poem will actually ruin the space mission. But thank you for that. Now I will.

Pink Floyd founder Roger Waters is not new to controversy. He's taken banmates to court over using the Pink Floyd name, caused protests over his support for Palestinians, and had a concert cancelled in Poland over comments about the war in Ukraine. Now, a show in Berlin has prompted a police investigation because he wore a trench coat and wielded a fake machine gun. The complaint said he was glorifying Nazis. Frederica Heine is in Berlin. As soon as Waters' German tour dates were announced, the state government in Hesse, which is where Frankfurt is located, cancelled the concert, saying that anti-Semitism allegations against Waters meant that it would be inappropriate to hold it.

Waters then filed a complaint in a Frankfurt court, and the Frankfurt court decided in April that the concert could go ahead because there is no indication that the musician would violate any laws on stage. Our show tonight is a tiny bit different than all the other shows we've done in Germany up until this point. In fact, all the other shows we've done anyway. So in Frankfurt on May 28th, Waters told the audience that he was not wearing his controversial costume out of respect for the victims of the Holocaust and that he had read about

the use of the Festala to round up Jews in 1938. He also repeated that he is not an anti-Semite. I wrote a theatrical section where I dress up as a demagogue, sort of a Nazi demagogue if we're honest about it. And I am honest. I'm extremely honest. As you can imagine, any issue surrounding Nazi symbols, SS uniforms. That's always a sensitive topic in Germany. However, it's also a period of intense

change in Germany. So we're going through an intense period of rearmament against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine. Antisemitism has sort of re-entered the mainstream of German society in recent years. So it's just a very sensitive topic, especially now. That's it for this edition of Reuters World News. We'll be back tomorrow with a special edition on the battle to save the Amazon rainforest. To get all our shows in your podcast feed, make sure to follow us on your favorite platform or download the Reuters app.