First Thing: Zelenskiy faces difficult time in Washington amid Congress spending battle

Republicans propose stopgap bill that excludes funding for Ukraine as both parties signal they have questions for Kyiv’s delegation. Plus, why are 500,000 people watching paint dry?

Good morning.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy is likely to find his latest visit to Washington a much tougher occasion than the hero’s welcome he was given nine months ago.

Zelenskiy was given a standing ovation when he delivered an address to a joint sitting of Congress in December, but this morning there will be minimal ceremony, and the Ukrainian president faces difficult conversations behind closed doors when he meets congressional leaders who are in the midst of a bitter spending battle that could lead to a government shutdown.

Republicans have proposed a stopgap bill that does not include funding for Ukraine, an omission that the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer called “an insult to Ukraine and a gift to Putin”.

“I cannot think of a worse welcome for Zelenskiy,” Schumer said.

What are the Republicans saying? The Republican House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, made clear to his party that he would approach Biden’s pending request for an additional $24bn in support for Ukraine with considerable scepticism. “Where’s the accountability on the money we’ve already spent? What is the plan for victory? I think that’s what the American public wants to know,” he said.

What about the Democrats? Democrats too will have questions if the Ukrainian delegation comes with requests for drone technology. Party leaders are wary of providing weapon systems that could be used to strike Russian territory, and congressional sources say Zelenskiy will be quizzed on Kyiv’s role in recent strikes on Moscow and other targets deep within Russia.

AI-focused tech firms locked in ‘race to the bottom’, says MIT professor

The scientist behind a landmark letter calling for a pause in developing powerful artificial intelligence systems has said tech executives did not halt their work because they are locked in a “race to the bottom”.

Max Tegmark, a co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, organised an open letter in March calling for a six-month pause in developing giant AI systems.

Despite support from more than 30,000 signatories, including Elon Musk and the Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, the document failed to secure a hiatus in developing the most ambitious systems.

Speaking to the Guardian six months on, Tegmark said he had not expected the letter to stop tech companies working towards AI models more powerful than GPT-4, the large language model that powers ChatGPT, because competition has become so intense.

What did the letter say? The letter warned of an “out-of-control race” to develop minds that no one could “understand, predict or reliably control”, and urged governments to intervene if a moratorium on developing systems more powerful than GPT-4 could not be agreed between leading AI companies such as Google, ChatGPT’s owner OpenAI and Microsoft. It asked: “Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilisation?”

Revealed: one in three Europeans now vote anti-establishment

Almost one-third of Europeans now vote for populist, far-right or far-left parties, research shows, with wide support for anti-establishment politics surging across the continent in an increasingly problematic challenge to the mainstream.

Analysis by more than 100 political scientists across 31 countries found that in national elections last year a record 32% of European voters cast their ballots for anti-establishment parties, compared with 20% in the early 2000s and 12% in the early 1990s.

The research, led by Matthijs Rooduijn, a political scientist at the University of Amsterdam, and shared exclusively with the Guardian, also found that about half of anti-establishment voters support far-right parties – and this is the vote share that is increasing most rapidly.

“There’s fluctuation, but the underlying trend is the numbers keep rising,” Rooduijn said. “Mainstream parties are losing votes; anti-establishment parties are gaining. It matters, because many studies now show that when populists secure power, or influence over power, the quality of liberal democracy declines.”

What is populism? Usually combined with a rightwing or leftwing “host ideology”, populism divides society into two homogeneous and opposing groups, a “pure people” versus a “corrupt elite”, and argues that all politics should be an expression of the “will of the people”.

In other news …

Negotiators for the striking Writers Guild of America and Hollywood studios are set to meet again today to try to resolve a nearly five-month standoff that has disrupted film and television production. The two sides issued a joint statement saying simply: “The WGA and AMPTP met for bargaining today and will meet again tomorrow.”

Merrick Garland faced down the latest Republican attacks on the justice department’s handling of Hunter Biden and other issues yesterday, vowing to “not to be intimidated”. The House judiciary inquiry came just a week before the Joe Biden impeachment hearing.

The family of a North Carolina man is suing Google for negligence after he died from crashing into a creek below a collapsed bridge at the alleged behest of Google Maps. ​​Philip Paxson drowned in his overturned pickup truck beneath a bridge that had collapsed nearly a decade earlier.

The Biden administration announced it is providing $600m in funding to produce new, at-home Covid-19 tests and is restarting a website allowing Americans to again order up to four free tests per household – aiming to prevent possible shortages during a rise in coronavirus cases during winter.

Stat of the day: Connecticut to pay $25m settlement to men wrongly convicted in 1985 murder

Connecticut has agreed to pay a $25m settlement to two men who spent decades in prison for a brutal murder they did not commit, and whose convictions were partly based on evidence presented by a forensic scientist who worked on some of America’s most notorious criminal investigations and trials. Ralph “Ricky” Birch and Shawn Henning were convicted for the 1985 murder of Everett Carr after Dr Henry Lee – whose name would later become widely known in connection with the OJ Simpson, Lana Clarkson and JonBenét Ramsey cases – testified about “blood” evidence on a towel and how blood from the victim’s wounds had spattered in an “uninterrupted” fashion. But no forensic evidence existed linking Birch and Henning to the murder despite its exceptionally gory execution.

Don’t miss this: Europe is beating its addiction to plastics. Why is the US so far behind?

Though I grew up in the United States, I’ve spent the majority of my adult life in France – which means that every trip “back” across the Atlantic has become a moment of curiosity and culture shock. Most recently, the shock was over the sheer prevalence of plastics in American daily life. In Paris, and elsewhere in Europe, plastics are clearly on their way out and paper is in. The standard takeaway cup in coffee shops, juice bars and cafes serving hipster smoothies is paper. Delivery food orders arrive in paper cartons. In grocery stores, bulk sections for pasta, nuts, dried fruit, cereals, rice and legumes are normal, as is putting those things (or your fruit and vegetables) in paper bags.

Setting foot in the US, on the other hand, felt like stepping out of a time machine – and not in the right direction. Even in progressive spaces, plastics reigned supreme.

Climate check: Rishi Sunak defends net zero policy U-turn after domestic and international condemnation

Rishi Sunak has vowed to press ahead with watering down measures to combat climate change despite intense criticism, because he still believes the UK will hit its net zero target in 2050. The UK prime minister defended defying the recommendations of the Climate Change Committee (CCC) and insisted he had “absolute confidence and belief” the country was on track to meet its end goal.

The prime minister announced yesterday a flurry of U-turns on climate targets: pushing back the ban on purchasing new petrol cars from 2030 to 2035, and delaying the target of eliminating gas boilers. Al Gore, the former US vice-president, led international condemnation of what he called a “shocking and really disappointing” decision that had left young people feeling “stabbed in the back”.

Last Thing: ‘Why are 500,000 people watching paint dry?’ The man behind YouTube’s DIY sensation

Martijn Doolaard has released 83 videos documenting his restoration of an Alpine cabin. They are slow, quiet, uneventful. The films he has published on a YouTube channel he set up for the purpose have, despite their meditative pace, netted him 584,000 subscribers. As one journalist put it, why are 500,000 people lining up to watch paint dry? Yet his weekly instalments are fascinating and strangely elegiac, unhurriedly recording the painstaking tasks he sets himself and anything else that happens to occur. Each episode opens with gentle piano or distant cowbells over a gliding shot from the air, like a bird cruising at his altitude. Doolaard appears on camera well before he says anything, wearing a shirt, blue jeans, leather boots and an old-timer’s hat. When he does speak, it’s as if to an old friend. He explains his secret.

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