First Thing: World leaders gather in Italy for G7 summit

Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza wars are on the agenda as the US and other wealthy nations meet. Plus: US firefighters face a housing crisis

Good morning.

The G7 summit kicks off in Puglia, Italy today, with the leaders of wealthy G7 nations meeting to discuss Russia’s war on Ukraine, the Israel-Gaza conflict and the climate crisis in Africa, among other topics.

What are some goals of this meeting? The US state department is billing this meeting as the best opportunity to ease Ukraine’s financial burdens before the US presidential elections in November and a way to send a message to Russia of western stamina.

What are some key initiatives that will be discussed? The key US initiative is a large expansion of entities, including banks, that will be subject to sanctions if they are deemed to be enabling not just Russia’s military industrial complex, but any Russian entity that has been hit with sanctions.

Russia accused of ‘deliberate’ starvation tactics in Mariupol

A fresh analysis submitted to the international criminal court accuses Russia of engaging in a “deliberate pattern” of starvation tactics during the 85-day siege of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol in early 2022 – a war crime. An estimated 22,000 people were killed during the encirclement and capture of the city at the beginning of the war, with civilians left without water, gas or electricity within days of the siege as temperatures fell below -10C (14F).

US House votes to hold Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress

The US House of Representatives voted yesterday to hold the attorney general, Merrick Garland, in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over audio of Joe Biden’s interview in his classified documents case. The 216-207 vote that fell along party lines marks Republicans’ latest and strongest rebuke of the justice department as partisan conflict over the rule of law animates the 2024 presidential campaign.

In other news …

The homes of five Jewish leaders and board members of the Brooklyn Museum were splattered with red paint early Wednesday, in an attack that the New York mayor, Eric Adams, decried as “overt, unacceptable antisemitism”.

Violent protests erupted in Buenos Aires after Argentina’s senate voted to approve the first set of harsh austerity measures proposed by the president, Javier Milei. Protesters overturned cars and hurled sticks, stones and molotov cocktails at police, who responded with a water cannon and teargas.

An Arizona firearms dealer sold weapons to an undercover federal agent he believed would help him carry out his plan for a mass shooting targeting minorities and “incite a race war”, according to a federal grand jury indictment.

Stat of the day: women live about 5% longer than men

Globally, women live longer than men. While a multitude of factors contribute to the disparity – young men are more likely to die in accidents and through suicide, and women often lead healthier lifestyles – scientists in Japan have shown for the first time that cells that develop into eggs in females and sperm in males drive sex differences in lifespan. Experimenting on turquoise killifish, a team at Osaka University found that by knocking out the production of germ cells, which develop into sperm or eggs, led to longer-living males and to females that died younger than usual, essentially closing the lifespan gap.

Don’t miss this: is fracking in Pennsylvania making local children sick?

Rare cancers are occurring with alarming frequency in south-western Pennsylvania. Between 2009 and 2019, six students in one school district were diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma, and the region recorded about 30 overall cases of the cancer during that time. “We’re seeing more rare childhood cancers and brain tumors in adults,” said one local mother. Community members are concerned that this uptick in illness is related to fracking. A number of studies have confirmed their concerns, with one finding that Pennsylvania children between the ages of two and seven who lived within 1.2 miles of unconventional wells at birth were two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

… or this: US firefighters are in a housing crisis

A recent survey of firefighters found that 86% of respondents had lived in their cars, crashed on couches or stayed in campgrounds while tackling blazes, due to a lack of available housing or financial constraints. In particular for federal firefighters getting by on incomes as low as $15 an hour, these frontline workers are being forced to choose between the overcrowded, substandard government barracks, or spending the season living outside in their tents or trucks as they are priced out of local rentals or deployed to remote duty locations.

Climate check: Russia’s war with Ukraine is accelerating the global climate emergency

In more Ukraine news, research has found that the climate cost of the first two years of Russia’s war on Ukraine was greater than the annual greenhouse gas emissions generated individually by 175 countries. The Initiative on Greenhouse Gas Accounting of War (IGGAW) – a research collective partly funded by the German and Swedish governments, and the European Climate Foundation – has calculated that Russia faces a $32bn (£25bn) climate reparations bill from its first 24 months of war.

“The Russian Federation should be made to pay for this, a debt it owes Ukraine and countries in the global south that will suffer most from climate damage,” said Lennard de Klerk, the IGGAW lead author.

Last Thing: how Australians are banding together to save their koalas

Koalas on Australia’s east coast are increasingly at risk of disappearing altogether, with the species officially listed as endangered in 2022. Some Australians and private landholders are doing what they can to prevent this by creating wildlife corridors for the marsupials to thrive. One group, Bangalow Koalas, has planted more than 377,000 trees across the region. “We’re not just connecting and creating a koala wildlife corridor, and a fragmented habitat, we’re connecting communities,” said its founder, Linda Sparrow. “Land care groups, Indigenous communities, schools – they come all the time to do planting.”

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