SUDAN

Two generals turn their armies on each other, and Khartoum becomes a battlefield

The men who ran the country together decided they could not, and fifty million people are living inside the argument.

Fighting broke out in Khartoum on the morning of April 15 between Sudan's army, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and a paramilitary force called the Rapid Support Forces, led by his deputy-turned-rival, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. The two had seized power together in a coup in 2021 and had spent the months since negotiating a transition to civilian rule that neither wanted on the other's terms. The unresolved question, who would command a unified army, was the fuse. When it caught, it caught in the capital, a city of six million, rather than at some distant front.

Within days the airport was a wreck of burning planes, hospitals were shelled, and residents were trapped in their homes without water or power as tanks fought in the streets outside. The RSF, descended from the Janjaweed militias of the Darfur genocide, embedded itself in neighbourhoods; the army had the air force and used it over its own capital. Ceasefire after ceasefire was announced and broken within hours. By the end of the fortnight several hundred people were dead, thousands wounded, and foreign governments were mounting evacuations, pulling diplomats out by helicopter and convoy while telling their ordinary citizens, and the Sudanese who had no embassy to call, that they were on their own.

This is a catastrophe with no good actor to root for. Both generals betrayed the 2019 revolution that removed the dictator Omar al-Bashir; both are now fighting to rule what is left. The people caught between them had spent four years trying to build a civilian government and watched it dismantled first by the men's coup and now by their war. Sudan borders seven countries, several of them fragile, and sits on the migration routes to the Mediterranean. The fear, already, is that this does not stay inside Sudan.

MEDIA

Fox News pays $787.5 million to Dominion, and settles rather than testify

The largest defamation settlement in American history, agreed as the jury was seated. The price of the lie was known; the reckoning was avoided.

Fox News agreed on April 18 to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million, roughly half of what the voting-machine company had sought, to settle a defamation suit over the network's promotion of false claims that Dominion had rigged the 2020 election. The settlement came moments after the jury was sworn in, sparing Rupert Murdoch, his son Lachlan and the network's biggest hosts from testifying under oath about what internal messages had already shown: that on air they amplified allegations they privately called "crazy" and "totally off the rails," because they feared losing viewers to rivals who were telling the audience what it wanted to hear.

The dollar figure is the largest ever in a defamation case, and Fox can afford it. What the settlement bought the network was silence: no admission beyond a single sentence acknowledging the court had found the claims false, no apology on air, and no cross-examination of the Murdochs in front of a jury. A week later the network parted ways with its most-watched host, Tucker Carlson, without explanation. Dominion's lawyer said the money was accountability. Others noted that the truth had been established in the pre-trial filings, for anyone who wished to read them, and that the audience which believed the lie was unlikely to be the audience that did.

SPACE

Starship flies, and explodes, and SpaceX calls it a success

SpaceX launched Starship, the largest rocket ever built and the vehicle NASA is counting on to return astronauts to the Moon, from south Texas on April 20. It cleared the tower, which was the main thing the company wanted, flew for about four minutes with several of its 33 engines out, began to tumble, and was blown up on command over the Gulf of Mexico. The launch pad was cratered and debris was thrown for miles. SpaceX, which builds by breaking things on purpose and had set expectations at "don't blow up the pad," called it a successful test and said the next vehicle would fly within months. Its way of working, fly, fail, learn, fly again, is the opposite of the aerospace tradition, and it has put the company a decade ahead of everyone.

POPULATION

India becomes the most populous country on Earth

India will overtake China as the world's most populous country around the middle of this year, with about 1.429 billion people, the United Nations estimated on April 19, a milestone reached decades earlier than once forecast and, for China, decades too soon. India's population is young, with a median age of 28; China's is ageing and, as of last year, shrinking. The number is an asset and a test at once: a vast, young workforce is the country's great advantage, and finding it enough jobs, at a moment when the technology industry is asking whether software can do the work software workers do, is the great question behind every economic headline of the coming decade.

COURTS

The Supreme Court preserves access to the abortion pill, for now

The Supreme Court on April 21 blocked lower-court rulings that would have sharply restricted access to mifepristone, the more common of the two drugs used in medication abortions, keeping it available while the underlying case proceeds. The order, with two justices noting their dissent, preserves the status quo for a drug used in more than half of American abortions, ten months after the same court removed the constitutional right to the procedure. The case will be back.

IN BRIEF

Twitter's checks; DeepMind and Brain; Tesla's margins; a warrant unenforced

Twitter removed the blue verification ticks from accounts that would not pay for them on April 20, briefly stripping the marks from governments, aid agencies and the dead, and creating a market in impersonation. Google merged its two AI groups, DeepMind and Brain, into one unit on April 20, a sign of how far behind it feels. Tesla cut prices for the sixth time this year and reported on April 19 that its profit margin had fallen accordingly, testing the theory that it can sell cars like software. Ukraine's spring offensive gathered, still waiting on Western armour, as Bakhmut smouldered.

The Column

A twenty-one-year-old had the keys to everything

The leak that embarrassed the Pentagon this fortnight is not a spy story. It is an access-control story, and I have seen the same mistake in every organisation I have worked in.

By Daniel Reeve

The most-discussed detail of the classified documents that spilled onto the internet this month is not what they said about the war. It is who leaked them: not a defector, not a foreign agent, but, according to the arrest this week, a 21-year-old air national guardsman who ran a small chat group of gaming friends and, it appears, printed some of the most sensitive intelligence the United States produces and carried it home to impress them. Set aside the motive, which is sad and stupid in equal measure. The question that should keep people up at night is the boring one. Why could he see it at all?

I am not a defence contractor. I build business systems, and this is the single most common serious flaw I find when I inherit one. Somebody, years ago, needed broad access to get a job done under deadline, and it was granted, and it was never taken away, and then it was copied, because the fastest way to set up the next person was to give them what the last person had. Access accretes. It almost never recedes. Five years later you have interns who can see the whole customer database because the permission set they were assigned was cloned from someone who once needed it, and nobody has looked, because looking is nobody's job and the system works.

The principle that prevents this has a name, least privilege, and it is old and unglamorous and constantly ignored. It says that every person and every system should have exactly the access required to do their work, and not one field more. It is unglamorous because it produces nothing you can demonstrate. A permission that was correctly withheld is invisible. You only ever see least privilege in the negative, on the day someone who should not have been able to reach something reaches it, and by then it is a leak, or a breach, or a 21-year-old with a printer.

Here is the uncomfortable part, and it is the same in a war room and in a rental company's customer platform. The reason access sprawls is not incompetence. It is kindness under pressure. Saying no to an access request slows someone down today, visibly, in front of you, while the risk it prevents is abstract and lands, if it lands, on a Tuesday years from now on someone else's watch. So the request gets granted, every time, and the sprawl is the sum of a thousand reasonable, generous, individually defensible decisions.

The fix is not a tool, though tools help; I have spent a fair amount of my own time building ones that show an administrator who can see what and flag the permissions nobody uses. The fix is making the review somebody's job, on a schedule, whether or not anything is wrong. Once a quarter, who can reach the sensitive thing, and does each of them still need to. It takes an afternoon. It is the same afternoon I keep writing about in this column, the one nobody spends until the failure makes them. The Pentagon has more of those afternoons available to it than almost any organisation on Earth, and a 21-year-old still walked out with the war plans, because access is easy to grant, invisible to hold, and painful to take back. Go and look at who can see your most sensitive data. I promise you will be surprised, and I promise the surprise will be someone you had forgotten was still there.

The Ledger

Italy's ChatGPT block continues while OpenAI negotiates age and data controls. Google folds DeepMind and Brain together, an admission of urgency. The regulatory front, not the pause letter, is where this moves.

Data centers & power

Still under the surface, still building. Google's consolidation of its AI groups is partly a fight over who gets the scarce compute inside the company.

Rates

March US inflation cooled to 5.0 percent headline but core stayed sticky at 5.6 percent; the Fed is expected to raise once more in May. The regional-bank strain has not gone away, only quieted.

Real estate

Office vacancies at multi-decade highs in several US cities; the loans behind them sit largely on regional-bank balance sheets, which is why the two stories are one story. Mortgage rate 6.39 percent (April 20).

India tech

India is now, by the UN's count, the most populous nation. The jobs question underneath that number is the same one this column keeps circling: what happens to a young services workforce when the entry-level work is the work AI does first.

What we called wrong

Nothing to correct this fortnight. The access-control column above is, if anything, a restatement of a warning we should have made in No. 5 when we praised systems that "match the operation" without saying that matching also means withholding.

The Back Page

Dame Edna, and the man inside

Barry Humphries died in Sydney on April 22, at 89. For sixty years he was, on stage, a lilac-haired housewife from the Melbourne suburbs named Dame Edna Everage, who called her audiences "possums," hurled gladioli into the stalls, and insulted the famous to their faces with a sweetness that made it impossible to be offended. He was also Sir Les Patterson, a grotesque of a cultural attaché, and, underneath both, a serious man of letters who nearly drank himself to death in his forties and spent the rest of his life sober and prodigiously productive. The character outgrew the country that made her; Edna played Broadway and the West End and roasted royalty. Humphries said once that satire was tragedy plus time. He gave Australia a mirror it could laugh at, and he held it up for so long that most people forgot there was a man behind it, holding it steady, all those years.