EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT LIZ TRUSS What Truss wants you to read: Britain shouldn't be daunted. What you need to read about Truss: Her political journey from liberal left to radical right. What Washington really thinks about Truss, by Global Insider and Ella Creamer. Truss' full Cabinet. SIX SMART THINGS TO SAY ABOUT TRUSS She's remaking the British Conservatives in ways U.S. Republican leadership never remade their party. Truss' team is the first British cabinet in which none of the top five jobs are held by white men. Kwasi Kwarteng is chancellor, James Cleverly is foreign minister and Suella Braverman is home secretary. Therese Coffey is deputy prime minister (and apparently has Dr. Dre as her alarm music ). Unlike Boris Johnson, she always has a plan: Truss doesn't go anywhere or pick up the phone without a to-do list and a political team behind her. And she doesn't want anyone undercutting her as she faces a poisonous set of challenges: Johnson's buddies and her main leadership rivals have been frozen out, replaced by loyalists and close contacts who entered Parliament with her in 2010. It's a total clear-out among Downing Street advisers. Truss hugs Biden tight — agrees to protect the Good Friday Agreement: That's going to be a tightrope walk given her very public commitment to ripping up the Northern Ireland Protocol, which governs Brexit border arrangements on the island of Ireland. In the first leaders' call readout supplied by Downing Street, the two leaders also agreed on "furthering our deep defense alliance through NATO and AUKUS." No love for EU, and right back at her: For all Truss' bravado over Russia's invasion of Ukraine, EU leaders consider her an irritating time-waster, who picks fights over issues like Northern Ireland, instead of focusing on issues like energy prices and defeating Russia. No surprise they're not top of Truss' call list. Truss channels Thatcher but also free market socialism: With millions of Britons paying as much for energy as for their housing, the only way out is expensive price caps or other forms of subsidy. Truss is expected to freeze energy bills — via a massive funding injection that would make a socialist proud. Much of Britain is also going on strike for the first time in decades: rail workers, barristers, dockhands, bus drivers, garbage collectors, Amazon employees and even journalists at the infamously anti-union Daily Express. Truss will get to live out any Margaret Thatcher fantasies she has stored up. THE CHIPS ARE DOWN FOR RUSSIA PUTIN'S SCRAMBLE FOR FOREIGN HIGH-TECH PARTS: Russia is being throttled by a severe technology deficit inflicted by sanctions. Kyiv is acutely aware that the outcome of the war is likely to hinge on whether Russia finds a way to regain access to high-tech chips, and is out to ensure it doesn't get them, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal told POLITICO. My colleague Zoya Sheftalovich obtained a list of parts Moscow is hunting for . The big risk is Moscow buying microchips via intermediary countries that aren't sanctioning Russia, for example: China. In extreme cases, Russians appear to already be clawing chips out of household appliances like fridges. What exactly is Russia missing? Of the 25 items Russia is seeking most desperately, almost all are microchips manufactured by U.S. firms: Marvell, Intel, Holt, ISSI, Microchip, Micron, Broadcom and Texas Instruments. They're also needing chips by Japanese firm Renesas, Germany's Infineon and American firm Vicor, and connectors by U.S. firm AirBorn. By the numbers: Moscow's arsenal may be down to fewer than 50 microchip-guided hypersonic missiles. "These are the ones that have precision and accuracy due to the microchips that they have," per Shmyhal. Russia is turning to North Korea for weapons: Not the fancy microchipped weapons, but the basics that it should be able to mass produce on its own. BY THE NUMBERS — RUSSIAN FOSSIL FUEL INCOME: After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, oil and gas prices spiked. But as the market has cooled, those revenues are now back below 2021 numbers. Moscow's tax take will drop further as a result of the decision to cut off Nordstream1 flows to Germany. LATIN AMERICA LEANS LEFT … OR DOES IT? TIME branded Chile's millennial President Gabriel Boric as a " New Kind of Leftist Leader." And if Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva retakes the Brazilian presidency in October, it's a fact that all six of Latin America's largest economies will have left-wing leaders. But Chileans on Sunday overwhelmingly rejected a draft new 170-page constitution supported by Boric. Though 80 percent of Chileans voted in 2020 to be presented with a new constitution, majorities in all 16 regions rejected this particular version, which would have enforced gender parity in public institutions, required government environmental protection and enshrined LGBTQ rights. Tl;dr: The constitution was literally too long to read, and too rigidly progressive for many. AFGHANISTAN — HOW THE TALIBAN FRAMES ITS RULE, ONE YEAR ON: Per Suhail Shaheen, the group's international spokesperson who's camped out in Qatar, partly because the Taliban is either not welcome or not recognized elsewhere. FOOD SECURITY HIGHS AND LOWS The good news is that global food prices dropped for a fifth consecutive month in August, thanks to higher supplies, per the U.N.'s Food Price Index. The bad news is the cost of producing food has been rising in 2022, including because of fertilizer price hikes. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says farms will pay 18 percent more in costs in 2022. And the much worse news is that Somalia will probably be officially classified as in a famine in October, the U.N. said. SOMALIA — REACHING A MALNUTRITION TIPPING POINT: Ukrainian grain getting to Africa was too late for 730 children who died in Somalia's food and nutrition centers in recent months. UNICEF Somalia Representative Wafaa Saeed told U.N. agencies in Geneva that "1.5 million children, nearly half of the under-five population, are likely to have acute malnutrition. Of these 385,000 will need treatment for severe acute malnutrition. These are unprecedented numbers." "Water and sanitation are just as important. … No matter how much food a malnourished child eats, he or she will not get better if the water they are drinking is not safe." ( Full comments here.) That point takes us back to the opening item of today's Global Insider, on rainwater now being unsafe to drink everywhere. Fewer than half of the children who needed it most got the safe drinking water they needed. But of course, you'd drink it anyway if the alternative is starvation. But with unsafe water comes a higher risk of deadly diseases — which are also much harder to fight off when you're malnourished. UNICEF says outbreaks (diarrhea, cholera and measles) spiked between January-July. If a child in Somalia survives all that, there's an increased risk of being orphaned, and a 90 percent chance they'll never return to school. PLANET CORNER CLIMATE — LESS THAN 100 DAYS TO COP27, G-20 TALKS STALL: A G-20 climate and environment ministers meeting ended with no joint communiqué, following a predictable fight over whether to criticize Russia's invasion of Ukraine. (Russia is a G-20 member.) Diplomats from Beijing also blocked deals on a set of specific policies and principles they had agreed to in previous years, including the Paris Agreement threshold of holding global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The G-20 is broadly viewed as the key group for holding global warming to the lowest possible level. Around 80 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from G-20 members (including the EU). THE OTHER COP: There's another global environmental conference coming up, COP15 on Biodiversity. And it has advocates excited (and also a bit freaked out). "With our planet experiencing the biggest loss of life since the dinosaurs, COP15 in Montreal this December could be Nature's "Paris moment," said Noor Yafai , the Nature Conservancy's global policy and partnerships director in Europe. TECH — INSTAGRAM FINED $400 MILLION FOR CHILD PRIVACY BREACHES: POLITICO revealed Monday that the Irish Data Protection Commission has whacked Instagram with a $400 million fine for mishandling kids' personal data, marking a coming of age of Europe's most important digital privacy regulator (many tech companies have their European headquarters in Ireland), and which has been criticized as toothless and understaffed. Children and the internet an increasingly hot topic for regulators: Australian authorities have served Apple, Microsoft and Meta with world-first legal orders to come clean on what — if anything — they are doing to detect and report child sex abuse material online or face fines of more than half a million dollars a day.
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