Civil War Continues in Sudan

Happy Wednesday! Some bars have begun using a new beer glass that is filled from the bottom up and sealed by a magnet. Sellers of the glass pitch it as a way to save bartenders time—but we’re pretty sure they just wanted to invent a way to shotgun a pint glass.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• U.S. and Chinese officials met in Beijing on Tuesday to kick off a joint working group that will address the flow of fentanyl into the United States and the chemical shipments from China used to make the drug. The talks are the product of President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s summit in San Francisco last November. “We reached common understanding on the work plan,” China’s Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong said yesterday. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the meeting represented “a good start, but it is just a start.”
• Kataib Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militia group in Iraq, announced the suspension of attacks on U.S. forces on Tuesday. “As we announce the suspension of military and security operations against the occupation forces—in order to prevent embarrassment of the Iraqi government—we will continue to defend our people in Gaza in other ways,” Ahmad al-Hamidawi, the group’s leader, said in a statement yesterday. The announcement comes two days after a drone strike that the Pentagon said had “the footprints of Kataib Hezbollah” killed three Americans and wounded dozens of others at a base in Jordan near the Syrian border—an attack for which the U.S. has vowed a strong response. 
• The House Homeland Security Committee voted 18-15 early Wednesday morning—entirely along party lines—to advance two articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas: for his “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and “breach of public trust.” GOP Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee—chairman of the committee—argued that, “for three years, Secretary Mayorkas has willfully and systemically refused to comply with the laws enacted by Congress, and he has breached the public trust. His actions created this unprecedented crisis, turning every state into a border state.” A full House vote on the articles of impeachment could come as early as next week.
• The Labor Department reported Tuesday that job openings ticked up from an upwardly revised 8.9 million in November to 9.0 million in December, bucking forecasts predicting a decline in openings. The hires rate also increased slightly, from 3.5 percent in November to 3.6 percent last month. But the quits rates—a sign of workers’ confidence in their ability to find new employment—remained at 2.2 percent, the lowest level in over three years.

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Sudan Still Gripped by Brutal War

Safaa Abdel Karim, a member of the Masalit tribe from Geneina in West Darfur, told Reuters last month how she watched members of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—a paramilitary group allied with mostly Arab militias at war with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF)—beat her 2-year-old son to death just 10 kilometers from the border with Chad. Abdel Karim and her children were trying to escape the days-long massacre that had already claimed her husband’s life. 

The RSF fighters killed Abdel Karim’s son, Ibrahim, because he was a boy. “You zurga won’t stay in El Geneina,” she recalled the RSF men shouting, using a derogatory term for people with darker skin. “They said if the boy grows up, he will fight us.” When Abdel Karim, also carrying her infant daughter, tried to intervene to save her son, one of the men shot her below the shoulder. She was one of 40 mothers to recount similar instances of gender- and ethnically motivated killings in the area.

The brutal war in Sudan between the once-allied RSF and SAF has claimed more than 10,000 lives and displaced some 6 million people since it began in April of last year. The conflict carries echoes of previous atrocities in Sudan and in Darfur in particular, where Janjaweed militias—the precursor to the RSF, backed by the then-dictator, Omar al-Bashir—committed genocide in the early 2000s. The war shows few signs of abating in its tenth month, even as the SAF loses ground. Rival regional powers are reportedly backing opposing sides in the hopes of gaining influence once the war is over, but it’s a strategy that may ultimately prolong the violence. The U.S., for its part, has accused both sides of war crimes and the RSF of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, but has seen little progress in its efforts to help broker peace. 

The seeds of this war were sown …

As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of The Morning Dispatch. Our full 1,675-word story on the Sudanese civil war is available in the members-only version of TMD.

Worth Your Time

• Writing for Politico, former congressman and recent GOP presidential candidate Will Hurd outlined his vision for the responsible development of artificial intelligence (AI). Hurd was a board member of OpenAI until last summer and believes that artificial general intelligence (AGI), if developed without guardrails, could pose catastrophic risks. “Artificial general intelligence will be an evolution of AI that can understand, learn and apply intelligence to a wide range of problems, not just those for which it was specifically trained,” he wrote. “Indistinguishable from human cognition, AGI will enable solutions to complex global issues, from climate change to medical breakthroughs. If unchecked, AGI could also lead to consequences as impactful and irreversible as those of nuclear war. … Who can be trusted to develop such a powerful tool and weapon? Who should be entrusted with the tool once it’s created? How do we ensure the discovery of AGI is a net positive for humanity, not an extinction-level event? As this technology becomes more science fact than science fiction, its governance can’t be left to the whims of a few people. Like the nuclear arms race, there are bad actors, including our adversaries, moving forward without ethical or human considerations.”

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Associated Press: Justice Department Investigating Democratic Rep. Cori Bush Over Alleged Misuse of Campaign Funds

Toeing the Company Line

• What’s the latest from the campaign trail? How could the debate over immigration shape the 2024 election? Mike was joined by John, Drucker, Grayson, and James to discuss all that and more on last night’s Dispatch Live (🔒). Members who missed the conversation can catch a rerun—either video or audio-only—by clicking here. 
• In the newsletters: Nick dove into (🔒) the fever dream that is right-wing influencers’ latest conspiracy theory: Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce teaming up in a Pentagon “psy op” to reelect Joe Biden.
• On the podcasts: Sarah and Jonah discuss (🔒) Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon on The Dispatch Book Club, and Jonah is joined by journalist and politician Daniel Hannan on the latest episode of The Remnant to explore when and why America began to take a turn for the crazy.
• On the site today: Elias Ferenczy explains the legal fight between Biden and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott over the border, and Jonah analyzes former President Donald Trump’s NATO bashing.