Global Headlines Express | The US and North Korean leaders land in Singapore, and The Economist asks what makes a country good at football

Global Headlines is a new QDaily column for 2018, still in trial run. As ever, it exists to help you know more.

What the agenda-setters are talking about

The Economist: What makes a country good at football?

At the World Cup that starts in Russia on June 14, Uruguay is ninth in the betting to win it. A country of just 3.4 million people has won the tournament twice; only Brazil, Germany and Italy have won it more often.

If Uruguay can do that, why can't bigger, richer countries? The Economist built a model to work out what determines whether a country is good at football. It tallied goal differences from international matches since 1990 and compared them with what the model predicted. To predict goal difference, the model weighed several things: the state of the economy, how popular football is, and the venue and opponent for each match.

National will alone cannot decide how good a country is at football. Still, from its analysis of the results and of conditions in each country, The Economist proposes four things a state can do to strengthen the game.

The first is to encourage children to train creatively. The stress is on "creatively," not "train." Jonathan Wilson, an editor at the football magazine The Blizzard, points to Chinese training as an example: formal, punishing drills strip children of the inventive edge that turns them into prodigies. Liberia's current president, the former FIFA World Player of the Year George Weah, honed his superb technique in the slums, working the ball in short, quick steps; five-a-side football, which prizes playful skill, produced Pelé, Maradona, Cristiano Ronaldo and Messi. One survey found that players who signed with clubs had, as children, been through more unconventional training than players who didn't.

Germany is the good example here. Between 1990 and 2005 the German national team's goal difference ran a third below prediction: tall players had few answers for nimble opponents. Since 2001 German clubs have spent $120,000 training young players, and one creative drill has them deal with balls fired at them from different directions by a machine.

The second piece of advice is not to miss talented players. Russia, this year's host, has the oldest average squad age at the World Cup. The United States puts far less effort into finding young footballers than it does into basketball, baseball or American football.

That advice is clearly easier to follow in some small countries. Iceland's population is only 330,000 and it has around 100 professional players, yet it has trained more than 600 coaches to work with grassroots clubs. Since 2000 it has built 154 heated mini-pitches, so that every child plays under a watchful eye.

The third piece of advice is to use the global football network. In 2002, when Senegal beat the defending champion France at the World Cup, only two players in its squad were not with French clubs. Today Senegal is recruiting hard from its diaspora too: nine of its players were born abroad.

Mexico, by comparison, is far more closed off. Its under-17 side has outperformed Brazil's, Argentina's and Uruguay's, yet a third of the senior national team plays in the domestic league. Part of the reason is that the league pays well enough that players see no need to try their luck abroad.

Hiring foreign coaches is another route to globalization, but it needs the backing of the whole football system; otherwise even the cleverest coach starts a passing fashion rather than a reform.

The fourth is to prepare for the World Cup properly. State money and dressing-room policy both matter, but the heaviest load falls on the players. Take England's weak spot, the penalty: the national team has lost six of its seven World Cup shootouts, because its players tend to shoot at a hurried tempo. Its under-17 players deliberately slowed that tempo in training, and it made them the winning side in the shootouts at the Under-17 World Cup.

24-hour newsmakers

North Korea's supreme leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump both arrived in Singapore on the 10th, local time, to prepare for the summit on the 12th.

After landing, Kim met Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong at the Istana that evening and thanked him for his part in arranging the historic Trump-Kim meeting. It is the farthest Kim has traveled abroad since becoming the country's leader. The summit is expected to cost S$20 million (about US$15 million); Lee said he was glad to host it for the sake of regional peace.

Trump arrived in the evening. Asked by reporters how he felt about the summit, he answered "very good" twice. Lee is due to meet him on Monday.

The Trump-Kim summit is set to open at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, when the two men will discuss denuclearization among other things. Trump has called it a "one-time shot" at peace and said both of them are heading into "uncharted territory."

The US wants to see North Korea give up its nuclear weapons entirely, and will move with the UN Security Council to ease sanctions only once it sees the other side take a further step in that direction. That does not mean the Singapore summit will settle everything at a stroke; a process is expected.

Some analysts believe that simply getting a meeting with Trump is already a win for Kim, and doubt that he would abandon the nuclear weapons he has worked at for so long.

CNN, citing sources, reported that US officials are preparing for talks that could run into a second day.

What else happened in the world

The Afghan Taliban announced its first ceasefire since 2001. After the Afghan government declared a ceasefire, the Taliban announced a three-day truce over the weekend. It is the first since the US-led invasion in 2001.

People in Spain's Basque Country formed a human chain to demand a vote on self-rule. The chain, made up of tens of thousands of people, ran 202 kilometers. The region already has more autonomy than Catalonia, whose independence referendum and subsequent declaration of independence last year were put down by the Spanish government.

A candidate for Mexico's congress was shot dead. On the evening of June 8, local time, Fernando Purón, a congressional candidate from the Mexican state of Coahuila, was shot dead in the town of Piedras Negras after finishing a debate.

Italy refused to open its ports to a migrant ship. Matteo Salvini, Italy's newly appointed deputy prime minister and interior minister, turned down a request for a ship carrying 629 migrants to put them ashore in Italy. The migrants had been picked up off the coast of Libya.

A warehouse holding ballot boxes from Baghdad's parliamentary election caught fire. Fire broke out on the afternoon of the 10th in three adjacent warehouses belonging to Iraq's Independent High Electoral Commission in central Baghdad. They held the ballot boxes and the electronic counting equipment for Rusafa, the district on the east bank of the Tigris.

Someone said

"He really did stab us in the back."

Larry Kudlow, the White House's chief economic adviser, said the United States refused to endorse the G7 summit's joint communiqué because Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had betrayed it.

Shortly after the summit ended, Trump wrote on Twitter from his plane that, on the basis of Trudeau's "false statements" at his press conference and the "fact" that Canada charges "massive Tariffs" on American farmers, workers and companies, he had instructed the US delegation not to endorse the communiqué.

At that press conference Trudeau said Canada would hit back at the steel and aluminum tariffs the United States has imposed on Canada, the EU and Mexico: "I have made it very clear to the president that this is not something we relish doing, but it is something that we absolutely will do... Canadians, we're polite, we're reasonable, but we also will not be pushed around."

In an interview on Sunday, Kudlow said Trudeau's remarks were "for domestic political consumption" and did "damage to the G7 summit." "He really did stab us in the back," he said.

By Kudlow's account, the United States had meant to sign the communiqué right up until Trudeau held that press conference. He also said American irritation had to do with the coming Trump-Kim summit: "Trump is not going to permit any show of weakness on the trip to negotiate with North Korea."

"I finished my soup, called a taxi and went to murder Babchenko... [Babchenko] lay in a pool of blood waiting for the ambulance. I wished him good health, and he told me not to make him laugh."

In an interview with the BBC, the "hitman" Oleksiy Tsymbaliuk explained how he faked the assassination of the Russian opposition journalist Arkady Babchenko.

Tsymbaliuk belongs to a Ukrainian right-wing group. He said that in April a Ukrainian, Borys Herman, asked him to kill Babchenko and paid him $14,000 up front. He went straight to Ukraine's Security Service.

The Security Service introduced Tsymbaliuk to his target, and the two met a few days before the planned murder. "I said to the Security Service officer, 'You don't get a chance to slap Putin in the face every day,'" Tsymbaliuk said.

On May 29 he set out to kill. "I finished my soup, called a taxi and went to murder Babchenko," he told the BBC reporter, laughing. "[Babchenko] lay in a pool of blood waiting for the ambulance. I wished him good health, and he told me not to make him laugh."

News outlets everywhere reported Babchenko's "death." Herman was arrested by the authorities just as he was preparing to leave Ukraine. Soon afterward word came that Babchenko had come back from the dead — the death had been staged.

You might also be interested in

John Lasseter, chief creative officer of Pixar Animation, is leaving at the end of the year.

Disney announced that John Lasseter, chief creative officer of Disney Animation and Pixar Animation, will leave both studios at the end of the year. Until then he will act as a consultant.

Lasseter worked on the Toy Story, Cars and Frozen franchises. Last November employees accused him of repeatedly giving unnecessary hugs. Lasseter, now 61, left an apology by email and announced he was taking six months away from the company.

Disney has not named a successor. According to people familiar with the matter, Jennifer Lee, who directed Frozen, will be promoted within Disney Animation, and Pete Docter, who directed Inside Out, will take on more at Pixar.

The statement from Disney CEO Robert Iger gave no reason for the departure and praised Lasseter's contribution to the company and to animation. In his own statement, Lasseter said he felt it was time to turn to other creative work, though he would keep following what Disney and Pixar make.

The United States says it has built the world's most powerful supercomputer

The US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced that its supercomputer, named "Summit," is now the "world's most powerful," with a peak speed of 200 petaflops, beating the previous leader, a Chinese machine.

It uses 4,608 compute servers, each holding two 22-core IBM Power9 processors and six Nvidia Tesla V100 graphics-processing-unit accelerators.

In the global TOP500 supercomputer rankings published at the end of 2017, China's "Sunway TaihuLight" came first, with a peak floating-point speed of 125 petaflops and a sustained speed of 93 petaflops.

On this day in history

On June 11, 1898, the Qing dynasty's Guangxu Emperor issued the Edict on the Establishment of the National Policy (《定国是诏》), beginning the Hundred Days' Reform.

On June 11, 1963, the "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door" took place at the University of Alabama, an attempt to stop the university from ending racial segregation.

On June 11, 1971, the United States and Japan signed the Okinawa Reversion Agreement, handing the Ryukyu Islands to Japan. The same day the government of the Republic of China issued a solemn statement that the Diaoyutai Islands are part of its territory, and voiced deep displeasure at the United States giving the Ryukyus to Japan on its own authority.

On June 11, 1982, Steven Spielberg's science-fiction film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial premiered.

On June 11, 2010, the 19th FIFA World Cup opened in South Africa.

Cover image from: pxhere