HARD NUMBERS: Mona Lisa moves, EU tries to stop Russia from playing games, Pakistan bans "fake news", Trump tells India to buy more US weapons
30,000: The Mona Lisa is moving. The 16th-century masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci will have its own room at the Louvre Museum as the institution readies for a massive, long-overdue expansion. The current structure, last updated with I.M. Pei’s iconic glass pyramids in the 1980s, is crumbling as it struggles to accommodate 30,000 visitors daily, more than twice the intended capacity. President Emmanuel Macron visited the museum on Tuesday to announce expansion plans, but who’s going to pay for the hundreds of millions of dollars required? The answer to this question remains as inscrutable as Mona Lisa’s smile …
120 million: The EU is proposing a ban on any exports of videogame consoles to Russia over concerns that Moscow techies are repurposing the equipment to fly combat drones. Major Western and Japanese manufacturers of gaming equipment suspended sales to Russia in March 2022, but secondhand sellers in Europe continue to ship to Russian buyers. Will the ban have an effect? Chinese companies sold $120 million of this equipment to Russia last year, a fourfold increase over 2022.
3: Pakistani lawmakers have voted to criminalize the spread of “fake news.” Anyone convicted of intentionally spreading misinformation faces three years in prison. The law also creates an agency empowered to block web content that is “unlawful or offensive.” Journalism and civil society advocates are already on edge about this new sweeping power of unelected bureaucrats to decide what’s true and what’s not.
35 billion:Donald Trump on Monday told Indian PM Narendra Modi he wants India to buy more US weapons. The two men have a famously good relationship, but India’s overall trade surplus of $35 billion with the US has caught the mercantilist attention of Trump. India has long been the world’s biggest arms importer, buying mostly from Russia. But as it faces down a potentially hostile China, Delhi has been boosting domestic production instead. Buying more American kit could complicate that strategy.