Welcome to Friday, where Russia warns Ukraine about attacks inside its territory, a video of deadly Brazilian police violence sparks outrage and a grandmother in New Zealand takes on Elon Musk and Tesla. We also feature a story from Buenos Aires daily Clarin about "Agrotokens," a way that farmers in Argentina are turning surplus grain into a kind of tangible cryptocurrency.

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• Moscow accuses Ukraine of attacking inside Russia, warns of “unacceptable escalation”: The head of the Border Service of Russia’s intelligence services accused Ukrainian militants of trying to enter the country disguised as refugees. Meanwhile, the U.S. announced it would provide rocket launchers with the potential to strikes deep inside Russia, further raising the risk of what Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called "a serious step towards unacceptable escalation."

• Outrage against Brazil police after video of Black man asphyxiated during arrest: A video of the brutal arrest of a Black man suffering from schizophrenia, recorded by passers-by, is causing public outrage in Brazil. It shows police officers forcing the unarmed man to breathe the gas emanating from the trunk of their car, which led to his death later that day.

• Growing questions about police response in Texas school shooting: Criticism is swelling in Texas as locals accuse police officers of not intervening quickly enough in the Uvalde school shooting, where 19 children and 2 adults died.

• China and Russia veto UN sanctions on North Korea: For the first time since 2006, Russia and China have vetoed a US-drafted resolution to strengthen sanctions against North Korea at the United Nations Security Council. The U.S. ambassador to the UN has called the move by Moscow and Beijing “dangerous.”

• Update on Senegal fire: Senegal health minister Abdoulaye Diouf Sarr has been fired by President Macky Sall following the death of 11 newborn babies in a hospital fire, reportedly due to an electrical short circuit.

• Kevin Spacey charged with sexual assault in UK: Britain’s Crown Prosecutor Service has announced that U.S actor Kevin Spacey is facing multiple charges of sexual assault, following complaints of three men between 2005 and 2013.

• Ray Liotta died at 67:U.S. actor and producer Ray Liotta, renowned for leading roles in ‘Goodfellas’ and ‘Field of Dreams,' died in his sleep at 67 in Dominican Republic, where he was shooting the movie ‘Dangerous Waters.’

Today’s front page of the daily newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo shows a screenshot of the video recording two police officers trapping an unarmed Black man into a “gas chamber” police car, which made him suffocate, in the state of Sergipe, northern Brazil.

Rosemary Penwarden, a 63-year-old grandmother living in New Zealand, converted a 29-year-old Honda car into a homemade electric car — named Frida — for $24,000. The solar-powered vehicle has been going up and down the streets for three years now, and was built in eight months by Penwarden and one of her friends.

Digital currencies may be volatile, but one company has found a way to allow Argentine farmers to purchase goods and services online using surplus grain, the Buenos Aires-based daily Clarín reports.

🇦🇷 Amid a boom in the price of farming products, Agrotoken, an Argentine firm, has devised a way for local farmers to turn surplus grain into digital credits that can be used to purchase goods with a debit card. In partnership with Visa, the firm has created a card accepted by 80 million shops and businesses associated with its tokenized grains program. This will effectively turn the grain, typically kept in storage, into digital cash to be spent on goods or even as loan or credit guarantees.

🌾 The "tokenized grains" are in effect a stable cryptocurrency, which, unlike other notoriously volatile digital currencies, is backed by a tangible asset. Each token is specifically equivalent to one ton of grain, which a producer has sold and sent into storage. Every ton is validated through a Proof of Grain Reserve certificate (PoGR), a system that is safe, transparent, decentralized and auditable at all times.

💳 Eduardo Novillo Astrada, who founded Agrotoken with Ariel Scaliter, says they are creating an app with Visa “where the producer can keep a record of all their transactions to make accounting and decision-taking easier. And every time they use it, they'll have cashback in crypto form." Gabriela Renaudo, the managing-director of Visa in Argentina, says the farming sector is "fundamental for the Argentine economy, and we need digital solutions to make a business more agile, efficient and competitive, allowing it to break into tomorrow's commerce."

➡️ Read the full article on Worldcrunch.com

— Javier Cazares, whose 10-year-old daughter Jacklyn was killed during the mass shooting at Robb elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, was one of many questioning why police didn’t storm the premises sooner. At a press conference Thursday afternoon, authorities confirmed that the shooter had been locked inside a classroom for an hour before a swat team arrived and killed him. The 19 children and two teachers were all killed inside that classroom.

✍️ Newsletter by Lila Paulou and Lisa Berdet

Let us know what’s happening in your corner of the world!

Russia's invasion has created a stark global divide: them and us. On one side are the countries refusing to condemn Moscow, with the West on the other. It's a dangerous split that could have repercussions far into the future.

A member of the Ukrainian Armed Forces writes his account of the new dynamic of targeting, and being targeted by, the invading Russian troops, as drones circle above and trenches get left behind.

While Russia is accusing Ukraine of carrying out attacks on its territory, the U.S. is set to send rocket launchers that could fire into Russian territory. But Washington is also warning Kyiv of the high risks of escalation.

Digital currencies may be volatile, but one company in Argentina has found a way to allow farmers to purchase goods and services online using surplus grain.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, aka AMLO, says his plans to reform the electoral system are a way to save taxpayer money. A closer look tells a different story.

Russia continues to shrink its ambitions in Donbas, as Ukraine doubles down on its strategy of guerilla attacks, interrupting supply and communication contacts and ultimately undermines the morale of the enemy.

Russian troops are attempting to encircle Severodonetsk, the last key city remaining under Ukrainian control in the Luhansk region, as Vladimir Putin looks to claim victory in a war that is not going Moscow's way. But will the toll be for civilians?

No doubt, strategic errors and corruption at the highest ranks in the Kremlin are partly to blame for the Russian military's stunning difficulties in Ukraine. But the roots run deeper, where the ordinary recruits come from, how they are exploited, how they react.

After a shooting left 21 dead at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, we take a look around the world at other countries that have faced similar shooting sprees on school grounds outside of the United States.

The two 90-something European-Americans spoke separately at the Davos summit this week, offering very different assessments of what the West should do in the face of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Facing resurgent protests in several provinces, Iran's clerical regime now relies on two defenses: brute force and Western appeasement. But its days may be numbered as younger Iranians are increasingly emboldened to demand a different future.

The risk of the Kremlin launching a tactical nuclear weapon on Ukraine is small but not impossible. The Western response would itself set off a counter-response, which might contain or spiral to the worst-case scenario.

As a psychoanalyst, Wolfgang Schmidbauer has researched the psychological effects of war on children — and in the process, also examined his own post-War childhood in Germany. In this article, he warns that parents tend to use their experiences of suffering as a method of education, with serious consequences.

Vladimir Putin had planned to roll through Ukraine and splinter the West. While it has not gone according to plan, the destruction and uncertainty left in the path of the invasion has shaken the world.

A Ukrainian court has convicted the first Russia soldier of war crimes. Meanwhile, Moscow offers no news on the Ukrainian soldiers surrendered in Mariupol. The very meaning of this war may be contained in the different treatment of POWs.

Lebanon's recent elections have shrunk the legislative block led by national power-brokers Hezbollah. But will a precarious new majority be able to rid the government of the long shadow of Tehran?

Can you believe Poles are happy to see Germans re-arming? It is just one of a series of examples of how the world has turned upside down since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, completing a shift begun during the pandemic toward less interdependence and more uncertainty.

Vadim Shishimarin had confessed to shooting an unarmed 62-year-old man in northeast Ukraine shortly after the invasion began.

The Colombian president recently said that the country had exported one million barrels of carbon-neutral or offset oil. But in an unregulated carbon market, such a claim is pure greenwashing.