Good morning. We’re covering India’s population milestone and China’s nuclear buildup. |
 | | A train station in Mumbai, India.Atul Loke for The New York Times |
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Can India’s economy keep up with its population? |
With size — a population that now exceeds 1.4 billion people — comes geopolitical, economic and cultural power that India has long sought. And India’s economy has been growing much faster than its population for a generation, causing the proportion of Indians living in extreme poverty to plummet. |
India’s work force is young and expanding, even as those in many industrialized countries are aging and, in some cases, shrinking. Its service sector is successful and wage costs are lower than in China, so India could try to capitalize on China’s difficulties and become a high-end manufacturing alternative. |
Enormous challenges: India’s immense size and lasting growth also lay bare a multitude of problems. Most Indians still remain poor by global standards: Many young people are not well educated and face a looming shortage of good jobs. There is also a yawning gender gap, with only about one-fifth of Indian women working in formal jobs. The country’s infrastructure is in bad shape (though the government is working to change that), and the Hindu-first nationalism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party contributes to a combustible environment. |
Those problems raise the uncomfortable question: When will India ever fulfill its vast promise and become a power on the order of China or the U. S.? |
 | | President Xi Jinping of China seems intent on expanding the nation’s nuclear arsenal.Florence Lo/Reuters |
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China has built a reactor on its coast that excels at making plutonium, a key ingredient for producing nuclear bombs, though Beijing maintains that it is strictly for civilian purposes. It is also building three vast fields of missile silos while upgrading its missile technology and its “triad,” the methods for delivering nuclear weapons from land, sea and air. |
Russia, which has threatened to use battlefield nuclear weapons in Ukraine, is cooperating with China to potentially produce arsenals whose combined size could dwarf that of the U.S. |
The big picture: Just a dozen years ago, American leaders envisioned a world that would move toward eliminating nuclear weapons. Now the U.S. is facing questions about how to manage a three-way nuclear rivalry, which upends much of the deterrence strategy that has avoided a nuclear war. |
Numbers: The U.S. and Russia each have 1,550 long-range nuclear weapons, and both countries are modernizing their arsenals. China currently has about 410 nuclear warheads — the latest Pentagon estimates say that warhead count could grow to 1,000 by the end of the decade. |
 | | The Ukrainian Army uses billboards, like these in Kostyantynivka, to encourage enlistment and counteract propaganda.Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times |
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How Russian propaganda plagues Ukraine |
Some people living along the front line in eastern Ukraine blame attacks on their towns not on the Russian forces that have bombarded their region for the past eight months, but on the Ukrainian Army. |
The police chief in the frontline town of Kostyantynivka blamed a relentless propaganda campaign that has been imposed for more than a decade. It has turned citizens against the government in Kyiv, he said, and pushed informants into the arms of the Russian proxy forces that took hold of parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014. |
Tactics: Pro-Russian television and social media channels have suffused the area for years. One channel on Telegram often announces that the Ukrainian Army is firing mortars, just before a Russian missile strike. |
Other developments in the war: |
 | | This week’s event in Shanghai showcased the transformation of China’s auto market.Qilai Shen for The New York Times |
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 | | The legal status of the abortion pill mifepristone has been in doubt since a federal judge in Texas invalidated the F.D.A.’s approval.Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images |
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 | | New Zealanders are broadly in agreement that feral cats need to be controlled.iStock/Getty Images |
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Culling invasive species like rats, rabbits and possums is not uncommon in New Zealand. While hunting feral cats is an acceptable way of controlling their population, one wildlife ecologist said, “it’s when you talk about children in particular, and doing it as a competition, I think, that it’s politically unwise.” |
 | | Natalie Portman in “Black Swan,” a Darren Aronofsky film shot on 16 millimeter.Niko Tavernise/Fox Searchlight Pictures |
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A century of 16-millimeter film |
Major studios shot on 35-millimeter film, which produced a sharper image but was more expensive. Sixteen millimeter ushered in a new era of movies made outside the Hollywood system. Regular folks could now record their own lives; journalists and soldiers could film in the midst of war; and activists could shoot political documentaries in the street. |
Today, 16 millimeter, which is increasingly expensive and difficult to process, is no longer optimal for amateur filmmakers. But filmmakers like Darren Aronofsky and Spike Lee still turn to it, attracted to 16 millimeter’s “grain,” a three-dimensional, pointillist texture that gives the finished movie a rougher look, evoking the analog past and the blurry nature of memory. |
 | | Bobbi Lin for The New York Times |
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In Han Kang’s novel “Greek Lessons,” a young mother loses the ability to speak Korean and takes solace in learning ancient Greek. |
Keri Russell plays a savvy U.S. civil servant in the Netflix series “The Diplomat.” |
That’s it for today’s briefing. See you next time. — Dan |
“The Daily” is about the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on abortion pills. |
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