Pandora's Box.

And the future of birth control.

News Items will be off the grid for a bit, beginning now. It resumes distribution on Tuesday, 31 May. I will distribute a Political Note at some point over the weekend. To those of you who have been waiting for the News Items investment opportunity “deck,” thank you for your patience. You will receive it next week. We explored “other options” for a while. We decided against them. So it’s back to “the base.” Happily so.

1. Pakistan on Thursday announced it will hike fuel prices so that it can resume receiving aid from a $6 billion package signed with the International Monetary Fund in 2019, the country's finance minister said. Prices will rise by 20% starting today, causing long lines to form at filling stations as the news spread. The new price of petrol will be 179.86 Pakistani rupees (around 90 U.S. cents) per liter and diesel will be 174.15 rupees, said the minister, Miftah Ismail, in a tweet. Reuters reported yesterday that the IMF and Islamabad had reached a deal to release over $900 million in funds, once Pakistan removed the fuel subsidies and hiked prices, according to a Pakistani source directly involved in talks in Qatar. "When we raise fuel prices, the deal will be done. We have worked out the outlines of a deal," the source said in a text message after the end of the talks in Doha. (Sources: reuters.com, asia.nikkei.com)

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2. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed suggestions that his country should cede territory to Russia in return for peace, comparing them to attempts to appease Nazi Germany, as Russia stepped up its attacks in Ukraine’s east. With the war in Ukraine now past the three-month mark, there is debate among Western officials about what it would take to achieve a cease-fire, and what concessions—including territorial ones—such a deal might necessitate. But despite Russia’s renewed attacks in Kharkiv and other areas of the east, Moscow has absorbed heavy losses in both troops and equipment, raising questions of how long it can sustain the forward thrust of its military campaign in Ukraine. Poland, the U.S. and the U.K., among Ukraine’s staunchest allies, have advocated taking an uncompromising stance against Russian aggression. Some European Union states have floated the idea of giving President Vladimir Putin an off-ramp that would make it easier for him to justify a de-escalation to his domestic audience in Russia, while a peace plan drawn up by Italy proposed autonomy for Ukraine’s Crimea and Donbas. Mr. Zelensky forcefully rejected the notion, put forward Monday by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, that Ukraine should forfeit land to Moscow as part of negotiations on a peace deal. (Sources: wsj.com, telegraph.co.uk)