🌏 Around the world in 53 seconds

🇷🇺 Russia is toying with gas flows to Europe… again. Yesterday, Moscow temporarily stopped natural gas deliveries through Nord Stream 1, the pipeline through which ~35% of Europe’s Russian gas imports flow, citing maintenance issues. It also cut off all supplies to a French utility over its refusal to pay in rubles, instead of dollars or euros as stated in contracts. In recent months, Russia has decreased flows via other pipelines, as well as slashed supplies through Nord Stream 1 to just 20% of capacity. Prices have more than doubled over that period, per the Financial Times.

🇵🇰 Pakistan is still underwater. About one-third of the country is covered by floodwaters caused by a “monsoon on steroids,” per UN Secretary General António Guterres. So far, ~33 million people – or about 14% of Pakistan’s population – have been affected. More than 1,100 people have been killed. Agriculture, a mainstay of the country’s economy, per NPR, has been severely impacted; nearly half of the cotton crop in the southern Sindh province has been lost.

🇸🇦 A Saudi Arabian court sentenced a woman to 45 years in prison for “disrupting the cohesion of society” and “destabilizing the social fabric,” per a court document obtained by Democracy for the Arab World Now yesterday. And once you peel away the euphemisms, what was Nourah bint Saeed al-Qahtani’s offense? Social media use that “offended the public order.” Her posts/activity still remain a secret, though her sentence follows a similar 34-year prison term handed down earlier this month to Salma al-Shehab, a Saudi doctoral student at Leeds University in England, whose offense was following and retweeting dissidents and activists on Twitter.