Our daily trip around the world

🔠 ​​The oldest known sentence was recently discovered on the side of an ivory comb in Israel ☝️. The inscription, written in a pre-Phoenician Canaanite language with no name, reads: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.” The comb was discovered at an excavation site dating back 2,700 years, but experts said this particular artifact is roughly a thousand years older than that (circa ~1,700 B.C.E) – making it the oldest sentence ever discovered by about 400 years.

🇬🇧 London Underground workers plan to hold a 24-hour strike today, a move that'll halt virtually all metro train services. Labor leaders called for the strike after the workers’ union and railway companies failed to resolve an ongoing dispute over pension cuts, layoffs, and working conditions. The London Underground, aka the ‘tube’, carries an estimated 5 million people each day. Today’s strike is also expected to completely shut down 5 of the 16 metro railways in Paris.

🇩🇪 Germany blocked a Chinese-owned firm from acquiring a domestic chip company over national security concerns. Germany’s economic minister said China is pursuing a deliberate strategy of trying to acquire knowledge of the semiconductor industry in order to wield influence over the sector. The decision came days after German Chancellor Olaf Scholz became the first Western leader to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping since the start of the pandemic.