Sometimes a president strives for a unifying message at the annual State of the Union address. In this hard-fought election year, President Joe Biden sought to draw sharp contrasts – and to resolve concerns about his age.

• Republican shake-up: Donald Trump cements his grip on the Republican National Committee as his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, and ally Michael Whatley assume top leadership posts.
• U.S. military to build Gaza port: President Joe Biden announces that the military will build a temporary port on Gaza’s Mediterranean coast to receive aid by sea.
• Hong Kong crackdown: Hong Kong unveils a proposed law that threatens life imprisonment for residents who “endanger national security.”
• Ramadan begins Sunday: The Muslim holy month of Ramadan starts Sunday. It unites observant Muslims in daily fasts from dawn to sunset as well as charitable works.
• SATs on tablets: Students across the United States for the first time will take SATs with computers and tablets – not the pencils they’ve used since the college admissions test was introduced nearly a century ago.

Read these news briefs.

A tour along Ukraine’s front lines finds a noted shift from the optimism before last summer’s failed counteroffensive. With critical U.S. military supplies held up in Congress, the emphasis is on defense, and on patient, courageous resolve.

Gaza has become too dangerous for humanitarian aid trucks, so parachuted supplies are all that Palestinians in Gaza can rely on. This is what an airdrop looks like firsthand, with all its heart and heartbreak. 

After long resisting Europe’s rightward political creep, Portugal looks set to join the trend in Sunday’s elections. Critics worry that the populist Chega party is giving new life to the ideology of Portugal’s bygone dictatorship.

On March 10, Lily Gladstone could win an Academy Award for her performance in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” She would be the first Native woman to receive an Oscar – after a century of work that has tended to go unrecognized.

An Italian-made movie about Senegal is up for the foreign film Oscar. But at a new film school in Dakar, students are fighting to tell the world their own stories, on their own terms. 

One of the top news items in sports this week was about a player on an all-female cricket team in India breaking the world record for the fastest delivery of a ball by a woman in a match. Coming just before International Women’s Day on March 8, the feat was another sign of progress for women. Yet for India – which still emphasizes that a woman’s place is at home – it was one more milestone in the rapid rise of girls and women playing the nation’s most popular sport.

In many countries, access to organized sports has been a liberating force for young women. In the United States, passage of Title IX in 1972 ignited greater equality for girls in school athletics, giving them skills and confidence for later success. In India, with nearly 20% of the world’s population, a similar gender revolution would be a giant leap for humanity. India currently ranks 122nd out of 191 countries in a global index on gender inequality.

Only last year India created the first women’s cricket league equal to the men’s league. It has attracted massive private investments and motivated girls in the remotest villages to take up the sport. A women’s match can now draw a crowd of more than 30,000 people and millions of viewers on TV.

Yet the impact for women is greater than opportunities to play a sport. “Cricket is likely to be seen as a more important avenue of upward economic and social mobility,” stated The Times of India in December.

Last year, India’s governing body for cricket decided that all contracted female cricketers would be paid the same as men. Some of the most famous players are now national models for girls.

“In a country like India, there is a question mark over everything women do,” one former player, Jhulan Goswami, said in a 2022 interview with The Cricket Monthly. “To me it really matters to be able to lift the women’s game in my country, and that feeling has always been inside me. It’s a space occupied by nothing but you and that pure passion for your dream.”

Two years ago, a well-known male cricketer, Sachin Tendulkar, posted a video of girls and boys playing cricket together. It went viral. One reason may be what Mr. Tendulkar wrote in the post: “Sport can be a great enabler for equality.”