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China’s measured response to Trump’s tariffs, Salman Rushdie to face his alleged attacker, and Putin͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌ 
 
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February 5, 2025
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The World Today

  1. Trump and Bibi meet
  2. China’s limited tariff response
  3. Google’s cloud falls short
  4. Russia’s mineral warning
  5. Rushdie to face attacker
  6. Risks of targeting USAID
  7. Quantum theory debate
  8. Paris automates subway
  9. All-knowing bonobos
  10. Putin’s own Eurovision

A UK gallery shines the spotlight on Simone de Beauvoir’s younger sister.

1

Trump meets with Netanyahu

US President Donald Trump and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.
Leah Millis/Reuters

US President Donald Trump hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House Tuesday, his first sit-down with a world leader since returning to power. Trump still does not like Bibi,” a source close to Trump told Axios; their relationship soured during Trump’s first term, but Israeli officials hope the early invite signals Netanyahu’s return to the president’s good graces. Israel’s Arab partners and possible allies like Saudi Arabia will likely take note that a “reliable and direct line to Trump’s ear runs via Netanyahu,” The Times of Israel wrote. The meeting could be advantageous to Netanyahu’s reelection, Haaretz’s editor-in-chief argued, with Trump’s suggestion of moving Palestinians out of Gaza potentially offering the “central message” of his campaign.

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2

China’s ‘muted’ tariff response

Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Anthony Kwan/Pool via Reuters

China’s retaliatory tariffs on US oil, gas, and coal appeared calculated to avoid disrupting global energy markets, analysts said. International gas benchmarks slipped and US oil prices fell Tuesday after Beijing imposed the new duties in response to 10% US tariffs on Chinese imports. But oil recovered on reports that US President Donald Trump could speak to China’s Xi Jinping, with one investor telling Reuters, “We kind of know how those go now, in terms of walking all this back.” Beijing’s measures appear “a fairly muted retaliation” a China economist said: The energy import tariffs are narrower in scope than the US’ blanket levy, while China’s anti-trust probe into Google “has no real bite,” a Bloomberg columnist argued.

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3

Google stock falls after Q4 earnings

Mike Blake/Reuters

Google’s parent company fell short on its expected cloud revenue for the latest quarter, as Wall Street looks to US tech giants’ outlook on AI amid heightened competition from China. Google’s stock rose 7.8% in January — despite the market turmoil following the release of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s latest model, and the uncertainty created by President Donald Trump’s tariff threats, Bloomberg wrote. “Alphabet is less susceptible to tariff risk than the more hardware-focused tech names, but it also has insulation from how strong its cloud and ad markets are,” one investor said before the earnings report. After Tuesday’s report, Google’s shares dropped sharply; the company also announced a planned $75 billion investment for 2025 as it expands its AI business.

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4

Russia warning over Ukraine minerals

Russia hit back at President Donald Trump’s proposal to provide Ukraine with military aid in exchange for access to Kyiv’s mineral deposits. “This is a proposal to buy help,” a Kremlin spokesperson said. Germany’s chancellor called Trump’s remarks “very selfish,” but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said it was “absolutely fair;” Zelenskyy called for sharing resources with allies as part of his 2024 “victory plan.” Ukraine has deposits of 22 minerals classified by the US as critical to the economy or national security, including substantial reserves of lithium and titanium, some of which are close to the front line. Russia is estimated to have seized control of at least $12.4 trillion worth of energy deposits, metals, and minerals.

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5

Rushdie to testify against attacker

Author Salman Rushdie.
Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

Salman Rushdie will face the man accused of trying to kill him in 2022 at a trial that began Tuesday. The British-American author is set to testify about the stabbing attack in New York that damaged his liver and blinded him in one eye, an account detailed in his 2024 memoir Knife. The trial of Hadi Matar, a US-Lebanon citizen, was delayed after his lawyers unsuccessfully argued the book could be used as evidence. Matar previously said that he disliked The Satanic Verses author for criticizing Islam. In Knife, Rushdie wrote that his desire to confront Matar in court had faded, and he only wished to tell him, “I don’t care about you, or the ideology you claim to represent.”

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6

Targeting USAID could cost lives

The US Agency for International Development (USAID), effectively shuttered by tech billionaire Elon Musk, “has saved millions of lives,” Vox argued. Programs combating HIV and malaria in developing countries likely prevent about 200,000 deaths per year. A Nobel-winning economist found that one USAID unit that invested in nonprofit pilot programs achieved “unheard of” results with low-cost interventions such as chlorinated water dispensers, which reduced child mortality in treated villages by 63%. While some USAID programs were no doubt “less effective, or wasteful,” Vox wrote, the agency is audited. Musk and the Trump administration’s targeting of USAID may be politically strategic given many Americans’ negative views toward foreign aid, but it could cost lives, the outlet argued.

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7

100 years of quantum mechanics

Werner Heisenberg.
Werner Heisenberg. Wikimedia Commons

This year marks quantum mechanics’ true centenary, a physicist argued. German physicist Max Planck observed in 1900 that light seemed to act like discrete chunks of energy, rather than continuous waves, but it wasn’t until 1925 that Werner Heisenberg fleshed out a comprehensive model. It has since had “breathtaking experimental successes,” Sean Carroll wrote in Nature, but physicists can’t agree why, or how much it explains the universe. Quantum theory implies that the universe is fundamentally unpredictable at its smallest level, and that particles have no single location. It also conflicts with Einstein’s relativity theory. “Quantum mechanics is a beautiful castle, and it would be nice to be reassured that it is not built on sand,” Carroll wrote.

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8

Paris is transforming its subway system

Paris commuter train with the Eiffel Tower in the background.
DXR/Wikimedia Commons

Paris is rapidly moving towards an automated subway system. The French capital’s underground rail network is the busiest in the world after Tokyo’s, with 9.4 million journeys a day. Service deteriorated and prices increased after the pandemic, Le Monde reported, but a decade-long funding push is starting to bear fruit, with three new services opening in the last two months alone. The Grand Paris Express system, which will add 120 miles of lines and 68 new stations to the network, will be entirely automated. Its $25 billion price tag is comparatively low: London spent about the same to build a single line, and New York’s still-incomplete Second Avenue Subway is expected to cost $17 billion.

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9

Bonobos know what you don’t

A bonobo.
Ape Initiative

Bonobos know what you don’t know, and how to point it out — as long as there’s a treat involved. The findings suggest some animals are capable of “theory of mind,” or the ability to imagine and understand the mental state of others, a skill once thought to be uniquely human. But in a new experiment, bonobos pointed out where a snack was hidden to their “ignorant” human partner; when the humans merely pretended not to know where the food was, the great apes didn’t bother directing them to it. “It’s quite surreal,” one of the researchers told NPR. “We found evidence that they are tailoring their communication based on what I know.”

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10

Putin revives Soviet Eurovision

Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov/Pool via Reuters

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree Monday reviving a Soviet alternative to the Eurovision song contest, which banned Moscow following its invasion of Ukraine. Unlike Eurovision, which the Kremlin has criticized as a “Europe-wide gay parade,” Intervision will focus on “traditional universal, spiritual, and family values” according to documents Reuters obtained. Russian officials have said up to 25 countries are interested in taking part in the contest. The Kremlin has used anti-LGBT rhetoric to crack down on the liberal opposition, and shore up support among older conservatives. The share of Russians who believe LGBT members should have the same rights as other citizens has fallen from more than 50% in 2005 to 30% in 2024.

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Flagging

Feb. 5:

  • State assembly elections are held in Delhi.
  • Novo Nordisk, Uber, and Disney report earnings.
  • Soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo celebrates his 40th birthday.
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Curio
Hélène de Beauvoir.
Galerie hammer/Wikimedia Commons

A UK gallery is hosting the country’s first exhibition of paintings by Hélène de Beauvoir, the younger sister of celebrated feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. While her older sister remains one of the most widely recognized cultural figures of the 20th century, Hélène’s “reputation as a painter has lingered in relative obscurity,” Artnet wrote. Yet her paintings are among the collections of some of the world’s leading galleries, including the Uffizi Galleries in Florence and the Centre Pompidou in France. Now, London’s Amar Gallery is showcasing several of Hélène’s watercolors and abstract paintings, the latter of which once prompted philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to remark that “a joy and an anguish emanate with striking clarity from images whose contours are not drawn.”

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Semafor Spotlight
South Africa’s Mineral Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe.
Esa Alexander/Reuters

South Africa should prevent the US from accessing its minerals if Washington withdraws funding to the nation over its land expropriation policies, its mining minister said on Monday.

US President Donald Trump, in a social media post hours earlier, accused South Africa of “confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY” — referencing a law passed last month that allows land to be seized without compensation if deemed to be in the public interest — and added that he’d be “cutting off all future funding” to the country.

“If [the US] don’t give us money, let’s not give them minerals,” Mineral Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe said at a conference in Cape Town.

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