Flagship

US expands efforts to lure chip firms

The U.S. expanded its efforts to incentivize foreign firms to make advanced semiconductors domestically. The Biden administration announced $6.6 billion in funding on Monday for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest chip maker, to build three facilities in the state of Arizona. And next week, it is set to unveil subsidies totalling over $6 billion to Samsung so the South Korean tech giant can construct four chip facilities in Texas, Reuters reported. The funding, a major part of Biden’s domestic economic reelection pitch, is “designed to both secure U.S. supply chains and outgun China’s tech advancements,” Semafor’s Morgan Chalfant wrote.

China stands firm on EV exports

China’s commerce minister defended his country’s exports of electric vehicles at the opening of a Europe trip. The European Union is investigating whether Chinese government subsidies for EV makers — which are fast making inroads outside of their home market — give them an unfair advantage over European car manufacturers, an inquiry that has rankled Beijing. Wang Wentao’s remarks highlight growing trade tensions between China and the EU ahead of a visit by Chinese leader Xi Jinping to the continent set for next month. But they also spotlight a tension faced by Western governments that voice commitment to reducing their carbon emissions, but are reluctant to grow their dependence on China, which has fashioned itself into a clean-tech manufacturing hub.

India fights for ‘basmati’ copyright

Indian scientists accused Pakistan of “illegally” cultivating what they claimed were copyrighted strains of basmati rice. The dispute is among many worldwide in which neighboring countries compete over the provenance of types of food: Hummus is claimed across the Middle East and parts of the Mediterranean, for example. India — which holds an estimated 65% of the basmati rice market worldwide — has sought to control the use of the term “basmati” in relation to certain types of rice, filing a request with European Union regulators over the issue: The EU has pioneered controls on naming-rights for food and drink from the continent, such as feta cheese from Greece and champagne from France.

Putting Modi’s dominance in context

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has amassed power and popularity, but viewing him as the sole, top-down enforcer of a new political order obscures broader shifts in the country, Foreign Policy editor-in-chief Ravi Agrawal argued in a new essay. Modi has “built a cult of personality,” but for the last century, the Hindu group associated with his political party has laid the groundwork “to equate Indianness more closely with Hinduism,” Agrawal argued. The result is an “illiberal, Hindi-dominated, and Hindu-first nation,” coupled with a more assertive foreign policy posture. Many Indians align with Modi’s vision, making his party’s dominance “primarily demand-driven,” a Chennai-based professor and Modi expert said. “Progressives are in denial about this.”

Trump doesn’t back abortion ban

U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Monday declined to back a nationwide limit on abortion, his clearest stance on the issue so far. The former president has long been cagey about his view on abortion, sowing months of speculation over what policy position he would take. In saying abortion laws should be decided on a state-by-state basis, Trump faced pushback from Democrats, as well as some Republicans who are pushing for a national abortion ban. Trump’s delay on announcing his position “reflects a Republican Party that has struggled to formulate a unified message on abortion,” NPR reported.

Eclipse leads to eye pain

Millions of people across North America watched the moon fully or partially cover the sun on Monday, and many are now regretting foregoing special eclipse-watching glasses, Google data suggests. Searches for “why do my eyes hurt” and “eyes hurt after looking at eclipse” spiked shortly after the solar phenomenon. Experts, of course, don’t advise looking directly at the sun, but mass eye damage is unlikely, if the 2017 eclipse in the U.S. is any indication: Many of the 150 million people who viewed it showed up at emergency rooms, but there were just 100 documented cases of eye damage. Google data also told another story of eclipse enthusiasm: The frequency of searches for Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart closely followed the path of totality.

mRNA drug shows promise

An mRNA drug for a rare genetic disorder showed promise in early clinical trials. mRNA vaccines tell the body to manufacture bits of pathogens so that it recognizes them in future: Since the pandemic, they are established technology. But mRNA therapies that treat existing diseases have not yet taken off. In propionic acidaemia, patients have a mutation that stops them producing a certain enzyme, leaving them unable to digest some proteins and fats — it can be life-threatening. A new Moderna drug helps the body make that enzyme. Promising results raise hopes of a new class of drugs that could treat a wide range of conditions, although physicians warned Nature that this was just “a first step in the right direction.”

Stéphane Bancel, CEO, Moderna; David Zapolsky, Senior Vice President, Global Public Policy & General Counsel, Amazon; Arati Prabhakar, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Accenture Chair & CEO Julie Sweet, Co-Founder & Chairman of Infosys, Nandan Nilekani and Aravind Srinivas, Co-Founder, Perplexity AI will join the Global AI & Policy Session at the 2024 World Economy Summit to discuss the implications of AI in our everyday lives — from the way we learn, to how we work at the office or on the factory floor. Explore the latest in the AI revolution and the ways which companies are racing to take advantage of the technology, and what we can learn from past attempts to regulate tech.

April 18 | 2:30 p.m.-5:30 p.m. ET | Washington, D.C.

Chechnya bans techno and slow jams

The Russian republic of Chechnya banned songs deemed to be either too fast or too slow, in an attempt to quash Western influences. The government said that music should have a tempo of 80 to 116 beats per minute in order to make music “conform to the Chechen mentality.” That would bar techno music, mambo, salsa, and ironically, the Russian national anthem, which is typically performed at 76 BPM. Since coming to power in 2007, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has cracked down on civil liberties in the heavily conservative, majority-Muslim region in the name of “tradition” and cultural norms.

Honeybee population hits record

The U.S. has more honeybees than ever before. Despite widespread coverage of “colony collapse,” the country has almost a million more bee colonies than it did five years ago, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service. The growth is driven by Texas, which in 2012 gave tax breaks to bee farmers, and by pollination rather than honey: The U.S. almond crop, in particular, relies on farmed bees. But colony collapse has not ended and their growing numbers are not necessarily a sign of ecological good health: Honeybees are “essentially livestock,” one entomologist told The Washington Post, and you wouldn’t say “Hey, birds are doing great. We’ve got a huge biomass of chickens!”

European war mystery solved?

The mystery of the whereabouts of thousands of missing dead from Europe’s battlefields may have been solved. At Waterloo in 1815, 10,000 men died in one day. But archaeologists have been excavating the site since 2012, and found just two bodies. A new book, Bones of Contention, posits that in the 18th and 19th centuries, human bones suddenly became valuable: They are rich in phosphates, which are vital in recently developed fertilizer. The price of bones went up sevenfold between 1832 and 1837 alone. And, the book’s authors told Science, Waterloo was “just the tip of the iceberg”: Grave robbers stole bones from all the Napoleonic battlefields.

April 9:

• Iran’s foreign minister travels to Beirut, following a visit to Syria where he inaugurated a new consular building after an airstrike last week blamed on Israel.
• Chinese car-sales data is published.
• Anne Lamott releases her 20th book, Somehow: Thoughts on Love.

The percentage of millennials who said they helped a stranger in the past month, an increase from around 50% pre-pandemic. The 2024 Gallup World Happiness Report registered an increase in “benevolence” — which includes helping a stranger, donating to charity, and volunteering — worldwide, and across age groups since the pandemic. Millennials were most likely to help strangers, compared to Gen X and Boomers.

The animated Japanese movie The Boy and the Heron has been a big hit in China. The Oscar-winning Hayao Miyazaki film opened in China on Wednesday, eight months after its Japanese premiere, and set a record for the biggest single-day performance by a non-Chinese animated film. While big-budget U.S. releases have mostly flopped in China, the Studio Ghibli production could earn over $105 million there — more than it made in the U.S. and Japan — according to The Hollywood Reporter. Japanese anime “arguably has supplanted Hollywood tentpole fare as Chinese filmgoers’ favorite international film category,” the outlet wrote.

• Biden gives TSMC over $6 billion for advanced chips in U.S.
• Soros fund is building an audio empire.
• The strange bedfellows slowing a greener US grid.