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Trade talks accelerate

Major US trading partners are racing to reach trade deals before President Donald Trump’s 90-day tariff reprieve expires. Italy’s prime minister today meets with Trump, a day after the American leader joined talks with Japan, while Vice President JD Vance is headed to Italy and India. British outlets meanwhile reported that London hopes to finalize its own US trade deal within weeks: Britain is easy to negotiate with, the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon told The Daily Telegraph, because “you don’t make anything anymore.” China — the target of the toughest US tariffs — is looking for agreements elsewhere, however: Chinese leader Xi Jinping today concludes a Southeast Asia tour during which he has called for “Asian family” unity on trade.

US-China decoupling looms

US President Donald Trump’s trade war is forcing a radical decoupling of the world’s two biggest economies. Though American politicians of both parties have become increasingly hawkish toward Beijing in the past decade, trade between the superpowers has grown, albeit fitfully. A spate of tariffs and restrictions on China promise to change that: The World Trade Organization projects that merchandise trade between the US and China will plummet by 80% this year, while American and Chinese investors may have to sell off as much as $2.5 trillion in equities and bonds from each other’s countries, according to Goldman Sachs. “This is a phenomenon we’ve talked about before,” the WTO’s director general said, “and now we’re seeing it emerging.”

Trump-Harvard row escalates

The White House threatened to prevent Harvard from enrolling international students, sharply escalating its row with the most prestigious US university. The standoff began after Harvard, in a striking act of defiance, rejected President Donald Trump’s order that colleges end DEI programs and screen students for antisemitism, among other demands. International students pay higher fees than domestic ones, and excluding them would mark a further financial blow for Harvard following a funding freeze and threat to revoke its tax-exempt status. There may be more to come: The administration will soon target universities’ investment funds, Semafor’s Liz Hoffman reported, which it says fund “terrorism,” and Harvard’s $52 billion endowment could be a weak spot in its defenses.

ECB readies rate cut

The European Central Bank is expected to cut interest rates today, as it moves to shore up economic growth in the face of a transatlantic trade war. Policymakers will lower borrowing costs by a quarter-percentage-point, 60 out of 62 economists surveyed by Bloomberg predicted, with at least two more cuts likely this year. Though the White House’s tariffs are projected to slow economic growth worldwide, they are also expected to cool inflation in Europe, unlike in the US. This makes the ECB’s decision somewhat more straightforward than that of the Federal Reserve, whose chair yesterday warned that the conditions that lead to stagflation — high inflation and slow growth — could imperil the US economy.

SAfrica coalition may survive

South Africa’s long-dominant African National Congress party slipped to second place in a recent poll, counterintuitively raising hopes that its troubled coalition government may survive. The ANC-led 10-party alliance looked set to collapse this month after the Democratic Alliance — the coalition’s second-biggest party — voted against the government’s budget. Yet an opinion poll this week put the DA ahead of the ANC for the first time, fueling gains in the South African rand as traders bet the ANC will have to give ground to the pro-business DA and that the coalition will ultimately weather the dispute.

RFK Jr launches autism probe

The US health secretary ordered an investigation into environmental causes for the rise in autism cases, despite most scientists pinning the increase on broader diagnostic criteria. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the National Institutes of Health investigation would look into food additives, pesticides, and ultrasound scanning, but notably did not mention vaccines, which President Donald Trump has suggested may be a cause and which Kennedy himself has been skeptical of. The US Centers for Disease Control today released a report suggesting that improved detection and changing social mores drove the change, a claim Kennedy called a “canard.”

Europe’s solar hampered by sand

Europe’s solar energy will be curbed in the coming days by a plume of dust from the Sahara Desert, likely boosting electricity prices. Forecasts suggest that Germany’s solar output will be reduced by 11 gigawatts, nearly a third of its total and enough to power nearly 10 million homes. Renewable energy’s intermittent output is a problem, because a lack of utility-scale batteries means electricity cannot easily be stored. When the sun shines and/or wind blows, power is cheap, and prices can even turn negative if there is more than the grid can handle. But when there is a shortage and there is insufficient power from sources such as geothermal or nuclear, grids must switch to more expensive fossil fuels.

Jan Jambon, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finances and Pensions, Belgium; Kate Johnson, President and CEO, Lumen Technologies; Ynon Kreiz, Chairman and CEO, Mattel; Antonio Neri, President and CEO, Hewlett Packard Enterprise; John Santora, CEO, WeWork; Kathy Warden, Chair, CEO, and President, Northrop Grumman, and more will join the Fostering Global Innovation session at the 2025 World Economy Summit. This session will explore the incentives and barriers facing both the public and private sectors in generating new ideas, methods, and products while examining the broader implications for economic growth, job creation, and financial opportunity.

April 24, 2025 | Washington, DC | Learn More

Peruvian heir’s ashes returned

Ashes believed to belong to an heir to an 18th-century Peruvian Indigenous revolutionary family were finally returned to Lima this week. Fernando Túpac Amaru Bastidas — whose parents José Gabriel Túpac Amaru Noguera and Micaela Bastidas together led an uprising against the Spanish monarchy in the Peruvian Andes — was forced at the age of 13 to watch them be brutally executed, before being permanently exiled to Spain, where he died in 1798. His remains were mixed with those of others when a bomb exploded during the Spanish Civil War at the cemetery where he was buried. His story was largely “absent from official accounts,” El País noted, “a centuries-old Indigenous claim on justice that, like so many others, went unnoticed.”

Hints of life outside Earth

Scientists detected the strongest hint so far of extraterrestrial life. The James Webb Space Telescope looked at light coming through the atmosphere of the planet K2-18b, 124 light years away, and found the presence of large amounts of dimethyl sulfide, a molecule that on Earth is only made by life, especially marine algae. Earlier observations of K2-18b had found water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane, all of which are associated with life. There are many ways this could turn out to be false — some as-yet-unknown geological process that creates the molecule, or a simple measurement error — but if further observations confirm the finding, it raises the possibility of a water world teeming with, at the very least, microbial life.

Crows are smarter than we thought

Crows, already considered among the smartest birds, may be cleverer than previously thought. Scientists discovered crows can detect the difference between regular- and irregular-sided shapes, a crucial basis for the mathematics of geometry and previously considered something only humans could do. Corvids have shown remarkable abilities before: Research last year suggested they could count out loud, using different vocalizations for different numbers up to four, and they have been shown to understand that putting stones into tubes of water allows them to retrieve food from the surface. As with many things we thought humans had monopolies over, such as language, the real story may be more complicated.

• BP holds its annual general meeting.
• Malaysia’s prime minister holds talks with Myanmar’s junta chief to push for a ceasefire extension in the earthquake-hit country.
• The Madrugá procession takes place in Seville to mark the night between Holy Thursday and Good Friday.

Netflix’s market capitalization target for 2030. At time of writing, there are just seven trillion-dollar companies in the world: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Saudi Aramco. At least three of them offer streaming services, but Netflix hopes to become the first to break the barrier on the back of streaming alone, The Wall Street Journal reported. Its market value currently stands at around $400 billion, meaning it needs a steep — though not impossible — rise, and it is the streamer best placed to do so, with revenues and profits well ahead of others. But it must navigate an uncertain economic future, with fears that tariffs could spark a recession and reduced ad spending.

Mario’s Café, Kentish Town, London. London is proud of its “greasy spoons,” cafés that serve a good full English fried breakfast — sausages, bacon, egg, baked beans — at a reasonable price. Among the finest, according to the Financial Times, is Mario’s, established in the 1950s by an Italian immigrant and, later, run by his son and then grandson, and subject of a song by the 1990s Britpop band Saint Etienne. Overpriced hipster breakfast places are ten a penny these days, but Mario’s is “delectable yet inexpensive” and has a revolving cast of regulars whom the owner considers “a second family.” Visit the Mario’s Café website here.

Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris launched financial news platform Moniify at a lavish party in November. Meant to speak to a new generation of investors in emerging markets, the UAE-based outlet hired aggressively, spent prolifically, and made the competition take notice, Semafor’s Kelsey Warner reports.

But it quickly ran into the harsh realities of the news business, current and former staffers said. Costs spiraled, with $50 million spent pre-launch and another $50 million projected annually, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. The outlet struggled to find a voice, debating whether content was “Gen Z enough” with terms like “earnings seazn” and “slay,” and revenue-generating plans faltered.