Flagship

US, China on edge over Taiwan

Tensions between the US and China are surging in the run-up to Taiwan’s presidential inauguration. Beijing ramped up military tactics near Taiwan and criticized the passage of a US ship through the Taiwan Strait as “publicly hyped.” Taiwan, which Beijing views as a breakaway province, is eyeing US-made munitions known as suicide drones — commonly used by Ukraine to combat Russia — to deter China, Foreign Policy reported. The view that Taiwan is vulnerable due to Western focus on Ukraine underestimates how closely Beijing and Moscow’s agendas are tied, Taiwan’s foreign minister argued in Foreign Affairs. Taiwan “welcomes” US-led support to Kyiv, he wrote, as it shows the West’s “unabated and unquestionable resolve to safeguard democracy” and counter Chinese-Russian aggression.

Israel says it can ‘stand alone’

Ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas were put on ice as Israel remained defiant after a US threat to withhold arms over its planned Rafah invasion. Talks have not broken down completely, Politico reported, but Hamas is less willing to engage due to Israel’s ongoing actions in Rafah. Israel will “stand alone” if it has to, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday, while the White House said it was more at liberty to threaten Israel by withholding weapons because Hamas has been significantly weakened. Israel now has to make a “choice” on whether to escalate the Rafah assault, a top White House official said, and “​​it’s one we hope they don’t.”

Eurovision ‘marred’ by Israel controversy

Thousands protested in the Swedish city of Malmö on Thursday over Israel’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest, making it the most fraught edition of the once-unifying European event, observers said. Several contestants have called for a ceasefire in Gaza, while organizers rebuked a former Swedish contestant of Palestinian descent for performing while wearing a keffiyeh. Israel, which qualified for this year’s final, became the first non-European Eurovision participant in 1973, part of a broader push to build closer political and cultural ties, but critics say geopolitical tensions are blurring the contest’s historic mission of inclusivity. “Eurovision has survived a lot in its 68-year history, but will be marred by this,” a columnist for Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter wrote.

Futuristic Saudi city runs into hurdles

Things aren’t quite panning out for Neom, Saudi Arabia’s futuristic desert city that’s at the center of the country’s economic growth plan. The kingdom pulled its senior officials out of this week’s Milken Institute Global Conference in California at the last minute to brief the Crown Prince on the status of Neom, Semafor reported. Meanwhile, a BBC investigation found that Saudi authorities have allowed the use of lethal force to evict villagers to make way for “The Line” — a 105-mile-long, 1,640-foot high pair of skyscrapers — only a fraction of which is expected to be unveiled at Noem’s 2030 launch. Saudi has other ambitious bets: The 2034 World Cup and the 2029 Asian Winter Games at a ski resort in the desert that doesn’t yet exist.

Georgia’s envoy to France resigns

Georgia’s ambassador to France on Thursday became the country’s first senior official to resign over the country’s draft law on “foreign agents” that has sparked mass protests in Tbilisi. Critics say the bill — which requires NGOs and media outlets that receive at least 20% of their funding from overseas to register as “pursuing the interests of a foreign power” — is authoritarian and Russia-inspired. The proposal also sparked demonstrations when it was introduced last year; protesters believe the country’s leaders are trying to sabotage Georgia’s ambitions to join the European Union. “Within Georgia, both political camps see the battle in existential terms,” The Economist wrote. “It is difficult to imagine either backing down.”

Seoul pushes for K-robot economy

South Korea is turning to robot sommeliers and baristas to relieve its labor shortage. One robotics company recently unveiled a robot arm that decants wine, while another is testing a robot that can pour 80 cups of coffee in an hour and create fancy lattes. South Korea has 1,012 robots for every 10,000 workers, with Singapore’s robot density a distant second in the world at 730, Nikkei reported. Seoul is serious about creating a “K-robot economy” to make up for its declining workforce caused by an extremely low birthrate. Sales of service robots in the country are expected to double from last year’s levels to $1 billion in 2026, and the government plans to build a $146 million robot testing facility.

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Casio calculators target Asia

Casio is trying to boost sales of scientific calculators in the developing world. Most single-use electronic devices are in decline, replaced by multipurpose phones — sales of digital cameras are way down from their 2010 peak, despite a recent slight recovery. But Casio is aiming for a 19% increase in shipments of its calculators to 27 million in 2025, Nikkei reported. Most of its shipments go to the US and Europe, where they are used in education. Casio now wants to target Southeast Asian and African countries including Thailand, Indonesia, and Egypt, by promoting uses of calculators in schools and their value in fostering logical thought: The firm is collaborating with local education ministries and provides training for teachers to incorporate the calculators into their curricula.

TikTok to employ new AI tech

TikTok will now use technology that detects whether a photo or video was made using external artificial intelligence tools, but experts have questioned its efficacy. The app already encourages and in some cases requires creators to label AI-generated content, but the new system uses a digital watermark to identify AI content made by other apps, like OpenAI. YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook have also said they plan to employ the watermarks during a busy global election year. The move is seen as well-intentioned for reducing the spread of deepfakes, but researchers have shown that “every single watermarking technique is vulnerable to exploitation and evasion,” the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists wrote.

Rare Irish script found on stone

A geography teacher in England found a stone in his garden that turned out to be covered in 1,600-year-old Irish writing. Before the arrival of Latin script in the early medieval period, people in what is now Ireland wrote in a script called ogham, parallel lines in groups on hard materials such as stones. The stone’s inscription reads “Maldumcail/ S/ Lass,” which an archaeologist suggested meant it could be a commemorative item relating to a person called Mael Dumcail. Ogham artifacts are rarely found in England: Experts said that it could have been brought over by monks or clerics moving between monasteries, and that the local river may have been a major transport route.

Japan’s cult actor wins the West

The success of Shogun, the FX adaptation of the 1975 James Clavell novel set in feudal Japan, has won a cult Japanese star a whole new fanbase in the West. Tadanobu Asano, described as “king of the indies” in Japan, has starred in cult classics such as Takashi Miike’s gory 2001 yakuza thriller Ichi the Killer, which earned him a place in Tokyo’s Madame Tussauds. The decline of arthouse cinema in Japan, and Asano missing out on some key roles, meant he “remained largely peripheral in Western mainstream discourse,” Dazed magazine wrote. But Asano is now in line for an Emmy nod, as he made his “scheming man-boiling warlord” character, Yabushige, “the most relatable character on the show.”

• May 10: The China Passenger Car Association publishes April’s passenger vehicle sales data.
• May 11: The Eurovision Song Contest’s final takes place in Malmö, Sweden.
• May 12: Families in the US and Canada celebrate Mother’s Day.

Rojak  is a colloquial Malay word for “eclectic mix,” and is the name for a Javanese dish that typically combines sliced fruit and vegetables with a spicy dressing.

Drifting to Jingdezhen

Jingdezhen, known as China’s “porcelain capital,” is drawing in hundreds of young people, burned out by city hustle and in search for an artistic, laidback lifestyle. These self-proclaimed “Jing Drifters”–– a play on “Beijing Drifters,” referring to those who migrated to the capital for their careers — are discarding their full-time jobs to open cafés or ceramic workshops.

On social media, they have romanticized the city’s inclusivity and slow pace of life, according to Radii China’s weekly newsletter. But the influx of newcomers to Jingdezhen has raised rents, pricing out longtime residents, including many elderly porcelain artists. “It’s sad that a wave of younger people is squeezing out local artisans, but it’s also inevitable,” one Jing Drifter said. “At least we, as a younger generation, can build something meaningful along the way to shape the future of this amazing city.”

Look to the water

The origins of Western music have largely been shaped by groups on the geographical and social fringes of Western culture. In his newsletter, The Honest Broker, music historian Ted Gioia draws a through-line between musical traditions among marginalized groups in West Asia and what we think of as Western music.

Several musical modes including Lydian and Phrygian — types of scales considered core to Western classical music theory — were named after slave groups conquered by the Greeks in what is now modern-day Turkey. And the love songs associated with French troubadours originated from enslaved female singers in Baghdad. Their “deeply personal approach to singing about romantic love … only entered Europe via Spain after the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula.” Port cities on major waterways were especially crucial in the movement of musical culture: “Cultural historians rarely pay attention to water, but they really should,” Gioia writes.

Type casting

The ability to easily type Chinese characters on a QWERTY keyboard is an underrated technological feat. The Chinese “input method editor,” known as IME, can generate tens of thousands of characters. The innovation, which dates back to the 1940s, takes on even greater significance given that the present-day US-China competition over AI and electric vehicles absorbs “all headline buzz and pundit bloviation,” Jeffrey Ding wrote in the ChinAI Newsletter.

In reviewing Thomas Mullaney’s new book, The Chinese Computer, Ding noted that for most of the 20th century, Chinese computing was slow to innovate. But Mullaney argued that the IME system helped China develop by acting as a “work around” to the challenges associated with processing complex Chinese text. Ding summarized it this way: “​​Chinese computing is the middle school boy with bad acne who is not very good at sports. Chinese IMEs are the sense of humor he develops in order to belong.”

The world’s first food item baked in space is on display at a US museum. The cookie, inspired by popular treats served at DoubleTree by Hilton hotels, was made more than four years ago using a microgravity oven on the International Space Station. “It does still smell like a baked cookie,” said a museum curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum annex in Virginia. But visitors can’t smell the cookie, since it’s preserved in a custom enclosure to prevent moisture from building. The cookie returned to Earth frozen in 2020, and was defrosted by the Smithsonian using a special method to retain its original condition.

• How Princeton got burned by its outreach to Iran.
• Team Trump is warming to TikTok.
• FreedomWorks’ collapse means the end of the Tea Party era.