Flagship

Warming US-China ties pressure EU

US President Donald Trump floated talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping this week, as he hailed a “total reset” in otherwise frigid relations. China watchers have long been skeptical that Xi would enter into a top-level meeting with the White House without greater certainty over the result — certainty which is unlikely given Trump’s sudden U-turns. The US leader’s remarks nevertheless buoyed hopes that a temporary tariff suspension could be made permanent, and shifted focus to slow-moving trade talks with the European Union, with Trump describing the bloc as “nastier than China.” Negotiations between Washington and Brussels are unlikely to make progress anytime soon, Politico noted: Trump wants quick wins, which the EU’s multilateral negotiating style is ill suited to.

Trump courts Saudi investment

US-Saudi business ties are in the spotlight with President Donald Trump addressing a summit of executives in Riyadh on the first day of his Gulf tour. The kingdom has pledged $600 billion in investment and trade with the US over the course of Trump’s term, but the president wants that figure bumped up to $1 trillion: Semafor scooped an early success for Trump, with a new Saudi AI company backed by the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund picking a California chipmaker to help power its work. Trump has also pressed Saudi Arabia and other major oil producers to ramp up output in order to slash domestic US gas prices, demands that partly explain the OPEC+ grouping expanding production recently.

Japan’s carmakers stumble

Honda and Nissan both reported staggering losses, the latest sign of the Japanese car industry’s woes. Honda’s operating profits dropped 76% in the three months to April, while Nissan — which yesterday announced 20,000 global job cuts — announced record-breaking losses. Rival Toyota already forecast a 21% drop in profits this year, which it blamed on US tariffs. Japan’s carmakers have been slow to pivot to electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, and are struggling to sell cars in China, in the face of competition from Chinese rivals such as BYD, which recently passed $100 billion in revenue. In February, Honda and Nissan abandoned a merger plan which would have created the world’s third-largest automaker.

US struggles to pull back

The US is still to some degree the world’s policeman, despite US President Donald Trump’s efforts to reduce America’s foreign intervention, two columnists argued. India and Pakistan agreed to step back from their escalating conflict in Kashmir largely thanks to Trump, and as Bloomberg’s Mihir Sharma noted, even if the US casts a diminished figure worldwide, “If that US didn’t exist, we would have to invent it.” American mediation efforts in Gaza and Ukraine also point to the challenges the US faces in pulling back. Trump is “running a superpower and, as the foreign policy thinker Robert Kagan once put it: ‘Superpowers don’t get to retire,’” Gideon Rachman wrote in the Financial Times.

Ceasefire setback for India

The US’ claim to have mediated a ceasefire between India and Pakistan undermines New Delhi’s push to “de-hyphenate” from Islamabad, analysts said. India has long demanded it not be automatically grouped with Pakistan, insisting, for example, that foreign leaders eschew visiting both countries while on regional trips: “How do you hyphenate a country which is one-eighth of your economic size?” India’s foreign minister argued in 2019. Noting that US President Donald Trump spoke of them together while announcing their truce, one foreign-policy expert told Scroll, “India and Pakistan are again hyphenated… It’s a major setback for India’s foreign policy.” A leading Indian journalist concurred, writing that the deal “reversed years of diplomatic efforts by Delhi.”

Family feud in Philippines

A feud between two powerful Philippines dynasties dominated midterm elections this week, with results suggesting a weakening of President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr’s grip on power. Marcos and Vice President Sara Duterte both won in 2022 but have since fallen out spectacularly: Duterte faces impeachment over an alleged assassination attempt, while Marcos had Duterte’s father, former President Rodrigo Duterte, imprisoned for alleged human rights abuses. The results so far favor the Dutertes, with Rodrigo winning a mayoral race from jail and Marcos Jr’s supporters underperforming in their own elections — though they appear to have won enough seats to proceed with impeachment efforts against Sara Duterte. She is the frontrunner for 2028 presidential elections, but would be ineligible to run if impeached.

China tells Latam to stand firm

Chinese leader Xi Jinping urged Latin American powers to “stand united” while warning against “bullying and hegemonism,” a veiled reference to trade pressure from the US. The remarks at a summit in Beijing — Xi’s first since China and the US agreed to lower tit-for-tat tariffs — underscore how the superpowers compete for influence in Washington’s backyard, even as they step back from their trade war. China is the main trading partner for a growing number of Latin American countries, doubling its trade in goods with the continent over the past decade. Yet Latin American leaders remain cautious on dealing with Beijing, fearing both the dumping of low-cost goods in their countries as well as the risk of angering Washington.

Semafor’s Eleanor Mueller will sit down with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Cynthia Lummis for a timely discussion about the future of innovation and regulation in the digital asset space. Join us at the Stand With Crypto Day Reception this Wednesday, May 14, in Washington, DC. RSVP here.

Africa’s diabetes insights

The rise of Type 2 diabetes in Africa represents a public health challenge, but may also provide new insight into the disease. The number of diabetes cases in sub-Saharan Africa rose from 4 million in 1980 to 23.6 million in 2021, and this number may double by 2045, thanks to changing diet and exercise habits. But the epidemiology of diabetes in Africa varies in important ways from the Western variety, WIRED reported: In particular, the disease appears to behave differently and be less driven by obesity. One genetic variant commonly found in Africa increases the risk of diabetes, while some African women are especially resilient. Researchers said that understanding why diabetes presents differently could lead to “genetically informed” treatments.

China develops uranium extraction

Chinese researchers developed an efficient, low-cost way of extracting uranium from seawater, which they hope will boost their country’s nuclear expansion. The oceans are estimated to hold 5 billion tons of uranium, 1,000 times more than can be mined, but the dissolved minerals are dilute and difficult to gather. The new system involves trapping uranium atoms with electric fields: It was 10 times as efficient as physical methods, and 1,000 times cheaper than previous electrical techniques. Half of all the nuclear plants under construction worldwide are in China and authorities recently approved 10 more, but the country imports most of its uranium, so a domestic source could be transformative.

The race to explain the universe

Japan and the US are racing to build neutrino detectors that could help explain why the universe exists. Physics says matter and antimatter should have arisen in equal quantities in the Big Bang. It also says they should have annihilated each other, yet here we are. Neutrinos, near-undetectable chargeless particles, may offer an answer: They seem to be not quite symmetrical with their antimatter equivalents, antineutrinos, and these hints of asymmetry could explain why some matter survived and antimatter didn’t. The US system involves an underground particle accelerator in Illinois firing neutrinos 800 miles through the Earth to a detector in South Dakota; Japan’s, a huge subterranean sphere to detect neutrinos from space. Japan’s team is some years ahead in construction.

• The WTO director general visits Japan for talks with the country’s foreign minister.
• EU finance ministers meet in Brussels to discuss joint borrowing to fund bloc-wide defense spending.
• The Cannes Film Festival opens.

The number of hazy days recorded at an airport in Nepal in 2024, up from 23 in 2020 and 84 in 2021. Air pollution is increasingly making the Himalayas harder to see: On hazy days visibility is around three miles, rendering even nearby mountains invisible. Dust and smoke from fires and industry are limiting views, and climate change is shortening the wet season, leading to less rain falling to clear the air. “Each time I visit Kathmandu,” the BBC’s environment correspondent, who grew up in Nepal, said, “I hope to catch a glimpse of the dramatic mountain range. But these days, there’s usually no luck.”

Welcome to Holland, BBC Radio 4. A moving documentary talking to parents whose children have received a shock diagnosis, named as one of The Times of London’s best radio shows of the week. The host’s own son has Down’s syndrome, and when he was born she was sent an essay, Welcome to Holland, about how it feels: As though one has booked a holiday to Italy, and arrived in Holland. Not a worse place, it argues, but a different one. Listen to Welcome to Holland on the BBC website.

Details of a Boeing 747 that appears to be the same plane offered by the Qatari government to President Donald Trump are available online, offering a glimpse inside the luxurious jet, Semafor’s Shelby Talcott and Ben Smith reported.

A so-called “palace in the sky,” the proposed gift includes an upper deck lounge, master bedroom, club seating area, and private office. It “will need to be literally torn apart to confirm that there’s nothing on board that can compromise security,” one former Department of Homeland Security official told Semafor.