Flagship

Russia’s record air assault on Ukraine

Russia launched its largest-ever air attack on Ukraine, even as both countries engaged in a massive prisoner swap that US President Donald Trump had suggested could spur ceasefire negotiations. But Russia’s overnight onslaught prompted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to rebuke Washington for its lack of response, saying, “the silence of America … only encourages Putin.” Ukrainian and Western officials believe Russia will ramp up attacks through the summer, as analysts pointed to Trump’s growing disengagement from acting as a peace broker. “What is clear to Ukrainians … is that without pressure from Washington, or hugely accelerated aid from Europe, the war will grind on,” The Guardian wrote.

Israel aims to capture 75% of Gaza

Israel’s military said it would capture 75% of Gaza in two months, as part of a major new ground offensive against Hamas. Israel has recently escalated airstrikes, and aims to confine Gaza’s 2 million population into an area amounting to 25% of the strip, The Times of Israel reported. The territory’s population is at risk of famine, humanitarian groups have warned, with many criticizing a new US-sponsored aid delivery system run by contractors “with obscure histories and unknown financial backers,” The New York Times wrote. The United Nations’ chief said Israel is now letting in a “teaspoon of aid”: One woman told Reuters that she and her nine children had just a single meal a day to share last week.

US importers face shipping headaches

Global shipping disruptions stemming from US tariffs and bottlenecks at major ports are hampering American companies’ ability to rush orders before Washington’s 90-day tariff détente with China ends. Several Northern European trade hubs have been hit by labor shortages and low water levels on the Rhine River, preventing ships from berthing and stretching transit times, Bloomberg reported. The tariff rollback has boosted shipping demand between the US and China, but importers are struggling with a shortage of ships after many were rerouted because of the trade war. The issues are pushing up freight rates and compounding firms’ logistical headaches: “The next 90 days will be quite chaotic,” a logistics executive in Asia told The Wall Street Journal.

China looms over US-Vietnam talks

Vietnamese officials are rushing to secure a trade deal before a 90-day pause on US President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs ends in July, but Hanoi’s Beijing ties could hamper talks. Trump’s trade war has benefited Vietnam’s status as an alternative manufacturing hub to China, but Washington wants Hanoi to crack down on transshipment, whereby companies reroute goods from China through Vietnam to avoid tariffs. Trump’s top trade adviser recently called Vietnam “a colony of China,” and if Hanoi is pressed into purging its economy of Chinese influence to strike a deal with the US, it could “upset the delicate geopolitical balancing act it has performed so well,” The Economist argued: “Vietnam will need to pull off a second miracle.”

Japan PM wants trade deal during G7

Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba on Sunday said Tokyo hoped to advance US trade talks, with the aim of sealing a deal during June’s Group of Seven summit. Ishiba is under pressure over concerns stemming from Japan’s national debt and the impact of US tariffs, which have led borrowing costs to rise. But Ishiba’s recent assertion that Japan’s fiscal situation is “worse than Greece” was disputed by analysts: Unlike the challenges Athens once faced, Japan’s government debt is mostly held domestically, a Japanese politics newsletter noted, and it remains the world’s largest creditor nation. “The endless gold bugs and Bitcoin bros salivating over the prospect of an impending Japanese fiscal collapse will be disappointed yet again,” Bloomberg’s Gearoid Reidy wrote.

Steven Pinker on Harvard, antisemitism

US President Donald Trump’s assault on Harvard is shifting the politics of America’s tense intellectual life, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argued in The New York Times. A prominent voice against progressivism on campus, Pinker wrote the fixation on antisemitism had gone too far, echoing a Harvard senior who dismissed a report about Jewish students feeling unsafe on campus as “an absurd statistic I struggle to take seriously as someone who … wears a kippah around campus each day.” Pinker wrote that for some who argued against “wokeness,” Trump and the right resemble its funhouse mirror image: “The obsession with antisemitism at Harvard represents, ironically, a surrender to the critical-social-justice credo that the only wrong worthy of condemnation is group-against-group bigotry.”

Iranian dissident wins top Cannes prize

An Iranian dissident filmmaker, who was forbidden from leaving Iran for 15 years, won the top prize at the Cannes film festival for his movie It Was Just an Accident. Tehran has banned Jafar Panahi’s films, but he continues to direct them clandestinely in Iran. The plot was inspired by Panahi’s time in jail three years ago, and despite Iran’s restrictions, the filmmaker refuses to live in exile: “No one should dare tell us what kind of clothes we should wear, what we should do or what we should not do.” The Palme D’Or award has stirred diplomatic tensions; Iran summoned France’s Tehran envoy Sunday over his “insulting” comment calling Panahi’s win “a gesture of resistance against the Iranian regime’s oppression.”

Christiane Amanpour has been on the front lines of global media since the 80s, while her ex-husband, Jamie Rubin, held top State Department jobs in the Clinton and Biden administrations. Now, with Jamie freshly out of the White House, they’ve come together to make a podcast. Ben and Max talk to them about what it’s like to make a podcast with your ex, what the role of media is in shaping foreign affairs, how the information landscape has changed, and much more.

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

NOAA forecasts busy hurricane season

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast an above-average Atlantic hurricane season this year, predicting between 13 to 19 named storms between June and November. Between six and ten storms could become hurricanes, and as many as five of those could be major hurricanes — Category 3 or higher. The increased storm activity is driven by warming ocean temperatures because of climate change, NOAA said. The forecast comes as NOAA and the National Weather Service are under pressure from staffing cuts amid US President Donald Trump’s efforts to slash the government workforce: One NOAA scientist told The New York Times that it was “very hard” to judge if the agency’s forecasting has been affected by the cuts.

Scientists find novel way to fight malaria

Treating mosquito nets with antimalarials could help prevent the disease, Harvard University researchers argued. Malaria infections spread by mosquitoes kill around 600,000 people every year: Bed nets are considered an effective preventative, alongside administering vaccines in high-risk areas, although some malaria vaccine programs have likely been endangered by US cuts to foreign aid. In a paper in Nature, the scientists found that instead of coating nets with insecticide to try and kill the bugs when they land, which is typical, nets can be laced with a pharmaceutical cocktail to kill the malaria parasite itself. That’s crucial, one researcher told the BBC, because the insecticides are “no longer cutting it” as the mosquitoes have become more resistant to them over time.

Java turns 30

The programming language Java turned 30, a feat of longevity achieved thanks to its “write once, run anywhere” ethos and adaptability to changing software needs, a tech writer argued. Java was revolutionary when it launched in 1995: Its “getting the job done” approach and ability to run on different operating systems effectively challenged Microsoft, which was trying to lock users into a Windows ecosystem, Chris Stokel-Walker wrote in LeadDev. Java won that battle: 90% of Fortune 500 firms still use it, and it runs on 3 billion devices worldwide. Still, artificial intelligence could erode some of Java’s relevance, Replit CEO Amjad Masad told Semafor recently, especially as AI coding assistants improve to the point of replacing traditional software developers.

May 26:

• US financial markets close for Memorial Day.
• Southeast Asian leaders meet in Kuala Lumpur for an ASEAN summit.
• The American Music Awards are held in Las Vegas.

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is set to acquire a unique trove of 6,500 photographs, including images of iconic moments from modern Africa, China, and Japan. The collection is a gift from former Goldman Sachs general partner and art collector Artur Walther. In 1994, he began amassing modernist German photographs, later expanding to Africa and Asia, with many images capturing key moments of social and economic upheaval during that period, Hyperallergic wrote. Other items in the collection are examples of “vernacular photography,” capturing medical, commercial, and private family life: “Many are just random, but others are sociologically relevant as they say something about individualities and the way people investigate or represent themselves,” Walther said.

Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S expects artificial intelligence to have profound implications for his 350,000 employees — and for those he hasn’t hired yet.

Kumar, a former nuclear scientist-turned-executive who joined the IT giant in 2023, is a big believer in upskilling, he told Semafor’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson: Cognizant is training its developers on new AI tools, while funding a global initiative that aims to teach a million people how to use AI by 2026.