Flagship

Trump tariffs reinstated, for now

A US appeals court on Thursday reinstated many of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, the day after another court blocked them. The move puts a pause on a trade court’s ruling that Trump exceeded his authority in imposing his “Liberation Day” tariff regime, adding a jolt of legal chaos to the uncertainty surrounding Trump’s global trade war. Trump’s advisers, who had condemned the tariff block as a “judicial coup” celebrated the reprieve, but the possibility of the initial ruling being reinstated weighs heavily on the White House. Despite the setback, Trump will likely be undeterred in his aim to “rewrite the rules of global commerce in America’s favor,” The Wall Street Journal wrote.

Harvard gets reprieve in student visa fight

Harvard University on Thursday won another reprieve in its fight to keep enrolling international students. A US judge extended a temporary block on the Donald Trump administration’s plan to revoke Harvard’s participation in student visa programs, after the government said it would give the university 30 days to contest the move. Harvard’s legal win came on a symbolic day: At the university’s graduation ceremony, its president received a thunderous ovation after welcoming students “from around the world, just as it should be.” Harvard said in a court filing that countless international students have already asked about transferring as a result of the Trump administration’s crackdown — such an exodus would be a boon to other countries, Bloomberg wrote.

China is already trying to de-Nvidia

Nvidia’s CEO renewed his criticism of US curbs on chip exports to China that are expected to cost the company billions. Jensen Huang has become the “chief lobbyist” for his company, The Information wrote, appealing directly to US President Donald Trump for help reviving Nvidia’s China business. Huang told CNBC that he wants China’s AI developers to adopt “the American technology stack.” But the reality is that China is working to “de-Americanize” and “de-Nvidia the AI technology stack,” Sinocism’s Bill Bishop wrote, with a massive effort underway to accelerate the country’s domestic tech innovation. National security and geopolitics matter more to both countries than Nvidia’s revenue: “China is probably a lost cause for the company.”

A critique of techno-utopians

Elon Musk’s brief but influential tenure in the White House shows how the worldview of techno-utopians like him has real-world consequences, two commentators argued. Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have all spoken about technology’s potential to transform society and allow humanity to exceed the current limits of science, age, and planetary boundaries. Science journalist Adam Becker argues in his new book More Everything Forever that these tech moguls’ “grand ambitions are not benign eccentricities,” but that they are “prioritizing their utopian vision of the future” over concerns that impact the world today, The Atlantic wrote. Some futurists are also skeptical about Musk’s version of “longtermism,” because it ignores present-day suffering, a philosopher told The New York Times. 

NYT strikes AI deal with Amazon

The New York Times struck an artificial intelligence licensing deal with Amazon, the newspaper’s first such agreement with a tech platform. Amazon will use Times content such as articles and recipes across its products including Alexa, and will train its AI models on the material. The deal is somewhat surprising, The Hollywood Reporter noted, given that the newspaper has previously pushed back on efforts by AI firms to leverage its content: It sued OpenAI in 2023 for allegedly using Times stories to train its chatbot without permission, while the ChatGPT-maker inked licensing deals with other publishers including Axel Springer and Le Monde. The legal battles and deals reflect the media industry’s wavering approach to the emergence of AI.

Israel approves more West Bank settlements

Israel authorized its largest expansion of settlements in the occupied West Bank in decades amid rising international pushback. The government legalized outposts that were already built without approval, escalating what has been a deeply contentious issue in the region. Much of the international community sees the settlements as illegal: The UK, France, and Canada warned Israel this month of possible sanctions if it continued to expand in the West Bank. Israel’s military operations in Gaza and the chaotic distribution of aid in the enclave have also sparked widespread condemnation. The White House said Thursday that Israel accepted a US-backed Gaza ceasefire proposal, but Israel and Hamas are nowhere close to reaching an agreement, Haaretz reported.

US cancels bird flu vaccine deal

The US government canceled a $766 million dollar contract with Moderna that was aimed at developing a bird flu vaccine. The deal — first announced last year, with more funds awarded in January amid an outbreak in dairy cows — was seen as central to strengthening the country’s readiness in the event of a future pandemic. Moderna was developing vaccines using messenger RNA, which is used in most coronavirus shots, and enables faster production of doses than other approaches. But the contract’s cancellation was expected because of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s skepticism over the safety of mRNA technology. Health experts said the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the urgency in developing a wide range of vaccines in non-pandemic times to increase preparedness.

The global workforce is at an inflection point. New tech continues to impact how we work, and managers are struggling as organizations undergo major changes.

Join Semafor for newsmaking conversations in partnership with Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report. Explore new data on how employees and managers are navigating ongoing uncertainty in the global labor market. Experts will discuss key findings on productivity, resilience, and well-being, and examine how leaders and policymakers are responding to shifting workplace expectations.

June 12, 2025 | Washington, DC | RSVP

US losing ground to China on biotech

China is catching up to — or even surpassing — the US’ biotech advances, analysts said. Despite a simmering trade war, Chinese drugmakers have announced several licensing pacts with Western counterparts: Pfizer, for example, recently secured the overseas rights to a cancer treatment developed by a Chinese firm. Long known for “me-too versions of Western medicines,” as The Wall Street Journal wrote, China has now eclipsed the US in clinical trials, a report found. China’s biotech is having its “DeepSeek” moment, one venture capitalist said. Beijing has benefited over the decades from cheaper labor, less regulation, and a ready pool of Ph.D.s. Some experts warn the US government’s research funding cuts could cede even more ground to China.

West Nile virus in UK mosquitoes

West Nile virus was detected in mosquitoes in the UK for the first time, a sign of how climate change is affecting the spread of tropical diseases. The British public health authority said the risk to the public was very low — West Nile infections are usually asymptomatic, although in rare cases it can cause neurological symptoms and death. But it represents one of the most northerly appearances of the virus, which has been spreading from its original range, particularly Africa and the Middle East, for decades: It is endemic in North America. Disease-spreading mosquito species are reaching higher latitudes as the world warms. Global temperatures are expected to remain at record levels over the next five years.

AI tools ease pathologists’ workload

Researchers are developing artificial intelligence tools that could transform disease diagnosis. Pathologists use tissue samples to diagnose cancer and other illnesses. But the profession is under strain, Nature reported: Demand for their work outstrips supply, and pathologists’ jobs have become more challenging. Digital image-recognition tools are already used in limited ways, uncovering patterns in tissue or highlighting suspicious regions. But more sophisticated AI models, apparently capable of identifying cancer subtypes from images or detecting metastases, are now available, and have been widely taken up. They are not yet clinically validated, and some researchers are concerned that AI’s hallucinations and opaque inner workings could pose a problem, but one oncologist said they represent a “transformative technological advancement” in pathology.

May 30:

• The IISS Shangri-La Dialogue defense summit begins in Singapore.
• India publishes its latest quarterly GDP estimate.
• The Phoenician Scheme, directed by Wes Anderson, premieres in US theaters.

The Victoria and Albert Museum is opening up its vast archive to the public in a former data center in London, in a radical reimagining of a museum. With more than half a million works displayed amid ordinary warehouse racks, including a 15th-century domed ceiling from the now-lost Torrijos Palace, a wood-paneled office interior by Frank Lloyd Wright, and a 17th-century marble colonnade from a Mughal emperor’s bathhouse, the V&A East Storehouse is a “spectacle of storage,” the Financial Times wrote. It offers visitors unprecedented access to its archive, representing “a huge shift in museology.”

AI-generated social-media slop has become a barometer of political fame, and some lawmakers are starting to worry, Semafor’s David Weigel and Kadia Goba reported.

“Clearly the algorithm loves my name, so people do stuff with my name,” said Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett, whose busy — and fictional — Tuesday included a closed-door confrontation with Elon Musk and rhetorical smackdowns of Republican representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. Cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, and presidential family members regularly appear in fake stories with tidy narratives, which sometimes get more views than real-world political reporting that’s not built for the algorithms.