Flagship

World Bank slashes growth forecast

Global economic growth is set to fall sharply this year, the World Bank said Tuesday, citing rising trade barriers and market uncertainty over US President Donald Trump’s shifting tariff policy. The world’s economic output is set to expand 2.3% in 2025, down from 2.8% last year, while the US’ GDP growth rate is expected to halve. The new estimates were published as US and Chinese officials held a second day of trade talks in London aimed at easing export curbs. But given the unpredictability of Trump’s economic agenda, “it will be hard to trust in any supposed ‘deals’ now announced,” the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf argued. “Risks seem overwhelmingly to the downside.”

California steps up Trump fight

California stepped up its pushback against US President Donald Trump’s deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles as the city braced for a fifth night of immigration protests. The state asked a court Tuesday to immediately block the National Guard and Marines from assisting with immigration raids; a judge denied the request, but set a hearing for Thursday. As the legal fight escalates, one Democratic strategist argued Trump has already succeeded in diverting attention away from his feud with Elon Musk and the messy legislative debate over his spending package: “He wants to see people standing on top of burning cars, waving the Mexican flag — that’s the exact imagery that can help him overperform in the midterm elections.”

UK sanctions hard-right Israeli ministers

Several Western countries sanctioned two hard-right Israeli ministers over their support of settlers in the occupied West Bank. The UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway — all allies of Israel — said they would freeze the assets and bar the entry of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, accusing them of inciting Israeli settler violence against Palestinians. The move reflects the intensifying global criticism of Israel; the UK, Canada, and France last week threatened “concrete actions” over Israel’s renewed offensive in Gaza. The US is also privately ratcheting up pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: President Donald Trump reportedly told him Monday that he expects Israel to end the war in Gaza.

Xi wants bureaucrats to spend less

China is cracking down on bureaucrats who spend lavishly as the country struggles economically. Beijing’s new campaign of frugality honed in on an incident in March where a local official died after he and his colleagues consumed several bottles of baijiu, a Chinese liquor, over lunch. New measures include a ban on serving alcohol, gourmet meals, and cigarettes at official meals, The Wall Street Journal reported, underscoring leader Xi Jinping’s “struggle to rein in what he sees as widespread hedonism in China’s bureaucracy.” The effort bolsters Xi’s image “as a leader who stands against corruption and excess, especially at a time when many ordinary Chinese are feeling economic pain,” an expert said.

How China wins in new propaganda war

American influencers are flooding China to show off its technology and culture — while the US expelled the world’s most-followed TikToker. Beijing is paying for US influencers to visit and collaborate with local counterparts as part of a program to boost cultural exchange, according to Chinese state media. It’s an investment in soft power and a propaganda coup: State outlets praised recent visits from Western influencers like IShowSpeed (whose YouTube video on his Shenzhen visit has nearly 9 million views) for showcasing “authentic” life in China, Bloomberg wrote. Meanwhile, the world’s most popular TikToker, the Italian citizen Khaby Lame, was forced to leave the US after a pro-Donald Trump influencer reported him to immigration authorities.

Russia mulls ‘national messenger’ platform

Russia is moving toward replacing WhatsApp with a “national messenger.” President Vladimir Putin unexpectedly brought up the need for a flagship Russian messaging platform during his first speech addressing Ukraine’s bold drone strike on Russian airfields, The Bell reported, and preparations are “well underway” for a domestic equivalent to Telegram. A media mogul close to Putin has also mulled creating a platform similar to WeChat, China’s “everything app.” The Kremlin has tightened its grip on the information ecosystem, but messengers are still dominated by foreign players led by WhatsApp. The only way for the Kremlin to force Russian users off of the Meta-owned platform, The Bell wrote, would be to ban it.

Meta leans into superintelligence

Meta is creating a new research lab to pursue an artificial intelligence system that exceeds human cognitive powers. The tech giant’s focus on “superintelligence” underscores its efforts to stay competitive in the AI race; CEO Mark Zuckerberg has grown frustrated with the company’s shortcomings in AI and is personally recruiting for the new team, Bloomberg reported. Meta has tapped Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old CEO of startup Scale AI, to join the lab, and could invest billions in his company, The New York Times wrote. But superintelligence remains a hypothetical technology, and it has yet to be clearly defined, despite the massive funding its boosters have attracted, Ars Technica noted.

Hot Money: Agent of Chaos investigates a playboy executive turned Russian spy. In 2020, the Financial Times exposed a €2 billion fraud at Wirecard. But that was just the beginning of the story for reporter Sam Jones, who spiraled into a world of warlords and espionage to uncover who the fintech’s COO Jan Marsalek really was, and why he vanished just as the company collapsed. Listen wherever you get podcasts.

AI drivers may be safer than humans

Replacing all human drivers with artificial intelligence could save approximately 34,000 lives each year in the US alone, if the numbers from existing self-driving cars can be extrapolated. A recent study of Waymo safety data found that its autonomous cars driven across 56.7 million miles saw 85% fewer crashes with serious injuries, compared to human drivers. If that trend held true for fatal crashes over the 3.3 trillion miles driven each year in the US — “a big if,” acknowledged Vox’s Bryan Walsh, because there were too few fatal Waymo events to measure in the study — it would save five times the number of Americans who died in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined, every year.

Shocking decline of emperor penguins

Antarctica’s emperor penguin populations have shrunk by almost a quarter, far outpacing even the most pessimistic estimates of their decline. Satellites looked at 16 colonies in the Antarctic Peninsula, Bellingshausen Sea, and Weddell Sea, where almost a third of the world’s emperors live. Warming has thinned ice so it crumbles earlier in the season, often plunging chicks into the sea before they can survive in it. Numbers have been declining since monitoring began in 2009, scientists told Le Monde, but the most recent data is “about 50% worse” than previous worst-case computer modeling. The penguins’ plight is “probably the most clear-cut example of where climate change is really showing its effect,” a scientist said.

Ethics of eradicating mosquitoes

Humanity may have the ability to eradicate disease-carrying mosquito species from the Earth, but doing so would raise ethical questions, The Washington Post reported. “Gene drive” technology allows scientists to edit mosquitoes’ DNA so that females don’t develop ovaries, and to make that mutation spread throughout a population, so the species dies out. There is a strong case for exterminating mosquitoes: Malaria killed 600,000 people — mostly in Africa — in 2023. Some bioethicists argued that deliberate extinction of a species “might occasionally be acceptable, but only extremely rarely,” because its impact on wider ecosystems are little understood. However, one Zimbabwean researcher said that most people opposed to eradicating mosquitoes “are not based in Africa.”

June 11:

• Poland’s coalition government faces a vote of confidence.
• Israel’s Knesset holds a preliminary vote on dissolving the legislature.
• A peak “Strawberry Moon” is visible over most of the US.

A new exhibition in Los Angeles showcases a masterpiece of 17th-century Italian art that was only recently rediscovered because of the 2020 Beirut blast. The Getty Museum will host the first public display of Artemisia Gentileschi’s Hercules and Omphale, which had hung in a private Beirut residence for a century before it was “riddled with shards of glass” in the port explosion five years ago, the Financial Times wrote. The damage spurred a Lebanese art historian to confirm a hunch he had formed decades earlier and to press for its official attribution: “When I saw the devastation, I understood that there was an emergency,” he said. “I was the only person with the suspicion that these paintings were by Artemisia.”

Brad Schneider has a vision for how moderate Democrats can help their party climb out of the wilderness, reported Semafor’s Eleanor Mueller.

“Elon Musk has a reputation: He wanted to move fast and break things,” Schneider told Semafor from his Capitol office on Monday. “The New Dems are looking to move fast and fix things.”