Flagship

Iran meets Europe in diplomatic push

Iran’s foreign minister is set to meet with European counterparts today after the US opened a diplomatic window for ending the Israel-Iran war. One week after its attacks began, Israel is still pounding its adversary, albeit less heavily than in recent days. The White House framed President Donald Trump’s announcement that he will take up to two weeks to decide whether to join Israel’s offensive as a last-ditch push for a diplomatic resolution. Yet as The New York Times noted, the pause “opens a host of new military and covert options,” potentially lulling Tehran into a false sense of security. Or — because Trump often uses “two weeks” as an indeterminate placeholder — it could mean “nothing at all.”

Hezbollah faces stark choice

Israel warned Hezbollah against entering its war with Iran, as fears grow that the conflict may engulf the rest of the Middle East. The fighting has so far been largely contained, but the Lebanese group — once a powerful Iranian proxy whose leadership and capabilities have been hammered by Israel in recent months — could draw Lebanon and others into the war: Hezbollah’s leader said it will “act as we see fit,” prompting Israel’s defense minister to warn it against involvement. The group is one of several Iran-backed organizations severely weakened by Israeli attacks over the past year, and now faces a quandary, a Carnegie expert noted: “Fight someone else’s war or… prioritize its own political survival.”

Trump to slash malaria program

Cuts to US overseas aid could lead to an extra 13 million cases of malaria and 10,000 deaths in Africa this year, Lancet modeling suggested. President Donald Trump wants to halve the budget for a George W. Bush-era program that provides bed nets, insecticide, and drugs to prevent and treat the mosquito-borne disease. Malaria kills around 600,000 people, mostly African children, each year. It marks the latest White House assault on global health initiatives, despite their high cost-effectiveness: The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief is estimated to have saved 25 million lives in 22 years, for a few thousand dollars a life. But PEPFAR has also been cut, with scientists now estimating 600,000 extra AIDS deaths over 10 years.

Gloomy prospects for trade

The global trade war looked set to resume, with little sign of resolution over Washington’s disputes ahead of the expiry of a 90-day tariff reprieve. Canada unveiled new restrictions on steel imports Thursday and warned of increased duties on American metals, Japan failed to reach an agreement with the US on lowering levies, and US President Donald Trump complained that European Union negotiators had yet to offer “a fair deal,” despite the EU’s trade chief insisting the two sides were “making progress” ahead of a July 9 deadline. Speaking with Politico, the chair of Trump’s council of economic advisers acknowledged that policy was “still not settled,” which the outlet described as “intellectually honest, but not entirely reassuring.”

NZ halts Cook Islands aid

Wellington halted aid to the Cook Islands after its Pacific neighbor made its own deals with China, a row that played out as New Zealand’s prime minister visited Beijing. The parallel storylines illustrated the challenge facing many nations seeking to balance ties with regional powerhouse China alongside concerns over its ambitions: Almost a fifth of New Zealand’s total trade is with China, but Wellington has voiced frustration over agreements between Beijing and the Cook Islands, and was worried by a Chinese missile test in the South Pacific last year. Both moves showcased — in Wellington’s view — Beijing’s aggressive ambitions. Chinese leader Xi Jinping insisted his country had “no fundamental conflicts of interest” with New Zealand while meeting its prime minister.

Meta looks to lure AI leaders

Meta is moving to acquire some of the biggest names in artificial intelligence after its own AI offerings have disappointed. Mark Zuckerberg last week invested $14 billion in Scale AI and hired its founder, and is now reportedly trying to poach the CEO of Safe Superintelligence after his attempts to buy the startup were rebuffed. Meta’s Llama AI models have had a “lukewarm” reception compared with rivals such as Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Zuckerberg is concerned about falling behind in the competition to achieve “superintelligence.” That race is hotting up: The tech investment group SoftBank plans to back Taiwan’s TSMC to create a trillion-dollar industrial facility in Arizona focused on AI and robots, Bloomberg reported.

Nvidia backs Gates’ nuclear firm

Nvidia backed Bill Gates’ nuclear energy firm TerraPower, as Big Tech increasingly looks to reactors to supply electricity to the data centers powering artificial intelligence. Gates set up TerraPower in 2006 to create small modular reactors and is building its first in Wyoming, a 345-megawatt plant capable of powering about 300,000 homes. The chipmaking giant’s $650 million investment follows Gates’ own Microsoft as well as Meta, Google, and Amazon in investing in nuclear power, with smaller reactors likely to be key. The rise of AI comes with ever-greater energy demand, more than national grids can currently deliver, so tech firms are building their own reliable, zero-carbon power sources to keep their data centers running.

Over its 174-year history, The New York Times has weathered seismic shifts in the media industry — and stayed on top, evolving into a digital powerhouse with hit podcasts and a daily app for games and cooking. This week, live from the Cannes Lions festival, Ben and Max sit down with CEO Meredith Kopit Levien to talk about how she’s keeping the Times relevant, where journalism fits into the business model, and whether it’s helping or hurting the bottom line.

LatAm’s data center frenzy

Latin America is building a vast number of data centers as it seeks to leverage its abundant land, water, and energy resources amid soaring AI investment. The Inter-American Development Bank forecasts data center investments in the region will double by 2029 relative to last year’s level, potentially boosting stagnating economic growth. Investors have also plowed billions into Latin America’s solar energy development, with “industrial sunbelt” countries including Brazil and Mexico now making up 59% of the world’s pipeline of global clean industrial projects, the Financial Times reported. A Chilean minister told Bloomberg that Latin America could “change a pattern where earthshaking technological developments always take place in the US or Europe.”

AI speeds up science

Scientists say they used artificial intelligence to produce 12 systematic reviews — which would usually take many months each — in just two days. Systematic reviews gather research on a topic, then collate and summarize it: A laborious process, but a vital one for assessing the state of a scientific field. A new, not yet peer-reviewed paper by Canadian researchers used an AI to automate the processes of finding relevant studies and extracting data from them, and was able to recreate 12 existing “gold standard” systematic reviews of medical fields representing about a dozen person-years of work in days. Other scientists told Nature that they were cautiously excited but warned that without more details, the findings can’t be independently verified.

Jaws turns 50

Half a century after its razor-toothed antagonist first terrified audiences, movie fans are looking at how Jaws changed cinema. The blueprint for blockbusters the film created is “now so recognizable that you have probably seen Jaws — even if you haven’t actually seen Jaws,” The New York Times reported. The beats of the film — the reluctant hero challenging authorities, his sacrifice, the final confrontation — have been followed by dozens of films; Aliens was originally pitched as “Jaws in space.” It also kept the shark largely off-screen, building up suspense, and while that decision was forced by the unreliability of the animatronic great white, it has also been widely copied. It also created a new form of nerdy, un-masculine hero in Richard Dreyfus’ Hooper, The Conversation argued.

• Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu hosts the West Africa Economic Summit.
• French President Emmanuel Macron is due to visit the Paris Air Show.
• Brazil hosts a solar-powered boat competition along its northeastern coast.

The number of guns per 100 people in the United States, far above Montenegro, the next democracy on the list, which has 39. The prevalence of weapons and rising polarization have fed fears of increased political violence, exemplified by the killing of a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband last week. Threats to judges and politicians have soared in recent years. Meanwhile US President Donald Trump’s recent pardon of people who stormed the Capitol, which led to the death of uniformed police officers, raises the specter of such violence going unpunished, Edward Luce argued in the Financial Times. “America in 2025 is making political murder easier,” Luce wrote. “This is a choice, not fate.”

28 Years Later, dir. Danny Boyle. Trainspotting’s Boyle and his scriptwriter Alex Garland have reunited, 23 (rather than 28) years after the release of the groundbreaking zombie movie 28 Days Later. Post-apocalyptic stories are commonplace now — see The Last of Us — but Boyle and Garland “breathe thrilling life back into an overexposed genre,” says Empire, avoiding obvious choices and bringing a “soulful, almost mythical” tone as survivors scrabble for existence in the ruins of Britain. Watch 28 Years Later in a theater near you.

MAGA loyalists trying to deter President Donald Trump from bombing Iran this week are at a disadvantage: They have only three real Republican allies in Congress, and Trump hasn’t been listening to them, reported Semafor’s David Weigel.

“Unconditional surrender — that means I’ve had it,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday as he acknowledged he’s openly wrestling with whether to directly strike Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility. “I give up, no more. Then we go blow up all the nuclear stuff that’s all over the place there.”