Flagship

Senate inches closer to megabill passage

The fate of US President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax and spending bill was still uncertain Monday, as senators slogged through a marathon session of votes on proposed changes to the package. Lawmakers contended with pushback over the package’s proposed new tax on wind and solar projects; the Senate’s version of the megabill would also impose more cuts to green energy tax credits. The amped-up Republican assault on clean energy has stunned the power industry. The tax — which would apply to projects using materials from China, the industry’s primary supplier — is a “kill shot” to the wind and solar sectors, a climate policy advocate said. It comes as China charges ahead in the global clean energy race, expanding Beijing’s geopolitical influence.

No ‘great rotation’ from US assets

Despite fears that tariffs would spur a mass investor exodus from US stocks, there’s little evidence that narrative is still holding up, analysts said. US stocks, bonds, and other assets “remain attractive versus the rest of the world,” Morgan Stanley strategists said in a recent report. HSBC experts similarly noted that a previous surge of investments out of the US and into Europe seems to be slowing. And while the dollar has weakened this year, that’s not part of a “great rotation” away from US assets, an international central bank body said this week. Still, growing concerns over ballooning American debt stemming from Republicans’ tax and spending package have made long-term US bonds less attractive, the Financial Times noted.

South Korea embraces stablecoins

South Korea now has the best-performing stock market in Asia thanks to the new government’s embrace of stablecoins. President Lee Jae-myung has pledged to allow private companies to issue won-backed stablecoins, which are cryptocurrencies pegged to a national currency. South Korea already has a vibrant crypto market, and companies seen as benefiting from a stablecoin-friendly environment have seen their stocks surge. The country’s central bank halted its digital currency pilot program, Bloomberg reported, as market interest shifts away from state-led tokens and toward a private-sector role in stablecoin issuance. But experts have warned that stocks driven by crypto hype tend to be overvalued; top global monetary policymakers warned last week that stablecoins “perform poorly” as money.

Trump-Harvard clash threatens settlement

The Trump administration’s clash with Harvard University appears to be escalating, risking negotiations over a settlement. A US government investigation alleged the nation’s oldest college was in “violent violation” of the Civil Rights Act over its treatment of Jewish and Israeli students, an accusation the university rejected. Earlier in June, Trump said a “historic” deal with Harvard could be forthcoming, but talks have since stalled, Bloomberg reported. The government has already frozen billions in federal research funding and threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status, with further leverage in the form of pulling student aid grants.

Japan’s US, Europe ties fray

Japan’s ties with its most important Western allies appear increasingly strained. US President Donald Trump on Monday threatened higher tariffs on Tokyo over an apparent unwillingness to buy American-grown rice, suggesting a trade deal was still a ways off. Signs of discord emerged after Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba skipped the NATO summit, and Japan canceled a top-level meeting with Washington after reportedly being rankled by US calls for Tokyo to spend more on defense. Ishiba also hasn’t visited Europe once during his nine months in office, Nikkei reported, raising concerns that Japan is failing to counter Chinese and Russian influence on the continent. Ishiba appears to instead be focused on Asian diplomacy, as well as domestic political challenges.

CCP membership passes 100M

Chinese Communist Party membership surpassed 100 million people in 2024, official data showed Monday, but growth has slowed as leader Xi Jinping tightens his grip on the country. The number of cadres increased 1.1%, down from a 3.7% jump in 2021 as Xi accelerated his anti-corruption campaign, eliminating perks and purging senior ministers, military officials, and bankers from the party. Unlike Western political systems, CCP membership is tightly regulated, with a roughly 10% acceptance rate. In that sense, the party’s growth doesn’t purely reflect ideology, The Wall Street Journal wrote; many young people see it as a way to more easily secure steady government employment in a languid job market.

CATL’s battery-swapping ambitions

CATL, the world’s largest electric vehicle battery maker, plans to bring its battery-swapping technology to Europe. Despite speed improvements, recharging EV batteries is still slower than filling a petrol tank. Beijing has pushed battery-swapping, which can take minutes, as an alternative. It also lowers EVs’ upfront cost by letting drivers lease batteries, the most expensive component, rather than owning them. There are now thousands of swap stations in China, but they have been slow to take off elsewhere thanks to high infrastructure costs: Europe has merely dozens. CATL, which plans to build 10,000 new stations in China in the next three years, told the Financial Times that it wants to partner with local carmakers to build more in Europe.

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Why AI models are Shoggoths

Tech companies’ efforts to render artificial intelligence models safe are “putting makeup on a monster we don’t understand,” two AI safety researchers argued in The Wall Street Journal. Large language models are “grown, not programmed,” Cameron Berg and Judd Rosenblatt wrote, and “fed the entire internet… until an alien intelligence emerges.” Some AI researchers call LLMs Shoggoths, after amorphous monsters in HP Lovecraft’s fiction, to describe their inhuman nature. “Post-training” the LLMs to make them act helpfully is like painting on a friendly face, but that face paint comes off easily: A few minutes’ work can make ChatGPT fantasize about destroying the US or murdering ethnic groups, as Berg and Rosenblatt discovered: “The Shoggoths are already in our pockets… and boardrooms.”

What makes someone cool

A person’s “coolness” transcends nations and languages, a new study suggests. A global survey of nearly 6,000 participants found cool people tend to have six traits: They’re extroverted, hedonistic, powerful, adventurous, open, and autonomous. Respondents had to recognize the word “cool” in English, suggesting “they were already familiar with… notions of coolness from wealthy Western countries,” The New York Times wrote. “Globally,” one expert said, “American success has led to the diffusion of music styles and an immense amount of cultural content, including, apparently, the concept of cool.” Research suggests coolness isn’t necessarily a positive: Kindness was a trait attributed to “good” people, rather than cool ones.

Napoleon relics sell for $9.7 million

A collection of Napoleon-related relics sold for $9.7 million at auction. Among the lots were paintings, a bust, a sword, and one of his famous bicorne hats, which he wore so that its wings flared sideways from his head to create his unmistakable silhouette. They came from the collection of a French obsessive who has indebted himself so much by buying memorabilia that he was forced to sell his home, Artnet reported. The French emperor was the subject of global fascination in his lifetime — Lord Byron wrote an Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte in 1814, a year before his final defeat at Waterloo — and two centuries after his death, he still remains one of history’s most compelling figures.

July 1:

• Denmark assumes the rotating Council of the European Union presidency.
• The result of New York City’s ranked-choice vote is finalized in the city’s Democratic mayoral primary.
• France’s ban on smoking in certain public places takes effect.

A new exhibition in Florida harnesses antique methods of pigmenting and textile production to honor the indigenous peoples of colonial Spanish America. Painter Sandy Rodriguez’s Currents of Resistance at Sarasota’s Ringling Museum of Art is a “reimagining of colonial archival material,” specifically cartographic documents, ARTnews wrote: To create what she calls a “resistance map,” Rodriguez manufactures pigments from native mineral and botanical specimens, which are transferred onto amate paper produced in accordance with pre-Conquest Aztec techniques. Once illegal to produce, the knowledge of manufacturing amate — or, as Rodriguez calls it, “outlaw paper” — has persisted: “Indigenous cultures have existed here for over 12,000 years and continue to endure,” the museum’s curator said.

Roughly 1.8 billion consumers have used AI tools, and a third of them do so daily. But according to a Menlo Ventures survey, almost all of them are using the products for free, Semafor’s Rachyl Jones reported.

That leaves a huge amount of untapped revenue for AI companies that must pay off hundreds of billions in capital expenditures to build out their AI footprints. But there are a few avenues they can tap to convert users, said Menlo’s ​​Shawn Carolan, who invests in consumer tech.