Flagship

US urges G7 tariffs on China, India

The US will urge the G7 to impose harsh tariffs on China and India as punishment for buying Russian oil. The pair are the biggest buyers of Russian fuel exports, and import at discounted prices because other major economies have largely cut Moscow off following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. US President Donald Trump hopes the pressure will force Moscow to join Ukraine peace talks: Washington has already boosted its own levies on Indian imports to 50%, and had earlier suggested the EU place duties of up to 100% on the world’s two most populous nations. But his efforts look unlikely to make headway. Top European officials are in New Delhi this week to discuss expanding, rather than curtailing, trade with India.

Threat to NATO intensifies

Russia’s aerial incursion into Poland this week poses a strategic and a tactical threat to NATO that the military alliance is ill prepared for, analysts warned. Poland and allies had to scramble fighter jets to shoot down the 19 low-tech drones, illustrating the imbalance that European powers face, having to use expensive equipment to battle Moscow’s low-cost antagonization. Alongside the short-term challenge, Europe faces the deeper issue of facing off with a Russia that experts say frequently opts for “gray zone” operations, testing the boundaries of what a rival will tolerate. NATO states, one expert said, are unprepared “for not only future war — but the war that is staring them right now in the face.”

US pledges response to Bolsonaro ruling

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Washington would “respond accordingly” after Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting a coup. Rubio’s comments come after the Trump administration imposed 50% tariffs on Brazil over what it alleges are spurious charges against the rightist Trump ally. Bolsonaro was accused of having masterminded a plan to kill his successor along with one of the Supreme Court judges who convicted him. In response to what he called “tariff blackmail,” Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva this week vowed to pursue closer ties with BRICS nations, saying the group had become “victims of unjustified and illegal trade practices.”

Coffee prices in US surge

Coffee prices in the US have surged more than 20% in the last year, as duties on some of the world’s biggest producers take effect. While American consumers have in general been shielded from the impact of tariffs, coffee drinkers are feeling the pinch as steep duties on imports from Brazil and Vietnam force sellers to pass on some of the cost. The levies compound the pain for US coffee retailers, who already faced higher costs after droughts dented global production. One New York City cafe owner who recently had to hike the price of a cup of drip coffee by 50% said: “We have held off on making this change for as long as possible, but… this adjustment is necessary.”

Soybeans at center of geopolitics

The coming soybean harvest season is emerging as a political and geopolitical flashpoint, as US farmers face a market in which their biggest global customer is looking elsewhere. China’s growing wealth has driven increased consumption of meat from animals that are largely raised on soybean meal. That surging demand had largely been met in prior years by US farmers, but trade tensions have spurred Beijing to turn to Brazil for its soybeans. Whereas China imported about $13 billion of soybeans from the US last year, it has booked no orders so far this year. Farmers are among the Trump administration’s staunchest supporters, but the steep fall could offer their “stiffest loyalty test yet,” Politico noted.

Trump threatens crackdown over Kirk

US President Donald Trump vowed a crackdown on political critics after the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Trump said the “radical left” was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing,” even as he called on supporters to refrain from violent reprisals. His deputy chief of staff said that government employees could be fired, and non-citizens deported, for celebrating Kirk’s death online, a threat reiterated by other senior Republicans. Trump’s team also tightened security around the president, The Wall Street Journal reported, with some advisers scared for their safety. A manhunt is underway for the suspect, who could be seen in video footage escaping the scene.

Nepal crisis unfolds online

A chat room for gamers has emerged as an unlikely gathering place for Nepalis to discuss their country’s future after a social media ban sparked youth-led protests and a violent crackdown. The parliament building was set alight and more than 30 people were killed in clashes with police, ultimately forcing the prime minister’s resignation. More than 100,000 citizens have now gathered to discuss the crisis in a Discord channel, which has become so influential that it is being livestreamed on news sites: Army chiefs have met with the channel’s organizers and asked them to name potential interim national leaders. One young protester told The New York Times that “the Parliament of Nepal right now is Discord.”

We’ve got a special episode this week featuring Josh Spanier, VP of marketing at Google, who you might recognize from our branded segments. In this sponsored episode, presented by Think with Google, Ben asks Josh about how Google thinks about advertising, how he’s navigated the technological changes in that space, and if AI is going to homogenize all of the ads we see. Josh also answers some listener questions about how advertisers work with creators and what the biggest blind spots in marketing are today.

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

OpenAI may loosen nonprofit grip

OpenAI could become more like a traditional company after reaching an agreement with Microsoft to loosen its nonprofit board’s control. The AI firm is, in theory, controlled by its board. But CEO Sam Altman has been chafing against that oversight for a while, not least since it briefly fired him in 2023. Altman argued the company needed more capital than it could attract as a nonprofit, while the board worried he had abandoned its credo of serving humanity rather than shareholders. Microsoft, the company’s largest shareholder, has given a tentative thumbs-up to creating a “public benefit corporation,” essentially a regular company but one which claims a social mission, allowing OpenAI to raise more cash and potentially go public in the future.

AI podcast company denies ‘slop’

An AI podcast company is releasing 3,000 new episodes a week, all generated in about an hour for $1 a go. Inception Point AI has seen more than 10 million downloads since September 2023, according to The Hollywood Reporter. It has about 50 AI personalities, including the nominatively determined nature-show host Nigel Thistledown and food expert Claire Delish. Each episode takes a fraction of the time a human-produced podcast does to make, and as long as 20 people listen to each one, it turns a profit. CEO Jeanine Wright, former head of Amazon’s podcast division, said people calling it AI slop “are probably lazy luddites” and that “in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI.”

Foreign leaders’ travel grows

New analysis showed that world leaders are taking nearly double the number of overseas trips in the period since the end of the Cold War. Whereas African leaders accounted for about a fifth of all such international travel from 1990 to 1994, that figure rose to 30% three decades later; Asian and Latin American leaders, by contrast, saw their relative share decline. The data also illustrates how much borders have shifted: One of the earliest trips studied was by Czechoslovakia’s prime minister to East Germany, neither of which exist today; one of the latest was by Montenegro’s president to Azerbaijan, neither of which existed when the dataset began.

• Qatar’s prime minister will meet with the US secretary of state at the White House for talks following Israel’s drone strike in Doha.
• China’s foreign minister begins a tour of European capitals.
• Day two of the Rally Chile Biobío, the 11th stage of the World Rally Championship, begins in Concepción.

The drop in the rate of questions asked on Stack Overflow in the six months following the release of ChatGPT. Software developers use Stack Overflow to ask how to solve programming problems, but since 2022 they haven’t had to: They can just ask a large language model such as ChatGPT. The concern, argued The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip, is that while LLMs are extremely good at collating information, they don’t create it. “If LLM output comes to dominate the web,” said Ip, “the web will become, well, dumber.”

Millet: Life on the Land, the National Gallery, London. This small exhibition of works by 19th-century French artist Jean-François Millet is almost out of place in London’s flagship art gallery, according to Time Out. You must walk past “centuries’ worth of grand portraits of society’s upper crust” to find this collection of 15 understated paintings of peasants at work, depicting the harshness and stoicism of their lives. It may jar, but it has “an intensity rarely achieved in the portraits of nobility in the adjacent rooms.” Plan your free visit here.