Flagship

Trump’s swift anti-Ukraine pivot

US President Donald Trump called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator” on Wednesday, widening the rift with Kyiv while pivoting closer to Russia. Trump’s recent exchange of insults with Zelenskyy, and his apparent willingness to accept many of Moscow’s demands in peace negotiations over the Ukraine war, have stunned Washington’s European allies; even longtime US-Russia watchers were surprised at how swiftly Trump has seemingly turned anti-Ukraine and adopted Kremlin talking points. As Moscow and Washington look toward normalizing relations, with the Kremlin suggesting American firms could do more business in Russia, they are “meeting on equal ground as partners — Putin is no longer the kid slouching at the back of the classroom,” one expert told the Financial Times.

Trump could help China geopolitically

Donald Trump’s transactional and disruptive approach to the US presidency could boost China’s geopolitical ambitions, several analysts argued. Trump’s “rough-and-tumble treatment of allies,” like trying to acquire Greenland, signals a “demise of US support for a rules-based order that China has long sought to end,” a Foreign Policy columnist argued. And Trump’s apparent appeasement of Russia has rankled Europe, fracturing the Western alliance that Beijing is seeking to counter. China has encouraged US-Russia talks to end the Ukraine war, and any gains Moscow can extract in a truce would also benefit Beijing, The Atlantic wrote: If Trump reduces security guarantees to Europe, China could expand power “by offering to step into the breach.”

Arab leaders craft Gaza proposal

Arab nations are crafting their own proposal for Gaza’s future to counter US President Donald Trump’s controversial idea of resettling Palestinians outside the enclave. Officials from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar are meeting in Riyadh Thursday to discuss a plan that could see the countries contribute $20 billion toward a new Palestinian committee of technocrats and community leaders that would govern and help rebuild Gaza without Hamas, Reuters reported. It would also avoid the displacement of Gaza’s residents. But “the obstacles to these ideas are as old as the ideas themselves,” which have been floated for years, The New York Times wrote. Israel opposes any plan paving the way for a Palestinian state.

Asia deepens data center embrace

Asian countries are embracing billion-dollar investments in data centers as economic drivers. An investor group in South Korea plans to build one of the world’s largest artificial intelligence data centers, with a capacity totalling three times that of a similar US project backed by OpenAI and SoftBank. Thailand could see its largest-ever data complex built this year, which entrepreneurs said would support local AI developers and tech startups, Nikkei reported. And Malaysia, Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing data center market, has benefited from US-China tech tensions forcing companies to diversify production. But some experts worry these countries “may be overstating data centers’ transformative capabilities,” the Associated Press wrote: They require lots of land, water, and power, while generating fewer jobs than promised.

Another OpenAI vet starts rival firm

Former OpenAI executives are launching and expanding rival startups as the race to build artificial intelligence intensifies. Ex-technology chief Mira Murati on Wednesday launched Thinking Machines Lab, which aims to make artificial intelligence “more widely understood” and customizable. Her company has already poached 20 former OpenAI researchers. And Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI cofounder and its former chief scientist, started a firm last year focused on “safe superintelligence”; it is currently raising money at a valuation that could exceed $30 billion, Bloomberg reported. Their efforts point to the increasingly competitive AI landscape and sustained investor interest: Murati believes “we are still in the early stages of AI, and the competition is far from closed,” Wired wrote.

Microsoft hails quantum breakthrough

Microsoft unveiled a new chip Wednesday, hailing it as a milestone toward building a quantum computer able to solve “industrial-scale problems in years, not decades.” The company said its Majorana 1 chip was powered by “the world’s first topoconductor” to help produce fewer error-prone qubits — the building blocks for quantum computers — than rivals like Google’s Willow chip. Microsoft’s CEO said the development could pave the way for solving problems that “all the computers on Earth today combined could not.” Scientists were more cautious: “You have to verify… that a device behaves in all the magical ways that theory predicts it should; otherwise, the reality may turn out to be less rosy for quantum computing,” one physicist told The New York Times.

The egg marketplace shaping US prices

The trading of billions of eggs in the US is administered by a dozen people in an office dubbed the “Wall Street of Eggs.” The Egg Clearinghouse in New Hampshire helps shape the price of eggs — which recently hit a record high amid a bird flu outbreak — by operating an online marketplace in which farmers list eggs for sale, and buyers place bids on them. It oversees a small fraction of the country’s egg market, but has seen a recent surge in bids, The Wall Street Journal reported. The scramble for eggs has also highlighted the uniqueness of the food’s trade in the US: Prices of other major edible commodities like hogs, corn, and wheat are determined on markets run by a large Chicago-based firm.

US approval for bird flu vaccine

US regulators granted conditional approval for a new bird flu vaccine for poultry. The US usually handles bird flu with culling, rather than vaccination. But authorities are now trying different containment tactics given that the ongoing US outbreak has affected 150 million birds, including 20 million in the last month. The spread has caused significant economic damage — the price of eggs is up 65% since January 2024 — and has infected dairy cows and humans. So far, there has been only one fatal human case in the US and no confirmed person-to-person transmission; officials say the threat to the public is low. But in a sign of how far the virus has spread, a scientific expedition confirmed its presence on six Antarctic islands.

With a GOP trifecta now in power, calls for tax reform are swelling. Semafor’s Burgess Everett and Eleanor Mueller will explore the high-stakes debates shaping these proposals: How will Congress navigate tax cuts amid record deficits? Join Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), Ranking Member, Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs; Adam N. Michel, Director of Tax Policy Studies, Cato Institute; Natasha Sarin, Professor of Law and Finance, Yale University; and David Chavern, President and CEO, American Council of Life Insurers, for news-making discussions on the tax battles that could reshape Washington.

March 6, 2025 | Washington DC | RSVP

British students pivot to Bulgaria

A shortage of college spaces in UK universities is driving medical students to train in Bulgaria. More than 2,500 British students are estimated to be studying medicine and dentistry in Bulgaria. Other popular destinations include Poland and Romania. The UK’s National Health Service is keen to recruit more doctors, but even as colleges increase their intake, demand still outstrips supply, the Financial Times reported. The NHS relies heavily on overseas recruiting, but source countries such as Pakistan are themselves short of medics, and immigration is a contentious issue: The health secretary recently said the UK is “too reliant on pulling the immigration lever.” The flow of students to Eastern Europe could ease the “pent-up demand” for medical degrees, one analyst said.

Why no one dresses up any more

The decline of formalwear is a symptom of a deeper cultural shift that prioritizes “the individual over the institution,” The New York Times’ fashion critic argued. In response to a reader who noted that people rarely dress up to go to restaurants, Vanessa Friedman wrote that until fairly recently, the state weighed in on appropriate attire: School students were lectured on work- and eveningwear, and a 1950s US government pamphlet guided consumers on “How to Buy Shoes.” But in the 1960s, young people began questioning those conventions, leading to a societal shift that said “we all have a right to dress as we want.” And any lingering pretense of a dress code “went out the window” during the pandemic.

Feb. 20:

• The foreign ministers of the G20 governments gather in Johannesburg for an annual summit.
• Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s nominee for FBI director, is expected to receive final approval in the Senate.
• Timestamp, a documentary on Ukraine’s schools, premieres at the Berlinale film festival.

After visitors at the Louvre are done feasting their eyes on the Mona Lisa, they can now admire a pair of Hermès gloves on display. The most visited museum in the world is hosting its first ever fashion exhibition to lure new visitors and help them discover that the French institution is “much more than only one painting,” curator Olivier Gabet told The Economist. To that end, high-end couture is playfully placed alongside historic works, like a Balenciaga chrome-plated dress next to a 1560 suit of armor, and a Givenchy trouser suit with a bumblebee-print sash near a throne of Napoleon, who used the insect as symbol in his imperial regalia.

Beneficiaries of a $20 billion clean-energy program that the Trump administration wants to claw back might sue to keep the money, a leader of one such group told Semafor’s Tim McDonnell.

“The days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left activist groups in the name of climate justice … are over,” EPA head Lee Zeldin wrote on X. But ending the program could also undermine the administration’s promise to cut household energy bills, wrote McDonnell.