Flagship

Conservatives win in Germany

Germany’s conservatives won the country’s national elections, promoting leader Friedrich Merz to become the next chancellor, exit polls projected. The populist Alternative für Deutschland finished second with 20% of the vote — marking the German far-right’s strongest postwar showing — while outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left party slumped. A longstanding mainstream “firewall” against extremist parties will keep the AfD from power, but its surge marks “a vote of no confidence in the political center,” Der Spiegel wrote, compounding the challenges Merz faces: He is tasked with repairing transatlantic relations and reinvigorating the world’s third largest economy. Merz’s chancellorship, Politico wrote, will test “whether he can lead Germany and Europe in defending the fraying liberal order without the US — or whether… it’s already almost too late.”

Divisions emerge on the US right

US President Donald Trump’s aggressive start to his second term is exposing potential fault lines within the American right. Recent polling shows Trump’s voters are increasingly opposed to some of his more controversial agenda items, like scrapping the Education Department. Some Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, are privately trying to counter Elon Musk’s cost-cutting onslaught, Politico reported. After Musk emailed every government employee Saturday threatening their jobs if they didn’t provide a list of recent accomplishments, many agencies, including some led by Trump’s cabinet picks, told staff to ignore it. At a UK political summit, anti-woke American journalist Bari Weiss warned conservatives against being swallowed by the far right: “If a political movement does not police its ranks, does not draw lines… it cannot long endure.”

Kyiv open to minerals deal with US

Washington is ramping up pressure on Ukraine to strike a minerals-for-security pact, and Kyiv seems open to a deal. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defended the exchange in the Financial Times, arguing it was not economic coercion. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — who is trying to salvage his relationship with US President Donald Trump — said Sunday that “we are ready to share,” adding that he would resign in return for peace and Ukrainian membership in NATO. The negotiations come as Russia launched its biggest drone attack yet on Ukraine Saturday after three years of war. Meanwhile, officials from Moscow and Washington are set to meet for a second time in Saudi Arabia this week to discuss an end to the conflict.

US aid claim sets off India row

A false claim that the US had spent millions on “voter turnout” in India has sparked a political firestorm in New Delhi. The claim originated from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, marking “another example of the global chaos wrought by Musk” as the tech billionaire works to slash spending and foreign aid, The Washington Post wrote. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has echoed the theory that outside actors sought to boost his opposition, leading some analysts to worry Modi could further tighten rules on foreign funding for civic groups. But while US President Donald Trump and his allies embolden Modi politically, India’s economy remains under the threat of reciprocal tariffs, a pledge Trump renewed over the weekend.

Investors fear return of high inflation

Escalating costs across the world’s developed economies are raising investor fears that high inflation is poised to return. Inflation ticked up in January in the US and in several European and Asian countries, leading some economists to question whether central banks cut interest rates too early, The Economist wrote. “Inflation is like cockroaches,” one expert argued, “When there are only a few left [it] is not the time to let up.” The price hikes might be a blip, but world leaders who came to power amid the global anti-incumbent wave, fueled by inflation, may now face the same challenge. Some investors believe US markets in particular are underestimating the risk of stagflation — rising prices coupled with slow growth — Reuters reported.

China pushes self-sufficiency

Chinese policymakers pushed for agricultural self-sufficiency and food security, as Beijing works to bolster the country’s flagging domestic economy and limit the impact of US tariffs. The move follows Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s meeting last week with the country’s top entrepreneurs, outreach that analysts said aimed to signal Beijing’s commitment to bolstering the private sector. Between Xi’s meeting and the global prominence of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, “China has had a few good weeks,” The New York Times wrote, but analysts cautioned that hopes of a coming economic recovery are “overly optimistic.” Goldman Sachs researchers estimated that both existent and threatened US tariffs could shave as much as 1.4% off China’s GDP growth.

Obesity drug supply matches demand

US supplies of the obesity drug semaglutide finally caught up with the demand, but its availability isn’t necessarily good news for consumers, Wired reported. The drug, typically sold under brand names Wegovy for obesity and Ozempic for diabetes, has rapidly become one of the most widely taken medications in the world, with one survey finding 13% of all Americans have used it. But demand far outstripped supply: It has been on the Food and Drug Administration’s shortage list since 2022, until last week, when it was declared “available.” The decision to remove semaglutide from the list could make it less accessible however, as it also means that the rules around making cheaper, off-brand versions will be tightened up.

‘Ne Zha 2’ smashes global records

Chinese film Ne Zha 2 overtook Pixar’s Inside Out 2 as the highest-grossing animated movie of all time. The movie, which is based on a 16th-century novel that draws on ancient Chinese myths, had already become the highest-grossing non-Hollywood film ever, and the first to cross the $1 billion mark in a single market — China, where analysts predict the film will cross the $2 billion threshold, another world first. Hollywood has chased the Chinese market for years: Films often avoid Beijing-sensitive topics like Taiwan and tweak plots to avoid censorship, while studios increasingly emphasize visuals over dialogue to ease translation. But China also wants some of the soft power that Hollywood gives the US, selling its country via film.

Apple removes encryption in UK

Apple removed end-to-end data encryption from its devices in the UK rather than give the government a backdoor to let it surreptitiously access customers’ private data. The update followed a new UK law — dubbed the “Snoopers’ Charter” by critics — that grants officials powers to “access the encrypted data of Apple customers anywhere in the world, including in the US,” the Financial Times reported. The US tech giant said such a workaround would essentially give bad actors access to encrypted data, too, and rather than risk such broad security failures, Apple simply turned off encryption for many of its services: “We have never built a backdoor… and we never will,” the iPhone maker said.

AI evaluates tuna quality

A Japanese app that uses artificial intelligence to grade the quality of tuna is expanding to Indonesia, one of the world’s largest fish producers. Traditionally, experts looked at a tuna tail’s firmness and fat content to determine its quality, but that has become a “dying art,” with fewer young people taking up the profession, Nikkei wrote. Tuna Scope, developed by a Japanese advertising firm, judges a fish’s grade using a single photo. In Japan, the app is already used to evaluate frozen tuna, but expansion to Indonesia will test its accuracy on fresh fish: The Southeast Asian country lacks standardized methods for grading tuna, which matters for export prices.

Feb. 24:

• France’s President Emmanuel Macron meets US President Donald Trump in Washington.
• Indonesia launches Danantara, its new sovereign wealth fund.
• China hosts the 62nd session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Hangzhou.

A new Japanese television show takes a nostalgic, analog approach to dating over more high-tech methods. Offline Love follows young people looking for a relationship in Nice, France: As part of the show, their phones are taken away, so they get around the city with guidebooks and communicate via written letters. “It’s a simpler kind of dating but also a more emotionally complicated experience — something the Gen Z-leaning participants crave,” The Japan Times noted. Even as the participants learn that their imagined halcyon past is not always all it’s cracked up to be, the show offers “a meditation on the pros of disconnecting — which is probably all the more welcome nowadays.”

Two weeks after Carl Eschenbach laid off 1,750 Workday employees in the interest of “prioritizing innovation investments like AI,” Eschenbach is not buying the idea that artificial intelligence will replace vast swaths of the workforce, writes Semafor’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson.

In a year, Eschenbach predicts Workday may have even more people on its payroll than before, but they will increasingly be focused on AI, and more spread out around the world.