Flagship

Putin agrees to limited ceasefire

Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to temporarily pause attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, but rejected a broader US-backed ceasefire, in a rare phone call with President Donald Trump on Tuesday. The leaders said they would begin negotiations on a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea and a full truce, though Putin stressed several conditions that could pose hurdles in future peace talks, including calling for an end to Western military support for Ukraine: “There’s no indication Putin has dropped any of his maximalist goals,” the Financial Times’ Moscow bureau chief wrote. Shortly after the call, Russian drones reportedly targeted Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities.

Pressure mounts over Panama port deal

China’s displeasure is mounting after a Hong Kong conglomerate sold two of its Panama Canal ports to an American-led investor group. Chinese leader Xi Jinping is angry that CK Hutchison didn’t get the government’s approval before the ports’ sale to a BlackRock-led consortium, The Wall Street Journal reported, and Beijing is reportedly investigating the deal. China had planned to use the Panama ports as a bargaining chip with US President Donald Trump, who had criticized their non-US ownership. Hong Kong’s leader John Lee echoed Beijing’s criticism Tuesday, saying the deal deserved “serious attention.” The pressure has turned CK Hutchison into a “geopolitical pawn,” Reuters wrote, in the two superpowers’ fight for global influence.

Trump escalates courts clash

US President Donald Trump is escalating his clash with the country’s judiciary. Trump’s call to impeach a federal judge who attempted to block his deportation plans provoked a rare public rebuke from US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who said Tuesday it was “not an appropriate response.” Trump’s pushback against the courts over immigration marks what may be “the most significant test of America’s system of checks and balances” in his second term, Politico wrote. Legal experts are concerned that Trump’s criticism of other court orders impeding his agenda could lead to an increasingly defiant White House. Breaking the bounds of American law, The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote, would “take the country down a dangerous road.”

Nvidia looks to grow its AI empire

Nvidia on Tuesday unveiled plans for more powerful chips, an artificial intelligence model for humanoid robots, and “personal AI supercomputers.” The US semiconductor giant’s announcements at an event CEO Jensen Huang dubbed the “Super Bowl of AI” — some also called it “AI Woodstock” — come at a critical time for the company. Nvidia has seen massive growth in the last two years, though investors have begun to question whether the steep costs of the AI boom are sustainable. Huang’s two-hour presentation looked to quell that anxiety by pushing the notion that demand will keep soaring for Nvidia’s high-powered chips. The world will need 100 times more AI computing power than it thought necessary just a year ago, Huang said.

Google to buy cyber startup

Google agreed to buy cybersecurity startup Wiz for $32 billion — its largest acquisition and a test for US regulators. President Donald Trump’s administration has so far echoed Joe Biden’s skepticism of corporate consolidation; the Justice Department is pushing ahead with its effort to break up Google’s search business. But tech giants are presenting themselves “as national security champions” to skirt antitrust scrutiny, Semafor’s Rohan Goswami wrote: A Google press release announcing the acquisition noted that governments can also use Wiz to protect against cyberattacks, a not-so-subtle reminder to several US agencies that suffered big security breaches in the last two years.

Fired Google worker’s ideas now mainstream

The ex-Google employee ostracized from Silicon Valley over his 2017 gender memo is seeing his once-derided ideas become mainstream, The Free Press wrote in a profile of James Damore. The engineer has been living a secluded, offline life in Luxembourg after being fired over his memo accusing Google of fostering an “ideological echo chamber.” He argued that the gender gap in tech stemmed from “biological causes,” and that Google’s programs to encourage gender parity discriminated against men. Damore’s perspectives were widely viewed as misogynistic at the time, but are now reflected in the US political and business culture’s shift away from diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts: “Ideas that were made radioactive over the past decade,” The Free Press argued, have “become more commonplace.”

Book urges liberals to look beyond Trump

A new book by two prominent American journalists urges liberals to look past their anger over Donald Trump’s return to power, and instead lean into an ambitious, pro-growth agenda. Abundance, by The New York Times’ Ezra Klein and The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, argues that since the 1980s, progressives have gotten in their own way by enacting bureaucratic hurdles that have curbed progress: “Blue cities are laden with rules and litigation procedures that block new housing and transit construction,” and thwart climate-friendly projects that liberals purport to support, they write. The authors’ argument has the potential to be the Democratic Party’s new “potent political manifesto,” Slate wrote.

German lawmakers OK big spending plan

German lawmakers on Tuesday approved a landmark defense and infrastructure spending plan, which experts say could resuscitate Europe’s largest economy and spur the continent’s rearmament efforts. Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz took the unusual step of using the outgoing parliament to secure a supermajority, which was needed to OK up to $1 trillion in debt-fueled investments. Some of the money was also earmarked for climate spending, boosting clean-tech hardware stocks. Germany has traditionally been frugal, but its newfound willingness to spend big could have continent-wide implications, with Brussels increasingly open to common borrowing, Politico wrote: Europe may have its “Hamiltonian moment” and move toward joint EU debt issuance.

SUVs still dominate roads

SUVs accounted for 54% of cars sold globally in 2024, despite predictions that the future belonged to smaller, more environmentally friendly vehicles. That figure is three percentage points higher than in 2023 and five higher than 2022, and 95% of SUVs currently on the road burn fossil fuels. Sales of smaller vehicles have declined across major markets. An industry spokesperson told the BBC that the change is driven by SUVs’ “practicality, comfort and good view,” although environmental activists said the industry gets higher profit margins on larger cars and has pushed them with “huge marketing and advertising campaigns.” The tech writer Martin Robbins recently proposed an alternative hypothesis: That safety requirements in many markets make smaller cars economically impractical to sell.

London turns toilets into cafés

London’s old public toilets are being turned into bars and cafés. For example, a Victorian-era underground restroom in Bermondsey is now a “speakeasy-themed cocktail bar,” the Financial Times reported. For London’s heavily indebted councils repurposing these often grand spaces “brings in much-needed income and restores life to old buildings.” Not everyone is pleased: The city has already lost as many as 100 public toilets in the last decade, and campaigners want to require councils to make more available. Some councils have established “community toilet schemes” where restaurants and bars offer the use of theirs to the public, sometimes for a fee. But other global cities like Tokyo are instead building beautifully designed and high-tech public lavatories.

March 19:

• The US Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan make interest rate announcements.
• Tencent publishes its fourth-quarter earnings report.
• Hans Zimmer & Friends: Diamond in the Desert premieres in select global theaters.

A new exhibit at Hong Kong’s Palace Museum documents how China’s food and dining culture has evolved over 5,000 years through the movement of people, technology, and ideas. A Movable Feast: The Culture of Food and Drink in China features more than 110 artifacts, paintings, and picnic sets to illustrate how ingredients were sourced, processed, and enjoyed amid ever-changing social arrangements. As food transportation methods changed, so too did feasting rituals: Picnic boxes, for example, were once stacked by the docks for passersby to collect, like a kind of 16th-century DoorDash — reminding us that food itself “migrates, adapts and absorbs new influences, much like the people who make and consume it,” the Financial Times wrote.

President Donald Trump’s claim that the pardons signed by Joe Biden at the end of his term are now “void” began with an outcry among Trump allies about Biden’s mental capacity, Semafor’s David Weigel and Shelby Talcott reported.

Some conservatives claimed that Biden’s use of an autopen to sign orders suggested he hadn’t seen or understood them, hence rendering them void. The controversy follows the current administration’s pattern of Trump or his allies elevating “stories that the rest of his party might not take seriously — but would, if the president did,” Weigel and Talcott wrote.