Flagship

Trump chooses NATO ambassador

Donald Trump picked former acting US Attorney General Matt Whitaker as the US ambassador to NATO, a key role given the president-elect’s vow to reassess the transatlantic alliance. Whitaker lacks foreign policy experience, “making him an unknown” in US security circles, the Associated Press wrote. If confirmed, he will be leading the US mission to NATO at a time when the alliance is grappling over how to continue supporting Ukraine. A Gallup poll conducted before Trump was elected showed Ukrainians are souring on US leadership and losing hope of joining NATO within the next 10 years. Hoping to regain broader US support, Ukrainian officials are traveling to rural American communities and portraying Trump as a potentially positive force for Kyiv, Politico reported.

US Senate to vote on Israel weapons block

The White House is lobbying Democratic senators to vote against a bill that would block the sale of more than $20 billion worth of weapons to Israel. The vote is likely to fail, but it will nonetheless mark a “watershed moment in a more divided Democratic Party” grappling with how to approach support for Israel over the war in Gaza, The Times of Israel wrote. President Joe Biden wants Democrats to maintain a pro-Israel stance, and the US on Wednesday was the only country to veto a UN Security Council resolution demanding a Gaza ceasefire. Still, one top US commander warned Tuesday that the country’s support for Israel and Ukraine was depleting critical weapons stockpiles needed to respond to any potential conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific.

World eyes China in preparation for Trump

World leaders at the G20 summit scrambled to steady relations with China, with even US allies worried about how a Trump presidency could destabilize the global stage. Trump’s threat to increase tariffs are “corrosive” to the US’ standing abroad, one Australia-based expert told The New York Times. Beijing is looking to fill the trade vacuum, and recently resumed high-level talks with Australia to ease some tariff concerns. The US’ waning influence is particularly pronounced in Latin America, which Washington once regarded as its “backyard,” the Financial Times wrote. Brazil on Wednesday signed 37 new trade and development deals with Beijing, and Trump’s return could further boost China’s trade dominance in the region, an analyst said: His “promises go in the opposite direction.”

US firms stockpile Chinese imports

US businesses are stocking up on goods from Chinese suppliers in anticipation of Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs. Outbound shipments from China were already up 13% year-on-year in October, though front-loading imports is only a “short-term solution,” one expert told The Wall Street Journal. A 2024 survey found that around 69% of business executives plan to reduce dependence on China, compared with 55% in 2022. A Reuters poll of economists expected Trump to impose nearly 40% tariffs on all Chinese imports in early 2025, while resisting levies of 60% over fears of accelerating US inflation. Still, major US retailers like Walmart have already warned that heavy tariffs will inevitably increase prices for American consumers.

US indicts Adani over bribery allegations

US prosecutors indicted one of India’s richest men on Wednesday for allegedly bribing Indian government officials to gain lucrative contracts, and concealing them from US investors. Billionaire Gautam Adani and other executives allegedly paid more than $250 million in bribes to obtain solar energy supply contracts with New Delhi, ultimately raising capital on false statements. The indictment comes just weeks after the Adani Group pledged to invest $10 billion in US energy and infrastructure projects. Regulators have for months been scrutinizing Adani’s business activities: Short seller Hindenburg Research accused him last year of improper use of tax havens and stock manipulation, and Adani’s infrastructure deals in Kenya, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh appeared to have been facilitated by the Indian government’s diplomatic ventures.

Indian scholar maps linguistic diversity

A drive by India’s ruling party to create a “monolingual monoculture” is being challenged by a scholar seeking to document the nation’s breathtaking polyglotism, The New Yorker reported. The Bharatiya Janata Party wants to cement the primacy of Hindi — the mother tongue of 300 million of India’s 1.4 billion people — by near-tripling the Department of Official Language’s budget and defunding institutes protecting endangered languages. Former professor Ganesh Devy has identified 780 languages, some with speakers in the single digits, each encoding a diversity of religion, culture, and thought that critics see Hindu nationalist leaders as trying to flatten. Linguistic plurality bolsters political resistance, one theorist said, because “the smallest language, the most innocuous dialect, might contain the potential of saying that all-important word: ‘No.’”

Group protests nuclear plant reopening

The reopening of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, site of the US’ worst-ever nuclear accident, will face protests from the group that lobbied for its closure 45 years ago. TMI’s second reactor partially melted down in 1979, and the poorly handled response dented public trust in nuclear power. Its first reactor was shut in 2019 after the plant failed to compete with cheap gas energy, but growing demand for low-carbon electricity for data centers is fueling a nuclear revival. The government is yet to approve TMI’s Microsoft-backed reopening, and TMI Alert, which was founded to protest against the plant in the 1970s, will challenge any licenses, saying it was “pure fantasy” that it would be safe to open by 2028.

Advisers close to Donald Trump are pushing for a renewed US-Africa policy that rows back what they view as “woke” diplomacy under the Biden administration, Semafor Africa’s Yinka Adegoke reported. “The general feeling seems to be that Washington’s relationship with the continent will benefit from a reset,” Adegoke wrote.

Einstein’s relativity theories still hold

Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity was tested at the largest scale ever. Relativity theory predicts how objects will move under gravity. Those predictions have always been astonishingly precise, but scientists want to find errors in it, because relativity — the science of the very large — cannot be integrated with quantum mechanics, the science of the very small. New research looked at how millions of galaxies have clustered over 11 billion years, looking for any anomaly that could be better explained by an alternative gravitational theory. But as always, Einstein’s predictions were proved right, and researchers must keep on looking for mistakes in one or other of physics’ two brilliant but incompatible paradigms.

Debate over AI agents

Artificial intelligence models are becoming increasingly “agentic,” with freedom to make their own decisions. Humans give the AI a goal, and the AI does what it thinks best to achieve it. For instance, Anthropic’s Claude can be given an instruction to do something, and can take control of your computer — clicking buttons and moving the cursor — to do so. Microsoft and OpenAI also released agent-like models. AI agents promise “increased efficiency and improved productivity,” IEEE Spectrum reported, by taking mundane and repetitive tasks away from humans, but there are concerns from AI safety proponents. Researchers already tricked one AI agent into leaking identifiable data.

Human Cell Atlas nears its first draft

An ambitious project to map the estimated 37.2 trillion cells in the human body is one step closer to fruition. Conceived in 2016, the 3,600-member Human Cell Atlas consortium published a trove of papers in Nature Wednesday with data and insights on some 62 million cells across different biological networks, including the gut and immune system, and how they change across distinct ancestries, ages, and in diseases. The atlas aims to be a “Wikipedia” for the body’s building blocks, and Nature argued that governments should fund it indefinitely, the way they do for other scientific and technical “projects of national or international importance.”

Nov. 21:

• European Union trade ministers meet in Brussels to discuss the future of trade policy.
• Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico visits Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić.
• Season 2 of Maybe Baby premieres on Netflix.

Japan’s famously realistic restaurant food replicas have become an art form in their own right, with a new exhibition dedicated to the craft. Looks Delicious!, at Japan House in London, showcases the intricate skill involved in shokuhin sanpuru (“food samples”) that range from bitter melon stir fry to salmon soup, while a Tokyo manufacturer offers workshops for tourists. The replicas were introduced in the 1910s when eating out first became popular, and helped introduce diners to unfamiliar Western dishes, the South China Morning Post reported. Craftsmen spend three years learning how to make models from plastic resin before progressing to coloring. “The goal is to make them look so real that you can practically smell them,” one factory manager said.