Good morning — America has cleared Nvidia chips for China that China is not buying, the Dow has retaken 50,000 on the strength of layoffs, Ukraine gained more ground than Russia in a single month for the first time since 2024, and Stephen Colbert begins his farewell tour tonight with David Letterman in the guest chair. Here's what happened.

America Clears Nvidia's Chips for Sale to China; China Declines to Buy Them

The United States has formally cleared ten Chinese technology firms — among them Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance — to purchase Nvidia's H200 AI chips, a development that Jensen Huang, who joined the Beijing summit aboard Air Force One after being collected by the President mid-refueling in Alaska in the manner of a very expensive parcel, clearly regards as a breakthrough. The Chinese firms, for their part, are not buying the chips: Beijing has made clear it prefers to direct investment toward domestic alternatives rather than expensive American semiconductors that could, under changed geopolitical circumstances, be switched off at the firmware level — a concern Americans tend to dismiss as paranoia until one recalls who controls the switch. The H200 is thus simultaneously approved for export, desired, undesired, and at the center of the most consequential bilateral summit of the decade, which is a rather distinguished position for a semiconductor to find itself in.

Source: CNBC

Hackers Hold Foxconn to Ransom, Which Is One Way to Get Apple's Attention

Foxconn — the Taiwanese manufacturer responsible for assembling an implausible fraction of the world's consumer electronics, including the iPhone, various Google and Nvidia devices, and a number of other objects one has come rather to rely upon — has been struck by a ransomware attack, with hackers claiming responsibility and proceeding to the extortion phase with the directness of people who know exactly what they have. Security professionals describe this as a "supply chain incident," which is the industry's way of noting that one has managed to inconvenience several of the world's largest technology companies simultaneously without technically attacking any of them — a feat that, viewed from a certain angle, resembles efficiency. Foxconn has not confirmed the precise scope of the breach; the devices continue, at least for now, to function normally; and one imagines a number of very senior people at very large companies are spending their Thursday checking their phones in a slightly different spirit than usual.

Source: Coaio Tech

Xi Jinping Informs Trump, at the Summit Trump Organized to Mend Relations, That Taiwan Is the Most Important Thing

At their Beijing summit, Xi Jinping opened proceedings by informing President Trump that the fate of Taiwan is the "most important issue" between the two countries, and that if the matter is handled poorly, the two nations could face "confrontation or even conflict" — a statement delivered at a summit Trump had organized specifically to mend ties and close trade deals, which gives the meeting the slightly uncomfortable quality of a dinner party at which the host has hoped for pleasant conversation and the first guest has arrived with a prepared statement about the terms of an ultimatum. The two leaders discussed trade, Iran, Ukraine, the Strait of Hormuz, and AI governance, and agreed that the Strait must remain open and that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon — two positions that, one notes, were not especially in dispute before the summit. Whether Taiwan remains the central structural obstacle or merely the traditional opening move is the sort of question that requires considerably more than one afternoon in Beijing to resolve.

Source: NBC News

The New Acting Director of ICE Has Been Recruited from a Company That Runs ICE Detention Centres for Profit

David Venturella, former senior vice president of GEO Group — a for-profit prison company that holds hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts to operate ICE detention facilities and track immigrants via GPS ankle monitors — has been named acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a development that those inclined toward irony will find impeccably arranged and those inclined toward concern will find somewhat forthright as a statement of institutional direction. His appointment arrives as the outgoing Border Patrol chief resigned with what is described as "immediate effect" — the administrative equivalent of leaving through the window — while separately, a new Gallup poll finds that seven in ten Americans now oppose data centers being built near them, which is perhaps not the most pressing political story of the day but does suggest that the modern infrastructure state is not winning friends at the neighbourhood level.

Source: Democracy Now

Ukraine Took Back More Land Than Russia Captured in April — the First Time Russia Has Suffered a Net Loss Since 2024

In April, for the first time since Ukraine's incursion into Kursk in August 2024, Ukraine liberated more territory than Russia seized — a net Russian loss of 116 square kilometres, according to the Institute for the Study of War, which tracks these matters with the patient precision of a very dedicated accountant working a very large spreadsheet under difficult conditions. Russia had been taking an average of nearly ten square kilometres per day in early 2025; by early 2026, that figure had fallen below three — a decline attributed to attrition, logistics strain, and Ukraine's improving drone capacity. Russia responded to this reversal by launching a fresh wave of missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian cities, which is not exactly a counterargument but does constitute a response of some kind, and one has come to recognise it as the form Moscow's editorials tend to take.

Source: CNN

Israeli Airstrikes Kill Twelve in Lebanon; the Region Continues to Manage Its Feelings About This

Israeli airstrikes struck seven vehicles and Hezbollah infrastructure across southern Lebanon on Thursday, killing twelve people — a development that arrives against the backdrop of an ongoing Iran conflict in which 120 Palestinians have been killed since the April 8 ceasefire pause, the Senate having voted 50–49 this week not to advance a Democratic-led effort to remove U.S. forces from those hostilities, three Republicans crossing the aisle in a gesture that was meaningful and insufficient simultaneously. India's Prime Minister Modi, observing events from a considerable distance, has urged citizens to conserve fuel and reduce international travel amid disruptions to Persian Gulf shipping — a sentence that indicates the consequences of the region's various conflicts have begun arriving in the inboxes of people not directly involved, which is generally how one knows things have reached a certain scale.

Source: Just Security

The Dow Retakes 50,000; Cisco Beats Estimates and Lays Off Four Thousand People, Which the Market Regards as Positive

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed Thursday above 50,000 for the first time in weeks, gaining 370 points on the combined strength of optimism about the Trump-Xi summit and Cisco's third-quarter earnings, which beat Wall Street's expectations and sent the company's shares up thirteen percent — Cisco also announcing it would cut nearly four thousand jobs, a detail the market received with equanimity bordering on enthusiasm, it being the market's settled view that efficiency and hardship are, in the short run, the same number. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq both scored all-time intraday highs and record closes; retail sales came in above expectations; and the prevailing mood was the kind of careful, contingent satisfaction that financial commentators label "cautious optimism," which differs from ordinary optimism mainly in that it arrives with a supplementary paragraph about risks, which everyone reads and no one acts upon.

Source: EconCurrents

Traders Now Put the Odds of Stagflation at Forty Percent, Which Is Not the Kind of Odds One Hopes For in an Economy

Prediction market Kalshi has revised its stagflation probability to nearly forty percent — up from eleven percent just three months ago — as April's CPI settled at 3.8%, import prices rose 4.2% year-over-year (the largest such advance since October 2022, attributable mostly to oil), and higher-than-expected producer prices led currency traders to push the dollar upward on renewed speculation about a Fed rate hike. Stagflation — the unhappy union of high inflation and high unemployment, last seen at length in the 1970s, when people wore wider trousers and the misery index was considered a reasonable way to follow current events — is the condition that no official body will name aloud while it is actually occurring, and that receives its formal acknowledgment roughly twelve to eighteen months after the fact, by which point the acknowledgment is of mainly retrospective interest.

Source: CNBC

Scientists Find Original Proteins Still Present in Dinosaur Fossils, Overturning a Belief the Field Has Held Since Roughly the Dinosaurs

Researchers have uncovered compelling evidence that fossilised dinosaur bones may still contain traces of their original biological proteins — an announcement that overturns the longstanding scientific consensus that fossilisation, over millions of years, eliminates all organic material and replaces it entirely with mineral, which is the sort of settled fact one had rather been relying upon. The discovery suggests that certain conditions — arid, hypersaline, or otherwise inhospitable to the usual processes of decay — may preserve collagen and other proteins far longer than the field had previously believed possible, opening new lines of inquiry into ancient biology and, one assumes, generating a small but enthusiastic number of conversations about whether this changes anything in a well-known film franchise, to which the scientists' answer is: it does not, but they are glad for the engagement.

Source: ScienceDaily

The Japanese, It Turns Out, Have Three Ancestral Groups Rather Than Two, Making the History Considerably More Interesting

A genetic study of thousands of individuals across Japan has identified evidence of a previously undetected third ancestral group in the population's origins, challenging the "dual origins" model — which held that modern Japanese people descended primarily from two groups, the indigenous Jōmon and the incoming Yayoi farmers — with a more complicated picture involving a third population whose precise provenance remains under investigation. The finding is described by researchers as "a previously overlooked contribution" to the genetic record, which is the scientific community's gracious formulation for noting that the long-accepted account was, in material respects, incomplete. History, as a general rule, turns out to be more densely populated than its earlier drafts suggest, and the Japanese case proves no exception to this tendency, which one has by now come to regard as something close to a law.

Source: ScienceDaily

Stephen Colbert's Final Late Show Is One Week Away, and He Has Invited David Letterman to Begin the Proceedings

CBS canceled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert earlier this year, citing financial reasons — a phrase some observers have been reading with some attention, Colbert having spent over a decade as one of American political comedy's more pointed participants. Tonight's episode features David Letterman, the show's original host, which has the quality of a handshake extended across thirty years of late-night television; the finale on May 21 will feature John Oliver, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel, and Jimmy Fallon alongside Colbert, in what promises to be either a moving farewell or the sort of occasion one is glad to have witnessed once and relieved not to have to witness again. Jimmy Kimmel will air a rerun that evening, which is, in its own restrained way, a tribute, and possibly the most eloquent thing that can be said about the state of American television.

Source: Variety

Frida Kahlo Leaves the Underworld at the Metropolitan Opera, Which Is More or Less What the Met Is For

Gabriela Lena Frank's first opera — which imagines the late Mexican painter Frida Kahlo descending from the underworld on the Day of the Dead to be reunited with her husband Diego Rivera — is making its debut at the Metropolitan Opera this week, in a production that critics have described as visually striking and emotionally bold, which is the sort of opera one hopes a story about Frida Kahlo would be, and would have been quietly worried about if it weren't. Frank, a celebrated composer best known for her orchestral work, brings a Latin American-inflected musical language to the form, weaving together Mexican folk traditions and the operatic repertoire in ways the Met has not previously attempted at this scale; the institution, which has been expanding its commissioning of new works with some urgency, appears on this occasion to have chosen rather well.

Source: NPR Culture