China Tariff Cuts, Hurricane Melissa Toll, Singapore Festival

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🗞️ FRONT PAGE​​

Brazilian daily Jornal do Commercio devotes its front page to the deadliest police operation against drug gangs in Brazil’s history, with at least 121 people killed Wednesday in Rio de Janeiro. Residents of the Penha neighborhood lined a street with dozens of corpses found overnight while some protested the police violence outside the governor’s palace. Victor Santos, head of security for Rio state, said the “elevated lethality of the operation was expected but not desired” and promised an investigation into any police “misconduct.”

🌎 7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW

• Trump cuts tariffs on China in deal with Xi on fentanyl, rare earths. President Donald Trump said on Thursday he had agreed to cut the “fentanyl tariff” on Chinese goods entering the U.S. from 20% to 10% after his face-to-face talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping in the South Korean city of Busan, their first meeting since 2019. In return, Beijing agreed to crack down on the illicit fentanyl trade, resume U.S. soybean purchases and keep rare earths exports flowing. Meanwhile, Trump also announced that he gave ally South Korea the green light to build its own nuclear-powered submarine and that he has ordered the Department of Defense to “immediately” resume nuclear weapons testing. For more, check French analyst Pierre Haski’s latest piece: A Fragile Truce In The U.S.–China Trade War Can’t Hide Trump’s Miscalculation.

• Israel launches new Gaza strikes despite commitment to ceasefire. Israel planes and tanks carried out new strikes in eastern Gaza on Thursday, a day after Israel had reaffirmed its commitment to a U.S.-backed ceasefire agreement. No injuries or deaths were reported so far in the latest assault. The Israeli military said it had launched “precise” strikes against “terrorist infrastructure that posed a threat to the troops” in the areas.

• Russia strikes Ukraine energy sites, killing two. Russia battered Ukrainian energy facilities with hundreds of drones and missiles, Ukraine reported on Thursday, killing two people and injuring 17. The strikes have caused power outages and restrictions in all the country’s regions, piling more pressure on Ukraine’s fragile energy grid as bitter winter temperatures approach. DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, called the attack a “bad blow in our efforts to keep power flowing this winter.”

• Dutch centrist party surges, far-right loses seats. The centrist D66 party is in a neck-and-neck race with far-right leader Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party (PVV) in the Dutch parliamentary election, with a difference of just under 1,400 votes with 99.6% votes counted early on Thursday. Both are projected to take 26 seats in the 150-seat lower house of parliament, with D66 almost tripling its seats while Wilders’ party suffered a sharp fall. Centrist party leader Rob Jetten, 38, could become the Netherlands’ youngest and first openly gay prime minister.

• France arrests five new suspects over Louvre jewelry theft. Five new suspects have been arrested in connection with the Louvre robbery in Paris,French authorities said on Thursday. This comes after two men “partially recognized” their involvement in the brazen theft of jewels worth an estimated $102 million, which remain missing.

• Hurricane Melissa leaves dozens dead in Caribbean. Hurricane Melissa is heading toward Bermuda early Thursday after tearing through the Caribbean, killing at least 30 people in Jamaica, Cuba, and the Bahamas though the full toll of the storm may take weeks to be determined. Hurricane Melissa, one of the most powerful Atlantic storms in more than 150 years, was downgraded to a Category 1 when it reached the Bahamas on Wednesday.

• News Quiz! Dictionary.com named the popular Gen Alpha slang phrase “6-7” as its 2025 Word of the Year. What does it mean?

A. “Very tall”
B. “Maybe this, maybe that”
C. “Way too early”
D. “Almost”
[Answer below]

#️⃣ BY THE NUMBERS

$5.03 trillion

Nvidia became the first company ever to reach $5 trillion in market value after it ended Wednesday’s session up 3% at $207.04. The new Wall Street milestone comes just three months after the U.S. tech company breached the $4 trillion mark, amid rising demand for its chips powering artificial intelligence applications. Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, Nvidia’s shares have climbed 12-fold.

📰 IN OTHER NEWS

🗳️ Paul Biya, 92, has been reelected for an eighth seven-year term, while Alassane Ouattara, 83, will serve a fourth five-year term in Côte d’Ivoire. The question of democracy remains unresolved in Africa, where countries that regularly change their leadership are still in the minority.
— FRANCE INTER

♀️ “Why do we men get uncomfortable when women talk about ovaries, periods, or surgical menopause?” A writer revisits his own machismo as the discourse between the genders evolves.
— RECALCULATING

🌿 Algae are emerging as a promising new source of food and pharmaceutical compounds — but their development depends as much on investment as on educating the public about what to expect.
— ETHIC