Happy Wednesday and welcome to your morning recap of the key international headlines from around the world.
First up, US President Donald Trump has called for Harvard University to lose its tax-exempt status after it defied demands to clamp down on campus activism, the BBC reports.
It comes just hours after his administration announced it is freezing more than US$2 billion in federal funds for the university for rejecting his administration’s recent demands. They include reporting students to the federal government who are hostile to “American values”, ensuring academic departments are “viewpoint diverse”, hiring an external party to audit departments “that most fuel anti-Semitic research” and checking faculty staff for plagiarism.
“The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Harvard's lawyers wrote to the government, reports Associated Press.
Trump took to social media in response. “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax-Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting "Sickness?" Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!"
Harvard University.
To Europe, where the European Union has warned it will impose retaliatory tariffs on American toilet paper, soybeans, eye makeup and hundreds of other products if trade negotiations with the United States are not successful. The products will carry additional duties of 25%, according to the report from CNN.
The EU suspended its initial countermeasures after Trump delayed his so-called reciprocal tariffs earlier this month. The EU levies had been planned to go into effect yesterday as a retaliation for the 25% US tariff on all steel and aluminium imports.
Staying with tariffs, China has ordered its airlines not to take further deliveries of Boeing jets in response to the United States’ decision to impose 145% tariffs on Chinese goods, Bloomberg News reports. The news prompted Boeing’s shares to fall.
Reuters reports that China’s top three airlines – Air China, China Eastern Airlines and China Southern Airlines – had planned to take delivery of 45, 53, and 81 Boeing planes respectively between 2025 and 2027.
The Bloomberg report also said that Beijing had asked Chinese carriers to halt purchases of aircraft-related equipment and parts from US companies.
In other business news, CNBC reports that OpenAI is considering building its own social media network to compete with Elon Musk’s X and Meta’s Instagram.
Citing sources, CNBC reports that the project is still in its early stages and is based on OpenAI’s image-generation feature, which has led to an overloading of the company’s servers. It is unclear whether the company wants to release the social media platform as a separate app or integrate it into ChatGPT, which was the most downloaded app in the world last month.
Hennessy is among LVMH's brands. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Luxury brand Hermès has eclipsed LVMH, the owner of brands such as Louis Vuitton, Tiffany and Co and Hennessy, to become the world’s most valuable luxury company.
It comes after shares in LVMH fell 7.8% overnight after its first-quarter sales unexpectedly fell 3%. Analysts had picked the company to slightly lift sales over the period. The biggest fall came in its wines and spirits division, where sales were down 9% due to weaker demand in the United States and China.
The drop saw LVMH’s market capitalisation fall to €244.1 billion against Hermès’ market cap of €246.4b. Hermès is best known for making the Birkin handbag.
Finally, The Guardian reports that millions are expected to tune into watch a livestream of Sweden’s spring moose migration.
The Great Moose Migration first aired on Sweden’s public broadcaster’s on-demand platform in 2019, and more than a million people tuned in. Last year, nine million watched.
The show’s latest edition has launched a week early due to warmer weather. The programme has a crew of 15, who have already laid 20,000 metres of cable and positioned more than 30 cameras to capture the moose as they meander through the country’s forests.
Ulla Malmgren, 62, said she had stocked up on coffee and pre-cooked meals for the duration of the march so she did not miss a moment. “Sleep? Forget it. I don’t sleep,” she said.
