TheChek News Flow

Well, look at that: We’ve broken ChatGPT.

A full week after OpenAI debuted an improved version of the bot with better image-making abilities, the tool has experienced a gigantic surge in demand and has at times been totally unavailable to use. (Sigh. I still haven’t gotten the darn thing to finish generating mocked-up images to inspire my slow-moving bedroom renovation. Sam—a little help, please!)

Now, if I could draw our attention away from all the Ghibli memes, another startup has also debuted a shiny new AI, and it points to the direction competition in the industry is heading in.

That spiffy AI belongs to Runway, a New York–based startup focused on generative video AI. It released a new version of its video-editing tool that makes it easier to construct longer, more sophisticated clips. A few days later, Runway formally announced what was a poorly kept secret: It had secured a gigantic new chunk of funding from General Atlantic and other investors, reportedly valuing it at $3 billion. And it publicly highlighted a new part of its operations that we spotlighted in a recent Big Read on Runway: The startup will begin financing filmmakers, hoping to deepen connections it has made in Hollywood.

Runway’s AI is rather obviously a significant step forward from what it offered before, and it seems pretty inevitable that OpenAI will shift to concentrating on videos in earnest given Runway’s very public advancements. (In December, OpenAI released its first version of its video-editing tool, Sora.) Runway hopes to capture a different market than OpenAI’s. It wants its tools used by professionals, while OpenAI targets a more general mass market. When Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela described the strategy in an interview for our earlier Big Read, I found myself nodding along: Yeah, they want to be the Adobe of AI—got it.

It seems like he’d have real room to maneuver away from OpenAI and establish his own territorial claim. Yet as this week has proven again, no AI company has proven to be better at capturing everyone’s attention than OpenAI, and I suspect it’s just a matter of time before OpenAI sets out to really squash the competition in video. (I wonder if concerns about that explain why Runway didn’t get the $4 billion valuation it initially wanted from its latest fundraising.) We’ll know that moment has fully arrived when Sora breaks down in public, too.—Abram Brown

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) plans to host a hackathon next week focused on the creation of a “mega API” that will provide access to taxpayer data, according to Wired.

Wired says the hackathon is being organized by two DOGE staffers at the Internal Revenue Service — Gavin Kliger and Sam Corcos, who’s also CEO at healthtech startup Levels. Corcos has reportedly been telling others at DOGE that his goal is to build “one new API to rule them all.”

This would make it easy for cloud providers to access IRS data including taxpayer names, addresses, social security numbers, tax returns, and employment information, which could all be exported to external systems. According to Wired, a third-party party vendor would manage parts of the project, with Palantir “consistently” brought up as a candidate.

“It’s basically an open door controlled by Musk for all Americans’ most sensitive information with none of the rules that normally secure that data,” an anonymous IRS worker reportedly told Wired.

The health-conscious elite are flocking to high-end clinics in the hopes of getting ahead of the aging process

For up to six figures a year, longevity clinics promise to buy their patrons longer, healthier lives. For now, they’re conferring something maybe just as valuable: status.

Plenty of people are deciding the hefty fees are worth it. High-end medical clinics aimed at optimizing their clients’ health for years to come are proliferating, as demand for their often-experimental treatments grows. A few hundred such clinics now operate in the U.S., longevity doctors and market researchers estimate. Most of them are in affluent areas in California, New York and Florida, according to research and media company Longevity.Technology.

Longevity clinics can charge hundreds to thousands of dollars for à la carte services such as biological age-testing, preventive body scans or plasma exchange and, at the highest end, $100,000 or more for annual memberships. At $250,000 a year, for instance, Extension Health in downtown New York now offers top-paying clients a “Superhuman” package by invitation only.

Robin Leigh, a chef-turned-restaurateur who alternates between London, New York and Miami, used to belong to the private social club Soho House. Now, he says, he would rather do hyperbaric oxygen therapy than mingle with influencers over Martinis. He estimates he spends $120,000 a year on longevity-related care in those cities for treatments such as red-light therapy and stem-cell injections for his knee pain.

“My main priority in life is to look and feel as good as I possibly can,” says Leigh, who takes more than 30 supplements a day and sees a concierge longevity doctor on top of his clinic visits. He says he recently got peptide injections at a London clinic for a price on par with a table for six at the upscale restaurant Cipriani.

“But they will last and make me look so healthy,” he says.

Many doctors and scientists caution that some clinics’ treatments lack robust scientific evidence and could even carry certain health risks. Supplements, a big part of many longevity regimens, aren’t regulated at the level that prescription drugs are, for instance.

“That’s the huge struggle in the field,” says Mazzarine Dotou, an operations lead at the National University of Singapore’s Academy for Healthy Longevity. “We don’t know when you’re taking a supplement if they really have any effect on you.”

Yet the clinics’ nontraditional approaches are often the draw for those obsessed with fighting aging and with the means to get personalized medical care, say clients, consultants and clinic operators.

“Being healthy inside and out is actually the ultimate status symbol,” says Julia Klim, who advises high-end gym club operator Equinox on longevity efforts. The company launched a $3,000-a-month longevity program last year that includes sleep, nutrition and exercise coaching and tests of metrics such as V02 max, a measure of aerobic capacity.

At Extension Health, services include peptide therapy, medical imaging and experimental procedures such as plasma exchange, which involves removing a patient’s blood, separating its components and replacing the plasma with a mixture of saline and albumin.

The clinic’s lower-level annual membership costs $10,000 and includes quarterly doctor’s visits, preventive body scans and comprehensive blood work.

For those who get the “Superhuman” package, “we are your everything,” says founder Dr. Jonathann Kuo. Many of the clinic’s clients, he adds, are chief executives, company founders and celebrities.

One Superhuman-tier client, a man in his early 50s, says he invested in the membership in the hopes of adding more healthy years to his life. His regimen at Extension includes plasma exchange and peptide injections. He has also traveled outside the U.S. for experimental stem-cell and gene-therapy treatments, he says.

Corey Malczewski and his wife, Kate, belong to Miora, a clinic that opened in 2023 in Minneapolis. The roughly $6,000 a year that they pay includes blood work and meetings with providers every few months. Both also started taking a compounded GLP-1—the class of diabetes and weight-loss drugs known by names such as Ozempic. His first appointment, which involved drawing 12 vials of blood, was a birthday gift from a friend.

“What do you get a man who’s 50 years of age who has everything?” Malczewski said.

As the number of clinics grow, some practitioners are seeking to develop standards for longevity care. The Healthy Longevity Medicine Society, a professional group of longevity specialists, is working to establish evidence-based guidelines and standards for the clinics, as well as training for healthcare professionals. The group consulted with the Abu Dhabi Department of Health, which last year became the first government agency to set regulatory standards for longevity clinics.

The standards include definitions for concepts such as “biological age,” a measure of how fast or slow a person is aging physically, and “healthspan,” how long a person lives in good health. Physicians are required to have formally trained in healthy longevity medicine or have experience in related fields.

In Minneapolis, Malczewski says his longevity clinic membership is already paying off. He credits the GLP-1 regimen with helping him reverse his prediabetes. After five months of monitoring his blood sugar levels with a continuous glucose monitor, his average blood sugar level dropped and he lost weight.

When he catches up with friends these days, the conversations are less about family and finances than they used to be. Now, they often talk about exercise regimens and testosterone boosters and compare blood pressure readings.

“We kind of cheer each other on,” Malczewski says.

In Vietnam, Factories That Boomed in Trump’s First Term Brace for 46% Tariffs

Hanoi and other cities have grown into bustling centers of commerce, but manufacturers worry about losing their biggest customer

HANOI—For Ha Pham, who runs a network of garment factories employing 500 Vietnamese workers, America has been good for business.

The U.S. accounts for most of her sales, and President Trump’s first-term tariffs on China nudged businesses to shift more production out of China and to factories such as hers. That boosted her revenue by as much as 20% annually.

So when Trump ordered a 46% tariff on Vietnamese goods, to go into effect on Wednesday, it sent her on a crash mission to find new customers in Europe and elsewhere. “The tariff itself is absurd,” said Pham, whose factories work on goods that end up at Levi’s, Target and other U.S. brands. “Americans would not benefit at all.”

Trump’s plan threatens to upend one of modern history’s great comeback stories: the rehabilitation of the U.S.-Vietnam relationship after the Vietnam War, which ended 50 years ago this month.

The U.S., little more than a footnote in Vietnam’s trade early this century, has become the country’s biggest customer, importing $137 billion in Vietnamese goods last year, according to the Census Bureau. The U.S. trade deficit with Vietnam—the basis for Trump’s tariff rate—is third only to China and Mexico.

That has helped turn Hanoi into a bustling center of global commerce. There are McDonald’s and Starbucks across the street from each other. Business bigwigs glide down modern roads in electric sport-utility vehicles, passing by digital billboards flashing ads for beer.

There are a few clues this isn’t an American city. One is the swarm of mopeds, often balancing potted plants or live chickens, puttering through red lights. Another: streets and alleys lined with the hammer-and-sickle flag of the ruling Communist Party.

It isn’t just American money that is welcome in Vietnam. Americans themselves are too. “Beloved and welcome pretty much everywhere,” said Ted Osius, a former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam who has worked in the country since the 1990s.

The hole-in-the-wall noodle shop where the late TV star Anthony Bourdain dined with President Barack Obama in 2016 commemorates the occasion by displaying the table and chairs they used behind glass, like a museum exhibit. After the trip, the Circle K convenience stores that dot Vietnamese cities began selling magnets showing Obama giving a thumbs-up to the grilled-pork dish he ate, called bun cha.

For American tourists in Vietnam, the biggest risk is making eye contact with Vietnamese teens at tourist locations like the Saigon Central Post Office. They might lose 10 minutes of time to students eager for a free lesson.

“It’s partly curiosity, partly a chance to practice English,” said David McCaskey, a University of California, Riverside student working on an environmental history Ph.D. in Vietnam.

After U.S.-China tensions flared in the first Trump administration and Trump imposed his first round of tariffs on Chinese goods, suppliers for companies like Nike and Apple doubled down on Vietnam to avoid the tariffs. Foreign businesses found Vietnamese officials to be pro-business and eager to give manufacturing projects a boost. And with Hanoi wary of China getting too powerful, Vietnam’s geopolitical stance aligned with Washington’s.

Labor is cheaper in Vietnam than in China and, since the two countries are neighbors, it is easy to truck in needed Chinese parts. Vietnam’s youthful population of about 100 million means it has more workers ready to toil at factories than most other nations—although even then, it can be hard to find enough with the right skills.

Now, Vietnam’s ballooning trade surplus with the U.S. has put it in the sights of people like Trump.

Since it opened in 2019, Christina Chen’s factory in northern Vietnam has been churning out tables and chairs—nearly all of them destined for America. She said that since Trump announced the tariffs, she has spent so much time negotiating with clients over their orders that she has developed a sore throat.

“This is something we cannot defeat even with the best product and best price,” said Chen, a Taiwanese executive whose business makes furniture from local acacia wood. Without a reprieve, she said, “everybody knows the volume is going to crash.”

After the tariffs were announced, Michel Bertsch, a Belgian national who runs a business in Vietnam making baby cribs and high chairs, met other Europeans at a reception for the Belgian royal family, who were in Vietnam on a state visit. Even the royal splendor couldn’t lighten the atmosphere.

“The mood was very worried, shocked,” Bertsch said. “Nobody expected the tariffs to be this high.”

He said he expected Americans would have to pay more for his products and demand would fall.

Factory owners say they will struggle to find other takers for their products, in part because Chinese competitors will be trying to cut deals with the same European buyers.

Vietnam’s leaders tried to put themselves in position to negotiate over the tariffs even before they were announced. When a delegation of about 60 American businesses including representatives of Amazon, Coca-Cola and Ford Motor visited the country last month, they got a rare meeting with Vietnam’s top leader, Communist Party General Secretary To Lam.

“He had some very clear messages that he wanted to convey about Vietnam’s desire to work with the private sector,” especially U.S. businesses, said Osius, the former ambassador, who led the delegation.

Vietnam also said recently that it approved a trial for Starlink, the satellite internet provider of Elon Musk, Trump’s adviser. Hanoi cut its tariffs on U.S. goods, including on cars and natural gas, and pledged to buy more American planes and agricultural products.

The moves appeared to have an initial effect. Two days after announcing the tariffs, Trump said that he had a “very productive” phone call with Lam on Friday to strike a deal.

Now, Vietnam is on tenterhooks awaiting word of progress. The nation’s deputy prime minister is flying to the U.S. on Sunday, and businesspeople are speculating what further promises Hanoi could offer Trump.

Interviewed this weekend, Hanoi-based ceramic exporters who sell decorative vases and other goods to U.S. companies including Walmart said they were confident that the 46% rate would be negotiated down. “Things will fall in place soon,” said one exporter, Thanh-Tam Pham.

At a bustling industrial park near Hanoi’s airport, Do Thi Loan had just finished her sewing shift at Vit Garment, where she earns about $310 a month. After buying a bag of oranges and guavas, she said worries about tariffs hadn’t yet hit her factory floor.

The lower labor costs are among the reasons why Pham, the garment executive, finds the American tariffs and Trump’s plans to revitalize U.S. manufacturing absurd. “If you want to switch production to America like 100%, the price would be over the top,” Pham said.

New EDF boss at mercy of ‘to-do list’ that ousted predecessor

Bernard Fontana must repair relations with the French state after the stormy end to the rein of Luc Rémont

The new boss of French state-owned energy group EDF faces the same nearly impossible tasks that led to the ousting of his predecessor: satisfying the government’s often contradictory demands for cheap power to help industry and the construction of costly new nuclear reactors. 

Bernard Fontana, nominated as chief executive on March 21, is a seasoned industrialist who has run EDF’s engineering arm Framatome for nearly nine years. He will seek to avoid the fate of the previous chief executive Luc Rémont, removed last month after just over two years because of repeated clashes with the state. 

On Fontana’s to-do list will be repairing relations with the government, the company’s only shareholder, striking energy supply deals with some of EDF’s biggest industrial clients, while also advancing plans to build six nuclear reactors in just over a decade — a key initiative of French President Emmanuel Macron, which was announced three years ago. 

“It is one of the most difficult jobs in France and perhaps the world,” said Roland Lescure, the former industry and energy minister, now a centrist MP from Macron’s party.

The challenges at EDF felled Rémont, who was removed after just over two years following repeated clashes with the state. People familiar with the matter said his abrasive style and desire to run EDF like a private sector company, with a keen eye on profits, angered government decision makers.

“The state simply cannot work with someone with whom the relationship is so stormy,” said one top government official. 

Lescure welcomed the arrival of Fontana but did not waste time in turning up the pressure. 

“Our message to Fontana is to deliver on all aspects of what is needed. Deliver competitiveness, deliver production, deliver the new nuclear plants,” he told the Financial Times. 

Fontana’s main challenge is to balance competing pressures of delivering low rates for power, demanded by government and industry, while generating profits that will help support vast investments required to launch new nuclear reactors.

The company ran over budget and behind time on the completion of Flamanville, a new nuclear reactor in northern France, and faces budget and timing issues with the UK’s Hinkley Point.

It has also faced criticism that it is yet to outline timelines and costings for the project to build the six new nuclear reactors, which were originally due by the end of 2024. Last month, the government pushed back the launch date from 2035 to 2038, although observers have long considered the 2035 target unachievable. 

The nuclear project is critical to France as more than 65 per cent of the country’s energy mix comes from this power source and demand for decarbonised electricity will grow as the continent transitions away from fossil fuels. 

Refreshing France’s ageing nuclear network will strengthen its energy self-sufficiency. Europe’s reliance on Russian gas saw energy prices surge in the wake of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

But Fontana will have to satisfy demands from the government that management must offer industry cheap power as it struggles to compete with US and Chinese rivals that benefit from much lower energy prices. 

Rémont outlined his own reasons why the government opted not to extend his mandate in a no-holds-barred interview with French newspaper Le Figaro in March. “We have a fundamentally different vision of what EDF should be and the way it should be managed. And this difference of vision grew over recent months, as key choices had to be taken,” he said. 

The debate comes down to an existential question of whether EDF should be run as a normal business for profit, as a state arsenal designed to support the country’s industrial ambitions, or as something between these two aims.

Eric Lombard, French finance minister, appeared to agree with Rémont’s assessment of his removal, telling the Senate in March that there were a “certain number of disagreements”.

The ex-Bank of America Merrill Lynch banker, who worked at Schneider Electric before he took charge of EDF in November 2022, aimed to run the group as a business focused on delivering profits and lowering debt in preparation for the launch of the hugely expensive nuclear projects. 

He achieved the goal of increasing profits, delivering €36bn in operating profits in 2024 while increasing output of EDF’s nuclear plants after corrosion at some had led to costly maintenance outages in 2022. As well as nuclear reactors, the company operates offshore wind farms, solar farms, biomass and hydro power plants.

Rémont was also relatively popular with the company’s strongly unionised workforce. Alexandre Grillat, head of the CFE energy union that represents managerial workers at the group, noted that there were no major strikes during his tenure. 

But his approach was described as “inflexible” towards the government and important companies, according to people familiar with the matter. 

Rémont first ran into disagreements with the government in fractious negotiations in 2023 over changes to the way EDF sold its electricity. The sticking points were largely over the price for supplying power.  

Rémont and the government finally agreed to adopt a more market-based pricing system for much of its electricity, as well as making plans to secure long-term deals with energy intensive businesses. This new pricing system will take effect at the end of 2025.

But the state had been left “disappointed” with slow progress in reaching the long-term deals, officials said. EDF has said it has signed just two since the 2023 agreement, with many companies saying the terms are unattractive.

In parallel to the long-term contracts, EDF said last month that it would launch a new auction-like process for electricity supplies, including for foreign buyers, in a move that angered the French energy-intensive groups because negotiations for their long-term contracts are yet to be finalised. 

Another problem was Rémont’s failure to advance Macron’s plans for the six new nuclear reactors as he disagreed with government over how to finance them.

Under government plans announced last month, EDF would receive a subsidised state loan to cover half the costs of the reactors and guaranteed electricity prices of €100 once they were up and running. Contrary to Rémont’s wishes, this will probably involve EDF funding some upfront costs through debt.

Rémont’s uncompromising streak was on further display at an energy conference in December, in which he told an audience that “investing in France is hellish for regulatory and administrative reasons”.

The comments were “probably right but embarrassing” for a business backed 100 per cent by the state, said one French banker. Another said the comments called into question the “sacred dogma” of Macron, who has tried to make investing easier in France. “He’s not a diplomat,” they added.

Fontana, described as “discreet” and well respected as the head of Framatome by one union official, is set to face senate and parliamentary hearings on April 30 before he is confirmed in the role.

He will be expected to reach power supply agreements with the energy- intensive groups, which were beyond Rémont, by the summer. 

The French government’s hope is that Fontana’s engineering experience — he worked at groups such as cement company Holcim and steelmaker ArcelorMittal — will make it easier for him to agree a deal by summer and advance plans for the new reactors.

He is “quite reputed as a good industrialist and will have an awareness of how to advance different work projects”, said a former government aide. 

One adviser to the industrial groups negotiating the long-term contracts said businesses were “not welcoming Fontana as much as they are shocked by the brutality of Luc Rémont being fired”, although they remained hopeful of a better deal on power prices. 

In short, Fontana’s success will depend on whether he can walk the tightrope of running EDF profitably while delivering the vast capital outlay needed to reboot France’s nuclear sector. This will require a major shift from Rémont’s uncompromising approach. 

“If Fontana has taken the job, he’s understood the lesson [from Rémont’s sacking]. If he hasn’t, he’s an idiot,” said another adviser.

Sports shoes’ supply chain is pain point in Trump’s tariff war

Nike, Adidas and Puma shifted production to Vietnam for its cheap labour but will now be hit by 46% levy

The Vomero 18 running shoe on display at a Nike store in New York features thick soles, a $150 price tag and tongue labels woven with the message “Made in Vietnam”. 

That last fact is a big problem for Nike’s plans for a turnaround under chief executive Elliott Hill, who this year launched the Vomero 18 to win back runners who have switched to other brands. Vietnam has become the global centre of athletic shoe manufacturing — and it is subject to some of the most punishing US tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump this week. 

Trump has said he wants to bring manufacturing back to US shores. Analysts say the more likely effect will be higher prices for trainers, as the US lacks factories with the specialised equipment to make running shoes and workers with the knowhow to operate them. 

US-based Nike began manufacturing in Vietnam in 1995, through five contract footwear factories, becoming one of the country’s earliest foreign investors and contributing to its exports and economic growth. The company expanded its supplier base rapidly in the following years and created thousands of jobs, attracted by the cheaper labour force. 

Nike now has 130 supplier-factories in Vietnam producing shoes, clothing and equipment, and the country accounts for half of its footwear production.

Adidas, its Germany-based rival, gets 39 per cent of its shoes from the south-east Asian country.

Trump’s new 46 per cent tariff will be layered on top of 20 per cent duties already paid on US imports of athletic shoes with textile uppers, according to the American Apparel & Footwear Association. 

Manufacturers could open trainer factories in new countries, but relocating footwear supply chains typically takes about two years, said Chris Rogers, head of supply chain research at S&P Global Market Intelligence. Companies typically plan such changes on a five-year cycle. 

Adam Cochrane, a Deutsche Bank analyst, suggested that Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, and Egypt could be alternatives to Vietnam as manufacturing hubs. However, due to the length of order contracts with suppliers, it would take 18 to 24 months for any decision to result in tangible changes on the ground. 

As well, Trump has imposed so-called reciprocal tariffs at a minimum rate of 10 per cent on virtually every trading partner. For major footwear hubs such as China and Indonesia, the new rates are more than triple that. 

“Finding a cheaper market without leaving the planet is going to be tough,” said David Marcotte, senior vice-president of retail at consultancy Kantar. 

Nike did not respond to a request for comment. In a quarterly report filed on Thursday, the company said: “We are navigating through several external factors that create uncertainty and volatility in the operating environment, including, but not limited to, geopolitical dynamics, new tariffs, tax regulation and fluctuating foreign exchange rates.”  

The company last year appointed Hill as CEO after falling into a sales slump as running shoes from smaller competing brands such as On and Hoka grabbed market share.

Its shares plummeted to a nearly eight-year low this week as investors took fright at the costs associated with Trump’s new tariffs. 

For a footwear brand, “You’ve got three primary avenues here from a cost mitigation standpoint,” said Dylan Carden, analyst at William Blair. “You can push back to get your suppliers [to] charge you less. You can try to push price on consumers, and charge more. Or you can eat it.” 

Cochrane estimated that Adidas and Puma, another Germany-based brand with extensive manufacturing operations in Vietnam, would need to increase prices in the US by around 20 per cent to maintain gross profit margins following the tariffs, though price rises might spread out over time to curtail damage to market share and operating profits. Both companies could be better off than Nike though, as they sell less in the US, he said.

Felix Dennl, an analyst at Metzler bank, said that Adidas was “well positioned” for price increases due to its “broad-based brand momentum in both lifestyle and performance segments”. 

Puma, on the other hand, would find it “significantly harder to pass on increased costs”, as its efforts to rebrand as a premium shoemaker have so far failed to gain momentum — one of the reasons for the replacement of Puma chief executive Arne Freundt on Thursday. 

Overall, sporting goods manufacturers would “scrutinise their product range in the US”, Dennl said, phasing out less profitable products. 

Adidas declined to comment. Puma said it had “a multi-country-of-origin strategy and many of the long-term partners in our supplier base can produce in several different countries”.

Vietnam received a new wave of manufacturing investments during Trump’s first term in office, when he started a trade war with Beijing that prompted companies to shift production away from China. Suppliers to footwear manufacturers in Vietnam are not only local companies, but also South Korean and Taiwanese groups operating there. 

The migration to Vietnam led its trade surplus with the US to balloon to $123.5bn last year, the third largest after China and Mexico. The White House used trade balance figures to calculate each country’s “reciprocal” tariff rates. 

Cochrane, the Deutsche Bank analyst, said that the trainer brands might have to “reduce order volumes and reroute more products to Europe, the Middle East and China”, which could result in increased competition in those regions. 

In the US, where 99 per cent of footwear is imported, Carden said the market might become more like the Soviet Union, when Russian residents paid foreign visitors a handsome premium for Levi’s jeans.

“We’re behind the Iron Curtain,” he said. 

Trump’s levies on foreign-made vehicles spark disruption across global carmakers’ supply chains

Jaguar Land Rover has suspended all shipments of cars to the US for a month, as disruption to global automakers’ supply chains rapidly spreads in response to US President Donald Trump’s punitive tariffs on vehicle imports.

The British carmaker has paused shipments as it works out a longer term response to the 25 per cent tariffs on vehicle imports. The duty applies to all cars assembled outside the US with partial exemptions for Mexico and Canada.

“The USA is an important market for JLR’s luxury brands. As we work to address the new trading terms with our business partners, we are enacting our short-term actions including a shipment pause in April,” it said in a statement.

The producer of the Range Rover and the Land Rover Defender, which is owned by India’s Tata Motors, is highly exposed to the tariffs since it generates almost a quarter of its sales in the US but has no local manufacturing capability in the US.

People briefed on the matter said JLR had previously considered building a plant in the US but instead chose to build another plant in Slovakia before the start of Trump’s first presidency.

The move by the British car company underlines the chaos that Trump’s tariffs are unleashing on a global car industry that has built up complex supply chains underpinned by free trade.

It follows the decision by Chrysler and Jeep maker Stellantis on Friday to furlough 900 employees in the US after putting a temporary pause on production in Mexico and Canada.

The chief executive of Swedish carmaker Volvo said on Thursday that it was considering adding production of another car model to its US plant in South Carolina, which has 150,000 cars per year capacity.

The group, owned by China’s Geely, recently brought back its former boss Håkan Samuelsson to navigate the geopolitical challenges caused by the global tariff war.

Japan’s Nissan is also looking to rework its supply chains in response to the tariffs.

On Friday, the Japanese group said that it would not take any new US orders of two models from its Infiniti luxury range built in Mexico. It also said that it plans to maintain two shifts at a production line on its Smyrna plant in Tennessee, having earlier said it would go down to one shift to save costs.

Nissan has drawn up plans to shift some production of the Rogue SUV from its domestic plant in Kyushu to Smyrna, according to a person familiar with Nissan’s plans. Nissan declined to comment.

The attempt to reshape car supply chains comes after equity markets suffered a brutal plunge this week with the S&P 500 losing 10 per cent in two days.

The impact of the tariffs on the auto industry could be enormous — and become even more severe if 25 per cent tariffs on a wide variety of imported parts comes into effect on May 3, adding to the levy on finished cars imposed on Thursday.

Analysts at Wedbush estimate that the tariffs could reduce new auto purchases by up to 20 per cent and raise the prices of a typical car to a US consumer by $5,000 to $10,000.

Nissan shifting production out of Japan will be politically sensitive given mounting strains felt by thousands of small and medium-sized car suppliers, whose profit margins have already been put under pressure by rising wage costs.

Likewise, JLR’s pause will add to concerns about the future health of the British car industry, where about one in six of all shipped cars goes to the US.

Toyota, the world’s largest carmaker, has signalled to suppliers that it intends to reduce manufacturing costs in response to the tariffs in an attempt to avoid rising prices for consumers.

The Japanese carmaker was singled out by Trump in his speech unveiling “reciprocal” tariffs. He said Toyota sells 1mn foreign-made cars every year in the US. Japan was the “worst violator” and “in many cases, the friend is worse than the foe in terms of trade”, the US president said.

Many Japanese carmakers already have factories in the US and may be wary of assembling huge investment packages, analysts say, given concerns about the high costs and the availability of labour in the US.

A dark hour for American science

Other countries have a chance to attract US talent driven out by Trump’s policies

Right-wing populism routinely contains a strong vein of scepticism towards science, or at least some fields. Yet nowhere has the populist backlash been as virulent as in Donald Trump’s second term. US science and health research are being hit by planned large-scale funding cuts and lay-offs at federal agencies, and a clampdown on what are regarded as permissible areas of scientific inquiry. The impact on US public health and the economy could be profound; America’s scientific verve has underpinned its entrepreneurial success. Countries elsewhere — notably in Europe — have a responsibility to ensure US researchers can continue vital work. They have opportunities, too, to turn America’s self-imposed loss into their own gain.

In the past week alone, thousands of employees across the US health and human services department began to be laid off in a sweeping downsizing by Robert F Kennedy Jr, the vaccine sceptic who is now in charge. (The top US vaccine regulator earlier quit over Kennedy’s “misinformation and lies”.) Leaders at the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes for Health have been put on administrative leave and offered reassignment. More than 1,900 leading US scientists have written to the Trump administration to decry its “wholesale assault on US science”. The slapdash calculation of “reciprocal” tariffs on trade partners last week only added to the White House’s perceived lack of respect for rational thought.

Cuts to grant funding from the NIH — by far the world’s largest funder of biomedical research — have thrown researchers into uncertainty. Cutbacks there and elsewhere are also being driven by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency of Elon Musk; some experts suspect Musk wants to push parts of publicly-funded science into the private sector, including his own companies.

White House directives attacking climate science and diversity and inclusion policies are meanwhile putting under threat research on global warming or even on different ethnic groups’ vulnerability to diseases. Global progress on dealing with climate change and preventing disease and epidemics could be at risk.

That creates a clear incentive for other countries to safeguard such work by providing havens to US-based academics. But there is a broader chance for Europe. By offering unimpeded academic freedoms, it could start to reverse a long transatlantic brain drain and invigorate its own research and start-up efforts.

The hurdles are strained public finances and sensitivities over immigration. Some institutions, though, are already taking initiatives. Aix-Marseille University in France has set up a “Safe Place For Science” scheme and Brussels’ two top universities are similarly offering grants to “scholars looking to relocate”.

France’s research minister Philippe Baptiste, himself a scientist, co-ordinated a letter signed by 11 other European ministers calling for an EU-wide effort to attract “foreign talents ”. One possibility could be to expand the EU’s seven-year, €95bn Horizon Europe initiative — the world’s largest multilateral research programme to which Canada, South Korea, Turkey and others have been granted associated membership — in its next phase from 2028 to woo displaced US-based scientists.

The UK, also a Horizon associate, could benefit. But while a shared language and its university strengths should give Britain a golden opportunity to attract “exiled” US academics, visa costs and restrictions put it at a competitive disadvantage that prime minister Sir Keir Starmer urgently needs to address.

Donald Trump’s second term may prove to be a temporary, if destructive, interlude after which US science can begin to be rebuilt — or it may not. The challenge is to be ready for both eventualities, by doing as much as possible to preserve all facets of American scientific endeavour, at home or abroad.

Government wants to close superfluous agencies and bring responsibility for decisions back in-house

More than 300 arm’s-length bodies will be considered for abolition or merger under UK government plans to cut waste and restore ministerial control over swaths of policy areas.

Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden has written to Whitehall departments demanding they justify the existence of every quango — a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation — to which decisions are currently outsourced, with a view to closing superfluous agencies and bringing responsibility for decisions back in-house.

He is expected to announce the first targets to be scrapped soon, according to government officials.

“We are taking action to ensure decisions of national importance that affect everyone in this country are made by those who have been elected to do so,” said McFadden on Sunday.

It is the latest move in the government’s programme to overhaul the state to improve its efficiency, in response to Sir Keir Starmer’s concern about Whitehall’s ability to deliver his five core missions.

Some arm’s-length bodies are already under review. In February chancellor Rachel Reeves announced an audit of Britain’s 130 or so regulators, with a view to refocus them on boosting growth. She gave notice that she would look at whether some should be scrapped.

Since then, the Payment Systems Regulator is the only regulator that has been abolished, with its operations merged into the Financial Conduct Authority.

Last month it became clear that ministers intended to review a wider category of arm’s length body, however, when Starmer announced that NHS England, the world’s largest quango, would be axed and its functions brought back into the Department of Health and Social Care.

Starmer said the abolition of the organisation — which employed more than 15,000 staff — would put the NHS “back at the heart of government” and return it to “democratic control”, while freeing it up to “focus on patients” and cut waiting lists.

Under the latest review, quangos found to be duplicating work conducted elsewhere across government will be abolished to slash bureaucracy and save money, while those with large policy functions will be merged back into departments so they fall under the oversight of ministers.

Officials said that arm’s-length bodies with a genuine need to remain independent from ministers — because they scrutinised the government or protected the rule of law — would be exempt.

Clearer accountability will be introduced for the quangos that remain after the review, however, with relevant Cabinet ministers and permanent secretaries, plus the cabinet secretary, being held responsible for their activities. Legislation may be required to deliver these reforms.

Simon Hoare, Conservative chair of the Commons public administration and constitutional affairs committee, told the Financial Times last autumn that UK quangos lacked accountability and some had become a “law unto themselves”.

He also complained that officials had been unable to confirm the exact number of quangos in operation. The last audit four years ago recorded 295 such bodies.

It recorded 38 executive agencies, including the corporate registry Companies House and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency; 237 non-department public bodies, such as the Environment Agency and British Council; plus 20 non-ministerial departments, such as the Crown Prosecution Service and Food Standards Agency.

Trade unionists took a wary view of McFadden’s announcement. Mike Clancy, general secretary of Prospect union, warned that many quango staff around the country performed “incredibly important work” that was “often under-appreciated” in Westminster.

“Any reorganisation must not jeopardise the essential expertise and specialist skills contained within arm’s length bodies, and must make it easier to recruit and retain the specialists the civil service needs,” he said.