TheChek News Flow

Mahmoud Khalil was picked up by immigration officers who said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke his green card, his lawyer says

A Columbia University student who helped lead last year’s pro-Palestinian demonstrations has been arrested by federal immigration authorities.

Mahmoud Khalil was detained Saturday night by Department of Homeland Security agents, according to his lawyer Amy Greer. The agents said they were acting on orders from the State Department to revoke his green card, Greer said.

Multiple immigration agents took Khalil into custody around 8:30 p.m. after entering his building, which is owned by Columbia University, according to his lawyer.

Khalil, who is Palestinian and Syrian, was able to call Greer from the lobby, she said, and one of the agents got on the phone to speak to her. When the agent told her the State Department had revoked his student visa, Greer said she informed the agent that Khalil is a lawful permanent resident.

“And the agent said they revoked that too,” said Greer. The agent hung up when she said she needed to see a warrant before Khalil could be detained, according to Greer. Khalil finished his studies in December and plans to walk in the school’s coming graduation ceremony, she said. During the protests he took on the role of negotiator between his group and administrators, his lawyer said.

DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said on Sunday night that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had arrested Khalil “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism.”

She said Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization” and his arrest was done in coordination with the Department of State. DHS didn’t provide details about the allegation.

A State Department spokesperson said the agency doesn’t comment on individual cases, citing visa confidentiality laws.

Columbia University said that law enforcement needs a judicial warrant to enter nonpublic areas, such as housing. A spokeswoman didn’t respond when asked in an email if the school had seen a warrant in Khalil’s case.

Khalil’s detention came a day after the Trump administration said it would cancel roughly $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University. The Ivy League school has come under scrutiny by the Trump administration for an alleged failure to protect Jewish students.

The grants in question are from the Department of Health and Human Services, the General Services Administration and the Education Department. In response, Columbia University said it is reviewing the agencies’ moves and pledged “to work with the federal government to restore Columbia’s federal funding,” adding that the school is “committed to combating antisemitism and ensuring the safety and well-being of our students, faculty, and staff.”

Greer said she hadn’t heard from Khalil since he was detained. “It’s hard to imagine how this could be separate and apart” from the Trump administration’s recent actions, she said.

The Justice Department has said it is sending a task force to visit Columbia and a group of other universities that have dealt with antisemitism. Those schools had some of the biggest pro-Palestinian demonstrations that disrupted campuses last year and prompted rebukes from across the political spectrum.

Columbia drew especially heated criticism from some alumni for what they perceived as the university’s tepid response.

In his role, Walker will provide educational content, be available for press opportunities and advise on future sleep-related products.

Estée Lauder is ready for its beauty sleep.

The company, known for its many nighttime skin care products, on Monday is announcing the appointment of its first global sleep adviser, Dr. Matthew Walker, who is an author, sleep scientist and professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. In his role, Walker will provide educational content both internally and externally, employ his expertise for press opportunities and share his findings and knowledge in the field for Estée Lauder to expand and enhance its sleep-related skin care offerings.

“To see a brand that is trying to actually invest in the notion of the science of sleep, to me, was very appealing,” Walker said of the partnership. “I’m excited to get involved with the science, because there’s so much more that we want to know and can be doing, but the second component is education.”

For Estée Lauder, the appointment is an evolution of the brand’s ongoing commitment to the category, which includes fan favorites like the Advanced Night Repair Serum (Walker’s go-to), $128, and Advanced Night Cleansing Balm, $49.

“The Lauder brand has been all about night, researching night, obsessed with night for more than 40 years,” said Jennifer Palmer, Estée Lauder’s senior vice president, global innovation development and science leadership. “We launched the first night repair serum back in 1982 and have built that into such a powerhouse for our brand….We have undergone many years of research and learnings into understanding how skin is biologically, fundamentally different at night.”

Specifically, in 2013, the company released findings of a study done in collaboration with Case Western that showed a link between sleep deprivation and skin aging.

“We uncovered, sadly, that chronic poor sleep or [poor] quality of sleep ages your skin by two times,” Palmer said.

It’s this conversation that the brand is looking to expand by bringing Walker onboard.

“We are excited to have Matt start to advise and inform on upcoming research, upcoming new initiatives, as we think about the future of continuing to develop new studies and new research,” Palmer said.

To kickstart his position, the brand will be releasing an array of educational, short videos across its platforms featuring Walker discussing different sleep subjects — for example, he’ll define what good sleep really is, how it impacts the body and skin in particular and of course, share tips for better beauty rest. In addition, the brand has internal and external events planned where Walker will be featured.

“Sleep is the single most effective thing that you can do each and every day to reset your brain and body health, but skin is the very same thing under that rubric, too, that gets restored,” Walker said.

While the team didn’t share specifics, they said there is more coming when it comes to nighttime innovations.

“Lauder is incredibly committed to night. It’s in our DNA….This will absolutely continue to feed our innovation pipeline,” Palmer said. “This type of partnership with Dr. Matt Walker will help to guide, inform and strengthen the research and new pipeline of products that are to come.”

Foxconn Builds FoxBrain, Its Own AI Model

Nvidia provided support through its Taiwan-based supercomputer and technical consulting

The world’s largest contract electronics maker, Foxconn, said Monday it has built its own large language model with reasoning capabilities, developed in-house and trained in just four weeks.

Initially designed for internal use within the company, the artificial intelligence model, called FoxBrain, can serve functions including data analysis, mathematics, reasoning and code generation, the company said.

Foxconn said Nvidia NVDA 1.92%increase; green up pointing triangle provided support through its Taiwan-based supercomputer and technical consulting, enabling successful model training.

The company said it intends to open-source the model for collaborations with industry partners. It envisions FoxBrain driving advancements in manufacturing and supply chain management.

The model “prioritized optimized training strategies over simply throwing computing power” at the problem, said Yung-Hui Li, director of Foxconn’s artificial intelligence research center.

Using 120 Nvidia H100 graphics processing units, Li’s team finished training FoxBrain in about four weeks, the company said.

Foxconn, best known for assembling Apple’s iPhones, has released some parameters of FoxBrain. The company said further information would be revealed at Nvidia’s annual technology event in mid-March.

Based on Meta’s Llama 3.1 structure, the company said FoxBrain was Taiwan’s first large language model with advanced reasoning, designed and optimized for traditional Chinese, the form of the language used in Taiwan and some overseas Chinese communities.

The company said its model’s performance was slightly behind some models of China’s DeepSeek but was approaching world-class levels.

Foxconn, facing challenges in its core electronics manufacturing business due to industry shifts and declining profitability, has been diversifying into areas such as AI and electric vehicles.

FT economists’ poll: Germany can spend almost €2tn without harming growth

FT survey finds ‘large fiscal capacity’, but economists urge would-be chancellor Friedrich Merz to spend funds wisely

The German government could take on just under €2tn in debt over the next decade without running the risk of damaging growth, according to a Financial Times analysis of a Eurozone economists poll that supports likely-chancellor Friedrich Merz’s fiscal bazooka.

An economists’ poll conducted last week estimated that Europe’s largest economy could raise its fiscal burden from its current level of 63 per cent of GDP to 86 per cent of GDP over the next decade without negative repercussions. The 28 economists’ responses imply fiscal space of €1.9tn.

“Germany has a large fiscal capacity,” said Marcello Messori, a professor at the European University Institute, Florence, adding that the space to create more debt should be used to push Germany’s and the wider European economy towards “high-tech sectors and an effective green transition.”

The findings come after Merz, head of the centre-right Christian Democrats, and his likely coalition partner, the Social Democrats, on Tuesday unveiled plans to boost the country’s creaking infrastructure and raise defence spending.

Economists anticipate the much-needed fiscal bazooka, which follows more than five years of economic stagnation, could lead to an additional €1tn in public borrowing over the next decade.

“The key point”, said Jesper Rangvid, professor at Copenhagen Business School, who estimated that the manageable debt level stands at 80 per cent “or perhaps 90 per cent”, was that Germany had “room to borrow responsibly”, to pay for urgently needed rearmament and infrastructure improvements.

“Critical infrastructure, such as the notoriously inefficient rail system and more generally its infrastructure, also digital infrastructure, must be upgraded,” he said.

The FT calculations of the €1.9tn in fiscal space assume that German nominal GDP will increase by 2 per cent per year from €4.3tn to €5.4tn by 2035. This estimate is likely to be conservative, as it does not account for any real GDP growth, should inflation match the European Central Bank’s 2 per cent target.

Many participants stressed that the additional borrowing needed to be combined with structural reform to raise the country’s productive capacity.

“Money alone will not solve the challenges,” said Ulrich Kater, the chief economist of Frankfurt-based Deka Bank.

Willem Buiter, former chief economist of Citi and adviser at Maverecon, described the German economy as “grotesquely over-regulated”.

On Saturday, the likely coalition partners outlined further policy details that clash with economists’ calls.

Instead of cutting red tape and unleashing sweeping pro-growth reform, the likely coalition instead promised new state benefits — including higher pensions for non-working mothers, a cut in VAT for restaurants, and a reintroduction of fuel subsidies for farmers.

Bert Flossbach, co-founder of German asset manager Flossbach von Storch, said ahead of the announcement on Saturday that the new government’s flexibility to spend big on defence could create “more room to increase social consumption and inflate the welfare state even further”.

Lorenzo Codogno, founder and chief economist of LC Macro Advisors, said that Germany’s “real problem” was its model that has prevailed over the past 20 years and was dominated by “sophisticated but old industries”. Germany also needed “leading-edge, innovative companies”, he said.

“German industries are stuck in a middle technology trap” and the country needed to “modernise” its manufacturing, said Antti Alaja, an economist at the Finnish Centre for New Economic Analysis.

Stefan Hofrichter, an economist at Allianz Global Investors, blamed the country’s stifling bureaucracy and tax regime, saying that the economy was dragged down by “too rigid bureaucracy” and “too high corporate taxes” which were both “contributing to private under-investments.”

Jörg Krämer, the chief economist of Commerzbank, urged Merz to dial back the state’s influence over the economy and to “trust the citizens and the corporates” instead in a push for “better business conditions”.

The findings were based on 28 quantitative responses given to a question on whether, leaving aside any legal borrowing limits, Germany could raise its federal debt without repercussions on growth.

A widely-cited 2010 study by Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart suggested that debt exceeding 90 per cent of GDP harms growth, but subsequent research has challenged this conclusion.

“The economic literature does not provide a definite answer on the appropriate level of public debt,” said Isabelle Mateos y Lago, group chief economist at BNP Paribas, adding that debt dynamics driven by nominal growth and borrowing costs were more important.

All of the 41 economists who responded to a question on Germany’s strict debt brake, which locks in additional spending at 0.35 per cent of GDP, said the borrowing rule, in place since 2009, should be eased.

More than a quarter — or 29 per cent of respondents — said it should be completely abolished, which 41 per cent or overhauled to provide “a lot more flexibility”. The remaining economists supported a moderate reform to introduce “a bit more flexibility.” No one called on the rule to be left unchanged or harden it.

“[The] German obsession with fiscal prudence is overdone and reforms are overdue,” said Martin Moryson, global head of economics at German asset manager DWS, adding that the incoming government had “obviously” understood the “magnitude of the task and stands up to the challenge.”

However, lawmakers for the Green Party said on Sunday that they opposed, in their current form, Merz’s plans to create fiscal space through moving defence spending above 1 per cent of GDP outside of the debt brake.

Their opposition could thwart the plans, which require changes to Germany’s constitution and a two-thirds majority in the parliament’s upper house, the Bundesrat, to pass.

Trump’s energy chief says US shale can ‘drill, baby, drill’ at low oil price

Chris Wright claims industry can raise output even if crude falls to $50 a barrel as administration has suggested

US energy secretary Chris Wright has said the US shale sector can deliver President Donald Trump’s pledge to “drill, baby, drill” and boost oil production even if prices hit $50 a barrel, a level most analysts say would curtail drilling activity.   

The former chief executive of fracking group Liberty Energy told the Financial Times that the US sector could “absolutely” deliver both lower prices and higher production by “innovating” and driving “efficiency gains”.

But he predicted a period of industry disruption ahead, similar to that experienced by the shale sector during a bruising price war between Opec producers and the shale industry in 2014.

“There were a lot of bankruptcies. There was a lot of disruption, but the end result was far lower costs to produce a barrel of oil,” he said.

“We are going to see those same kind of market dynamics now. New supply is going to drive prices down. Companies are going to innovate, drive their prices down and consumers and suppliers will bounce back and forth.”

Wright, who has been criticised by green groups as Trump’s fracker-in-chief, said he was “pro-consumer” rather than “pro-business” and supported the president’s efforts to drive down energy prices.

His comments follow a steep decline in oil prices, with Brent crude falling to less than $70 last week for only the third time since before Russia’s 2022 full invasion of Ukraine. The unexpected decision by Opec+ to increase production, just as fears grow over the health of the US economy due to Trump’s tariff policies, have raised industry concerns about a possible oil glut.

Oil markets were jolted further on Tuesday when Peter Navarro, a trade adviser to Trump, suggested on Fox News that if oil fell to $50 a barrel it would help tame inflation. Trump has not given a specific dollar figure on where he wants oil prices to land, but during his campaign he repeatedly said he would slash energy costs in half within 12 months.

Wright’s comments will unnerve US oil executives, who are gathering at CERAWeek in Houston on Monday for the start of the largest oil and gas conference in the US. The industry is concerned that lower oil prices will dent profits and force it to curtail drilling activity at a time when Trump is demanding increased production.

Andrew Gillick, a managing director at energy research group Enverus, said he was not sure the Trump administration fully appreciated what $50 a barrel oil would do to the US energy industry.

“Operators had most likely planned for prices to be over $70 this year, so at $50, rigs would likely drop and activity slow. And when the rigs drop in the Permian you lose the associated gas that the LNG industry is counting on at the end of the year,” he said.

Daniel Yergin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning energy historian and author of The New Map said that “at $50 a barrel the economics of shale don’t work”.

The average break-even price for shale in 2010 was $77 a barrel of West Texas Intermediate, the US market, compared with $45 a barrel in 2025, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights data.

Wright will deliver a keynote speech at CERAWeek on Monday. He is expected to get a warm reception from oil and gas executives, who have welcomed the Trump administration’s rollback of environmental regulations and pivot away from renewables.

Wright said he hoped the goal in the Paris Agreement for the world to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 was now dead. He said diverting investment away from fossil fuels had increased energy prices and caused energy poverty in developing countries.

“Believing that we will have a re-transformed energy system in 2050 is pure fantasy. The problem is its been destructive fantasy,” he said.

Wright said Germany and the UK’s pursuit of green policies made their electricity systems expensive and unreliable, which had resulted in certain industries relocating to Asia and the US.

“Our priorities are focused on humans, lives, job opportunities. We’re not focused on climate,” he said.

In response to Wright’s comments, the Environmental Defense Fund said a lot had changed in the world of politics in recent months, but the science of climate change had not.

“Wright appears to be in the habit of talking about the benefits of fossil fuels but without talking about the considerable costs or what we can do to address these costs,” said Mark Brownstein, senior vice-president of energy at EDF.

“Greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere are contributing to natural disasters in the world, which are imposing huge and growing costs on economies and human misery.”

Bank of America and Stripe target market for payments in cryptocurrencies

Some of the world’s largest banks and fintechs are rushing to launch their own stablecoins, aiming to grab a slice of a cross-border payments market they expect will be redrawn by cryptocurrencies.

Last month Bank of America signalled it was open to issuing its own coin, joining established payments providers such as Standard Chartered, PayPal, Revolut and Stripe in targeting a business dominated by cryptocurrency groups Tether and Circle.

Their enthusiasm has been fuelled by growing acceptance among regulators around the world that stablecoins, designed to hold a constant value of a dollar per coin, could become a more accepted part of the financial system.

That shift, after regulatory hostility to Meta’s Libra stablecoin six years ago, has been given further impetus by US President Donald Trump’s fervent embrace of cryptocurrencies.

“It’s about people selling shovels in the stablecoin gold rush,” said Simon Taylor, co-founder of fintech consultancy 11: FS, who likened it to FOMO, or fear of missing out.

“The other thing that’s driven it is there’s real volume,” he said. “Founders want to get a piece of it because they know they’re going to get stablecoin regulation and so it’s all of those things coming together.”

Although stablecoins have typically been used to shift money between differing cryptocurrencies, they are growing in popularity in emerging markets as an alternative to local banks for payments, particularly in commodities, agriculture and shipping.

They are a type of private digital cash that acts as a de facto reserve of a sovereign currency, overwhelmingly US dollars, and payments in digital coins allow companies and consumers to cheaply and instantly access hard currency outside the banking system.

There are about $210bn of stablecoins issued globally, with about $142bn printed by El Salvador-based Tether and $57bn by the US’s Circle, branded as USDT and USDC respectively.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX uses them to repatriate funds from selling Starlink satellites in Argentina and Nigeria, while ScaleAI offers its large workforce of overseas contractors the option of being paid in digital tokens.

Transaction volumes climbed to $710bn last month, compared with $521bn in the same period a year ago while the number of unique stablecoin addresses has risen to 35mn, up 50 per cent, over the same period, according to data from Visa.

Large banks are growing increasingly confident pushing into the industry as regulations emerge. US politicians are debating bills in Congress that set out standards for stablecoins, giving banks, companies and ordinary consumers more confidence to use the tokens.

“If they make that legal, we will go into that business,” commented Brian Moynihan, chief executive of Bank of America, on the Trump administration plans at the Economic Club of Washington last month.

The EU introduced rules at the start of the year that required stablecoin operators in the bloc to be compliant. The UK financial regulator is planning to consult the market this year.

Standard Chartered said last month it will lead a venture planning to launch a Hong Kong dollar-backed token, under new incoming stablecoin regulations in the territory.

Underscoring the momentum, last month US group Stripe closed its largest acquisition to date with the $1.1bn purchase of stablecoin platform Bridge.

“Stablecoins and the more modern chains are really interesting for the payments use case, and that makes up our business,” said co-founder and president John Collison. The $91.5bn financial technology company processed $1.4tn in payments last year.

PayPal — which already has a stablecoin named PYUSD that is pegged to the dollar — plans to roll out the payment option more widely in 2025, and expects take-up to be particularly strong among US businesses paying suppliers abroad.

“OK. I give up. Klarna and me will embrace crypto! More to come . . . Last large fintech in the world to embrace it. Someone had to be last. And that’s a milestone as well of some sort,” Sebastian Siemiatkowski, chief executive of ‘buy now, pay later’ lender Klarna, wrote on the X social media platform last month.

Even so, the new entrants face an uphill battle to establish themselves. PayPal has enacted just $163mn of transactions this month compared with just over $131bn at Tether, Visa data shows.

Last month there were about 122mn transactions that took place globally using stablecoins, Visa said. Yet an average 829mn transactions a day took place on the credit card provider’s own network.

Martin Mignot, a partner at Index Ventures and backer of Bridge — said stablecoins were “attractive” in markets that lack “great infrastructure or great liquidity and have a lot of currency risk”. However, their use cases were “not as obvious” in western markets, he added.

Analysts also warned that the market was unlikely to be able to sustain dozens of coins as users begin to scrutinise the quality of the companies issuing them.

11: FS’s Taylor pointed out that stablecoins were not cash, but only substitutes for it, and reflected the credit risk of the issuing company, as well as its ability to manage the operational risks of running a stablecoin.

“Essentially what the brand of the stablecoin tells you is that this is who the issuer is,” he said. “Therefore, because the issuer is that organisation, your credit risk is X or Y. That’s not something you do with the dollar.”

In Washington, time is a malleable concept. In some moments, it seems like nothing there can ever happen fast. And then—zip, zip, zzzzip. The midterms are here! And the chessboard every macher in America has just painstakingly labored to set up in their favor gets reset.

Sam Altman grasps this dichotomy. Altman has gone to some effort to befriend the current White House: He attended Donald Trump’s inauguration and the very next day appeared in a banner news conference with the president, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son to unveil Project Stargate (speaking of Stargate, more on that in this week’s Big Read!). But Altman, once a reliable Democratic donor who grew disillusioned with President Joe Biden, is now getting back to liberal fundraising, according to The New York Times. Later this month, he’ll host a shindig for Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, who faces an election race in 2026. It’s Altman’s first such event for a Democrat since 2022.

Clearly, Altman realizes something a lot of Americans are seemingly struggling to remember amid the tumult of Trump’s reascension: As fast as the administration has swept to chaotic power, that momentum will diminish just as quickly—particularly if the president can’t hold up his end of the bargain with the corporate elite, and if the economy sputters.

Altman’s decision to boost Warner just months into Trump’s administration was one of several reminders this week that support for the Trump agenda could be brittle. A second was the stock market decline prompted by the confusion over Trump’s tariffs—and another was the public criticism of his proposal for a federal crypto stockpile from venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, a close Elon Musk friend and strident Republican. All together, it felt like one of the only weeks since January in which the president’s agenda didn’t advance totally unconsidered by the nation’s boardrooms.

Sure, Altman is a canny opportunist. But his ping-ponging here is a reminder that the vibe shift in Silicon Valley—and nearly every other part of the country—toward Trump and conservatism perhaps isn’t as durable or as overwhelming as it has appeared. CEOs like Altman want economic consistency. If Trump can’t deliver that, they’ll start reenvisioning that proverbial chessboard sooner than later.

For instance, Bolt’s annualized gross transactions is about 10 times the equity it’s raised. The equivalent for the U.S. ride-hailing companies, using the paid-in capital recorded on their balance sheets, is about 4 times for Uber and 1.6 times for Lyft.

Bolt was still burning cash as of 2023, however, while its rivals were profitable or getting close. Uber generated $3.4 billion in cash that year, and then nearly doubled that figure last year. Lyft, which burned cash in 2023, generated $766.3 million in free cash flow last year.

Bolt also generates less revenue for every dollar of gross bookings than its rivals, probably because of its presence in emerging markets. Villig said in a podcast last fall that Bolt is on pace to generate 2 billion euros ($2.1 billion) in revenue annually, or roughly 20% of its annualized gross bookings pace.

In contrast, Uber’s annualized revenue at the end of last year was 27% of annualized gross bookings, while Lyft’s was 36%.

Villig described his company’s approach to challenging Uber and Lyft as “pragmatic” and “experimental.” Even if Bolt only succeeds in half of the new markets where it’s launching new services, that’s a “good thing,” he said. Bolt launched in Egypt and Costa Rica last year.

Bolt, which secured a $238 million line of credit last summer, is not likely to pursue an initial public offering this year as it’s focused on expanding in Canada, said a person familiar with the matter.

US group has sought to broaden its appeal to a mass audience

Discord is in early talks with banks about a public listing, according to people familiar with the matter, in a sign of a possible revival in the sluggish US IPO market.

Founded in 2015 by video game developer Jason Citron, Discord offers multi-person voice, video and text-based spaces to its 200mn global monthly active users.

The San Francisco gaming chat platform was considering listing as early as 2021, according to people familiar with the matter. However, many technology companies and investors have put their IPO plans on hold due to political and market uncertainty.

That is expected to change this year as interest rates have fallen and US President Donald Trump has laid out a more tech-friendly regulatory agenda.

Discord was last valued at about $15bn in a 2021 fundraising, according to PitchBook. The company’s revived IPO plans remain subject to change, one of the people said.

“We understand there is a lot of interest around Discord’s future plans, but we do not comment on rumours or speculation,” the company said in a statement shared with the Financial Times. “Our focus remains on delivering the best possible experience for our users and building a strong, sustainable business.”

CoreWeave, an artificial intelligence cloud computing provider, filed for a New York IPO this month that would raise about $4bn and value the group at more than $35bn, which could make it the largest tech flotation of the year.

A series of valuable start-ups, including fintech groups Stripe and Chime and data platform Databricks, that had been forced to stay private far longer than planned are expected to reignite plans to list their shares.

Discord initially found popularity among gamers, as well as retail trading and cryptocurrency communities, but has since sought to broaden its appeal to a mass audience.

The company has largely shunned advertising, in contrast to larger rivals such as Meta, X and Reddit, in favour of offering its users premium features for a fee.

In 2021, it attracted interest from multiple Big Tech groups, rebuffing a $12bn takeover bid from Microsoft. The recent IPO plans were first reported by The New York Times.