>>> La Lettre – 10 avril 2026

La Lettre – 10 avril 2026 | Résumé bilingue

🇫🇷 RÉSUMÉ EN FRANÇAIS
Île-de-France : la prudence budgétaire de Pécresse se retourne contre elle
Valérie Pécresse, élue à la tête de la première région économique d’Europe il y a dix ans, a fait de la rigueur budgétaire sa marque de fabrique. Mais les chiffres révèlent une mauvaise anticipation en matière d’endettement, avec un encours de dette dépassant aujourd’hui 7 milliards d’euros. En 2021, année de sa large réélection, la région n’a emprunté que 500 millions d’euros malgré des taux à 0 %, alors qu’en 2020, pendant la pandémie, elle avait émis 800 millions à des taux quasi nuls (0,1 % et 0,61 %). Depuis 2025, les taux appliqués dépassent 3,6 %, et la région emprunte désormais le montant record d’un milliard d’euros par an. Entre 2031 et 2036, 4,6 milliards d’euros de créances devront être remboursés, auxquels s’ajouteront plus de 1,2 milliard d’intérêts.
Anne Le Hénanff : les réseaux cyber et bretons d’une ministre du numérique
Installée à Bercy depuis octobre 2025, la ministre déléguée chargée de l’IA et du numérique est en première ligne sur deux priorités de fin de quinquennat : renforcer la cybersécurité et protéger les jeunes de leur addiction aux grandes plateformes. Ralliée à Horizons en 2021, elle permet à la formation d’Édouard Philippe de peser à Matignon. Son réseau est ancré dans les cercles régaliens du numérique et les milieux militaires bretons, mais reste à étoffer du côté du business tech.
Bouclier spatial européen : Bruxelles mobilise les industriels
La DG Defis de la Commission européenne va rencontrer prochainement les États membres puis les industriels pour leur présenter son programme Space Shield, destiné à protéger les satellites, anticiper les incursions de drones et renforcer les capacités de renseignement. Le projet est porté par le commissaire Andrius Kubilius. La Commission entend financer des capacités dans les États membres pour renforcer leur résistance collective aux attaques et leur coordination.
General Electric : huitième redressement fiscal en France
GE vient d’écoper d’un nouveau redressement de 80,3 millions d’euros, portant le total des rectifications fiscales à 325,8 millions depuis six ans. La dernière rectification, notifiée en décembre 2025, concerne la filiale GE Energy Products France à Belfort pour la période 2020-2022. Les entités françaises font l’objet de deux contrôles fiscaux distincts toujours en cours.
Presse imprimée : accord de filière allégé sous Catherine Pégard
La nouvelle ministre de la culture a obtenu l’accord des représentants des quotidiens nationaux (Figaro) et régionaux (La Dépêche du Midi) sur un contrat de modernisation de la distribution de la presse imprimée, qui sera non contraignant, contrairement à la version initiale proposée en 2025. Le ministère de la culture financera 40 % des coûts de distribution des quotidiens à faibles recettes publicitaires, 30 % des coûts des quotidiens IPG, et 12,5 % des coûts des hebdomadaires IPG et des quotidiens non-IPG.

🇬🇧 ENGLISH SUMMARY
Île-de-France: Pécresse’s fiscal caution backfires
Valérie Pécresse, who took over Europe’s largest regional economy a decade ago, built her reputation on fiscal prudence. Yet the figures reveal poor debt timing, with the region’s total debt now exceeding €7 billion. The region borrowed at near-zero rates in 2020 but held back in 2021 (only €500m at 0%), then was forced to borrow at scale from 2022 onward into a rising rate environment. The mandatory financing cost has multiplied eightfold in ten years: borrowing €100m in 2016 cost ~€500k annually, while the €1bn borrowed in 2025 generates over €36m per year in charges — totalling more than €360m over the 2026–2035 period.
Anne Le Hénanff: the digital minister’s cyber and Breton networks
Since October 2025, the minister delegate for AI and digital affairs has been at the forefront of two late-term Élysée priorities: strengthening cybersecurity and curbing minors’ access to major social platforms. Her strength lies in regulatory and military cyber networks; her relative weakness is business tech connectivity, where her predecessor Clara Chappaz had a far larger profile.
European Space Shield: Brussels rallies industry
The European Commission’s DG Defis is preparing to present its Space Shield programme — a civil-military initiative to protect satellites, counter drone intrusions, and bolster intelligence capabilities — to member states and industry players including Airbus, Thales Alenia Space, Arianespace, and Safran. The urgency stems from Russia’s alleged use of spy satellites to conduct proximity operations against European military and observation assets.
General Electric: eighth French tax reassessment
GE has received its eighth tax reassessment from the French authorities, for €80.3m, bringing the cumulative total to €325.8m over six years. Multiple French subsidiaries across nuclear and wind energy are simultaneously under audit, with a preliminary money-laundering investigation also opened by the PNF.
Press distribution: a lighter-touch deal under Culture Minister Pégard
After two years of negotiations, the new culture minister has reached a compromise on modernising the printed press distribution chain, with the SPQN (nationals) and SPQR (regional press) signing on to a framework agreement that is non-binding — a significant concession from the original 2025 proposal. The deal unlocks FSDP funding and recalibrates state subsidies by category of publication.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

WSJ : America Has Wanted Greenland for Over a Century. Trump Isn’t Giving Up.

America Has Wanted Greenland for Over a Century. Trump Isn’t Giving Up.
The insistence that the U.S. must control Greenland is the latest in a string of American flirtations with the Arctic island

President Trump’s renewed push to acquire Greenland has created diplomatic tensions and threatens to splinter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
The U.S. is seeking to expand its military presence in three areas of Greenland, but Denmark rejects U.S. sovereignty over bases.
Greenlandic officials expressed feeling threatened by the U.S., which previously left abandoned military bases for Denmark to clean up.

IKATEQ, Greenland—Deep in a remote fjord in Greenland, hundreds of rusty fuel drums known locally as “American flowers” litter the icy wilderness.

Vehicles marked as property of the U.S. Army decay in the snow-covered valley near the abandoned remains of an aircraft hangar.

As President Trump seeks to expand U.S. territory with the island, this base, a remnant of World War II, stands as a reminder of the last time the U.S. tried to own Greenland.

Trump’s insistence that the U.S. must control Greenland is the latest in a string of American flirtations with the Arctic island going back over a century. It is, however, the first to threaten to splinter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

After weeks of closed-door talks between Washington, Copenhagen and Nuuk, Trump reignited public attention on Greenland this past week by putting it front and center of his conflict with NATO ahead of a meeting with the alliance’s secretary-general, Mark Rutte.

“We want Greenland. They don’t want to give it to us. And I said: ‘Bye, bye!’” Trump said.

Fears among Washington’s European allies of a U.S. invasion peaked in January when Danish forces transported explosives to the island to blow up runways and supplies of blood for potential casualties during a multinational exercise, according to a senior Danish official. These actions were first reported by Danish broadcaster DR.

European allies also sent soldiers to show they were willing to help defend Greenland. The French were among the first, sending some 50 elite troops, said Gen. Pierre Schill, commander of the French land army.

In talks with Denmark and Greenland, the U.S. is now seeking to expand its military presence in three areas of Greenland, the commander of the Northern Command, Gen. Gregory Guillot, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last month.


The locations are aimed at securing a presence for special forces and permanent access to Arctic waters, as well as expanding space and submarine monitoring. A senior Danish official confirmed two possible locations at Kangerlussuaq, formerly Sondrestrom, which houses a sizable airstrip, as well as the maritime gateway of Narsarsuaq. A third potential location could be a deep-water port near Pituffik, where the U.S. already has a space base.

The real hitch of the negotiations is ensuring the U.S. respects Danish and Greenlandic sovereignty. The Danish government has said U.S. sovereignty over bases, akin to the British model in Cyprus, is unacceptable. Such a deal might satisfy Trump’s desire for improved security but falls short of his goal of ownership.

“This is not what Trump wants, deep down, but he might accept it if he can sell it as a victory,” said Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard, senior researcher with the Danish Institute for International Studies. The U.S. is already permitted to expand forces under a 1951 treaty that allows virtually unimpeded access. “Trump could have achieved this without triggering a massive international diplomatic crisis,” Søndergaard said.

After meeting Trump, Rutte told reporters that the U.S. is also trying to ensure that any arrangement they reach with the Danes and Greenlanders remains in force if Greenland achieves independence.

The Danish foreign ministry declined to comment beyond saying that Denmark has opened a diplomatic track with the U.S.

The proposed expansion won’t mark a new development, but rather restore parts of the U.S.’s Cold War footprint in Greenland.

A Wall Street Journal team recently traveled across southern Greenland to reach the abandoned U.S. base. The team flew from the capital Nuuk by propjet to Kulusuk, population 200, then traveled by dogsled to the edge of the ice. This was followed by a four-hour trip by fishing boat to the entrance of the fjord, before a final dogsled to the base.

Greenland, the world’s largest island, is bigger than Mexico, but home to fewer than 60,000 people, with no roads connecting settlements. Building new bases here would be costly and logistically challenging.

The base, Bluie East Two, was built in 1942 as part of a network of 17 U.S. bases constructed across Greenland during World War II, partly to prevent Nazi Germany—which occupied Denmark—from taking the island.

The bases were built without Copenhagen’s official consent but with the help of a rogue Danish diplomat. In 1941, Denmark’s ambassador to Washington, Henrik Kauffmann, signed an agreement behind his government’s back that allowed the U.S. to establish defense bases in Greenland, effectively turning the island into an American protectorate. Copenhagen dismissed and charged Kauffmann with high treason, which he ignored. The charge was rescinded after Denmark was liberated from Nazi Germany after WWII.

During the war, bases like Bluie East Two served as midway points for bombers and transport planes flying between North America and Europe. Bluie East Two was abandoned in 1947. Until recently, the remains of the buildings on the base were riddled with asbestos and fuel barrels leaked jet fuel into the surrounding waterways.

After the war, U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes secretly offered Denmark $100 million for Greenland, roughly $1.6 billion today. Previous administrations also advocated purchasing the island in 1867 and 1910. The U.S. formally recognized Danish sovereignty in 1916 as a condition for its purchase of the Danish West Indies.

A 1951 defense treaty gave the U.S. the right to establish an indefinite number of bases in perpetuity, provided it informed Denmark and Greenland. That year, President Truman approved construction of Thule Air Base, 750 miles from the North Pole—today it is called Pituffik and is the northernmost American military base on the planet. At the height of the Cold War, some 10,000 U.S. soldiers were stationed on the island. Pituffik today houses some 150 U.S. troops.

During the Cold War, the U.S. stationed long-range bombers in Greenland, some loaded with nuclear weapons. It deployed early-warning radar systems and built weather stations to assert sovereignty and get reliable forecasts for military operations.

Jay Huggins, a retired telecommunications technician who worked on several Greenlandic radar stations from 1988 to 1990, including near the Bluie East Two base, said the remoteness and brutal winters challenged young soldiers.

“Some people would only be up there for a year, and they really couldn’t deal with the isolation,” Huggins said. “But then you had other people that had been up there 18, 19, 20 years. We called those guys ‘the land of misfit toys.’ Their personalities had, I would say, altered over their time there.”

The influx of American goods and soldiers after the construction of bases began in 1941 brought economic development to remote Greenlandic settlements, which until then had lived under a Danish trade monopoly aimed at preventing foreign influence.

“There was a lot of nation-building happening during World War II,” said Ujammiugaq Engell, leader of Nuuk Local Museum. “There was a feeling of self-determination due to free trade that made people’s lives easier.”

Peter Bosold, a dogsled musher who traveled with the Journal to Bluie East Two, said he would like the Americans to return to his village where they used to operate a radar station.

“I think it would benefit the village if they built a base in Kulusuk again,” he said.

When the U.S. abandoned its bases in Greenland, it left the cleanup to Denmark despite the treaty obliging Washington to do it. Copenhagen paid nearly $30m in 2018 to clean up chemical spills in Ikateq and another base, but it wasn’t enough to cover larger installations elsewhere.

Naaja Nathanielsen, a former Greenlandic minister of business and natural resources, said the existing agreement allows the U.S. to build more bases.

“But they could begin by cleaning up their old waste,” she said.

Trump has suggested Greenland as a piece of his proposed $185 million Golden Dome missile-defense system, which is intended to create a shield over the U.S. against ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missiles using sensors and interceptors. The growing use of hypersonic weapons that can maneuver during flight, often at low altitudes, has pushed the U.S. to improve space monitoring, said Charles Galbreath, director for space studies at the Washington-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

“I do believe Greenland can play a role in that,” he said. “Having the combination of assets in Greenland and Alaska, that does help monitor the North Polar region very well.”

Greenlandic officials say that despite U.S. rights to operate on the island, Greenlandic sovereignty must be respected.

“We have never felt this threatened before and it is by our ally,” said Pipaluk Lynge, chairperson of the Greenlandic Parliament’s foreign and security policy committee. “The White House has a lot of work to do to regain our trust in Americans.”

FT : Richard Caring sells majority stake in Ivy hospitality empire to Sheikh Tah

Richard Caring sells majority stake in Ivy hospitality empire to Sheikh Tahnoon’s IHC
Deal includes an investment of more than £1bn

Richard Caring has sold a majority stake in his UK hospitality empire, which includes the Ivy restaurant chain and London private members’ club Annabel’s, to an entity controlled by the powerful Abu Dhabi royal Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan. 

The deal includes an investment of more than £1bn from Diafa, an affiliate of Sheikh Tahnoon’s sprawling holding company IHC, the company said on Saturday.

Caring, dubbed the “King of Mayfair”, will remain as executive chair of the group, and lead the business’s next phase of international expansion alongside Diafa, which will be helmed by the former chair of LVMH’s Asia business Ravi Thakran.

Caring said in a statement that he was confident that the new company would “bring our world-class brands to new markets and continue to elevate our vision for hospitality.”

The FT reported last year that Sheikh Tahnoon was looking to buy a significant stake in Caring’s empire. 

The 77-year-old rag trader-turned-hospitality mogul has over decades assembled a portfolio of some of London’s best-known bars, restaurants and clubs. It includes Troia, the company that owns the Ivy Collection, as well as casual dining chain Bill’s and Caprice Holdings, which owns high-end restaurants such as ​​Sexy Fish, Scott’s and Bacchanalia.

Caring controls his empire through a complicated web of investment vehicles, which ultimately are owned through offshore holding companies in Jersey and the British Virgin Islands. 

The completed deal, which was first reported by the Sunday Times, will expand Diafa’s hospitality portfolio, which includes the Azumi Group’s high-end restaurants Zuma and Roka, as well as Los-Angeles based hospitality company h.wood Group.

Alongside controlling IHC, the most valuable company on Abu Dhabi’s stock exchange, Sheikh Tahnoon — a brother of President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed — is the UAE’s national security adviser and leads the UAE’s push into artificial intelligence through his G42 Group.

IHC has grown rapidly in recent years, boasting roughly 1,500 subsidiaries as of the end of 2025. Its holdings range from electricity, property development and hospitals to billboards, driving schools and chicken farms.

NY Post : White House warns staff against insider trading on prediction markets

White House warns staff against insider trading on prediction markets after suspicious Iran war bets

The White House warned staffers not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets as critics grow suspicious of lucrative trading activity around the Iran war.

A White House official confirmed to The Post that the warning was sent to all staffers in an email from the White House Management Office on March 24.

A day earlier, anonymous accounts made a blitz of trades just 15 minutes before President Trump announced a pause on strikes on Iran for five days, according to the Wall Street Journal. In less than two minutes, more than $760 million worth of oil futures contracts had changed hands, Dow Jones Market Data showed.

Then, three accounts on Polymarket raked in more than $600,000 this week by correctly betting on the timing of the ceasefire. The identity of the traders remains unknown.

Prediction markets like it and Kalshi allow traders to wage bets on everything from politics, sports and pop culture to the likelihood of the president saying “Sleepy Joe” or “Trump Derangement Syndrome” on a certain day.

Critics have been quick to blast the perfectly-timed wartime trades as instances of insider trading, and members of Congress have recently introduced several bills seeking to restrict public officials’ use of futures markets.

Ethics rules already ban government workers from using insider scoops for personal gain and from gambling while on federal property, but critics have argued that’s not enough.

“President Trump has been crystal clear: while he seeks a strong and profitable stock market for everyone, members of Congress and other government officials should be prohibited from using nonpublic information for financial benefit,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle told The Post.

“The only special interest that will ever guide President Trump is the best interest of the American people,” Ingle said.

US states have argued that the increasingly popular markets are the same as online gambling platforms, which require approval for state licenses and bans on users under 21.

Arizona, Connecticut and Illinois are currently fighting for the ability to restrict prediction markets.

New Jersey’s efforts to do the same recently suffered a major setback when a federal appeals court ruled Kalshi is under the exclusive jurisdiction of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Last month, Kalshi and Polymarket added new anti-insider trading rules to their platforms as members of Congress introduced a flurry of legislative proposals aimed at the new markets.

Sens. John Curtis (R-Utah) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) have pushed legislation to hand over control of prediction markets to state regulators, while lefty California Gov. Gavin Newsom banned state-appointed officials with insider information from using the markets.

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) also announced a ban on prediction markets among his office staffers, and last week blasted a Polymarket contract linked to the rescue mission of a US service member whose plane was shot down over Iran.

“They could be your neighbor, a friend, a family member. And people are betting on whether or not they’ll be saved,” Moulton wrote in a post on X. “This is DISGUSTING.”

In a response to Moulton’s criticism, Polymarket wrote: “We took this market down immediately as it does not meet our integrity standards. It should not have been posted, and we are investigating how this slipped through our internal safeguards.”

Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Andy Kim (D-NJ) also introduced legislation that would ban prediction markets related to war or military action.

Dems have also taken aim at the Trump family’s ties to prediction markets, since Donald Trump Jr. is an adviser to both Kalshi and Polymarket.

CrunchBase : The Week’s 10 Biggest Funding Rounds: SiFive Leads With $400M For C

The Week’s 10 Biggest Funding Rounds: SiFive Leads With $400M For Custom Chip Designs As Aviation, Biotech And Defense Startups Also Raise Big

While no billion-dollar rounds led this week’s list, we nonetheless saw a variety of startups in industries ranging from semiconductors to aerospace to biotech raise sizable rounds. The week’s biggest deal was $400 million for SiFive, a semiconductor startup challenging incumbent Arm Holdings with chip designs built on an open rather than proprietary standard.

1. SiFive, $400M, semiconductors: San Mateo, California-based semiconductor startup SiFive raised a $400 million Series G round led by Atreides Management. SiFive makes the blueprints used by companies such as Alphabet to develop their own internal chip designs, on an open standard called RISC-V. CEO Patrick Little told Reuters he expects the raise to be SiFive’s last funding round before an IPO, though didn’t say when an offering would take place.

2. Hermeus, $200M, aviation: Hermeus, an El Segundo, California-based startup developing autonomous military aircraft, raised $200 million in equity in a Khosla Ventures-led round. The company, which is developing what it says will be the fastest unmanned defense aircraft, also raised $150 million in debt as part of the round, which pushes its valuation to $1 billion. Other investors in the deal include Socium Ventures, RTX Ventures, Karman Ventures, Founders Fund, IQT and Cox Enterprises.

3. Sidewinder Therapeutics, $137M, biotechnology: San Diego-based Sidewinder, a biotech startup developing cancer drugs to target difficult-to-treat tumors, raised a $137 million Series B led by Frazier Life Sciences and Novartis Venture Fund. The company is developing next-generation cancer drugs called antibody-drug conjugates, or ADCs, which are designed to act like “guided missiles” by using engineered antibodies to deliver toxic payloads directly into tumor cells. The company said its new funding will be used to push its lead drug candidates into clinical trials.

4. Aria Networks, $125M, AI infrastructure: Palo Alto, California-based Aria Networks raised $125 million in a Sutter Hill Ventures-led Series A funding round. The company develops an AI-driven networking platform that monitors, analyzes and optimizes data center performance.

5. Starfish Space, $111.7M, aerospace: Starfish Space, a Seattle-based startup developing and manufacturing autonomous space vehicles that perform in-orbit, satellite servicing missions, raised $111.7 million. The Series B round was led by Activate Capital Partners, Point72 Ventures and Shield Capital. Starfish’s spacecraft dock to satellites already in orbit to service and reposition them. They can also remove defunct satellites and debris from space.

6. (tied) Stipple Bio, $100M, biotechnology: Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Stipple Bio raised a $100 million Series A round to advance its precision cancer therapies. The round was led by a16z Bio+Health, Nextech Invest and RA Capital Management. Stipple aims to develop highly targeted cancer treatments that selectively attack cancer cells while minimizing damage to healthy tissue.

6. (tied) Chapter, $100M, health insurance: Generation Investment Management led the $100 million Series E for Chapter, a New York-based startup offering a Medicare navigation platform that provides advisory services for seniors seeking health coverage. Other investors include ​​XYZ Venture Capital, Maverick Ventures and 8VC .

8. Modus, $85M, fintech: Modus, a Philadelphia-based startup, raised $85 million in a Lightspeed Venture Partners-led seed and Series A round. The startup describes itself as a tech‑enabled audit platform that acquires CPA firms and equips them with AI‑driven audit tools to deliver higher‑quality audits. Comma Capital and Garry Tan also participated in the deal.

9. Endovascular Engineering, $80M, medical devices: Gilde Healthcare and Norwest led the $80 million Series C for Menlo Park, California-based Endovascular Engineering, also called E2, which has developed a device called Hēlo for the treatment of venous thromboembolism, or VTE. The company secured FDA clearance for Hēlo in December.

10. Life Biosciences, $80M, biotechnology: Boston-based Life Sciences, which aims to develop drugs to promote longevity and find treatments for age-related diseases, says it raised $80 million in Series D funding. The company says it will use the funding to advance human trials of its cellular rejuvenation therapy, called ER-100, which aims to make older, damaged cells act younger again. Investors in the round were not disclosed. The company has previously been backed by Longevitytech.fund, Alpha Wave Ventures, LeFrak, Apple Core Holdings and George Godula.

WWD : Brunello Cucinelli Reports Strong Start to 2026

Brunello Cucinelli Reports Strong Start to 2026
Driven by robust gains at retail in America and Asia, Cucinelli confirmed the estimate of 10 percent growth this year, while discussing Saks Global and the war in the Middle East.

MILAN — While Brunello Cucinelli described this as “the finest moment of the company’s history,” reflecting continued growth at retail across geographies, he did not want to appear as if he was making light of this “particular juncture for humanity.”

On Thursday, during a call with analysts to comment on the first-quarter performance of his namesake company, Cucinelli often spoke about the pandemic and the lessons learned then, citing “the importance of clarity in the fundamental principles of our enterprise; the necessity for all our decisions to be reversible, elastic and flexible — culturally as well — on an almost daily basis, and, finally, the need for great caution and patience, without thereby relinquishing our rightful ambition.”

Quoting one of his beloved philosophers, he urged “to put into practice the teaching of Thomas More, who said: ‘Oh my God, help me to accept what I cannot change, and help me to change what I can.’”

Turning to business, he reported that his company, in the three months ended March 31, saw sales rise 8.1 percent to 369.1 million euros, compared with 341.4 million euros in the same period last year. At constant currency, growth stood at 14 percent.

“The first quarter of 2026 started on a positive note, further accelerating compared to the already positive conclusion of 2025, particularly in the Americas and in China, and even better than our expectations,” said chief executive officer Luca Lisandroni.

He underscored the strength of the company’s retail channel, which showed a gain of 12.9 percent to 238.2 million euros, accounting for 64.5 percent of the total. At constant currency, retail was up 20.1 percent.

The higher sales reflected like-for-like growth and the contribution from new stores, “as well as the continued increase in client numbers and average spending, accompanied by a sales mix increasingly oriented towards higher-value products,” explained Lisandroni.

In the first quarter, two boutiques opened in Florida, in Boca Raton and Naples, and one in Wuhan, China. A store in Vancouver will open in the second quarter and, toward the end of the year or early 2027, a second unit will open in Abu Dhabi and one in Mexico City. The Geneva, Toronto and Plaza 66 stores will be expanded in the third quarter.

In the first quarter, wholesale sales inched up 0.3 percent to 130.9 million euros. At constant currency, they grew 4.3 percent.

Cucinelli confirmed the forecast of revenue growth of around 10 percent at constant exchange rates for 2026 and for 2027.

The performance in March remained in line with the first two months of the year, even after the start of the war in the Middle East, said Lisandroni, noting that the region accounts for only about 5 percent of total sales, highlighting the centrality of the local customer and the limited dependence on international tourism. However, he said that stores in the Middle East have seen a 50 percent decrease in sales, but that they remain open.

In the quarter, sales in Europe rose 4.2 percent to 124.7 million euros, representing 33.8 percent of the total.

No new store openings took place last year or in the first quarter in the region, but the flagship stores on Bond Street in London and Saint-Honoré in Paris were expanded in the last part of 2025.

Revenues in the Americas rose 9.4 percent to 137.7 million euros. At constant currency, sales in that market climbed 20.3 percent, representing a share of 37.3 percent.

Lisandroni said shipments to Saks Global resumed in mid-January with regular payments, and revenues generated with the retailer since the beginning of the year show growth compared to the same period of 2025. Cucinelli is planning to expand at Bergdorf Goodman, and convert five locations to concessions at Saks, said Lisandroni.

Cucinelli said he will be traveling to New York next week to present the docufilm on his life directed by Gabriele Tornatore that premiered in December at Rome’s Cinecittà. The film will also be shown in Asia and is slated to end the tour in December in the Middle East.

In the quarter, sales in Asia were up 11.3 percent to 106.7 million euros, accounting for 28.9 percent of the total, driven by the retail channel and China fared particularly well, said Lisandroni, with a further improvement compared to the already positive trend of the fourth quarter of 2025. He added that Hong Kong has returned to becoming “a very strong pole of attraction.”

A new Casa Cucinelli store will open in Shanghai in August.

TechCrunch : Anthropic temporarily banned OpenClaw’s creator from accessing Clau

Anthropic temporarily banned OpenClaw’s creator from accessing Claude

“Yeah folks, it’s gonna be harder in the future to ensure OpenClaw still works with Anthropic models,” OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger posted on X early Friday morning, along with a photo of a message from Anthropic saying his account had been suspended over “suspicious” activity.

The ban didn’t last long. A few hours later, after the post went viral, Steinberger said his account had been reinstated. Among hundreds of comments — many of them in conspiracy theory land, given that Steinberger is now employed by Anthropic rival OpenAI — was one by an Anthropic engineer. The engineer told the famed developer that Anthropic has never banned anyone for using OpenClaw and offered to help.


It’s not clear if that was the key that restored the account. (We’ve asked Anthropic about it.) But the whole message string was enlightening on many levels.

To recap the recent history: This ban followed news last week that subscriptions to Anthropic’s Claude would no longer cover “third-party harnesses including OpenClaw,” the AI model company said.

OpenClaw users now have to pay for that usage separately, based on consumption, through Claude’s API. In essence, Anthropic, which offers its own agent, Cowork, is now charging a “claw tax.” Steinberger said he was following this new rule and using his API but was banned anyway.

Anthropic said it instituted the pricing change because subscriptions weren’t built to handle the “usage patterns” of claws. Claws can be more compute-intensive than prompts or simple scripts because they may run continuous reasoning loops, automatically repeat or retry tasks, and tie into a lot of other third-party tools.

Steinberger, however, wasn’t buying that excuse. After Anthropic changed the pricing, he posted, “Funny how timings match up, first they copy some popular features into their closed harness, then they lock out open source.” Though he didn’t specify, he may have been referring to features added to Claude’s Cowork agent, such as Claude Dispatch, which lets users remotely control agents and assign tasks. Dispatch rolled out a couple of weeks before Anthropic changed its OpenClaw pricing policy.

Steinberger’s frustration with Anthropic was again on display Friday.

One person implied that some of this is on him for taking a job at OpenAI instead of Anthropic, posting, “You had the choice, but you went to the wrong one.” To which Steinberger replied: “One welcomed me, one sent legal threats.”

Ouch.

When multiple people asked him why he’s using Claude instead of his employer’s models at all, he explained that he only uses it for testing, to ensure updates to OpenClaw won’t break things for Claude users.

He explained: “You need to separate two things. My work at the OpenClaw Foundation where we wanna make OpenClaw work great for *any* model provider, and my job at OpenAI to help them with future product strategy.”

Multiple people also pointed out that the need to test Claude is because that model remains a popular choice for OpenClaw users over ChatGPT. He also heard that when Anthropic changed its pricing, to which he replied: “Working on that.” (So, that’s a clue about what his job at OpenAI entails.)

Steinberger did not respond to a request for comment.

WSJ : Big Pharma Is Turning to China for the Newest Drug Ideas

Big Pharma Is Turning to China for the Newest Drug Ideas
China’s biotechs are faster and have lower costs, and its drug research threatens to soon overtake the West’s

Finding innovative ways to treat cancer is Pfizer’s biggest priority so to boost cutting-edge technologies, Pfizer executives went to Shenyang, China. There, last summer, Pfizer paid $1.25 billion to China’s 3SBio for rights to a cancer drug candidate.

Not long ago, China was a backwater for drug research. Its companies made pharmaceutical ingredients or lower-cost generic drugs. Its patients offered an opportunity for big drugmakers to sell medicines developed in the West.

Now it’s a major player in biotechnology. Researchers and startups in China are racing to develop hot new medicines for cancer, weight-loss and other diseases. Many are on the cutting edge of molecular biology.

“China is rallying their innovation to degrees that we haven’t seen before,” Pfizer Chief Executive Albert Bourla said.

Looking to tap in to the innovation, big drugmakers and investors are spending billions to lock up rights to promising Chinese-originated drug candidates like 3SBio’s.

All told, Western and Japanese drugmakers did 70 transactions with Chinese biotechs last year, paying nearly $5.6 billion upfront to get rights to promising molecules, according to pharmaceutical commercial intelligence firm Evaluate.

So far this year, the companies have spent almost $1.9 billion on 30 deals, Evaluate said.

Biotech is one of the advanced technologies that China has designated a national priority. Like artificial intelligence and electric vehicles, biotech in China has taken off in recent years, and Chinese drug research threatens to soon overtake the West’s.

Its rapid progress promises to help patients. Not only does China promise a new source of lifesaving medicines, but a less expensive supply, too.

Its advance has stirred national-security concerns in the U.S. Lawmakers and government officials have warned the U.S. could lose a large and important source of jobs and become dangerously dependent on China’s supply of medicines if drug innovation shifts to China.

Drugmakers in the U.S., Europe and Japan, on the other hand, see a more practical benefit: a new source of assets.

Drugmakers are under pressure to continually find new drugs to replace older products that lose sales when their patent protection runs out. And finding new, difference-making medicine is hard. Many promising leads fail during testing. Chinese biotechs are now filling the gaps.

Pfizer and other companies seeking to get into the booming market for weight-loss drugs, for example, have licensed rights to GLP-1 medicines that Chinese biotechs quickly developed.

Likewise, China has become a big supplier of a class of next-generation chemotherapy treatments, known as antibody-drug conjugates.

“Most U.S. and European pharma companies are actively searching for Chinese new drugs now,” said Paul Zhang, a partner with Bluestar BioAdvisors who advises drugmakers on the China biotech market. “Things are cheaper and faster.”

China accounted for 30% of the world’s pipeline of experimental drugs last year, according to McKinsey.

Last fall Gilead Sciences agreed to pay $120 million upfront to Chinese biotech Pregene Biopharma, which can rapidly test therapies known as CAR-Ts like ones that Gilead is developing.

“While we look in the U.S. and around the world for innovation, what we are seeing coming out of China is fundamentally different than what we saw five years ago,” said Gilead Chief Financial Officer Andrew Dickinson.

The progress is no accident. Starting in the 1980s, the Chinese central government targeted becoming a scientific superpower in certain technologies, including biotech. To realize its ambitions, the government has invested to build research labs and Ph.D. programs.

It has also created a regulatory system that permits rapid testing and speedier approvals of drug candidates, making it easier for drug researchers to innovate. For instance, the government established a route for researchers to quickly start testing drugs, rather than having to wait the months it takes to get cleared in the West.

Today cities like Shanghai and Suzhou are teeming with lab space and biotech startups. There, researchers who not long ago copied popular Western medicines are developing more advanced treatments. Some of the startups have executives who had studied and worked in the U.S., and have labs there, too.

They are aided by a cottage industry that helps scout for promising and lucrative targets for research.

When Novartis scientists published a paper in July 2024 for one of the most promising new classes of drugs, called molecular glue, Chinese drug scouts took notice.

Just four days later, a Chinese microblog published a detailed analysis of the paper and associated patent filings.

It read like a “how-to guide” for Chinese researchers interested in quickly making molecular-glue drugs that could rival those being developed by Novartis and Bristol-Myers Squibb which are among the big Western drugmakers racing to develop the drugs, said Zach Collins, a partner at Mission BioCapital, a U.S.-based venture firm that has closely monitored Chinese drug R&D for potential licensing opportunities.

The post broke down the potential molecules that were the most promising from the patent and which compounds were likely to be further developed. It also laid out how researchers could, with the help of the published work of Western firms, come up with their own drug candidate.

GluBio Therapeutics, a 22-employee company with operations in Shanghai and San Diego, had been working on its own therapies. By poring over the patents from Western companies, the biotech found clues to improve its drug candidates.


Within months, GluBio had made tweaks that produced more powerful and targeted therapies. It attracted interest from Western companies and sold a stake in February to French drugmaker Sanofi.

Molecular glue is a technology that promotes the stickiness of disease-causing proteins, allowing them to be degraded. It promises a way to treat cancers and other diseases that had been considered “undruggable.” The market potential is huge.

GluBio was established in 2021 with funding from Chinese venture capitalists to find molecular-glue drugs. Chief Executive Gang Lu is a native of Shanghai who had gotten a Ph.D. from UCLA, then worked in the U.S. as a scientist and research manager for Western drugmakers including Bristol-Myers.

The startup began working on molecular-glue drugs for sickle-cell disease, among other conditions.

By studying the molecular-glue patents of Bristol-Myers and Novartis, GluBio drew lessons that “helped us further improve our compounds” and clearly differentiate its experimental drugs from Novartis and Bristol-Myers’s, Lu said.

“That’s how we attracted a few drug companies that are developing treatment for SCD to the negotiation table” in 2024, he said.

Sanofi, which has been developing its own sickle-cell treatments, noticed GluBio’s work while scouting for additions to its pipeline.

The French drugmaker liked the prospects for GluBio’s drug candidates, and figured the company could develop them “quickly and well, and with less dollars or euros or yen than it would require somewhere else,” said Monika Vnuk, Sanofi’s global head of partnering and business development.

Sanofi made a $30 million strategic equity investment to support a first round of testing of the two experimental sickle-cell drugs. It was among six license deals and four equity investments the French drugmaker has done with Chinese biotechs in the past two years, Vnuk said.

GluBio’s sickle-cell drug candidates trail rivals from Novartis and Bristol-Myers, but Lu said it could close the gap by doing early-stage research and testing in China. It takes about two to four months to get a clinical trial going in China after seeking regulatory clearance, compared with six to nine months in the U.S.

In China, there are more patients and healthy volunteers who are willing to participate in trials, Lu said, and they can be enrolled more quickly at a single large academic medical center rather than spread out among many different centers.