Economy

US growth
Trump swung after Norwegian “Operation Gandalf”

During Easter, the worst possible thing happened for Norwegian energy giant Equinor’s US presence, writes Dagens Næringsliv in a report. The Trump administration stopped the construction of the wind farm “Empire Wind” in Brooklyn. Half a billion kronor in running costs went up in smoke every week.

But Equinor was prepared and mobilized in what was internally called “Operation Gandalf”. Among other things, they threatened to sue, contacted congressional politicians from New York and Republicans in Texas, involved top Norwegian politicians and spoke to CEOs of the major investment banks.

In May 2025, Donald Trump swung and allowed the park.

“We have never done this type of work before. There is no doubt about it,” says CEO Anders Opedal about the rescue effort during his first visit to the facility since the crisis.

China's growth
Hairy doll monster from China takes over the world

The Labubu doll has become a global sensation and made Chinese Pop Mart a giant in the toy industry, write the Financial Times and BBC. The doll can be seen in pictures with celebrities such as Rihanna and Dua Lipa. On the secondary market, buyers pay up to triple the price.

One explanation is the "lipstick effect", where consumers cut back on more expensive purchases during economic uncertainty but keep everyday luxuries such as lipstick. The sales are made in so-called "blind boxes", which experts say can lead to gambling addiction among young people.

Since its listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the share has surged 500 percent. Today, its valuation is over $40 billion, which is equivalent to approximately SEK 386 billion, and is higher than Hasbro and Mattel combined.

The development of AI
Linguistics professor sees AI: “The emperor is naked”

AI has nothing to do with intelligence, it’s just about automatic text generation, says linguistics professor Emily Bender in an interview during the “Lunch with FT” vignette. She became famous – and criticized – in AI circles after calling language models “stochastic parrots” in a 2021 research paper, that is, probability-based models that only imitate.

Two of her co-authors, who worked at Google at the time, were fired.

“It feels like people are angry that I’m undermining what they see as the crowning achievement in our field,” she tells the FT, adding:

“The emperor is naked.”

According to Bender, the fact that so many people are convinced that AI is bigger than the internet has to do with commercial incentives. Others are more misguided, she says.

Tariff crisis  Trump's tariff policy
EU summit dismisses report of 10 percent tariffs

EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis dismissed reports that the EU would be ready to accept the US's basic tariffs of 10 percent, writes Bloomberg. He calls them "speculative assumptions that do not reflect the current state of negotiations".

- Our goal is to find a mutually acceptable solution, he says according to the news agency.

Dombrovskis adds that the EU is "making progress" in trade talks with the US ahead of July 9, when Donald Trump's tariff break expires.

On Thursday, sources told Reuters that EU officials have begun to accept that basic tariffs of 10 percent will be the starting point for a trade agreement.