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The geopolitical framing of the week, per France24: David Sacks of the Council on Foreign Relations argues the U.S.–China relationship under Trump is now defined by what he calls "selective silence, transactional prioritization, and carefully managed ambiguity." Sacks' single most quotable line — that "Taiwan doesn't really figure on the agenda" for Washington — is the kind of clarifying statement that will be cited for months. He also warns that allowing Chinese access to certain U.S. capital markets reframes the entire strategic-competition picture. The administration's posture, in Sacks' read, is heavily prioritising trade and investment over the harder security questions Taiwan and the semiconductor supply chain demand. Read the full France24 interview if you cover Asia. The cultural moment of the week comes also from France24, at Cannes: "The Fast and the Furious" marked its 25th anniversary with a midnight festival screening. Vin Diesel walked the red carpet alongside Paul Walker

The geopolitical story worth leading with is the Russia-China relationship. France24 hosted Aleksei Chigadaev, a China-Russia analyst at the New Eurasian Strategies Centre, who pushes back on the convenient Western framing of an anti-Western alliance. Per Chigadaev, the relationship is "highly complex" — marked by asymmetry, strategic necessity, and what he calls "quiet unease." His specific argument: Russia increasingly seeks legitimacy from outside through choreographed Xi Jinping encounters, but the partnership is far from equal. Annual Putin trips to Beijing are now standard, and Chigadaev's framing is that Russia is the supplicant. If you've been reading the relationship as a confident axis, his interview is the corrective. The public-health story with the most immediate stakes is Ebola. France24 spoke with Professor Anne Moore of University College Cork about the latest outbreak linked to the rare Bundibugyo strain. Moore's blunt assessment: while tested vaccines exist for the Za

The most consequential global-health story of the week: France 24 interviewed Anne Moore, Professor of Biochemistry at University College Cork, on the current Ebola outbreak — and the news is worse than the case counts suggest. The outbreak strain is Bundibugyo. Moore's framing: tests and vaccines exist for the Zaire strain but "we don't yet have proof that vaccines work against the current strain," and existing rapid tests were not designed to detect Bundibugyo. Combine that with what Moore describes as "shrinking international funding weakening the global response" — we are "plugging gaps instead of deploying the full countermeasures we could." The structural problem: the WHO and partner network rebuilt for Zaire-strain readiness can't auto-port their counter-protocols to a different strain without months of reagent re-validation. Watch caseload trajectory in DRC + Uganda over next two weeks. The geopolitics piece worth the time: France 24's Oliver Farry with Aleksei Chigadaev of the