The Biden administration is shoring up its CHIPS Act funding agreements before President-elect Donald Trump takes office on January 20. Trump has previously disparaged the CHIPS Act and called for higher tariffs instead of subsidies to incentivize companies to build semiconductor factories. What would be the future of TSMC under the Trump administration?
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BEVERLY HILLS, California — Musical thriller “Emilia Perez” and historical epic “The Brutalist” led the roster of films nominated on Monday for the 2025 Golden Globes, the Hollywood honors that kick off the movie awards season leading to the Oscars.
“Emilia Perez,” released by Netflix NFLX.O, scored 10 nods and “The Brutalist,” from independent distributor A24, earned seven.
Taking home a Globe can help movies in the race to the Academy Awards in March. Last year’s Hollywood strikes scrambled this year’s release schedule, and awards pundits say there is no clear frontrunner for best picture at the Oscars.
The Globe winners will be chosen by 334 entertainment journalists from 85 countries and will be announced Jan. 5 at a ceremony broadcast live on CBS and streamed on Paramount+.
“Emilia Perez” stars Zoe Saldana as a lawyer who helps a drug cartel leader (Spanish actor Karla Sofía Gascón) fake his death and transition from a man to a woman. Selena Gomez co-stars as the cartel leader’s wife. All three were nominated for by Globes voters for acting honors.
“The Brutalist” stars Adrien Brody in an epic tale of a Hungarian immigrant who flees the horrors of World War Two to rebuild his life in the United States.
Box office smash “Wicked,” adapted from a long-running Broadway play about the witches in “The Wizard of Oz,” landed four nominations.
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BEIJING — China on Monday said it has launched an investigation into U.S. chip maker Nvidia over suspected violations of the country’s anti-monopoly law, in a move that will likely be seen as a retaliatory move against Washington’s recent chip curbs.
The State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) said Nvidia is also suspected of violating commitments it made during its acquisition of Mellanox Technologies Ltd, according to terms outlined in the regulator’s 2020 conditional approval of that deal.
It did not elaborate on how Nvidia might have violated China’s anti-monopoly laws.
Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company’s shares fell 2.2% in premarket trading after the Chinese regulator’s announcement.
The investigation comes after the U.S. last week launched its third crackdown in three years on China’s semiconductor industry, which saw Washington curb exports to 140 companies, including chip equipment makers.
Nvidia has enjoyed booming demand from China, though this has been dented over the past year by U.S. efforts to stop China from acquiring the world’s most advanced chips.
Before the U.S. curbs, Nvidia dominated China’s AI chip market with more than 90 per cent share. However, it currently faces increasing competition from domestic rivals, chief among them being Huawei.
When the U.S. firm made a $6.9 billion bid to acquire Israeli chip designer Mellanox Technologies in 2019 there were concerns that China could block the deal due to U.S.-China trade frictions.
Beijing however later approved the deal in 2020 with multiple conditions for Nvidia and the merged entity’s China operations, including prohibitions on forced product bundling, unreasonable trading terms, purchase restrictions, and discriminatory treatment of customers who buy products separately.
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The results of the 2024 U.S. presidential election rattled the country and sent shockwaves across the world — or were cause for celebration, depending on who you ask. Is it any surprise then that the Merriam-Webster word of the year is “polarization”?
“Polarization means division, but it’s a very specific kind of division,” said Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large, in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press ahead of Monday’s announcement. “Polarization means that we are tending toward the extremes rather than toward the center.”
The election was so divisive, many American voters went to the polls with a feeling that the opposing candidate was an existential threat to the nation. According to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters, about 8 in 10 Kamala Harris voters were very or somewhat concerned that Donald Trump’s views — but not Harris’ — were too extreme, while about 7 in 10 Trump voters felt the same way about Harris — but not Trump.
The Merriam-Webster entry for “polarization” reflects scientific and metaphorical definitions. It’s most commonly used to mean “causing strong disagreement between opposing factions or groupings.”
Merriam-Webster, which logs 100 million pageviews a month on its site, chooses its word of the year based on data, tracking a rise in search and usage.
Last year’s pick was “authentic.” This year’s comes as large swaths of the U.S. struggle to reach consensus on what is real.
“It’s always been important to me that the dictionary serve as a kind of neutral and objective arbiter of meaning for everybody,” Sokolowski said. “It’s a kind of backstop for meaning in an era of fake news, alternative facts, whatever you want to say about the value of a word’s meaning in the culture.”
It’s notable that “polarization” originated in the early 1800s — and not during the Renaissance, as did most words with Latin roots about science, Sokolowski said. He called it a “pretty young word,” in the scheme of the English language. “Polarized is a term that brings intensity to another word,” he continued, most frequently used in the U.S. to describe race relations, politics and ideology.
“The basic job of the dictionary is to tell the truth about words,” the Merriam-Webster editor continued. “We’ve had dictionaries of English for 420 years and it’s only been in the last 20 years or so that we’ve actually known which words people look up.”
“Polarization” extends beyond political connotations. It’s used to highlight fresh cracks and deep rifts alike in pop culture, tech trends and other industries.
All the scrutiny over Taylor Swift’s private jet usage? Polarizing. Beef between rappers Kendrick Lamar and Drake? Polarizing. The International Olympic Committee’s decision to strip American gymnast Jordan Chiles of her bronze medal after the Paris Games? You guessed it: polarizing.
Even lighthearted memes — like those making fun of Australian breakdancer Rachael “Raygun” Gunn’s performance — or the proliferation of look-alike contests, or who counts as a nepo baby proved polarizing.
Paradoxically though, people tend to see eye to eye on the word itself. Sokolowski cited its frequent use among people across the political spectrum, including commentators on Fox News, MSNBC and CNN.
“It’s used by both sides,” he said, “and in a little bit ironic twist to the word, it’s something that actually everyone agrees on.”
Rounding out Merriam-Webster’s top 10 words of 2024:
Demure
TikToker Jools Lebron’s 38-second video describing her workday makeup routine as “very demure, very mindful” lit up the summer with memes. The video has been viewed more than 50 million times, yielding “huge spikes” in lookups, Sokolowski said, and prompting many to learn it means reserved or modest.
Fortnight
Taylor Swift’s song “Fortnight,” featuring rapper Post Malone, undoubtedly spurred many searches for this word, which means two weeks. “Music can still send people to the dictionary,” Sokolowski said.
Totality
The solar eclipse in April inspired awe and much travel. There are tens of millions of people who live along a narrow stretch from Mexico’s Pacific coast to eastern Canada, otherwise known as the path of totality, where locals and travelers gazed skyward to see the moon fully blot out the sun. Generally, the word refers to a sum or aggregate amount — or wholeness.
Resonate
“Texts developed by AI have a disproportionate percentage of use of the word ‘resonate,'” Sokolowski said. This may be because the word, which means to affect or appeal to someone in a personal or emotional way, can add gravitas to writing. But, paradoxically, artificial intelligence “also betrays itself to be a robot because it’s using that word too much.”
Allision
The word was looked up 60 times more often than usual when, in March, a ship crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. “When you have one moving object into a fixed object, that’s an allision, not a collision. You’re showing that one of the two objects struck was not, in fact, in motion,” Sokolowski said.
Weird
This summer on the TV news show “Morning Joe,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz called Republican leaders “weird.” It may have been what launched his national career, landing him as the Democratic vice presidential nominee. Though it’s a word that people typically misspell — is it “ei” or “ie”? — and search for that reason, its rise in use was notable, Sokolowski said.
Cognitive
Whether the word was used to raise questions about President Joe Biden’s debate performance or Trump’s own age, it cropped up often. It refers to conscious intellectual activity — such as thinking, reasoning, or remembering.
Pander
Pander was used widely in political commentary, Sokolowski said. “Conservative news outlets accused Kamala Harris of pandering to different groups, especially young voters, Black voters, gun rights supporters.” Whereas Walz said Trump’s visit to a McDonald’s kitchen pandered to hourly wage workers. It means to say, do, or provide what someone — such as an audience — wants or demands even though it is not “good, proper, reasonable, etc.”
Democracy
In 2003, Merriam-Webster decided to make “democracy” its first word of the year. Since then, the word — which, of course, means a form of government in which the people elect representatives to make decisions, policies and laws — is consistently one of the dictionary’s most looked up. “There’s a poignancy to that, that people are checking up on it,” Sokolowski said. “Maybe the most hopeful thing that the curiosity of the public shows, is that they’re paying attention.”
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Vancouver, British Columbia — Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour” officially ended Sunday in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The nearly two-year-long tour was record-breaking and trend-setting.
It is finally the end of an era for Taylor Swift.
The last show here in Vancouver is the finale of a 149-concert tour that spanned almost two years. It is estimated that it earned around two-billion dollars since the first concert in March 2023.
Each concert lasted about three-and-a-half hours and featured at least 44 songs, divided into 10 parts, or “eras,” of her recording career. The tour stopped in 53 cities on five continents.
For Vancouver residents, the arrival of Swiftmania took over the city and drew comparisons to when the area hosted the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Chris May is the general manager of BC Place Stadium, the venue that hosted the final three Swift concerts.
He said organizing and preparations for these concerts was similar to ceremonies for the Olympics, Paralympics and the 2015 Women’s World Cup of Soccer, which were held in the stadium.
He said 70% of attendees for the final concerts were from outside of the greater Vancouver area.
“That means we have a huge amount of guests that have never been here before. So, you know, it’s working through those realities of ensuring we have enough staffing, enough signage and wayfinding, and people to help to get people where they’re going,” he said.
May said the April 2024 concert for Diljit Dosanjh, which was the biggest Punjabi music concert outside of India, drew more than 50,000 fans. All told, Swift’s three Vancouver concerts drew about 160,000 people.
Jarrett Vaughan, an adjunct professor at the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia, said Swift’s adept use of social media played a crucial role in the tour’s success.
He also said the COVID-19 pandemic played a part for some younger members of her audience.
“I think when we look at the current audience that she has, you know, they were fairly young at that time. They didn’t have the opportunity to attend concerts going through maybe middle school or elementary school, and so for them now, to be able to attend something like this is pretty remarkable,” he said.
Vaughan said the legacy of the Eras Tour will not solely be just Swift’s use of social media, but the positivity she created for her fan base.
Stephanie Burt is an English professor at Harvard College and recently taught a very popular class at the school on Swift.
For her, the secret to Swift’s Eras Tour and her career itself is simple, she is really good at writing songs that are aspirational and relatable.
“We hear the songs, and we hear both someone who’s already like us and someone who we want to be more like and want to be closer to and aspire to be like. That’s a rare gift to extend it that long, and the tour testifies to the persistence of her talent and to her versatility and to her ability to collaborate and organize and plan,” she said.
Vancouver’s tourism office estimates the final dates of Swift’s tour boosted the city’s economy by $112 million.
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