General Min Aung Hlaing, the head of Myanmar’s junta, appealed for international assistance to deal with the aftermath of a 7.7-magnitude earthquake that struck on Friday. The regime said that blood was in short supply and that the death toll had breached 1,000. America, ASEAN, China and the EU are among those pledging assistance. In neighbouring Thailand authorities declared a state of emergency in Bangkok, where at least ten people died and scores are trapped under rubble.
American stocks tumbled amid mounting concerns that Donald Trump’s tariffs could stoke inflation. The Dow dropped by over 700 points, or 1.7%, when markets closed on Friday; the S&P fell by 2%. Earlier the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge, the core personal consumption expenditures price index, rose by 0.4% month on month in February, the biggest jump in a year.
One of Elon Musk’s companies, xAI, bought another, X, for $33bn. Mr Musk said the deal to join together the artificial-intelligence lab and social-media platform would lead to the combining of “data, models, compute, distribution and talent”. xAI is among the most valuable parts of Mr Musk’s harried empire.
America’s vice-president said Greenland would be “much more secure” if it chose to “partner” with America. During a visit on Friday J.D. Vance said Donald Trump believed the semi-autonomous Danish territory to be important to American security, and that Denmark had failed to keep it safe from Russia and China. Unlike his boss, Mr Vance played down the prospect of acquiring the island by force.
The Trump administration asked America’s Supreme Court to allow it to deport alleged gang members using the Alien Enemies Act, an eighteenth-century law. Lower courts have ordered the government to halt such deportations. The administration argues that the pause infringes the president’s power and jeopardises “delicate national-security operations”. It has not disclosed evidence that the deportees are gang members.
Novo Nordisk, a Danish drugmaker, will license an experimental obesity drug from Lexicon Pharmaceuticals, an American biotech firm, in a deal worth up to $1bn. It will gain global rights to develop and sell the oral treatment. The move follows Novo’s $2bn deal for a Chinese weight-loss drug earlier this week. Lexicon’s shares doubled after the announcement.
The former boss of Frank was convicted in a New York federal court for defrauding JPMorgan, a bank. In 2021 Charlie Javice sold the platform, which helped Americans apply for student financial aid, to JPMorgan for $175m. She was charged with faking a customer list that dramatically inflated the start-up’s client base. She could face decades in prison.
Word of the week: Hatarakanai ojisan, a Japanese term meaning “older men who don’t work”, used by younger employees to describe senior colleagues who contribute little. Read the full story.
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Correction: A previous edition of the World in Brief incorrectly stated that J.D. Vance would arrive in Greenland’s capital during a visit to the island. Sorry.