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Good morning and welcome back to FirstFT Asia. In today’s newsletter:
Singapore’s plans for Lee Kuan Yew’s house
Indonesia’s China-backed bullet train derailed by debt
How a warming world is making pregnancy riskier
We start in Singapore, where the government has announced it plans to turn late prime minister Lee Kuan Yew’s former home into a national monument. The decision is the latest chapter in the long-running feud between family members of the city-state’s modern-day founder.
What to know: The fate of the house at 38 Oxley Road is a controversial subject in Singapore, which was transformed from a developing country into one of the world’s richest nations under Lee’s leadership. The late prime minister’s two surviving children have been locked in a dispute for the past decade over whether the colonial-era family home should be razed or turned into a memorial.
Family feud: The family dispute over the property was reignited last year when Lee’s daughter, Lee Wei Ling, died while living in the property. She and her younger brother, Lee Hsien Yang, had long argued that the house should be demolished when she stopped living there, in accordance with their father’s wishes. Opinion polls have shown the majority of Singaporeans also believe the house should be demolished. However, members of Lee’s People’s Action party had argued the property should be preserved because of its historical importance.
Read more about the government’s plans for the property.
Here’s what else we’re keeping tabs on today:
Economic data: South Korea reports October inflation data.
Monetary policy: Australia’s central bank is likely to leave rates unchanged when it makes its monetary policy announcement. (Bloomberg).
Events: The Hong Kong Monetary Authority Global Financial Leaders Investment Summit begins, with speakers including Morgan Stanley chief executive Ted Pick, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and HSBC boss Georges Elhedery.
Results: BP, Mitsubishi, Nintendo, Pfizer, Saudi Aramco and Uber report earnings.
Five more top stories
1. OpenAI has signed a $38bn deal with Amazon Web Services, the latest in a string of agreements struck by the lossmaking start-up. The seven-year deal takes OpenAI’s total recent commitments to close to $1.5tn. It also lessens the ChatGPT maker’s dependence on Microsoft, its biggest backer, for computing power. Here are more details.
More tech news: The US has allowed Microsoft to ship the latest Nvidia chips to the United Arab Emirates for the first time.
State of AI: The first edition of the newsletter series, a collaboration between the FT and MIT Technology Review, looks at the battle for AI supremacy between the US and China. Sign up here.
2. Chinese officials carried out a campaign of intimidation against a UK university to prevent research into alleged human rights violations from being published. Internal emails, seen by the FT, reveal that staff at Sheffield Hallam University raised concerns about publishing research into forced labour in Xinjiang after China blocked access to the university’s websites, limiting its ability to recruit students.
3. Businesses, lawmakers and former US officials are pressing the US Supreme Court to rule against Donald Trump’s use of emergency tariff powers ahead of a showpiece hearing this week. About 40 legal briefs have been filed challenging the signature policy the US president has relied on to wage his trade wars ahead of Wednesday’s hearing.
More US news: Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook has signalled that a December interest rate cut is far from assured, in her first public remarks since Trump attempted to fire her.
4. Israel’s former top military legal officer has been arrested amid a growing scandal around the leak of a surveillance video of the alleged abuse of a Palestinian prisoner in Israel’s notorious Sde Teiman prison. Ex-military advocate general Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi was arrested three days after she resigned from her post. Read the full story.
5. Kimberly-Clark, the maker of Huggies and Andrex, has agreed to buy Tylenol owner Kenvue for $48.7bn, cementing this year as a record one for large takeovers in the US. The transaction, one of the largest in the consumer sector for several years, capped a frantic day of mergers and acquisitions across corporate America.
News in-depth
The Indonesian government is in debt negotiations with China over its $7.3bn “Whoosh” bullet train, as the Beijing-backed high-speed railway racks up losses and risks creating an unmanageable debt burden for Jakarta. The rail link connecting the capital Jakarta with the third-most populous city of Bandung has not proved popular, while the chief executive of the largest Indonesian shareholder described it as a “ticking time bomb”.
We’re also reading . . .
US-China tension: Washington and Beijing are both overconfident of the leverage they hold over one another, writes Sarah Beran.
Joy of analogue: In certain sectors, the physical world still rules as consumers resist and even turn their back on the digital revolution, writes Ruchir Sharma.
‘Mamdani effect’: Miami-based realtors are anticipating wealthy New Yorkers will flee the city for the Sunshine State if the democratic socialist wins today’s mayoral election.
Chart of the day
Some scientists argue that the link between increasing heat and adverse maternal outcomes is quietly becoming a public health emergency. Today’s Big Read looks at how a warming world is making pregnancy riskier.
Take a break from the news . . .
Long associated with politics or the military, the chief of staff position is becoming more important and popular in business. Many in the role say they act as a filter and work behind the scenes to keep operations on course. “We’re the invisible ones,” said Ann Hiatt, who was chief of staff to Eric Schmidt when he was Google’s CEO.
