Flagship

Blinken returns to Middle East

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was due in the Middle East as Washington upped efforts to prevent Israel’s offensive in Gaza spiraling into a wider regional conflict. The White House is preparing for a protracted, multi-front war, Politico reported, drafting plans to hit Iran-backed Houthi militants who have been menacing shipping routes in the Red Sea, as well as Tehran-supported militias in Iraq and Syria. Both theaters of combat show little sign of cooling: India sent a warship to respond to an apparent hijacking off the coast of Somalia, while the U.S. said it carried out a strike that killed a militia leader in Iraq.

Israel, meanwhile, outlined its plan for Gaza following the war, insisting it wanted a “Palestinian entity” to govern the enclave, but noting that its assault would continue for “as long as is deemed necessary.” Yet as The Washington Post noted, “Israeli calls for Gaza’s ethnic cleansing are only getting louder,” with proposals by ministers for the mass resettling of Palestinians included in a genocide case filed by South Africa against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

Tech giants step up AI monetization

OpenAI will launch its GPT “app store” next week. Users will be able to make and sell artificial-intelligence agents powered by the GPT-4 large language model behind ChatGPT: The store was supposed to launch in November but OpenAI’s schedule was disrupted by the firing and rehiring of CEO Sam Altman. At the same time, Google is getting ready to announce a premium, paid version of its own chatbot, Bard. A Google developer shared a screenshot of “Bard Advanced,” powered by the tech giant’s latest LLM Gemini Ultra, expected to be available to users of Google’s paid tier Google One. After the last couple of years of excitement over progress in AI, the industry leaders are moving toward monetization.

Google eats cookies

Google took a step towards killing cookies. The tiny text files stored by your browser every time you visit a website let those sites remember your shopping cart or login details, but also reveal lots of personal information. On Thursday, Google ended cookies for 1% of users of its Chrome browser — 30 million people — with the plan to end them for everyone by the end of the year. Since Chrome is the world’s most popular browser, the move will all but kill the use of cookies, which advertisers rely on to choose which ads to display. The Wall Street Journal reported that the advertising industry “is nowhere near ready” for the transition, imperiling a major source of revenue for many businesses.

Trump got $7.8M from foreign states

Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s businesses took at least $7.8 million from foreign governments during his presidency, mostly from China. The Constitution bars gifts “of any kind whatsoever” from foreign governments to federal officers without congressional approval. Democrats said the findings showed the hypocrisy of Republican efforts to impeach President Joe Biden. Nonetheless, Republican lawmakers continued to endorse Trump. Biden, meanwhile, will use the anniversary of the Jan. 6 riots tomorrow to frame his expected rematch with Trump in November’s presidential election as one in which the incumbent is standing against “an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs in our democracy.”

HK IPO slowdown showcases decline

A sharp slowdown in initial public offerings in Hong Kong spotlights the city’s decline among global financial centers. New listings last year raised $5.9 billion, the lowest figure in more than 20 years, The Wall Street Journal reported, pointing to a prolonged stock-market slump and an exodus of foreign investors driven in part by a regulatory crackdown in China. The decline marks a sharp contrast for Hong Kong, which in recent years had sought to challenge New York as a global IPO hub. Instead, it was overtaken last year by Mumbai in the number of new listings and, in November, the Indian stock exchange for the first time reported an overall market capitalization larger than Hong Kong’s.

N. Korea fires artillery near South

North Korea fired artillery near a disputed border with South Korea, sharply raising tensions between the two countries soon after Seoul completed a week of live-fire drills with the United States. The shelling did not cause any damage, but spurred South Korea to conduct a similar exercise in response, cancel some ferry services, and urge residents of two nearby islands to seek shelter. Analysts say relations between the two Koreas are near their worst in decades, and Western anger towards Pyongyang is growing for its actions beyond East Asia: The U.S. said yesterday that North Korea-supplied ballistic missiles were used by Russia in two recent attacks on Ukraine.

IMF and Argentina near deal

International Monetary Fund officials were due in Buenos Aires today with Argentina reportedly nearing a deal with the lender to unlock new funding. The country’s new, libertarian President Javier Milei has outlined hefty spending cuts and other measures to tackle triple-digit inflation and a deep deficit, but was dealt a blow this week when a court suspended a loosening of labor rights he brought in by decree. The legal hurdles point to Milei’s challenge of winning over both creditors who see spending cuts as painful but necessary and a population fearful of what the changes portend. “The government has shown commitment to its reforms,” one researcher told El País. “It must also demonstrate that the policies are sustainable.”

January 14-19, 2024 | Switzerland

Semafor will be on the ground at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, covering what’s happening on the main stages and lifting the curtain on what’s happening behind them.

Sign up to receive our pop-up newsletter: Semafor Davos (and if you’re flying to Zurich let us know so we can invite you to one of Semafor’s private convenings).

Oscar Pistorius freed from jail

Oscar Pistorius, the former Paralympic champion jailed in 2014 for the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, was released on bail. The South African, known as the “blade runner” for his speed on two specially designed prosthetic legs, shot Steenkamp multiple times through a bathroom door: He claimed he mistook her for an intruder, an argument initially accepted by the court who convicted him of “culpable homicide,” equivalent to manslaughter. A year later, that conviction was overturned and he was found guilty of murder. Pistorius will remain under parole until 2029, is required to stop drinking alcohol, and attend therapy for anger management and gender-based violence issues. Steenkamp’s mother said: “We, who remain behind, are the ones serving a life sentence.”

French supermarket drops Pepsi

The French supermarket Carrefour dropped PepsiCo products — including Pepsi, 7Up, and Lay’s chips — after what it called “unacceptable” price increases. It’s not the first European retailer to drop major brands: Belgium’s Colruyt supermarket chain dropped Mondelez products, including Milka chocolate, Philadelphia cheese, and Oreo biscuits last May, and Carrefour itself began putting stickers warning of “shrinkflation” on products that may cost the same, but have been shrunk in size. The French government is keen to fight inflation and cost-of-living increases, and its finance minister has threatened to claw back food companies’ “undue” profits if they did not pass on lower costs, but recent data showed the rate of inflation continued to rise.

Poppins’ Mrs Banks dies age 100

Glynis Johns, the actress best known as Mrs Winifred Banks in Mary Poppins, died aged 100. Johns, born in South Africa to Welsh parents, was in showbusiness for more than 60 years, between appearing at London’s Garrick Theatre in 1935 and in 1999’s Superstar featuring Will Ferrell. Although modern audiences know her for Poppins, her greatest role was in Stephen Sondheim’s stage musical A Little Night Music, in which she sang “Send in the Clowns,” her voice like “a rumpled bed,” according to Sondheim. The song was “just perfect, the simplest thing he has ever written,” said Johns: “I couldn’t stop the tears rolling down my cheeks.” She won a Tony award for the role.

Each Friday, we’ll tell you what a great independent bookstore suggests you read.

The Wellfield Bookshop, an independent store in Cardiff, Wales, recommends Love Story, With Murders by Harry Bingham: A noir-ish crime novel set in Cardiff itself, the sequel to Bingham’s Talking to the Dead, which introduced its star, Detective Fiona Griffiths. Wellfield, which has been family-run since 1982, says the book is “flying off the shelves.” Buy it from Wellfield or your local bookstore.

• Tokyo’s Toyosu fish market, the world’s largest, holds the new year’s first tuna auction.
• India’s first mission to study the sun, Aditya-L1, enters its final orbit on Saturday.
• The 40th Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival opens in northern China.

The number of people who may have lived in what is now the Indian Ocean off northwestern Australia. The Northwest Shelf is now up to 600 feet under water, but in the last Ice Age, when sea levels were lower, it was a low plateau. Newly released sonar data found that the area would have contained an inland sea and a large lake, ideal for human habitation, rather than a barren wasteland as previously thought. Around 14,000 years ago, as the ice caps melted, sea levels began to rise about 15 feet a century and the Northwest Shelf was submerged. “This is a lost landscape that people were using,” one researcher told New Scientist.

Hunt for Blackbeard, a game that recreates the 1718 fight to capture the legendary pirate Blackbeard, is one of 2024’s most-anticipated board games. The two-player game pits the pirate-hunter Robert Maynard, a British naval officer, against Blackbeard, one of the best-known buccaneers of the so-called Golden Age of piracy. Its publisher, Fort Circle Games, was behind last year’s successful Votes for Women. Polygon described the upcoming release as “dramatic and memorable and a very playable historical simulation.”

• Republicans deliver a show of unity at the border — for now.
• Defense tech is having a moment in Silicon Valley.
• Nikki Haley’s next challenge: managing expectations.