Flagship

Dear reader,

We’re writing to let you know that we’re expanding Semafor Flagship.

It has meant a lot to us that, nearly 350 editions in, you are still joining us daily to follow the key news and events insights from trustworthy sources around the world. Your feedback has been invaluable, and Flagship has become a hub of Semafor’s network of global and intelligent news across finance, technology, politics, and more.

We’ve also heard a lot from our readers: Tips, disagreements, sources, and perspectives. We’ve also heard that many readers would like our distilled global news more than once a day. That’s something we hear in particular from readers in Asia, and those who want a sophisticated and nuanced news update in the Asian morning, which is the end of the day in the U.S.

With that in mind, from today, you’ll be receiving a second daily edition of Flagship. The mission remains the same: to keep you informed without overwhelming you, ensuring you are aware of the world while still able to go about your day. We’ll publish it for a globally minded reader waking up in Hong Kong, or finishing work in New York. The news will be global, and we think readers everywhere will appreciate deeper looks into the changes underway in the world’s most populous continent — a behemoth that is home to a superpower as well as fast-growing minnows; a dizzying set of languages, cultures, and religions; and some of the most dynamic populations anywhere on Earth.

We can’t wait to hear what you think. If you’ve got any feedback, just hit reply to this newsletter, or send us an email at flagship@semafor.com. And if you’d prefer to keep receiving just one edition a day, just scroll to the bottom of this newsletter to manage your subscriptions.

Best,
Ben Smith,
Editor-in-Chief

DeSantis ends campaign

Ron DeSantis pulled out of the 2024 U.S. Republican presidential race just ahead of the New Hampshire primary. It’s a remarkable collapse for the Florida governor’s campaign, having been many pundits’ early favorite to take the nomination. But his poll ratings slumped — his campaign “careening from one embarrassment to the next,” The New York Times said in a postmortem — and he lost last week’s Iowa caucuses by 30 percentage points to the front-runner, former President Donald Trump. On Sunday he acknowledged that there is “no clear path to victory,” and endorsed Trump. His withdrawal leaves Nikki Haley as the only remaining challenger to Trump. Of her looming clash with Trump in New Hampshire, she said: “May the best woman win.”

India opens controversial temple

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a Hindu temple at the site of a mosque torn down by Hindu hardliners in 1992. The mosque’s destruction triggered nationwide riots and left around 2,000 people dead, marking a flashpoint in Indian politics that deepened religious tensions. The temple’s opening ends a protracted political and legal battle. It was celebrated by Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist party as a long-held promise finally kept, and by its most extreme supporters as cementing the majority religious group’s dominance in India. Muslims and Indian secularists saw it as the latest evidence of Modi’s sectarianism, “a sign that this is becoming ever more a Hindu-first country,” the Indian historian Ramachandra Guha wrote in Scroll.

Malaria vaccine rollout begins

Cameroon began the world’s first routine malaria vaccination program. The RTS,S vaccine was approved by the World Health Organization in 2021, and was piloted in Kenya, Ghana, and Malawi, leading to a 13% drop in all-cause child mortality despite incomplete coverage and the fact that RTS,S is only modestly effective. Researchers believe that a full rollout could save tens of thousands of lives a year. Malaria kills 600,000 people annually, almost all of them African children: RTS,S was the first vaccine approved for use against it. Its manufacturer can only produce 15 million doses a year, but shortage fears were eased by the approval last year of a new vaccine, R21, which is cheaper and easier to make.

German protests over immigration scandal

German cities saw huge protests against the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. The AfD is second in national polls, but German investigative outlet Correctiv reported on a meeting in Berlin between senior party figures and neo-Nazi influencers in which they discussed mass deportations of “non-assimilated” people and those with “non-German” backgrounds. The news shocked Germany, whose legislature just approved plans to ease the path to citizenship for migrants. More than 300,000 people turned out in protest in cities including Berlin, Hamburg, and Cologne, while demonstrations in Munich had to be ended early because of overcrowding. Chancellor Olaf Scholz thanked the protesters, calling plans for expulsion of non-Germans “an attack against our democracy and in turn on all of us.”

Israel rejects Gaza peace terms

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected Hamas’ terms for a ceasefire in a deal brokered by the U.S., Qatar, and Egypt. The Palestinian militant group demanded a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza before it would release its remaining 130 hostages, an offer Netanyahu said he “reject[ed] outright.” The U.S. insisted it would try to move talks forward, but a national security spokesperson said: “I wish I could tell you that there was a deal imminent” but that there wasn’t. The death toll in Gaza passed 25,000, the Hamas-run health ministry said, in attacks triggered by Oct. 7 attacks on Israel which killed 1,100 people.

Explosions hit oil terminal, market

Ukrainian media said an explosion at a St. Petersburg fuel-export terminal was caused by a drone attack, while Moscow said another blast in Russian-occupied Ukraine killed 27 civilians. The explosion at the Ust-Luga terminal, one of Russia’s key export hubs, caused a large fire and forced the plant to stop work. Kyiv is increasingly targeting Russian energy infrastructure in apparent retaliation for attacks on Ukrainian power supplies in each of the winters of the war so far: Moscow blamed another fire at a depot in south-west Russia on Friday on Ukrainian drones. Meanwhile the blast in a market in Donetsk, in occupied eastern Ukraine, was blamed on Ukrainian shelling, although Kyiv is yet to confirm it.

Japan’s bittersweet moon success

Japan became the fifth country to land a spacecraft on the moon, although its lander’s solar panels are not functioning and the mission may be over prematurely. The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) relied on high-precision navigation systems to put it down within 300 feet of its target, and apparently succeeded, but without solar charge its batteries could only last a few hours. All may not be lost: Sometimes, missions can be salvaged. NASA’s miniature drone Ingenuity, which was feared lost after a power outage two years into its Mars mission, re-established contact with Earth on Saturday, and may be able to undertake its 73rd flight on the red planet. It was originally intended to make just five.

Chinese firm unveils ‘atomic battery’

A Chinese company unveiled an “atomic battery” with a reported 50-year lifespan. The Betavolt BV100 uses a radioactive nickel-63 isotope and new diamond semiconductor technology. It does not provide a great deal of power, but could outlast the life of the tech it is powering: Its manufacturers envisage smartphones that never need charging or drones that can fly continuously. Nickel-63 decays to harmless copper, and Betavolt says that unlike old nuclear batteries, which were dangerous and expensive, its newly developed product would not leak harmful radiation even if damaged or destroyed. The company hopes to release a 10-times-higher-output successor next year.

Four-day week trial expands

The Dominican Republic will become the first Caribbean nation to trial a four-day working week next month, following similar pilots around the world. The six-month experiment will be voluntary for companies and will not entail a pay reduction for those that enroll, Al Jazeera reported. The move comes after positive results emerged from four-day-week pilots in countries including the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. The experiment in some cases was spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic and an argument that longer hours don’t always result in greater productivity. Of the 61 companies that joined the British trial last year, considered the largest such one, 56 extended it and 18 made the switch permanent.

Bigfoot sightings in bear country

Sightings of Bigfoot, the mythical North American primate species, correlate with the population of black bears in an area, a new analysis suggests. Despite the fact that everyone carries a camera now, no Bigfeet have ever been successfully photographed, but still there are regular claimed sightings. A zoologist looked at sightings data in the Pacific Northwest and found that, unsurprisingly, they correlate with human populations — more people means more opportunities for sightings — and with forest cover in the area. But taking those factors into account, the model found that bear populations predicted sightings very well: Every 1,000 bears in a region raised the probability of a sighting by about 4%.

The New Hampshire primary may be imminent, but chaos in Pakistan’s upcoming election takes the top spot in our latest Global Election Hot List. Also major issues: How a “brutal general” has employed TikTok to devastating effect in Indonesia, a transformational citizenship row in Senegal, and growing far-right support in Finland. This year is packed with elections and it can be hard to keep track of them all. That’s why we’re assembling the biggest election stories from around the world into a weekly hot list — informed by in-depth polling, international reporting, and local expertise.

• The president of the European Commission, together with the Croatian and Dutch prime ministers, is due to visit Sarajevo to discuss Bosnia’s path to joining the European Union.
• Liberia’s new President Joseph Boakai is expected to be sworn in.
• Berlin Film Festival directors unveil the lineup for this year’s competition.

Projecting forwards

Should you start a new project? First consider a different problem, says Ethan Mollick, a professor of innovation at Wharton: When should you launch your spaceship in order to get to a nearby star? If you launch right now, it’ll take 12,000 years. But eventually, spaceship drives will improve, and it’ll only take 50. If you want to get there quickly, it makes sense to wait. Similarly, if AI is going to keep improving, it changes the calculation of how we approach work.

Recently Mollick has started two long projects that — had he waited a little — he could have done with ChatGPT within a few hours. He expects it to happen again: It can take a decade to publish an academic paper, for instance, but prediction markets think superhuman AIs could be here sooner than that. “Should you wait?” he asks. You don’t want to put everything off: “Waiting ignores the intrinsic joy of doing things,” and predictions could be wrong. But also, “You don’t want to be the person who set out on a 12,000 year voyage,” he says, “only to be passed by a flurry of rockets launched 11,950 years after your departure.”

Regulators, mount up

In August 2022, the German town of Esslingen tried to organize a summer fête to help struggling businesses after COVID-19 restrictions. They would build temporary huts for restaurants to rent. But planning regulations meant that all the huts had to be built to withstand heavy snowfall — in August. The fête did go ahead, but only with “exorbitant” costs. The Berlin-based journalist Jörg Luyken has several other stories like that. A German government watchdog said in a report that bureaucracy costs “have reached a level that we’ve never seen before.”

Politicians are perfectly aware, says Luyken, “that over-regulation is having a stifling effect on society’s ability to function and adapt.” Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government mentioned cutting bureaucracy 63 times in its latest coalition agreement. But it’s almost impossible to do, thanks to inertia and “a deep-seated German mentality.” Scholz himself, asked why VAT on baby food is higher than on dog food, said that “I don’t think you’ll find anyone who understands the list of VAT exceptions … but I can tell you that all attempts to change it have ended in a massive disaster.”

Agency workers

It’s nice to feel like the master of your own destiny. Not all of us do: It can feel like we’re just reacting to stuff, or going down preset paths. Cate Hall, who has done many cool things — “I was a Supreme Court advocate and the number one female poker player in the world” and started art, perfume, and medicine companies — has a guide to being “more agentic.” That is: having a “manifest determination to make things happen.”

Among the tips: Court rejection. “If you’re only asking for things you get, you’re not aiming high enough.” Relatedly, learn to love “the moat of low status”: When you start learning a new skill, you will be bad at it, and it will be embarrassing, and you have to get over that to the other side. And most importantly: “Don’t work too hard … G​​rinding, even if it temporarily increases output, kills creativity and big picture thinking. Burnout is the ultimate agency-killer.”

A new podcast explores how a Chinese dissident known for his human rights activism became a supporter of former U.S. President Donald Trump. Chen Guangcheng, once imprisoned for fighting against forced abortions under China’s former one-child policy, fled to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing in 2012 and was eventually allowed to leave for America where he has lived ever since. In Dissident At The Doorstep, the podcast-makers ask if Guangcheng, who later became a cheerleader for Trump, changed, or if he was misunderstood from the beginning.

• Media executives are beginning to reckon with the reality that the 2024 U.S. election won’t bring a “Trump bump.”
• The U.S. Supreme Court is about to unleash a major weapon against climate action.
• With no obvious path to victory, Ron DeSantis faced both internal calls and a public push to end his campaign.