Flagship

Scotland’s Sturgeon to quit

Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s pro-independence first minister, will resign, the BBC reported. She is Scotland’s longest-serving leader, and the first woman to hold the post. The SNP under her leadership held 56 out of 59 Scottish seats in the British Parliament after 2015. But her electoral dominance never translated into decisive support for Scotland’s independence: Sturgeon ran the unsuccessful 2014 independence campaign and has repeatedly promised, but never delivered, another vote to leave the United Kingdom. Her reasons for resigning, and when it would take effect, are so far unknown, although the BBC reported that she had “had enough.”

China hopes for Iran deal

China will “constructively participate” in efforts to revive Iran’s nuclear deal, Chinese leader Xi Jinping said during Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s visit to Beijing. Relations between the two countries had grown tense: Xi’s visit to Saudi Arabia, Iran’s long-time regional rival, angered Tehran, and Iran’s ties with Russia have strengthened markedly since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Despite Xi’s support for the deal — which effectively died in 2018 when the U.S. under Donald Trump withdrew from it — hopes for its revival are slim, with many Western countries alarmed by both Iran’s apparent continuation of its nuclear program and its human rights violations tied to months of anti-government protests.

Air India’s record plane order

Air India will buy 470 planes from Boeing and Airbus, the largest deal in commercial airliner history. It was a clear signal of its plans to become a major global carrier and points to India’s rapid growth as an aviation market. The airline — acquired by Tata in 2022 after years of heavy financial losses — will massive expand its current collection of about 100 planes. Other airlines have also sought to build their fleets after the COVID-19 pandemic, but India’s growth is expected to be faster than anywhere else, with Boeing projecting the country will become the world’s third-biggest aviation market within a decade.

Apple struggles with India move

Apple’s plan to shift iPhone production from China is stumbling. The smartphone giant wants to reduce its supply chain dependence on the country, and has sent engineers and designers to train locals in factories in India. But the Financial Times reported that barely half of the components built at one factory met standards. One engineer bemoaned a missing “sense of urgency,” as well as logistical and regulatory hurdles. But Chinese analysts think India remains the biggest long-term threat to China’s dominance. One, translated in the newsletter Sinification, said India’s huge size and low dependency on China made it a realistic alternative, unlike Vietnam.

Russian exodus gives West intel

At least 500,000 Russians, possibly a million, fled Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, driven by authoritarianism, economic collapse, and conscription, The Washington Post reported. Most ended up in neighboring countries — Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Serbia top the list — while 20,000 reached the United States. It’s an economic disaster for Russia: Emigres are usually educated elites, including 10% of the country’s IT workers. But it has the potential to be an intelligence goldmine for the West. One was apparently a former Russian jet engineer, and has offered the U.S. credible information on Moscow’s most advanced military aircraft, according to Business Insider.

Global shipping costs collapse

Container shipping costs plunged in the last year as inflation slowed consumer spending. The widespread bottlenecks at ports — at one point last year more than 100 ships were waiting to dock at the Los Angeles port — have also largely dissipated, the Financial Times reported. As a result, shipping a 40ft steel container from eastern China to the West Coast of the U.S. now costs $1,444, down from a peak of $9,682 in March last year. According to Deloitte, a consulting firm, demand for goods in the U.S. will slow in 2023 amid high interest rates.

IE joins Clippy on the scrap heap

Microsoft permanently disabled Internet Explorer. It was once by far the most widely used browser in the world — 95% of us accessed the internet through it in 2003. It was born in some controversy, as Microsoft bundled it with Windows to win the late-1990s “browser wars” with Netscape, a move that led to an antitrust case. Later versions developed a reputation for security vulnerabilities and poor performance, and Internet Explorer was overtaken in market share by Chrome and Safari, then superseded by Microsoft’s own Edge. Since 2019 Microsoft has recommended people use something else, and as of Feb. 14, the latest update will simply kill IE altogether for most users.

Study finds Neruda was poisoned

Almost 50 years after his death, a forensic investigation found that Chilean poet Pablo Neruda died by poisoning, his family said in advance of a report expected later today. The long-awaited study by Canadian and Danish experts found poison in the Nobel laureate’s denture. Neruda died aged 69, 12 days after the military coup that felled his close friend, Salvador Allende, and led to Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship. Neruda’s family long rejected the official cause of death — stomach cancer — giving credence instead to claims that the poet was murdered by Pinochet’s regime. A government statement previously found that it was “highly probable” that Neruda was killed.

Solar panels for a lunar colony

Jeff Bezos’s rocket company says it can turn moon dust into solar panels. Blue Origin can now extract silicon, iron, and other elements from regolith — moon rock — in a major breakthrough, according to its blog post. An automated system takes regolith-like rocks, heats them up, and passes a current through, separating the stones into their constituent elements. “We have pioneered the technology and demonstrated all the steps,” the company said. The process even makes oxygen as a byproduct. As Ars Technica pointed out, making solar panels from moon-materials will be necessary for building sustainable lunar colonies, but little technical work had been done before this.

A new solution for cavities

A simple one-off treatment prevents 80% of dental caries, the acid damage to tooth enamel that can lead to cavities, a study found. Tooth decay is the most common chronic childhood disease, especially among low-income groups, and is linked to negative health and quality-of-life outcomes. The U.S. recommends schoolchildren have sealants to prevent caries, but the procedure is complex and expensive, requiring specialist care. The new study found that a simple fluoride varnish was just as effective over two years after treatment. It could be performed by school nurses, saving time and money, improving the dental health of millions more at-risk children.

Ford’s $3.5 billion investment in a U.S. electric-vehicle battery plant is sparking controversy over its China links, Semafor’s Climate & Energy Editor Tim McDonnell writes. Though the American company will operate the mammoth facility, and own it via a subsidiary, it will be licensing battery designs from CATL, a Chinese firm that is the world’s biggest EV battery manufacturer. EV tech has become a sore spot in China-U.S. relations, with Republican lawmakers stepping up scrutiny of whether government money supporting climate tech makes its way to Beijing. Ford’s latest deal illustrates that building EVs in total isolation from Chinese technology and supply chains won’t happen anytime soon.

— For more on the energy transition, subscribe to Semafor’s Net Zero newsletter.

• The Dutch foreign minister opens a two-day summit in the Netherlands about the responsible use of artificial intelligence for military purposes.
• The teenager who killed 10 people in a racially motivated mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, is due to be sentenced. He faces life in prison without parole.
• Netflix’s new golf PGA Tour series Full Swing is released.

A landmark legal change ending sperm and egg donor anonymity in the U.K. will allow donor-conceived adults to find out who their biological parents are. The law changed on 31 March 2005 but essentially comes into effect this year as children born after it was passed turn 18, becoming the first cohort that can request the name, birthdate, and last-known address of their donors. Previously they could only find out small amounts of non-identifying information.

The shift “marks a new era” that reflects changing attitudes towards donor conception in the last three decades, Zeynep Gurtin, a lecturer in women’s health at University College London, wrote in The Guardian. Donor-conceived children now account for one in 170 births in the U.K, their numbers tripling since 2009. “It is only right that donor-conceived people will now, for the first time, have a choice about how much they want to know about their genetic origins and the people who helped to create them,” she said.

A grisly makeover for Pooh bear

A new budget horror film about a beloved children’s book bear capitalizes on the recent lifting of copyright restrictions on many public works. In Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, Pooh no longer pursues honey but human flesh, embarking on a murderous rampage with his best friend Piglet. “I purposefully tried to make our Pooh and Piglet as distinct as I could,” said the director. Tigger, still covered by copyright, is spared the makeover, reported Collider. But Bambi and Peter Pan are set to get a darker reworking by the same filmmaker. The movie hits U.S. theaters today.

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— Tom, Prashant Rao, Preeti Jha, and Jeronimo Gonzalez