Flagship

Trump allowed to stay on ballot

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled Monday that Donald Trump can remain on states’ primary ballots, overturning a Colorado court’s decision to bar the former president from running again under the Constitution’s insurrection clause. The court’s ruling that states cannot disqualify presidential candidates was a big — if unsurprising — win for Trump on the eve of “Super Tuesday,” when he is likely to dominate primary elections in 15 states, including Colorado, putting more pressure on former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley to drop out. In a sign of Trump’s expected landslide victory, pundits are already debating whether Haley will immediately endorse Trump, and how he’ll work to win over her supporters.

Red Sea cables, reefs threatened

The first ship sunk by a Houthi attack in the Red Sea threatens the environment of the waterway and the internet cables running under it. Three undersea cables in the region were recently damaged, disrupting internet service in India, Pakistan, and parts of East Africa, with some experts attributing the outage to the sinking of the U.K.-owned cargo ship MV Rubymar, The Wall Street Journal reported. It renewed security concerns for the Red Sea’s critical cable infrastructure that facilitates the majority of internet traffic between Europe and East Asia; laying cables has become increasingly dangerous and expensive as the conflict escalates. The Rubymar’s sinking also spilled vast amounts of oil fertilizer, posing an environmental risk to the Red Sea’s extensive coral reefs.

Australia gives funds to ASEAN

Australia will give $42 million to Southeast Asian countries to protect against “provocative and coercive” actions in the South China Sea, a critical trade route that Beijing claims almost entirely. Australia did not name China as the aggressor, but its growing military dominance in the region has been the focus at the ASEAN summit in Melbourne this week. The Philippines urged Beijing “to stop harassing us,” referring to Chinese maneuvers in the contested waters, and its president declared that the country will “never surrender even a square inch” of its maritime territory. However, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said his country would remain friendly with China, a major investor, despite pressure from the U.S. and Europe.

Foreign investment boosts Japan stocks

Japan’s Nikkei index jumped above 40,000 for the first time Monday, after a surge in foreign investment made Tokyo’s stock market the world’s best performing among major indexes this year. At the heart of its resurgence is a series of economic reforms implemented a decade ago by then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that dragged Japan from its “clubby, conservative trading houses into the new Wall Street age,” Semafor’s Liz Hoffman wrote. Some analysts predict Japan will remain one of the top-performing markets through 2030, with one declaring, “The great shareholder return story in Japan has begun.” Meanwhile, positive signs in the economy have fueled hopes that Tokyo may declare an official end to deflation, almost two decades after prices began falling.

France enshrines abortion rights

France became the first country in the world to enshrine abortion rights in its constitution. The change was spurred by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, and marked the first time since 2008 that the French Parliament amended the constitution. It also offered President Emmanuel Macron a chance to bolster his left-wing credentials, while casting his right-leaning opponents as reactionaries if they opposed the move ahead of June’s European Parliament elections, the BBC wrote. France’s move comes at a time “when abortion, once thought to be a widely accepted procedure, is being undermined in a number of democracies, most notably the United States,” Le Monde’s editorial board wrote, noting that more than 80% of the French public supported the change.

FBI hunts for suspected assassin

The FBI is trying to track down an Iranian intelligence operative accused of plotting to assassinate current and former American officials, after years of pledges from Tehran to avenge the 2020 death of Major General Qasem Soleimani, who was killed by a U.S. drone strike. The FBI’s new alert seeking information on Majid Dastjani Farahani follows heightened tensions between Washington and Tehran, and points to how Iran and its allies are operating aggressively on U.S. soil, Semafor’s Jay Solomon reported Monday. U.S. officials told Semafor they believe former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Donald Trump’s special envoy for Iran, Brian Hook, are on Tehran’s hit list, though such an attack would surely cross a red line and lead the U.S. to retaliate directly.

Anthropic releases new AI models

Anthropic released Claude 3, its latest suite of artificial intelligence models. The Amazon- and Google-backed research company claimed that the most powerful model in the family, the subscription-only Opus, outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini on various benchmark tests. Earlier Claude versions had a tendency to refuse to answer even harmless prompts, but the new models are reportedly better at distinguishing between harmful content and inoffensive questions, an issue that has plagued other new AI releases: Gemini caused an uproar by depicting Nazi soldiers and 19th-century U.S. senators as Black. Anthropic believes it has walked that line. Whether that assurance survives the models’ first contact with consumers remains to be seen.

Semafor is partnering with Gallup for an exclusive first look at the 2024 World Happiness Report, and we want to include voices from our readers!

Make a video or a voice memo telling us where you live and what happiness means to you, and email it to eventvideo@semafor.com
More info on the Happiness Report and our partnership here.

India puts AI companies on notice

India warned tech firms to get government permission before deploying “untested AI models” on the internet. Following an outcry from some tech executives, the government clarified Monday that the advisory would not apply to startups, and is only aimed at “significant platforms.” The non-legally binding notice comes a week after Indian officials reprimanded Google’s AI tool, Gemini, for saying that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been characterized as fascist. A senior minister said the advisory points to “the future of regulation,” in a reversal from India’s decision last year not to regulate AI, citing it as an important growth area. India’s AI market is expected to grow 25 to 35% annually, reaching $17 billion by 2027, a recent report estimated.

EU slaps Apple with antitrust fine

The European Union fined Apple $1.9 billion for breaching antitrust laws following a complaint from Spotify. The EU said Monday that Apple prevents app developers from informing iOS users about alternative music subscription services. It’s the first EU fine on Apple, but may not be the last: Big tech companies will have to comply with major changes before a March 6 deadline set by the EU Digital Markets Act. By Thursday, The New York Times noted, Microsoft will no longer force Windows customers to use Bing as a default search tool and iOS users will have access to rival app stores, as tech giants — who have operated with “few rules and limits” so far — scramble to meet the new law’s demands.

Online research papers disappear

More than a quarter of scientific papers are not available online, a serious problem for researchers trying to verify the truth of a claim. A recent study looked at more than 7 million papers with a “digital object identifier,” DOI, a unique fingerprint used to identify research publications. It found that 28% — more than 2 million articles — did not appear online. Earlier research showed that 170 open-access journals disappeared from the internet between 2000 and 2019. But modern academia “relies on the chain of footnotes,” one of the study’s authors told Nature. “If you can’t verify what someone else has said… you’re just trusting to blind faith.” Stringent DOI registration and more awareness among scientists and publishers could help “the long-term sustainability of the research ecosystem.”

From the U.S. to India to South Africa, 2024 will feature major elections affecting over two billion people. To help our readers keep track, we’re debuting our new Global Election Hub, a constantly updated and easily scannable homepage tracking developments in races around the world. Our first edition includes updates on India’s YouTube dissidents, Botswana’s struggling old guard, and a bellwether race for Italy’s Giorgia Meloni. Each country has its own local quirks that we’ll be highlighting, but we’ll also be tracking major trends, like the rise of right-wing populism and the liberal coalitions trying to contain it, that are playing out in places all over the world. We’ll put out a new Global Election Hot List twice a week and regularly update the homepage in the interim, so check back often. And for more info, check out Ben Smith’s introduction to the site.

March 5

• China’s 14th National People’s Congress begins its second annual session in Beijing.
• The European Union unveils its defense strategy, urging the bloc to move into “war economy mode” over the Ukraine war and threats from Russia.
• Drag superstar RuPaul’s memoir The House of Hidden Meanings is released.

A new photography book documents Black American cowboy and rodeo culture. Ivan McClellan’s Eight Seconds features “a mix of portraits and candid, action shots that evidence the range of emotions within a single day of rodeo life,” from Alabama to Los Angeles, Colossal wrote. The introduction is written by Charles Sampson, who in 1982 became the first Black man to win the world championship bull-riding competition. Art celebrating Black Americans’ ties to Western culture is gaining more mainstream attention, “in part because they counteract a White-washed historical narrative,” Colossal noted. The current No. 1 song in the U.S., Beyoncé’s Texas Hold ‘Em, is a banjo-heavy country track that sparked conversations about Black artists’ contributions to the genre.

• How the Times stumbled on a sensitive Israel story.
• Some of Ghana’s looted artifacts will be returned from Britain.