Flagship

Trump wins but underperforms

Donald Trump dominated Super Tuesday but was denied a clean sweep by Nikki Haley’s victory in Vermont. The former U.S. president has an all-but-insurmountable lead in delegates for the Republican presidential nomination, although he will need to wait to declare victory. But there are concerns for the Trump campaign: While in 2016, Trump exceeded pollsters’ expectations, this time around he has underperformed in every big primary. In Vermont, he was expected to win by 30 points, but lost; in Virginia, his predicted 45-point lead was cut to below 30. In 2016, pollsters talked about a “secret Trump voter,” the Financial Times’ U.S. managing editor said, but this time around, “there appears to be a ‘secret non-Trump voter’ wandering the countryside.”

US braces for 2024 meddling

Foreign adversaries will seek to take advantage of the divided U.S. political landscape, Democratic and Republican politicians said. “Our foreign adversaries are more motivated than ever to try and interfere in our elections,” the 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton told Semafor’s Morgan Chalfant. Russia is at the top of the intelligence community’s list of major threats, along with China and Iran, while Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela and other nations could also dive in. “I think the Chinese are trying to get better at it, I think the Iranians have dabbled in it, and it’s not something that costs a lot of money, so you can imagine more and more nations are going to be engaged in that,” said Sen. Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Hack or be hacked: We’ll be tracking elections around the world at the Semafor Global Election Hub, which launched this week.

EU tries to boost defense industry

The EU’s executive body proposed that member states be required to spend at least half their defense budget within Europe in a move to reduce reliance on U.S. weapons. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, almost 80% of EU states’ military spending has been spent outside the EU, with more than 60% going to the U.S. alone. The move comes as experts have called on France and Germany, Europe’s biggest economies, to ramp up their support for Kyiv. “At a time of multiplying security challenges, the overwhelming message from Europe has been one of disarray and fecklessness,” a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution wrote in the Financial Times. The EU Commission proposal also included a $1.6 billion spending package to boost Europe’s arms industry, an amount one of the commissioners acknowledged was “not a lot.”

Facial recognition at Navalny funeral

The Kremlin likely used facial recognition technology to identify and detain attendees of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny’s funeral. The Russian press monitor OVD-Info said 400 people have been detained at protests across Russia, including at least five funeral attendees. An OVD-Info spokesman said security forces installed several new surveillance cameras around the church and cemetery ahead of the service last week. A Reuters investigation found that facial recognition technology has played a role in hundreds of arrests since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as Moscow increasingly centralizes its surveillance system. Despite the repression, hundreds of people continue to visit Navalny’s grave.

OpenAI airs Musk’s dirty laundry

OpenAI released emails showing Elon Musk encouraging it to drop its open-source, non-profit stance in order to compete with rival Google. Musk launched a lawsuit against OpenAI last week, saying it should “be renamed ‘super closed source for maximum profit AI.’” But in emails he suggested “a for-profit pivot,” because building true artificial general intelligence would be expensive in “compute horsepower,” and said a fully open approach would help rivals. Both Google and OpenAI, though, may have fallen behind a third rival, Anthropic, whose newly released Claude 3 model surprised researchers by realizing it was being tested, demonstrating something like self-awareness. Claude also became the first AI to score above 100 on a modified Mensa IQ test.

Hunger grows in Argentina

Demand for soup kitchens in Argentina is soaring as the country’s poverty rate topped 57%, a 20-year high. Despite being one of the biggest food producers in the world, more than 10% of the country’s population — many of them children — are struggling to get enough to eat. The taste of meat, once a staple, is a “distant memory” for many, wrote a journalist in Foreign Policy. Even as President Javier Milei’s austerity program has been welcomed by international financial institutions, for most citizens it “has been devastating,” the journalist added. “The world’s granary is going hungry,” prominent Argentine writer Martín Caparrós wrote in El País. “And the government is doing nothing about it.”

Senegalese migrants turn to US

The number of Senegalese migrants reaching the U.S. grew more than tenfold in 2023, a surge driven by the route going viral on social media. Although West African migrants have historically turned to Europe, tens of thousands have arrived at the U.S. border in recent years, a move that seems to hinge “largely on social media posts and the spread of the route there,” the Associated Press reported. Meanwhile Nicaragua has eased travel restrictions in response to sanctions from Washington, giving migrants visa-free entry that they then use to travel onwards to the U.S. by land via Mexico. “In Senegal, it’s all over the streets — everyone’s talking about Nicaragua, Nicaragua, Nicaragua,” a migrant who paid about $10,000 for the journey told the AP.

Ozempic prevents kidney deaths

Ozempic reduced the risk of kidney disease progression in diabetes patients, boosting evidence that the drug has wider health benefits. Novo Nordisk, the drug’s manufacturer, said initial results showed those given Ozempic were 24% less likely to die of kidney or cardiovascular complications than those given placebo. Last year another trial showed a 20% reduction in heart attacks and stroke among patients given Wegovy, the higher-dose Ozempic injection intended for weight loss. The popularity of the drug has made Danish firm Novo Nordisk the most valuable company in Europe: Denmark’s economy avoided a contraction in 2023 primarily thanks to Novo Nordisk’s rapid growth.

Hope for pancreatic cancer treatment

Scientists found a candidate drug that could disable the mutation behind most pancreatic cancers. Pancreatic cancer is extremely deadly, with fewer than 10% of patients surviving five years after diagnosis, and that has changed little even as progress has been rapid in fighting other cancers. More than half of cases are caused by a mutation that creates a particular rogue protein. The new drug molecule permanently binds to the faulty bit of that protein, and was shown to stop tumor growth in lab-grown cancer cells and an animal model without attacking healthy proteins. Researchers hope new therapies using the molecule could be in trials within two years, rare good news in the fight against a stubborn form of the disease.

Western liquor struggles in China

Despite hundreds of millions of dollars in investments, Western liquor companies have yet to gain a foothold in China. Last year, Western spirits made up just 3% of China’s spirits market — the biggest in the world — which is largely dominated by baijiu, a local liquor distilled from wheat or rice. Sales of the tipple in China amounted to $167 billion in 2023, more than twice the U.K.’s total spending on liquor. However Western brands remain undeterred, with Chinese demand for whisky expected to boom in the coming years: “There is so much room to grow,” the managing director for Greater China of Johnnie Walker-maker Diageo said.

• German train drivers go on strike.
• Indian farmers are expected to escalate their protests by entering New Delhi.
• Supersex, a series inspired by the Italian adult-movie star Rocco Siffredi, is released on Netflix.

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The number of independent record shops in the U.K., up 122 in the last 10 years. Physical music sales have been falling for years as streaming grows — 84% of the value of the British music market is streaming — but specialist and independent music stores have found a niche, as vinyl records become collectible. Vinyl record sales increased for the 16th year in a row in the U.K., while 2023 was the 17th consecutive year of growth for vinyl in the U.S.

Surrender by Bono was named Audiobook of the Year at the Audie Awards. In this memoir, the U2 frontman takes listeners back to his early days in Dublin, chronicles the Irish rock band’s unlikely rise to fame, and reflects on 20-plus years of activism. The book’s subtitle, 40 Songs, One Story, is a nod to its 40 chapters, each named after a U2 song. It’s “a great novel in memoir’s clothing,” said MSNBC’s Mike Barnicle. “Bono is a poet, a priest, a romantic, a realist. We meet a man of faith who is also a soldier marching in the direction of success.”

• FBI hunts for suspected Iranian assassin targeting Trump-era officials.
• France becomes the first country to enshrine abortion rights in its constitution.
• The EU hits Apple with a $1.9B antitrust fine.