Flagship

Wildfires warn of climate future

Wildfires in Canada are giving North America’s East Coast a taste of a climate future. By some measures New York has the worst air quality of any city in the world right now. David Wallace-Wells, writing in The New York Times, said that forest fires have already reversed large amounts of the gains in clean air caused by pollution reduction: “Extreme smoke days” have risen 27-fold in a decade, and it’s no longer just the U.S.’s western states that are dealing with it. “People in the green and leafy Northeast” could see smoke-covered Californian cities, he wrote, “and say, that can’t happen here, thank God. On Tuesday, it did.” Wildfires will only get worse for the coming years, and more cities will see days like New York’s.

— Watch the latest episode of Semafor’s Agenda series, focusing on how the way America fights wildfires is all wrong.

Uneven US-China thaw

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will reportedly visit China this month. Ties between Washington and Beijing have proceeded unevenly, after a prior Blinken trip was derailed by a Chinese spy balloon crisis. Officials from the two countries have held talks, and U.S. business leaders are visiting China — most recently, Citigroup’s chief executive — but defense officials have not spoken, and their armed forces have had close calls in the past month. “Both sides appear to be probing whether it’s possible to build a more functional and predictable relationship, where both accept the inherently competitive nature of relations and work to manage it,” the China scholar Ryan Hass wrote, concluding that neither believes the “relationship is irredeemably lost.”

Russian forces target dam rescuers

Russian forces are shooting at rescuers trying to save people from the flood zone below the broken Kakhovka dam, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said. The dam collapsed on Tuesday, sending vast amounts of water down the Dnipro River valley. “From the roofs of the flooded houses, people see drowned people floating by,” Zelenskyy told Bild. “When our forces try to get them out, they are shot at by occupiers from a distance.” At least 1,800 people have been evacuated and hundreds of thousands are without water. “I compare it with the Chernobyl disaster,” an expert told the Financial Times: The region’s farmland will be devastated and groundwater polluted.

Putin losing elite support

Russia’s elite is increasingly downbeat about the war in Ukraine, shaking support for President Vladimir Putin’s leadership, Bloomberg reported. “It is really surprising how widespread” the sentiment is that Moscow won’t win, a former Russian government adviser said. The despondency has been fueled in part by the growing web of sanctions against Russia’s wealthy, as well as drone and armed attacks within the country. Though none are reportedly willing to challenge Putin, their concern, coupled with outspoken criticism from Wagner mercenary group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, amounts to a significant threat to Putin’s rule. “When you try to generate a system without politics,” the historian Timothy Snyder wrote recently, “any politics at all feels like a challenge to the legitimacy of the state.”

AI translation set to boom in India

Google will release artificial intelligence tools that can translate more than 100 Indian languages on Android smartphones. It’s also aiming to make its smartphones cheaper, hoping to dominate the huge Indian market, Bloomberg reported. The AI translation tools will work for speech and text, and should “enable every Indian to use the internet as deeply as English users,” according to the head of Google India. AI translation capabilities have transformed in the last few years, driven by the growth of neural networks. AI systems are faster and far cheaper than human translators, and are now arguably just as good.

GOP contenders attack Trump

Mike Pence and Chris Christie launched their campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination with savage attacks on the frontrunner, Donald Trump. Former Vice President Pence said his erstwhile boss “should never be president again” for his backing of the Jan. 6 riots, while Christie called Trump a “lonely, self-consumed, self-serving mirror hog,” comparing him to Voldemort. But Pence admitted he would vote for whoever was nominated. Trump, meanwhile, was told that he was a target of a federal investigation over his mishandling of classified documents, the strongest sign yet that he will face charges over the files found in his Mar-a-Lago residence.

Fintech firm suffers short-seller report

A Nasdaq-listed company that claims to offer agriculture and financial services across Africa saw its share price plummet after a U.S. short seller described it as “an exceptionally obvious scam.” The report by Hindenburg Research — which captured headlines recently with its targeting of India’s Adani conglomerate — immediately went viral in African tech WhatsApp groups and on Twitter for confirming widely held suspicions about Tingo Group. “The company seemed to pop out of nowhere,” claiming staggering reach for a firm few had heard of, Semafor’s Alexander Onukwue wrote. Tingo issued a statement rejecting the Hindenburg report, and scheduled a special shareholder meeting to address its claims.

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Mexico vies for top US flight rating

Mexico’s president met the U.S. transportation secretary to lobby for his country to be returned to Washington’s top aviation safety category. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration downgraded Mexico’s safety level shortly after it built an airport within Mexico City’s mountainous valley, a location widely criticized by experts as badly chosen and in conflict with other regional airports. The new airport is run by the military, which has no previous experience operating commercial flights. The downgrade has meant that no new routes between Mexico — which generated 7.5% of its GDP from tourism in 2021 — and the U.S. can be opened.

Progress for Africa’s biggest wind farm

An Emirati-led consortium secured land in Egypt to build what will become Africa’s biggest wind farm. The Emirati energy company, Masdar, and its partners plan to build the $10 billion, 10-gigawatt plant — enough, when running at full capacity, to power 7 million homes — by 2030. The facility should displace 9% of Egypt’s carbon emissions, and could export power to other parts of the Middle East and Europe. Egypt relies on natural gas and oil for energy, but has pledged to reach 42% renewables by the end of the decade.

Messi joins Beckham in Miami

Lionel Messi, perhaps history’s greatest soccer player, will join the Major League Soccer team Inter Miami. U.S. soccer has a history of aging-superstar signings: Pele, the Brazilian great, joined the North American Soccer League in 1975. Others, including the Netherlands’ Johan Cruyff, followed. The NASL collapsed, but The Athletic notes that the great U.S. soccer players of later years grew up watching it. The MLS gained popularity when England’s David Beckham joined in 2007. As the U.S.’s Latin American population grows, so does soccer’s popularity: Beckham, now co-owner of Inter Miami, will hope Messi, who won the men’s World Cup with Argentina last year, will boost the MLS as he did.

• Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan to appear in court over multiple cases brought against him.
• Thousands of candidates will protest against the postponement of local elections in Sri Lanka after the government said there was no money to pay for the polls.
• People around the world mark World Ocean Day in support of mobilizing ocean and climate action.

Germany, Europe’s largest economy, is running out of workers. For employment just to stay flat, the fast-aging country needs 400,000 newcomers a year. The shortfall and the government’s response is seen by some Germans as akin to climate change: “a slow-motion, abstract disaster that policymakers have seen coming for years,” Bloomberg reported. Despite the retirement age being set at 67 — high by rich-country standards — the labor supply is forecast to shrink by 7% in the next decade, limiting the country’s economic growth to just 1% for the foreseeable future.

A Japanese artist’s illustrations of post-apocalyptic Tokyo have gone on show. Tokyo Genso, a creator of backgrounds for video games and anime, shows nature reclaiming the city in his images, some of which were also turned into a book in 2020. Among the artwork on display: Pools of blue water submerge rail tracks in Shinjuku station, a famed Shibuya department store is covered in vines, and shrubs overtake the upscale Ginza shopping district. “His lush, detailed illustrations play right into our fantasies,” Johnny Waldman wrote in Spoon & Tamago.

• Chris Licht is stepping down as CNN’s chairman and CEO. Ben Smith argued the change at the network is really all about the decline of cable.
• Skepticism towards cryptocurrency has only intensified among lawmakers, but the House is divided on a response and the Senate is losing interest, Joseph Zeballos-Roig reported.
• The AI boom is creating headaches for investors who worry ideas are too easy to copy. But the same things worrying VCs could be good news for consumers, Reed Albergotti explained.