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Israel gives 1.1 million Gazans 24 hours to evacuate, Europe cracks down on anti-Semitism, and burnt͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌ 
 
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October 13, 2023
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Americas Morning Edition
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The World Today

  1. Evacuate Gaza, says Israel
  2. Europe’s protest clampdown
  3. War threat to economy
  4. China deflation fears
  5. Ecuador starts election rush
  6. Russia faces Olympic ban
  7. Burkina Faso nuclear deal
  8. Climate challenge for hydro
  9. Vesuvius scrolls deciphered
  10. Air ticket tricks don’t work

PLUS: China’s dwindling births, and turning a children’s prison into a hotel.

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1

Israel warns Gaza residents to flee

REUTERS/Violeta Santos Moura

Israel told citizens to evacuate northern Gaza, home to 1.1 million Palestinians, within the next 24 hours “for their safety and protection.” The United Nations said the evacuation order would have “devastating humanitarian consequences,” but Israel said it wanted to minimize harm to civilians in its widely expected ground operation to root out Hamas. The U.S., U.K., and France backed Israel but called for restraint: “Israel has the right to defend itself,” said French President Emmanuel Macron, “but preserving civilian populations is the duty of democracies.” The U.S. defense secretary was the latest in a string of top Western officials to visit Israel to show solidarity, but Washington has been constrained in how much additional materiel and support it can offer because the House of Representatives is still stuck in political gridlock.

Overall, more than 1,300 people died in Israel in the Hamas attack, while 1,500 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli response. Reports from Asia illustrated the global cost: So far, 21 Thai nationals are known to have died in the violence. One wounded survivor who returned to Bangkok on Thursday told Nikkei that Hamas “kept firing into our car” as he tried to escape. Manila confirmed three Filipinos had died, including a nurse who stayed by her elderly patient’s side during the assault, while three Chinese nationals are confirmed dead and two remain missing.

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2

Europe cracks down on Palestinian demos

REUTERS/Sarah Meyssonnier

Several European governments clamped down on pro-Palestinian demonstrations. The moves were designed to battle rising anti-Semitism as a result of the Israel-Hamas conflict, but critics said they unreasonably restricted free speech. French authorities canceled pro-Palestinian rallies, Germany banned a pro-Palestinian group, and Britain’s interior minister said waving a Palestine flag could be an offense. Hamas’s attack and Israel’s response have exposed a schism within the European Union, whose countries and populations are divided over the conflict. That disagreement hides a more painful geopolitical truth, Politico’s chief Europe correspondent wrote: “No one cares what Europe thinks.”

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3

Growing economic fears from conflict

Concerns are growing over the global impact of the Israel-Hamas conflict. Though the wider economic consequences have been limited, experts and officials said that any expansion of the fighting — through the involvement of Hezbollah or Iran, for example — would be calamitous. Bloomberg estimated that Tehran becoming directly involved could send oil prices to $150 a barrel from under $90 now, and slash global growth by a full percentage point. Energy markets “remain on tenterhooks” because the situation is “fraught with uncertainty,” the International Energy Agency warned, while the head of the International Monetary Fund described the conflict as “a new cloud on not the safest horizon for the world economy.”

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4

China teeters near deflation

REUTERS/Aly Song

New data suggested China is on the verge of falling into deflation. Consumer prices were flat year-on-year, below analysts’ expectations, while factory-gate prices suffered a third month of annual declines. Trade also slumped, and the authorities are grappling with mounting concern over the mammoth real-estate sector and huge piles of local government debt. Beijing has so far resisted calls for a broad fiscal stimulus package, but officials are considering forming a stabilization fund to bolster confidence in the stock market, Bloomberg reported. “The deflationary pressure in China is still a real risk to the economy,” one economist told CNBC. “The recovery of domestic demand is not strong, without a significant boost from fiscal support.”

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5

Election season kicks off

REUTERS/Santiago Arcos

A presidential runoff in Ecuador is among votes this weekend kicking off a year of momentous elections worldwide. The vote, which has been marred by violence including the assassination of a candidate, comes alongside parliamentary polls in New Zealand, in which the incumbent Labour Party is projected to lose to a right-wing bloc, and neck-and-neck legislative elections in Poland. In the coming year or so, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Russia, Taiwan, Ukraine, the European Parliament, and possibly the U.K. — along with many others — will hold parliamentary or presidential elections, to say nothing of the U.S. presidential election which, despite campaigning already seeming to be in full swing, remains 13 months away.

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6

Russia hit with Olympics ban

REUTERS/Benoit Tessier/File Photo

The International Olympic Committee suspended the Russian Olympic Committee “with immediate effect.” The decision follows the ROC saying athletes from four Ukrainian territories annexed during Moscow’s invasion could compete under a Russian flag, which the IOC said breached the Olympic Charter. Russian athletes may also be banned from competing as neutrals in Paris next year, although that will be decided “at the appropriate time,” said the IOC. Attention has drifted from the war in Ukraine, but fierce fighting continues: Russian forces intensified their attacks in the east, and launched dozens of explosive drones into Ukraine, some of which Kyiv said hit infrastructure and civilian houses near Odesa.

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7

Burkina Faso to get Russian nuclear plant

Russia will build a nuclear power plant in Burkina Faso. The deal was struck after Burkina Faso’s coup leader-turned-president met Russian President Vladimir Putin in July at a summit in Moscow. Only 20% of Burkina Faso’s citizens have access to electricity, one of the lowest rates in the world, and since last year’s military takeover, its relations with the West, notably its former colonizer France, have become frosty. Russia is seizing an opportunity to increase its influence in the coup-hit Sahel region by offering economic and military support, the BBC reported.

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8

Hydro dams adapt to climate crisis

REUTERS/ Akhtar Soomro

Hydropower dams are struggling to keep pace with a changing climate. Some rivers are running much drier than they used to, while others are seeing more rainfall. It means a number of dams are either unable to provide enough power, or are oversupplied and have to release more water than usual, risking flooding. WIRED reported that some dam operators are adapting by releasing water based not just on how much is in the reservoir but on forecasts of future rainfall, thus smoothing out supply. Nonetheless, hydropower dams are supplying on average 2% less power than they were in 1990. The World Meteorological Organization called this week for improved monitoring of the water cycle, saying it has become increasingly erratic.

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9

Burnt Roman texts deciphered with AI

Vesuvius Challenge

Scrolls burnt by the volcano that destroyed Pompeii have been read for the first time in almost 2,000 years. The papyrus scrolls were discovered in a villa belonging to Julius Caesar’s brother-in-law in a villa in Herculaneum, a smaller town in the Bay of Naples also destroyed by Mount Vesuvius’s eruption in AD 79. They were burnt black and buried in mud: Researchers have been unsuccessfully trying to read them since 1752. A 21-year-old computer scientist created an artificial intelligence technique which was able to read a word — porphyras, “purple” — on one scroll. He won a prize for being first to decipher them, although bigger awards await those who can interpret longer passages. The scrolls are believed to be works of Greek philosophy.

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10

Study says air ticket hunting is futile

REUTERS/Agustin Marcarian/File Photo

Hacks to find the cheapest airline ticket don’t work, new research suggested. Consumers use various tricks — such as their browser’s incognito mode or a virtual private network (VPN) — to find cheap deals. But a study found that airlines are unusual among businesses: They don’t seem to adjust their prices in response to their competitors’, or assume that lowering costs on one flight will reduce demand for another. Instead, they only take into account how changing a ticket’s cost would affect other seats on that flight. The authors of the study said it meant hunting for tricks to find the cheapest tickets are therefore futile, except one: Prices usually go up in the days before a flight.

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Live Journalism

Securing the Digital Future: Cybersecurity in the age of AI
October 17 | Washington D.C.
Join us to explore a clear-eyed approach to the future of cybersecurity, hacks, and cyber defense vs. offense. RSVP here.

The Global State of Wellbeing: A Semafor Summit
October 24 | Washington D.C.
Join us for the definitive conversation on the global state of wellbeing. Led by Semafor’s expert editors and guided by Gallup data, we’ll explore global emotional trends, social connectedness, mental health, and what it means, ultimately, to be well. RSVP here.

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Flagging
  • North European and Baltic leaders meet on the Swedish island of Gotland to discuss security cooperation.
  • Australia will hold a referendum on whether to recognise Indigenous people in the constitution on Saturday.
  • ĂŚjọ̀gbọ̀n, a Nigerian film about four teenagers who find a pouch of diamonds, is released on Netflix.
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Semafor Stat

The number of births in China last year, the lowest figure since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The statistic highlights a worsening demographic crisis in the world’s second most populous nation, where the overall population is both falling and aging at precipitous rates, reducing the total number of workers while loading up government debts to deal with soaring health care costs. The trend also has geopolitical significance: “It is far from obvious that, hegemonically speaking, time is on China’s side,” an expert at the Washington-based Brookings Institution noted.

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Curio
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS/63highland

A former juvenile prison in Japan will be renovated and reopened as a hotel. The red-brick Nara Prison, built at the start of the 20th century, has “an air of castle more than incarceration,” notes Johnny Waldman in his blog Spoon & Tamago, pointing to its archways, onion domes, and gardens. But behind the impressive facade lies a harsher core: Small rooms and heavily bolted doors, which open into hallways with openings down their middle to assist the guards that once patrolled them. “It will be interesting to see how much is preserved and how these interiors will be translated into lodging,” he wrote.

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Hot on Semafor
  • A high-profile memestock CEO sent sexually explicit images and messages in a weeks-long text exchange with a woman who tried to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from him using fake identities.
  • OpenAI has quietly changed its “core values.” The AI startup now says its singular goal is to build “safe, beneficial” artificial general intelligence, noting that anything else is “out of scope.”
  • In the era of the “buff business leader,” some tech workers have turned to a broad class of oral and injectable drugs, treatments, and supplements to improve their health and appearance.
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