Flagship

Israel pounds Gaza as aid deal agreed

Israeli air raids pounded Gaza overnight, as doubt persisted over the cause of a deadly blast at a hospital in the region. Experts raised questions over both Hamas’ blaming of an Israeli missile strike and Israel’s insistence that a Palestinian group fired a rocket from a nearby cemetery. “The truth of what happened here last night requires independent, expert investigation,” Britain’s Channel 4 News noted in a widely shared analysis. U.S. President Joe Biden sided with Israel during a brief visit to the country. While there, he embraced victims of this month’s Hamas attack, but also warned that Israel should avoid being “consumed” by anger in response. “After 9/11,” Biden said, “we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”

Still, Biden’s unwavering support for Israel risks relations with U.S. allies. Though the president secured agreement from Israel and Egypt for trucks to be allowed into Gaza carrying much-needed humanitarian aid, Washington also vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution supported by 12 of the body’s 15 members — including several close U.S. partners — calling for a humanitarian pause to the conflict. Gallup polling, meanwhile, showed that most Palestinians had little to no confidence in Biden’s ability to help negotiate a fair peace deal between their leaders and Israel.

Macron backs Kyiv but support faltering

European support for Ukraine will not falter despite Israel’s war with Hamas, French President Emmanuel Macron told his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But concerns are growing that the rush to back Israel is eroding support for Ukraine among developing nations by undermining the West’s criticism of Moscow for breaching international law. “All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost,” one G-7 diplomat told the Financial Times. “They won’t ever listen to us again.” President Joe Biden, back on U.S. soil after visiting the Middle East, will give a rare Oval Office speech tonight on the two crises.

AI leaders call for ‘IPCC for AI’

The founder of DeepMind and the former Google CEO called for “an IPCC for AI” to evaluate the “risks, potential impacts and estimated timelines” of artificial intelligence. Mustafa Suleyman and Eric Schmidt, writing in the Financial Times, said that AI will be as consequential as the internet, but policymakers lack consensus on how to proceed safely. Calls to “just regulate” are simplistic, Schmidt and Suleyman said, but an “independent, expert-led body,” like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, could support government decisions. They praised a forthcoming U.K. government-led AI safety summit. But Meta’s Yann LeCun, who will speak at that summit, railed against “arrogant” regulation of AI research. Companies backing regulation “want regulatory capture under the guise of AI safety,” he told the FT.

DeepMind takes aim at climate change

Google DeepMind wants to solve climate change with artificial intelligence. The AI company’s head of climate Sims Witherspoon said the technology can help prepare for a changing climate, for instance by predicting rainfall patterns, optimizing the efficiency of existing systems, and designing new technologies, such as fusion reactors. Witherspoon told WIRED that she is a “techno-optimist,” who thinks AI is a “transformative tool” for solving the many problems of climate change. The tech venture capitalist Marc Andreessen clearly feels the same way: This week, he published a much-discussed blog post, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” arguing that “there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology.”

Milei to end science funding

Javier Milei, the frontrunner in Argentina’s presidential election on Sunday, said he would shut down the country’s main science agency if elected. The radical libertarian candidate said cutting the National Scientific and Technical Research Council’s $400 million budget would help end the country’s fiscal crisis, and that science investment should come from private rather than public sources. The government body employs 12,000 researchers at 300 institutions in Argentina, which despite its economic struggles has a strong science sector. Cutting science may be a false economy: U.K. government research found that investment in research has a 20% annual return, compared to 5% for investing in the stock market.

The case for Latam bullishness

Latin America is poised for a period of sustained optimism after years of economic malaise and crises, a prominent journal argued. The region’s politics are stabilizing, it could emerge as a renewable-energy powerhouse, its people are embracing the digital economy, and it benefits from geography, Americas Quarterly argued, being at once far from geopolitical hotspots in Ukraine and the Middle East, but close to the United States, which is pushing “near-shoring” of its supply chains. “After a ‘lost decade’ … a new optimism appears to be taking hold,” the publication’s editor-in-chief wrote. Latin America is seeing “the beginnings of a virtuous cycle — not an overwhelmingly positive one, but better than the status quo.”

Treasurys drop to multi-year low

U.S. Treasury yields hit their highest level since 2007 and stock markets fell, driven by geopolitical tensions and worries that inflation would keep interest rates high. European bonds followed that pattern, while stocks in Asia and Europe dropped, too. Gold prices — often seen by investors as a haven asset in times of turmoil — rose to their highest level since July. Another factor in the Treasury selloff: Chinese investors sold the most U.S. bonds and stocks in four years in August, a shift analysts attributed to authorities wanting to pile up dollars in cash to shore up the country’s own currency, which has been weakening.

Bissau’s electricity cut off

The capital of Guinea-Bissau was in darkness for two days after falling $15 million behind on its electricity bill. Karpowership, a Turkish electricity company, has supplied Bissau, a city of 400,000 people, since 2019. The West African country is one of the poorest in the world, and has suffered regular political instability since gaining independence from Portugal in 1974. After a “protracted period of non-payment,” Karpowership cut power early Tuesday, leaving hospitals without water and relying on generators. Much of the city already saw daily four-hour blackouts: The World Bank said in 2020 that Guinea-Bissau’s electricity sector “has been trapped in a downward spiral for decades.” Karpowership restored power late Wednesday after a $6 million partial repayment.

Chinese birth decline closes Irish factory

An Irish baby milk factory will close because of the falling Chinese birth rate. The factory, in County Limerick, is owned by the food multinational Nestlé and makes formula almost exclusively for the Chinese market. Nestlé said the number of births in China halved from 18 million in 2016 to a projected 9 million this year, a decline Beijing is struggling to reverse. China’s domestic formula industry has also grown, hitting demand for imported products. The closure, which will result in the loss of more than 500 jobs, will be completed by early 2026.

Windows 11’s mere 400 million users

More than 400 million devices worldwide run Windows 11, according to leaked internal Microsoft data. As huge as that is, it actually represents a slowdown for Microsoft — Windows 11 is now two years old. By that time, Windows 10 had already been downloaded on its 600 millionth device. The lag is caused by the latest version’s strict hardware requirements, according to The Verge: In order to run its security features, it requires post-2018 processing chips, among other things. Overall, more than a billion devices use Windows, so 70% are yet to update. Microsoft plans to end support for Windows 10 by 2025, but, if the uptake doesn’t speed up, they may need to bump that date.

The Global State of Wellbeing: A Semafor Summit
October 24 | Washington D.C.

This coming Tuesday, Semafor’s editors will be joined by Whole Foods Global Nutrition Program Director Akua Woolbright, Gallup CEO Jon Clifton, Blue Zones CEO Ben Leedle, Jr (and many more), for the definitive conversation on the global state of wellbeing.

Guided by exclusive Gallup research, we’ll dive into what data is telling us about the workplace and community wellbeing, loneliness, anxiety, depression, physical wellbeing, and the role of social connections.

RSVP

• The Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry meets with his British counterpart and the U.N. chief to discuss the Israel-Hamas war.
• The EU’s new Commissioner for Climate Action visits Brasilia on his first stop in preparations for the COP28 climate summit in Dubai later this year.
• The winner of the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for human rights is announced.

The number of people worldwide who own a smartphone, according to industry data. That’s 55% of the global population, up from 52% last year. The number of people using mobile internet, whether via smartphones or older models, is now at 4.6 billion or 57% of people, up from 4.3 billion last year. But a lack of infrastructure, a lack of digital skills, and a lack of relevant local-language internet content still keeps the remaining 3.4 billion people — disproportionately poor, less educated, and female — unconnected, and thus cut off from an ever-growing share of the global economy.

The new season of Lupin, about a French high-class thief, won rave reviews and topped Netflix’s charts for non-English TV shows. The third series features Omar Sy’s character Assane Diop returning to Paris from a hideout in Marseille to meet with his estranged wife. “The season’s hour-long premiere episode is practically pitch-perfect,” IGN gushed in a review, adding that the show “remains largely enjoyable from start to finish, thanks in large part to its not-so-secret weapon: Sy’s debonair performance.”

• A sector responsible for around a quarter of energy-related carbon emissions could drastically reduce its footprint with well-known, inexpensive, and easily deployable solutions. So why doesn’t it?
• Israeli and American intelligence are tracking the movements of Iranian diplomats and military officers, fearing that Tehran could spur its network of proxies and allies to support Hamas in a coordinated war against Israel.
• KKR owes $2.5 billion to Goldman Sachs’ richest clients, a tab that stems from an unusual provision in a 2021 deal and that is only getting bigger.