Flagship

Moldovans back EU accession

Preliminary results showed that Moldovans narrowly backed a referendum to join the European Union in a vote critics said was marred by Russian influence. Pro-Russian parties, which Moldovan government officials said were behind a vote-buying scheme, had framed the vote as a last opportunity to remain within Russia’s sphere of influence. Chișinău has previously accused Russia of backing a separation of Moldovan regions including Transnistria, where Moscow maintains 1,500 troops. Russia has ramped up its electoral meddling efforts in 2024 — during which roughly half the world’s population will have taken part in elections — with some fearing Moscow could deploy increasingly powerful AI tools to disrupt ballots, including in the US.

Navalnaya will run for Russian president

Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, said she would run for president of Russia once Vladimir Putin has gone. Navalny died in an Arctic penal colony in February: US President Joe Biden said there was “no doubt” Putin had him murdered. Navalnaya, at the launch of her husband’s posthumously released memoir, said she believes there will be a chance to hold free and fair elections in Russia after Putin falls, adding she would stand as a candidate. Opposition to Putin is dangerous: Navalny survived a poisoning in 2020, while several other dissidents have died in suspicious circumstances, both in Russia and worldwide.

Egypt defeats malaria

Egypt was declared malaria-free by the World Health Organization, after nearly a century of work to eradicate the disease in the country. Egypt is the 44th country to be certified, but the wider battle against malaria goes on: The mosquito-borne disease still kills around 600,000 people a year, the large majority of them children in sub-Saharan Africa. Egypt saw 3 million cases a year in the 1940s, and the Aswan Dam’s development in the 1960s created new bodies of standing water for the mosquitoes to breed in, but by 2001 the disease was “firmly under control,” according to the WHO. “The disease that plagued pharaohs now belongs to [Egypt’s] history,” the WHO’s chief said.

China slashes rates

China cut two key interest rates in a bid to boost the country’s flagging economic recovery. The move came shortly after figures showed Beijing may miss its 5% GDP growth forecast for 2024, with the economy last quarter growing at the slowest pace in a year. Experts fear China could fall into a deflationary spiral that would paralyze domestic consumption. Meanwhile exports slowed sharply last month, while house prices fell at the fastest rate in a decade. Even as Beijing looks to kick-start its economy, the US presidential election could prove decisive, with former President Donald Trump proposing tariffs of 60% or higher on Chinese imports should he win.

Trump speeches spark row

Republicans defended former US President Donald Trump’s rhetoric after his opponent Vice President Kamala Harris accused him of “demeaning the office.” In a rally in Pennsylvania over the weekend, Trump called Harris a “shit vice president” and went on a lengthy digression about the size of the late golfer Arnold Palmer’s genitalia, shortly after calling the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol “a day of love.” Harris said “the American people deserve so much better” and that Trump “should never again stand behind the seal of the president.” But senior GOP figures defended Trump: House Speaker Mike Johnson argued that voters would “put the rhetoric aside” and “look at the record of these two candidates.”

Israel’s pyrrhic victories

Israel has devastated Hezbollah, but the group has kept fighting. Three weeks after Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon, its forces face “a flexible enemy [capable of] complex and sometimes deadly operations,” The New York Times reported. Attacks last week killed several Israeli soldiers, and the Israeli prime minister’s house was hit by a drone attack, suggesting that Hezbollah is far from incapacitated. Last week, Israel killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, but that may not have had the desired effect: Sinwar was unpopular with Palestinians, but footage from his last moments, showing him fighting, “has prompted a reappraisal,” The Wall Street Journal noted, suggesting that Israel’s aggressive stance may be popular at home but could reinvigorate Palestinian and regional defiance.

Coca cultivation soars

Coca leaf production in Colombia reached a record high last year. The surge in the cultivation of cocaine’s precursor has fueled a wave of violence across Latin America, with drug cartels vying for control of the region’s valuable trade routes. The spike has emboldened armed guerrillas — who are deeply involved in drug-trafficking — with some threatening the COP16 biodiversity summit that Colombia hosts from today. Meanwhile, the surging supply of cocaine has upended life for many across Latin America, including in Ecuador, where the murder rate grew more than sevenfold in the five years to 2023. “Life has changed completely,” a dentist told Al Jazeera. “I feel fear living in Ecuador.”

Sergio Ermotti, CEO, UBS; Vincent Van Peteghem, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, Belgium; Ali Zaidi, White House Climate Advisor; Lael Brainard, Director, White House National Economic Council; and Amos Hochstein, Senior Advisor to the President for Energy and Investments, White House, will join the Fall Edition of Semafor’s World Economy Summit. Hosted in the Gallup Great Hall and spanning four sessions over two days — Oct. 24 and 25 — Semafor will feature on-the-record interviews on the state of global finance, the future of technology, digital payment infrastructure, and sustainability. RSVP for the World Economy Summit here.

Navajo Code Talker dies

One of the last Navajo Code Talkers, Native Americans who were recruited by the US Marines to use their then-unwritten language to transmit coded messages during World War II, died aged 107. John Kinsel Sr served in the Pacific from 1942 and worked on developing the code, including creating ciphers for words which didn’t exist in the Navajo language, such as “tank” or “aircraft.” He received the Purple Heart after his leg was broken in a Japanese bomb attack. “Were it not for the Navajos,” one officer said during the war, “the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.” The Code Talkers received no public acknowledgment until 1968, when their operation was declassified, but Kinsel and his colleagues were given congressional medals in 2001.

Lost Bram stoker story found

A short story by Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, was rediscovered after 134 years. Gibbet Hill was published seven years before Stoker, an Irishman, began work on the vampire story that would make his name. A fan reading through old archives at Dublin’s national library found a Stoker-bylined story in an 1890 Christmas edition of the Dublin Daily Express: “I was just astounded, flabbergasted,” he told AFP. “[I wondered], am I the only living person who had read it?” The ghost story is “a classic Stoker story [of] good and evil, evil which crops up in exotic and unexplained ways,” the discoverer said.

2004, the dawn of the modern age

We have lived in the future for 20 years, argued The Verge. “The digital world in which we now all live was created” in the year 2004, its editor argued: “Facebook, Gmail, Firefox, Flickr, and Digg all launched,” Google went public, the word “podcast” was coined from a portmanteau of “iPod” (remember those? The iPod Mini was launched in 2004, as well) and “broadcast.” The pioneering (and still dominant) World of Warcraft paved the way for modern massively multiplayer online games. The year also saw Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl halftime show, which didn’t go viral, because there was no real online video system it could go viral on — which inspired three friends to create a platform called YouTube.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin hosts his UAE counterpart for talks in Moscow ahead of a BRICS summit in Russia.
• Indonesia’s new President Prabowo Subianto inaugurates his cabinet ministers.
• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu turns 75.

Slow boring

There are barely two weeks until the US election. They are, laments the political scientist Ben Ansell, going to be boring. Two weeks “of doomscrolling. Of ‘unskewing’ polls you don’t like. Of cursing or cheering Nate Silver. [Two weeks] of essentially nothing changing.” It’s not easy for the media, which relies on a certain horse-race he’s-up-she’s-down narrative, but the fact of the matter is that nothing much has happened in the polls, and nothing much is likely to happen. That is, says Ansell on Political Calculus, the “horrible truth at the heart of the current period of the Presidential race.”

The poll average over the last month has not shifted. All the predictor sites have had Kamala Harris at around 53% to 57% likely to win, for weeks. That is barely better than a coin toss: This is “just a really really uncertain race.” The outcome could be interesting, sure. A systematic polling error in either direction could mean that either candidate could end up winning a landslide, and there have been systematic polling errors in several elections in the last decade or so. But we won’t know until after election day, and no amount of tea-leaf-gazing is going to change that.

Running hot and cold

The world is warming, and heat-related death is becoming more common. But the cold already kills a lot of people. Won’t that decline as the temperatures rise? Which are more common? Will the increase in heat deaths outweigh the drop in cold deaths? The Our World in Data environmental scientist Hannah Ritchie, on her Substack Sustainability by numbers, took at look at the figures to see. She notes that everywhere in the world, there is a “minimum mortality threshold” temperature — the point when death risks are lowest. It’s different in different places: It’s higher in Austin, Texas, than London, because Austin is adapted to the heat and has lots of air conditioning.

As it stands, cold deaths outnumber heat deaths everywhere in the world — not just in colder climates. So in much of the world, the forecast is that deaths will drop as the world warms. But as with so much about climate change, there’s a brutal divide: The poorest countries will systematically be the ones that see increases in deaths, while the richer, and historically more polluting, ones, “might actually ‘benefit’ from higher temperatures” when it comes to death rates. It’s a reminder, Ritchie says, that we need to “stop treating air conditioning as a luxury” — it is going to be a life-saving technology in much of the world.

History lesson

“One of the iron rules about news,” says the political writer Dan Gardner, “is that while something suddenly getting worse is urgent news we feel compelled to hear and pass on, something gradually improving doesn’t feel like news at all.” This is a problem for people who consume the news, because it means the news is systematically biased towards bad things and away from good things. The stock market, say: A chart showing its progress over months or years would show a sawtooth graph, zigging and zagging, but generally going up. “Each steep drop on that line prompted a wave of ‘stocks plunge!’ headlines on the front pages of newspapers and commentaries,” says Gardner. “But the rises that followed them? Few or no headlines.”

The problem is that news so rarely contains history. Not history in the sense of longread detail about how we got where we are, but simple context. Is a 4.2% unemployment rate good or bad? It’d be much easier to understand if we saw a few months or years of historical data alongside it. “Same for crime numbers. Terrorist attacks. Air crashes. And a thousand other stories with readily available data. Give it at least some historical context by showing us the numbers.” (We at Flagship like this idea, because we try to do it already.)

Sunset Blvd. at the St James Theatre, New York. Nicole Scherzinger makes her Broadway debut in this “bold and wildly entertaining revival” of the 1993 musical, and the former Pussycat Doll “blazes” in the role of the has-been silent film icon Norma Desmond, according to the New York Theatre Guide. Buy tickets to Sunset Blvd. here.