Flagship

US economy posts sturdy growth

The US economy grew at a sturdy pace in the third quarter of 2024, the latest indication that the country has avoided a post-pandemic recession. The annual GDP growth rate of 2.8% accompanied robust consumer spending not seen since early 2023, and could bolster Kamala Harris’ economic message in the final days of the presidential election. Her campaign has doubled down on economic messaging in ads and stump speeches, although this is “often less visible in daily coverage,” Semafor’s David Weigel noted. She’s hammered Donald Trump over his proposals to hike import tariffs, which corporate America is already bracing for: Companies reliant on foreign suppliers are ready to raise prices of products in response to the tariffs if Trump wins, The Washington Post reported.

EU-China tensions rise over EVs

Europe and China escalated their trade war Wednesday after Beijing retaliated against Brussels’ newly imposed duties of up to 45% on Chinese-made electric vehicles. The Chinese government instructed the country’s largest automakers to halt big investments in European countries that supported the higher tariffs, Reuters reported. Beijing appears to be taking a carrot-and-stick approach, indirectly rewarding countries that abstained or voted against the higher EV tariffs. Even as the Chinese companies rethink Europe expansion plans, they have maintained strong global leads in the EV sector: BYD on Wednesday reported that its quarterly sales outpaced Tesla’s for the first time.

OpenAI exec pushes ‘democratic AI’

The next US president should convene a summit on the future of artificial intelligence, similar to the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, a tech policy veteran now working for OpenAI argued. Just like the gathering of 44 countries forged a post-war international monetary system, a US-led AI summit should get nations to agree on building “democratic AI” over “autocratic AI,” Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s vice president of global affairs, told Semafor. Lehane, described by The New Yorker as “Silicon Valley’s top political guru,” said the next administration must work to get countries in parts of the Global South to subscribe to the American vision of AI — which he said centers around “small d” democratic values — rather than China’s.

SE Asia e-commerce landscape changes

E-commerce is booming in Southeast Asia despite very different government approaches toward the industry. In Indonesia, the region’s largest e-commerce market, officials barred social media platforms from processing payments, forcing TikTok to temporarily shut down its popular online shopping feature. To stay afloat, the Chinese-owned company partnered with an Indonesian platform, but the digital marketplace is now much more crowded, frustrating merchants, The New York Times reported. On the other hand, Vietnam’s brick-and-mortar retailers, who own stalls in once-bustling markets, are bemoaning the government’s push to get them onto platforms like TikTok Shop. If vendors refuse to move online, markets “could shut down,” an executive at a Vietnamese e-commerce industry group told Rest of World.

Indian billionaire eyes Bhutan

India’s second-richest man believes the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has the potential to become a global economic hub. Billionaire Gautam Adani, whose conglomerate is rapidly expanding its international infrastructure footprint, is reportedly considering investing in “Gelephu Mindfulness City,” a planned project along Bhutan’s border with India. Adani is in talks to build hydroelectric plants in the township. Bhutan has an ambitious goal of becoming “India’s Hong Kong” — a financial center that offers a gateway to its massive neighbor, The Economist wrote. Bhutan’s king envisions the planned city to have an international airport, and its residents to include “digital nomads, Buddhist pilgrims, crypto entrepreneurs and wealthy expatriates.”

The world’s courts get more political

A Russian court fined Google $20 decillion — that’s 20 with 33 zeros added on — for removing Russian TV channels from YouTube. The largely symbolic penalty, more than the world’s total GDP, shows how courts around the world are becoming more nationalistic, with global companies caught in the crosshairs, Bloomberg reported. “Legal systems are becoming battlegrounds in geopolitical conflicts,” one international lawyer said. Russia has been accused of weaponizing its courts to retaliate against Western sanctions, while some UK courts have issued counter-rulings, ordering Russian judges to halt proceedings. Such legal messiness could start a trend of cases being fought in neutral countries instead, and could influence how — or whether — large companies do business in Russia.

Do away with term ‘global majority’

The term “global majority” is unhelpful and should be retired, a Financial Times columnist argued. Stephen Bush, himself of mixed ethnic heritage, noted that the term coined in the mid-2000s was meant to point out that groups generally considered ethnic minorities actually form a majority of the world’s population. But “it is a very poor fit” for useful classification, because it often “excludes those who are most likely to need help,” he said, pointing to the UK’s “largely ‘white’” Roma community that has the worst health and education outcomes in the country. Being a dark-skinned man in Britain, Bush said, does not make him part of a global group that includes “a Chinese schoolteacher in Shanghai or an Indian bureaucrat in New Delhi.”

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The world celebrates Diwalloween

The world is celebrating Diwali and Halloween concurrently on Thursday. In the US, some Indian Americans are combining the festivals as “Diwalloween,” using aesthetics from both cultures to craft costumes and feasting on Diwali and Halloween treats, The Washington Post reported. The Indian celebration of light over darkness is a consumer juggernaut within India, with festive sales expected to surpass $50 billion across the country. In Japan, meanwhile, one website brought back its Halloween competition for the best “mundane” costume, in a celebration of the ultra-ordinary. Costumes included: “Person standing in line at the security checkpoint of an airport” and “That one coworker who kindly fills the office humidifier with water every morning.”

Scientists work on regrowing the heart

Efforts to regrow heart tissue are gathering pace, raising the possibility of reversing, rather than just slowing, chronic heart disease. Some animals can regenerate damaged heart muscle, but humans die with most of the heart cells they were born with. In heart attacks, muscle cells die and are not replaced. But an experimental drug can encourage cells to multiply and replace dead ones, rebuilding lost tissue. It has so far only been tried in animals, but human trials are scheduled for 2026. If the drug is effective in people with heart disease, it may one day be tried on healthy older people, to see if it can “turn a 70-year-old heart into a 40-year-old heart,” one scientist told The Wall Street Journal.

Animals are regularly boozing

Animals consume more alcohol than previously believed. Researchers found that ethanol occurs naturally, via fermented fruit, in almost every ecosystem, and that a wide range of animals ingest it. Chimps binged on the sap of raffia palms and spider monkeys ate fruit containing up to 2.5% alcohol, the review found. It’s not clear whether they drink for fun: “Tales of inebriated animals abound,” The Guardian reported, including elephants and moose, but alcohol levels were not measured. Also, drunkenness might be hard to spot in animals. Pen-tailed treeshrews apparently display “prodigious ethanol consumption” without showing signs of intoxication, but the scientists concede that it is “unclear how an inebriated treeshrew would behave.”

Oct. 31:

• Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico visits China.
• Amazon releases third-quarter results.
• Season 2 of The Diplomat premieres on Netflix.

A legendary Prague theater that shares its name with — well, us — marks 65 years since its first performance. “Semafor” is Czech for traffic light, and the name also forms an acronym for the different genres in the Semafor theater’s repertoire, including film, poetry, jazz, dance, and puppetry. Co-founder Jiří Suchý is still writing at 93, though he mostly reworks old material, he told Radio Prague International: “Of course it’s nicer to take what’s already been written and maybe rewrite it a little bit, but mainly I do it because I realise that nobody knows that stuff any more.” While this Semafor is only two years old, we hope to still be writing for you in 2087 — maybe even with puppets.

Sustainable aviation fuel is finally having its moment after biofuels company Gevo proved its readiness to start producing large volumes of advanced corn-based jet fuel, wrote Semafor’s Tim McDonnell. This first-of-a-kind breakthrough was hard to get, between high interest rates, inflation, and a turbulent political climate, but a “convergence of the supply and demand side of the equation” drove its success, wrote McDonnell.