Flagship

Trump eyes China hawks

US President-elect Donald Trump doubled down on a hawkish stance toward China with his White House appointments. Relations between the two powers have markedly deteriorated in recent years as Washington has curbed China’s access to cutting-edge technology and complained of Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea. Trump’s choices for his team — he is reportedly eyeing Sen. Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and a former Green Beret for national security adviser — along with his threat of 60% tariffs on Chinese goods suggest ties with Beijing will worsen further. Perhaps expecting as much, China is racing to win over US allies and resolve disputes with Europe.

— For the latest on Trump’s transition, subscribe to Semafor’s daily US politics newsletter. Sign up here.

Mexico mulls retaliatory tariffs

Mexico’s economy minister said his country would consider imposing retaliatory tariffs should US President-elect Donald Trump penalize Mexican imports. In the last days of the campaign, Trump vowed to impose tariffs of as much as 25% on Mexican imports should the US’ southern neighbor fail to crack down on migration and the flow of drugs north. Although the Mexican economy is highly dependent on the US — to which it sends almost 80% of its exports — Washington’s ongoing tensions with Beijing make decoupling from Mexico more difficult. “Unlike in 2016, this moment finds the United States more dependent on Mexico than ever before,” an analyst wrote in Americas Quarterly.

Leaders play long game with Trump

South Korea’s president started practicing golf for the first time since 2016, to prepare for meetings with US President-elect Donald Trump. That drive to succeed is not unusual: Foreign leaders are scrambling to ingratiate themselves with the new administration. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is making the case that defending his country would be good for the US economy, while Canada is deploying senior ministers to promote the two countries’ trading relationship. A former Australian prime minister warned, though, that “suck[ing] up to him” is not the best way to deal with Trump: “You’ve got to be able to demonstrate that a particular course of action is in his interest,” he told The New York Times.

Dem fallout after election sweep

Democrats are locked in a wide-ranging debate over their future direction after a sweeping defeat in the US elections. The party lost the presidency and the Senate, and looks set to fail in its bid to control the House of Representatives, spurring questions over whether its defeat was down to policy choices or a failure to grapple with a cultural shift. Politico described “a party that is badly out of touch with the median voter,” while Axios characterized the battle as between Sen. Bernie Sanders — who said Democrats had “abandoned working-class people” — and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who insisted theirs was the “kitchen table” party. Democrats must now choose their next party chair for another Donald Trump presidency.

Oil and gas victories

A Dutch court handed a major victory to oil giant Shell just as COP29 opened in Azerbaijan, where the global climate summit’s host extolled fossil fuels as a “gift from God.” The court ruling reversed an earlier judgment ordering Shell to reduce its carbon emissions by 45% by 2030, which the company had argued would simply drive customers to other firms without actually lowering overall global emissions. It came as ExxonMobil’s CEO told Semafor in an interview in Baku that rather than focus on cutting fossil fuel use, the world should develop the capability to use oil and gas without emitting greenhouse gasses — an argument that activists and researchers say is flawed because such technologies have not proven effective.

— For the latest from COP29, subscribe to Semafor’s Net Zero newsletter on the energy transition. Sign up here.

Russia’s war spending hits economy

Russia’s economy is overheating thanks to war spending and labor shortages. The country’s central bank has pushed interest rates to 21% to slow galloping inflation — butter prices are up 26% year-on-year, and some shops are locking it away to prevent theft. Unemployment is at a record low, forcing wages and thus prices up. High rates are increasing debt repayments, raising fears of a wave of bankruptcies, according to Meduza. Western sanctions are squeezing Moscow, the Financial Times’ European economics commentator wrote, and while there is guarded optimism in the Kremlin about the accession of US President-elect Donald Trump, he is unlikely to remove those sanctions — his economic policies would, if anything, make Russia’s life harder.

Israel presses on with offensives

Israel’s offensives in the Palestinian Territories and Lebanon showed little sign of slowing. Though the Israeli foreign minister said they were making progress towards a ceasefire in Lebanon, he noted a key stumbling block was the ability to enforce a potential truce with the Lebanese group Hezbollah, while Israel’s defense minister said there would be “no pause” until the country’s war objectives were met. In the meantime, Israeli forces carried out attacks across Lebanon, including in regions far from the two countries’ border. In the Palestinian Territories, aid groups said Israel missed a US deadline to boost humanitarian support to Gaza, while Israel’s finance minister ordered preparations for an annexation of settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Donald Trump’s victory reflects how legacy media is more limited in its reach and influence than ever, Semafor’s Max Tani wrote, after Democratic Sen. John Fetterman told him why he chose to appear on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast. “Critical political media coverage simply did not resonate with a large swath of the electorate,” Max argued.

UN to debate Sudan

The United Nations Security Council will today discuss a resolution to halt Sudan’s civil war and allow for the rapid delivery of aid into the country. The conflict has led to over 150,000 deaths and the displacement of more than 14 million people. Meanwhile famine has taken hold in refugee camps as both parties have prevented humanitarian supplies from getting through over fears that aid trucks could be used to smuggle weapons. The war has paralyzed the Sudanese economy, including tourism, from which the country used to generate a sizable share of its GDP. “Nobody has come here in over a year,” the caretaker of the pyramids at Meroë told the Financial Times. “All is dead here now.”

DeepMind’s protein AI is open-source

The protein-predicting artificial intelligence tool AlphaFold3, which won its developers the chemistry Nobel, is now open-source. Proteins are long chains of small molecules which fold into 3D shapes. For decades scientists have tried to predict the 3D shapes from the 2D sequence of molecules: DeepMind’s AI can do so extremely precisely, speeding up drug discovery and biomedical science. But until now the latest model was only available through DeepMind’s own web server, restricting the work scientists could do and making it hard to reproduce earlier results, since the AI’s code and weights were hidden. AlphaFold now has competition, though: Several companies, including the Chinese giant Baidu, have recently released their own protein-prediction models.

Mystery of Uranus solved

Humanity’s understanding of Uranus may have been skewed for decades because the planet was in the middle of a rare solar storm when Voyager 2 flew past it. The probe’s 1986 visit — the only one by any Earth spacecraft — showed that Uranus lacked a magnetic field, unlike other planets. But reanalysis suggested the magnetosphere was being suppressed by plasma from a freak solar event: “If [Voyager] had arrived a week earlier, we would have had a completely different picture,” an astrophysicist told The New York Times. NASA wants to send another spacecraft to orbit Uranus for the first time and probe its atmosphere. The new analysis shows “how little we know about the planet.”

• A New York Supreme Court judge will rule on US President-elect Donald Trump’s bid to set aside his criminal conviction in a hush money trial.
• The annual conference of the global grain industry begins in Geneva.
• The Martian New Year begins — or began — about 90 minutes before Flagship hit your inbox.

The decline in African elephant populations between 1964 and 2016. Elephants were known to have suffered badly with habitat loss and poaching, but the numbers were difficult to ascertain. A new paper analyzed 53 years of data and found that forest populations were hit particularly hard, down by 90%, while those on the savanna fell 70%. Researchers noted that there were success stories, areas where elephant populations were stable or increasing, especially in large, protected conservation areas.

The Gold Seekers by Augusto Monterroso. “On the surface,” this Guatemalan writer’s “erudite yet concise” 1993 work is a memoir of a bohemian childhood, noted The Paris Review. But in fact it “doesn’t conform to any particular genre,” as Monterroso digresses into “personal archaeology and literary autobiography… literature, film, Central American history, obscure Italian poets, and much more.” Buy The Gold Seekers.