Flagship

COP29 finance deal in doubt

Negotiators at the COP29 climate summit are stalled on how to raise the huge sums necessary to fund developing nations’ energy transition, and the talks risk ending without a deal, Semafor’s climate and energy editor reported from Baku. Developing nations blame richer peers for being responsible for the climate crisis, while wealthy countries say the trillions of dollars being demanded just aren’t there. The amount of money developing countries are asking for is about 1% of global economic output, arguably a small price to pay to protect the planet, but disputes remain over the overall sum itself, as well as the accounting structures of how to raise the figure. “It’s not going well,” one delegate said.

Ukraine escalation fears

Ukraine’s Western allies fear an impending escalation of Russia’s war on the country. The US embassy in Kyiv closed, warning of a “potential significant air attack” on the Ukrainian capital, while the State Department said it was “incredibly concerned” by Moscow’s actions, and European powers accused Russia of “systematically attacking” the continent’s “security architecture.” The alarm bells were sounded a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin approved a change to his country’s nuclear doctrine, lowering the threshold for such a strike — including using it as a response to a conventional military attack. The US, meanwhile, approved the provision of anti-personnel mines to Ukraine to help slow Russia’s territorial advance, a move criticized by anti-landmine groups.

Musk, Trump watch Starship launch

US President-elect Donald Trump joined Elon Musk to watch the latest launch of SpaceX’s Starship rocket. The uncrewed flight was intended to test the reignition of an engine in space and a redesigned heat shield, and was largely successful. Musk campaigned for Trump and has now been appointed to a government role, with growing signs of his power within the incoming president’s orbit: The businessman joined the politician on a call with Google’s CEO, The Information reported, following a similar joint call with Ukraine’s president and a reported meeting with Iran’s UN ambassador. Musk has chafed against federal restrictions which he felt were slowing Starship’s progress and which he hopes the new administration will ease.

Autonomous crop-spraying copters near

A US company wants to launch autonomous crop-spraying and firefighting helicopters next year. The agricultural industry has already embraced drones as ways of applying pesticide and fertilizer, The Associated Press reported, but Rotor Technologies also sees larger unmanned helicopters as a way to carry greater volumes and assist in dousing wildfires or carrying cargo to disaster areas, all dangerous tasks for human pilots. Rotor may find it is flying into a more favorable regulatory environment: The incoming Donald Trump administration, with its close ties to Elon Musk’s Tesla, wants to ease restrictions on autonomous vehicles, although whether that will include aircraft as well as cars is not clear.

US recognizes Venezuela opposition

The US officially recognized Venezuela’s opposition candidate as the country’s president-elect, an effort to ramp up pressure on Caracas following disputed July elections. Western nations had said Edmundo González Urrutia — who fled to Spain in September — won more votes than President Nicolás Maduro, but none named him president-elect. Maduro claimed victory in the vote, which international observers and domestic opponents said was rife with fraud. Further challenges are likely from Washington: US lawmakers this week passed a bill toughening sanctions on Caracas, and President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of state is a Venezuela hawk. Yet it is unclear what impact those efforts will have. In 2019, Trump recognized another opposition leader as Venezuela’s legitimate president, but Maduro held on.

HK’s global ambitions

Hong Kong courted international finance at a conference designed to reestablish its role as a global hub — but top executives mostly voiced caution. Speaking at the summit, the chief executives of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs called for increased transparency from Beijing, with the latter saying investors were staying on the “sidelines.” The city is growing more authoritarian: Judges yesterday jailed 45 pro-democracy activists, and on Wednesday heard testimony from a media magnate facing life in prison. “With stunning speed, the world’s pre-eminent East-meets-West investment hub has become more Chinese,” The Wall Street Journal noted. One notable attendee at the Hong Kong summit was Apollo Global Management’s chief executive, a frontrunner to be US treasury secretary.

VW boss quits amid Trump concerns

Volkswagen’s North America boss stepped down, further denting the giant carmaker’s global expansion hopes. VW’s market share has halved in China and is faltering in Europe: It wants to double its US market share to 10%. But US President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to scrap electric vehicle subsidies and impose tariffs will make that harder, the Financial Times reported. German manufacturing is struggling in general: One company owner told the BBC that the sector was facing “a formidable crash,” hit by energy price hikes, crumbling infrastructure, and competition from China. Across Europe there is a similar story. Official statistics show that industrial production in the eurozone fell 2.2% year-on-year to June, including in all four of the European Union’s biggest economies.

Uganda opposition figure arrested

The head of the UN’s HIV program UNAIDS said her husband Kizza Besigye, a former Ugandan opposition politician, had been kidnapped by the country’s government. Besigye was the personal doctor to now-President Yoweri Museveni in the 1980s, when the latter was a rebel leader. He later became critical of Museveni, running against him in elections four times and speaking up against Uganda’s draconian anti-gay laws. His wife Winnie Byanyima said on X that Besigye was detained during a trip to Kenya and is now “in a military jail in Kampala.” Museveni has arrested several critics and opposition figures during his 38-year rule, although his government has not yet confirmed Byanyima’s claims.

Happy birthday, Google Scholar

Google Scholar, the world’s largest academic search engine, is 20 years old. The tool has “become one of the most important in science,” Nature reported, finding not just papers but book chapters, web documents, and preprints, and often allowing access to the entire paper, not just titles and abstracts. But its dominance may be at risk: Other free tools now do similar things, while artificial intelligence systems can not only search the literature but review and summarize it, which some scientists said had become their go-to. “If there was ever a moment when Google Scholar could be overthrown,” it is now, one told Nature, although because of its size, “it would take a lot to dethrone.”

Soccer’s clash of the non-titans

San Marino, the world’s bottom-ranked international soccer team, won an away game for the first time ever. The country, a tiny enclave in the Italian Alps with a population of 33,000, beat fellow minnows Liechtenstein, an almost equally tiny country of 39,000 between Austria and Switzerland: The two nations could fit their entire combined populations in London’s Wembley Stadium. San Marino are ranked 200th — dead last — in FIFA’s rankings, and had only won two games ever before, both at home, and both against Liechtenstein. Liechtenstein, by contrast, have a comparatively stellar record: They have beaten the titans of Gibraltar, Iceland, Lithuania, Moldova, and Luxembourg, as well as San Marino, in the past.

• A Pakistani court holds a hearing in a graft case against jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan.
• Croatia’s lawmakers are expected to pass a budget for 2025.
• The Country Music Association Awards are held in Nashville.

The number of calculations the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s new El Capitan supercomputer can perform per second. The newly released TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful computers put El Capitan in first place, ahead of Frontier and Aurora, two other US-based supercomputers. When El Capitan was built, its designers hoped it would break 1.5 exaflops (quintillion floating point operations per second) barrier: Its overperformance at 1.742 suggests it will continue to hold the top spot for a while yet.

The Universe in 100 Colors by Tyler Thrasher and Terry Mudge. Inspired by a photograph of an opalized crab claw, the book — by an artist and a designer — “is a vibrant exploration of… color and color perception,” Nautilus said. Buy it from your local bookstore.

Donald Trump may be interested in using steep new tariffs to pay for tax cuts next year, but Republican lawmakers are far from sold, Semafor’s Burgess Everett and Kadia Goba reported.

“I don’t like tariffs, Number One. I think the consumer pays them. So they’re regressive. They’re a sales tax, basically,” Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul told Semafor.