Flagship

Markets cheer Trump Treasury pick

Markets reacted with relief to US President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for Treasury secretary. Billionaire hedge fund manager Scott Bessent is a largely conventional candidate for the post and is seen as someone who could moderate some of Trump’s proposals: Bessent supports wielding tariffs as a negotiating tool, but last month described across-the-board duty hikes as “maximalist” positions. “This is good news for Beijing,” one expert said, because it could give China room for trade talks. Bessent, who is especially inspired by the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s economic policies, spent decades studying big-picture geopolitical market moves. “We are going to have to have some kind of a grand global economic reordering,” Bessent said in June. “I’d like to be a part of it.”

Huawei to debut homegrown software

Huawei’s latest smartphone will feature a new, made-in-China operating system — a first for a Chinese company, signaling the country’s tech progress despite US sanctions. Huawei hopes the system can compete with the dominant incumbents, Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, the latter of which powered Huawei’s previous phones. “This is a significant turning point for China, it’s being driven by the fear that the US could cut off everything,” one tech expert said. Huawei has been a focus of the US crackdown on Chinese tech, and will likely remain in Washington’s sights during Donald Trump’s second term, experts said, given his nomination of China hawks to several high-profile posts.

COP29 deal highlights global divisions

India led a group of Global South nations in criticizing COP29’s climate funding deal. New Delhi — which said the agreement to raise $300 billion annually to power developing countries’ green transition is an “optical illusion” — also took the rare step of accusing the conference’s presidency of overriding India’s objection to the deal. “It was perhaps one of the strongest pushbacks I’ve heard from a country at a COP meeting,” Bloomberg’s Akshat Rathi said on his podcast Zero. Nigeria and Bolivia joined India in criticizing the deal, while developed countries cheered the agreement. “The big fight over money re-opened old divisions between rich and poor, with an anger and bitterness I have not seen in years,” the BBC’s environment correspondent wrote.

Adani indictment fallout widens

The US bribery charges against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani could lead to a broader fallout for India’s solar sector. Industry officials are worried that the indictment against Adani, which centers around alleged corruption related to a solar power project, could make financing more difficult through higher scrutiny and interest rates, the Business Standard reported. India’s state-run renewable energy company has paused one upcoming auction, and a French energy firm suspended new investments in Adani’s conglomerate. India’s solar sector is also facing other challenges, putting the country’s ambitious expansion of renewables at risk: Industry leaders are grappling with inadequate government funding and a shortage of skilled workers, Reuters reported.

Bluesky boom worries Chinese media

Chinese state media is reportedly troubled by the latest exodus of X users flocking to Bluesky. State outlets, which put considerable resources into amassing millions of followers on Elon Musk’s social media platform — including by buying ads, deploying bots, and hiring influencers — have recently seen their growth plateau. The growing popularity of Bluesky, which has a largely liberal base and harder-to-manipulate algorithm, has sparked “worried chatter within Chinese state media circles,” a former Xinhua and China Daily employee wrote in his newsletter. He predicted the accounts will migrate to Bluesky, though it may take time. For now, the sector’s focus has shifted back to domestic, Mandarin-language channels and platforms like Bilibili, WeChat, and Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.

Art auction sales struggle

Lackluster fall sales at the three major auction houses pointed to a broader correction in the art market. Autumn sales at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips rose to $3.2 billion in 2022 thanks to a pent-up supply of masterpieces post-pandemic, but sales this November were 60% lower as speculators stepped back, The New York Times reported. While a $6.2 million duct-taped banana drew headlines last week and buyers showed a penchant for surrealism and whimsy, the bigger picture is one of recalibration, with the art market returning to the broadly flat state of the past decade. “It seems like the art market has lost its momentum, its hype, its must-haveness,” one business school professor told The Times.

It’s India vs. China in chess showdown

The World Chess Championship kicked off Monday with questions about the game’s future — and geopolitical narratives — looming over it. Reigning champion Ding Liren of China defeated 18-year-old Indian grandmaster Gukesh Dommaraju in Game 1 of the first ever championship between two Asian players. “It is the two superpowers, India and China, battling it out,” one of the match commentators told NBC News, adding that “India seems to be the new Russia” in chess. But the contest is without its most recognizable figure, five-time champion Magnus Carlsen, who said he has become bored with traditional chess and instead staged a showdown of his own against the No. 2 player in a more “exciting” version of the game, where the pieces are lined up in random order.

Corporate executives have tasked their handlers with the job of transforming them into podcast-friendly figures by seeking out eclectic YouTubers and right-leaning online comic chat show hosts who can spread their message, Semafor’s Max Tani and Ben Smith reported. The shift is an acknowledgement that the public relations business has at times been slow to prepare itself for a world in which mainstream news outlets aren’t the only ones influencing public opinion, they wrote.

Internet resilient after cable damage

The internet seems to be able to route around damage. Two major subsea cables — between Denmark and Germany, and between Sweden and Lithuania — were cut recently. German officials raised concerns about sabotage: A Chinese ship was present both times and was stopped by the Danish navy. But the internet-analysis group RIPE Labs was unable to detect much data loss or internet slowdown, suggesting that the internet was able to find new paths to avoid the damaged cables. “There is plenty of redundancy at the physical level” in the Baltic, RIPE reported, which may explain the finding. But “the scarier part is that… we are blind on what would happen if another link would be severed, or worse, if many are severed.”

Finding rare earths in trash

Around 11 million tons of rare earth elements — vital for use in smartphones, renewable energy sources, and batteries — could be lying around in US landfills. The US imports most of its rare earths, but traces can be found in the 1.9 billion tons of coal ash disposed of by power stations. The concentrations are lower than in geological deposits but have the advantage of being within US borders, and new research suggests that there is eight times more in coal waste than there is in domestic reserves. The difficulty will be extracting the elements economically, Gizmodo reported, but if it can be done, “there’s huge volumes of this stuff all over the country,” one researcher said. Another called it “trash to treasure.”

Energetic electrons hint at cosmic mystery

Astronomers detected the highest-energy electrons and positrons ever recorded on Earth, shedding new light on a century-old mystery. Little is known about the origin of these charged particles, known as cosmic rays, which hit Earth from all directions. Looking at a decade of data collected by the HESS Observatory in the Khomas Highland of Namibia, researchers for the first time found cosmic ray electrons with energy levels up to 40 teraelectronvolts — many times higher than the energy produced by nuclear fusion. The results suggest that the cosmic rays may have been blasted out by one of the most extreme objects in the known universe — an incredibly dense, highly magnetic, collapsed core of a dead star, also known as a pulsar.

Nov 26:

• German Chancellor Olaf Scholz meets Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov in Berlin.
• Crowdstrike reports its third-quarter earnings.
• Standup comic Anthony Jeselnik’s new special, Bones and All, premieres on Netflix.

A soundscape created by Icelandic pop star and climate activist Björk blends the sounds of extinct and endangered animals with the singer’s voice. “The apocalypse has already happened. And how we will act now is essential,” Björk says in Nature Manifesto, which plays to visitors riding the long glass escalator at the side of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Created with French sound research institute Ircam, the vocalizations include orangutans and beluga whales, while some animals, including the Hawaiian crow, can no longer be heard in the wild. On reaching the top floor, visitors experience “the climactic musical event, which we lovingly call the ‘Dolphin Disco,’” a sound artist who worked on the project told NPR.