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Gaza ceasefire enters its final day, the UAE plans to make fossil-fuel deals at COP28, and New Zeala͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌ 
 
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November 27, 2023
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The World Today

  1. Final day of Gaza ceasefire
  2. COP hosts plan oil deals
  3. Milei scraps dollarization
  4. Drone attacks in Ukraine
  5. China destroys mosques
  6. UAE’s ‘newswashing’ plans
  7. The post-Wagner CAR
  8. Lynch wins Booker Prize
  9. NZ drops smoking ban
  10. How bowling is changing

The London Review of Substacks, and Chinese TV imagines Marx meeting Confucius.

1

Israel-Hamas truce nears end

Israel Defense Forces/Handout via REUTERS

The U.S., Qatar, and Egypt pressed to extend the Israel-Hamas ceasefire as it entered its final day. The militant group has so far handed over 58 hostages, while Israel has released more than 100 jailed Palestinians. The truce could be extended if more hostages are released. But Hamas does not hold all those kept in Gaza, with other militant groups having captured some, while Israel’s military appears ready to restart combat operations. “I can’t see the truce lasting more than a week,” an Israel counterterrorism expert told The Guardian.

The fallout of the war is still reverberating internationally: Among the hostages released were citizens of Russia, Thailand, and the U.S., including a four-year-old girl. The Israel-Hamas war has also “roiled the [White House] more than any other issue” in U.S. President Joe Biden’s tenure, according to The Washington Post, and increasing numbers of Democrats publicly support placing conditions on aid to Israel, our colleagues at Principals report.

— For more on the machinations in Washington, subscribe to Principals, out shortly. Sign up here.

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2

UAE plans oil deals at COP

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The United Arab Emirates plans to use its hosting of the COP28 climate summit to strike fossil-fuel deals. Leaked documents seen by the BBC showed plans to discuss oil and gas sales with 15 countries during the conference, and telling oil-producing nations that there is “no conflict” between extracting oil and reducing climate change. Dr. Sultan al-Jaber, the president of COP28, is also the CEO of the UAE’s state oil company, and the future role of fossil fuels — whether they should be phased “out” or “down” — will be a key debate at the summit, which opens on Thursday.

— For more from COP28, subscribe to Semafor’s Net Zero newsletter. Sign up here.

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3

Milei walks back dollarization

Argentina’s radical libertarian president-elect walked back plans to dollarize the country’s economy, having previously said the currency change was “not negotiable.” The about-face is driven by a need to attract centrist allies in Congress, where Javier Milei’s party holds a minority of seats, in order to govern. It may also reflect that voters “elected him not because they truly believed in his economic program,” an expert wrote on Americas Quarterly, “but because they found the status quo untenable.” Meanwhile former U.S. President Donald Trump, whom Milei has openly voiced admiration for, said he plans to travel to Argentina so the two can meet.

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4

Russia, Ukraine trade attacks

REUTERS/Valentyn Ogirenko

Russia said it intercepted dozens of drones and missiles, including several targeting Moscow. The barrage came a day after Russia launched what Ukraine described as the biggest attack on Kyiv since Moscow’s February 2022 invasion. Ukraine fears a repeat of last winter’s targeting of its energy infrastructure, except this year Kyiv is also grappling with weariness within its own military and among its allies — most importantly the United States — as well as the fallout from a counteroffensive that has not reaped hoped-for gains. “At the end of last year and beginning of this one, there was such euphoria,” Poland’s recently departed ambassador to Kyiv told The Guardian. “Now we see the other extreme.”

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5

China targets mosques nationwide

Dongguan Grand Mosque. Flickr

China is stripping hundreds of mosques of Islamic architectural features, and often destroying them entirely, two new reports found. Beijing has been criticized for its crackdown on Islam in the mostly Muslim region of Xinjiang, but the latest allegations point to efforts that extend nationwide. In two provinces, authorities are decommissioning, closing, demolishing, or converting mosques for secular use, according to Human Rights Watch. More than 1,500 have been physically modified or destroyed since 2018, the Financial Times reported, citing its own visual analysis. “This is the start of the end for Islam in China,” a U.S.-based campaigner told the FT.

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6

UAE fund eyes UK’s Telegraph

REUTERS/Luke MacGregor

An Emirati-backed investment fund looks increasingly likely to buy the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper group despite concerns over “newswashing.” It would represent a new direction in Gulf states’ influence-peddling, alongside investment in Western sporting institutions. The Telegraph was put up for sale after its owners failed to pay debts. British parliamentarians expressed concern over foreign influence, while the paper’s former editor Charles Moore warned in The Telegraph itself against “nationalisation by a country which does not have press freedom.” Jane Martinson, the biographer of the Telegraph’s existing owners, told Semafor’s Ben Smith that the only reason to buy newspapers is “to influence lawmakers and the people who elect them.”

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7

US, France target Wagner in CAR

STRINGER/AFP via Getty Images

The U.S. and France are among several countries vying to take over the role of security guarantor in the Central African Republic, as the Russian mercenary group Wagner’s influence in the country wanes. The outcome of the decision “could be a bellwether for the group’s future on the continent,” The New York Times reported, while the U.S. State Department encouraged the CAR’s government to “gain their independence” from Wagner. Although the group’s influence has weakened across the continent since the death of its founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner retains a presence in a handful of African countries, where it has been accused of propping up authoritarian regimes in exchange for concessions.

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8

Paul Lynch wins Booker Prize

PA Images via Reuters Connect

The Irish author Paul Lynch won the 2023 Booker Prize with his novel Prophet Song. The book, Lynch’s fifth, is set in a dystopian future Ireland under a totalitarian government, and was inspired by the migrant crisis triggered by the Syrian civil war: The head judge said the book could “speak to the immediate moment while also possessing the possibility of outlasting it.” Ireland has consistently punched above its weight in the Booker. Two of the six shortlisted authors both this year and last were Irish, and Lynch is the sixth Irish writer to win the award. He said the £50,000 ($63,000) prize money would mainly go to pay off his mortgage.

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9

NZ smoking ban law scrapped

New Zealand will scrap its upcoming tobacco ban. The 2022 legislation would have made it illegal for anyone born after January 2009 to buy cigarettes, among other changes. It was due to be implemented in 2024. But on Saturday the new government, a coalition of the center-right National Party and populist New Zealand First, said it would scrap the measures. The prime minister argued the reversal would boost tax and avoid a black market, while opponents said it would cause thousands of deaths, especially among Māoris, who have higher smoking rates. The law is believed to have inspired Britain’s similar measure: The U.K. prime minister said that plan will go ahead unchanged despite New Zealand’s decision.

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10

Bowling’s quiet revolution

WikimediaCommons

Pin-setting machines, which sweep away and reset the pins in U.S. bowling alleys, are being replaced by strings. The pins are suspended like marionettes, and those that are knocked over are pulled out. The string machines are cheap and easier to maintain: You just need someone “to run back when the strings tangle,” The Los Angeles Times reported. European alleys have used them for decades. But they haven’t taken off in the U.S., where bowlers are suspicious of them, since the pins don’t scatter as traditional ones do: Strikes are harder to come by, and the sound is less dramatic. Still, as economic woes hit the sport, the strings mean “big savings, maybe salvation, for an industry losing customers to video games.”

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Flagging
  • The prime ministers of Vietnam and Japan hold a summit in Tokyo, marking 50 years of diplomatic ties.
  • Elon Musk is reportedly due to visit Israeli leaders.
  • Thailand marks the water festival of Loy Krathong.
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LRS

A history of disappointment

A recent, much-publicized academic paper made a startling claim: That Black women in London were disproportionately likely to die of the bubonic plague. It based it on the skeletons of 145 14th-century people found in plague pits, of whom 18%, it said, were Black. This should come as a surprise, says the writer Ian Leslie, given that, if there were any Black people in 14th-century England at all, they would have been a tiny fraction of a percent of the overall population. If 18% of your sample is Black, then something has gone wrong.

It is just obviously bullshit,” says an exasperated Leslie. But the claim is not the only recent such example: Another paper claimed that Black slaves in Jamaica invented a key iron-production process. Other historians pointed out the many glaring flaws in the study’s claims, but the journal stood by it. These studies are using historical Black people “as tokens in an academic status game,” Leslie writes. “To me this seems a very bad thing for the authority of History as a discipline.”

Enema of the state

A word of warning: You should not squirt coffee up your butt. Perhaps you think it odd that people need to be warned of this, but apparently many do — the coffee enema is “one of the strangest health fads of the last century,” advertised as a treatment for almost anything, according to the epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz. “A quick search online shows people claiming that the introduction of some Joe into your rear end can help with everything from liver disease to chronic pain.”

The idea was invented in the mid-20th century, part of a wider set of pseudoscientific cancer treatments known as “Gerson therapy,” designed to remove imaginary “toxins.” But the evidence shows that people using those treatments tend to die more quickly than those who use conventional medicine, and coffee enemas in particular have risks: Most commonly burns (“people can underestimate how hot the coffee is”), but also “bowel perforation, rectal bleeding, and even septicemia and death.” “Best to put the coffee in your mouth,” says Meyerowitz-Katz, not unreasonably.

Tunnel vision

In 2022, a woman on Reddit had an unusual query: “How can I get my boyfriend to stop digging his tunnel?” The boyfriend in question had inherited some land and decided to dig a tunnel on it. The tunnel had, apparently, become something of an obsession: He had reached significant depths, and had added lighting, support beams, and furniture. The Reddit community had some suggestions, mainly about making sure that the tunnel was properly ventilated, and about discussing her concerns with him, and as far as we know the couple are still happily together and the tunnel continues to grow.

The blogger Dynomight loves Tunnel Man. So many of the things we get obsessed with are things humans evolved to obsess over — sex, food, our children — and/or that have been engineered to make us obsessive about them — such as “adult entertainment,” Doritos, or fentanyl. But “evolution didn’t program us to tunnel. No company optimized digging to increase engagement,” Dynomight writes. In that sense, the tunnel is a kind of “anti-pornography … a physical embodiment of the idea that we can choose to do things, rather than being chosen by them.”

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Curio
When Marx Met Confucius/Youtube

A new series on Chinese state TV depicts a meeting between Karl Marx and Confucius, philosophers who lived 2,400 years apart. In When Marx Met Confucius, the two men are portrayed strolling through a bamboo grove or chatting together and praising China’s high-speed trains. The show is the latest attempt to promote Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s doctrine on Chinese culture, wrote The Economist, by fusing Marx and Confucius’ ideologies. The show is not popular, though: Among the limited reviews on a Chinese film site, one person wrote the series “makes me sick.”

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Hot on Semafor
  • Influential members of the country’s largest journalist union are resisting calls to release a statement supporting a ceasefire in Gaza.
  • Nigeria’s top tech reviewer sketches a path to global attention.
  • Renewable energy companies are lobbying U.S. financial regulators over proposed rules they fear would hammer their businesses and slow the rollout of green power.
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