Flagship

Trump confirms econ team

US President-elect Donald Trump finalized his economic team, a largely mainstream selection unlike many of his other choices. A longtime adviser will head the National Economic Council and a trade lawyer will be US trade representative, following market-friendly picks for treasury and commerce secretaries. Notably absent are Robert Lighthizer and Peter Navarro — trade hawks in Trump’s first presidency — though the latter is being considered for an advisory role, The Wall Street Journal reported. “Trump’s economic team is more pragmatic” than his foreign policy one, Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer wrote in a note to clients. Still, “given the diversity of the group and the complexity of the policies at hand, it’s going to take some time to coordinate a strategy.”

Russia’s accelerating Ukraine advance

Russia’s troops are advancing faster in Ukraine than at any point since the earliest days of the war, Reuters reported. Moscow’s urgency may be driven by US President-elect Donald Trump’s imminent accession: He is expected to demand the conflict freezes along existing front lines, making territorial gains permanent. Russia controls 18% of Ukraine, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014. Both sides have suffered horrifying casualties, The Economist reported: Between 100,000 and 200,000 Russian soldiers have died in the three-year war, along with 60,000 to 100,000 Ukrainians, and many times that number severely wounded. Proportional to population, both sides have suffered worse than the US did “in the Vietnam and Korean wars combined.”

Graft probe for Chinese minister

China’s defense minister is under investigation for corruption. It’s the latest graft scandal to hit the People’s Liberation Army: Dong Jun, who was appointed in December 2023, is the third consecutive serving or former defense minister to face investigation for alleged corruption. His predecessor Li Shangfu was ousted after just seven months. The news suggests that Chinese leader Xi Jinping is “broadening his probe” into PLA graft, the Financial Times reported: Xi had earlier removed senior officers in charge of rocketry and nuclear weapons programs, while a foreign minister was removed in 2023. US military sources told the FT that the investigations were undermining Xi’s confidence that China would achieve its goal of being capable of invading Taiwan by 2027.

China’s emissions may have peaked

A growing number of experts believe China’s carbon dioxide emissions have peaked, or will do so in 2025, in the latest sign of the country’s booming renewable energy production. Although China is responsible for 90% of the global growth in emissions since 2015, it has added green energy capacity at an unprecedented rate: The country is on track to add 180 and 159 gigawatts of solar and wind power respectively, roughly twice as much as the rest of the world combined, according to new data by the Global Energy Monitor. However Western tariffs on Chinese clean tech could jeopardize the world’s efforts to reduce emissions, derailing decades of progress by forcing “consumers to bear the costs of the green transition,” an economist at Harvard University wrote.

Biden’s Medicare Wegovy expansion

US President Joe Biden backed a huge expansion of government coverage for weight-loss drugs for Americans with obesity. Under the proposal, drugs like Wegovy and Tirzapetide would become available on Medicare and Medicaid at up to 95% reduced price. Medicare is not allowed to cover weight-loss drugs but regulators proposed reclassifying obesity as a chronic disease to allow coverage. Obesity among Medicare enrollees has doubled in the last decade, CNN reported. The move would cost around $35 billion over nine years, but obesity is estimated to cost the US health care system $173 billion a year. US President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is strongly against the use of weight-loss drugs.

UK to limit online gambling stakes

The UK government will restrict the maximum bet on online gambling machines to £5 ($6.30). The country’s use of online slot machines has doubled in the last decade to over $3.8 billion a year. Almost half of all callers to a national gambling helpline report problems with online slots, and the health service says gambling addiction referrals are double what they were last year. Britain has had relatively lax gambling laws compared to the US, but they are under growing scrutiny — particularly advertising gambling during soccer games — and while Washington has relaxed some laws, notably sports betting, the UK may be moving in the other direction.

Police probe Philippines VP

Philippine police officials filed criminal complaints against Sara Duterte, the country’s vice president, and her security staff for allegedly assaulting authorities during a recent dispute in Congress. Duterte had earlier publicly threatened to have President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., his wife, and the speaker of the lower chamber of congress assassinated if she were killed in an unspecified plot, The Associated Press reported. Duterte and Marcos — both children of two former presidents — have been pitted against each other for over two years in a rift that threatens the country’s democracy, with former President Rodrigo Duterte saying “only the military” could mend the government’s fractures, Rappler reported.

Carlyle Co-Chairman David Rubenstein, Citadel founder and CEO Ken Griffin, former US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, and KKR Co-Chairman Henry Kravis will serve as co-chairs of Semafor’s World Economy Summit on Apr. 23-25, 2025, in Washington, DC.

The third annual event will bring together US cabinet officials, global finance ministers, central bankers, and Fortune 500 CEOs for conversations that cut through the political noise to dive into the most pressing issues facing the world economy.

UN evacuates Haiti staff

The United Nations will begin evacuating some of its staff in Haiti due to an escalation in violence as gangs expand their control over the capital. According to estimates, violent groups command as much as 85% of Port-au-Prince despite UN-backed troops trying for months to drive them back. The gangs have been bolstered through the forced recruitment of children: A UNICEF estimate suggests that between 30% and 50% of all gang members are underage. The violence has paralyzed the economy, with more than 60% of the population living on less than $4 a day and hundreds of thousands on the verge of starvation.

Sudan aid increased

Sudan’s famine-stricken Zamzam refugee camp began receiving its first aid trucks in months as the UN’s World Food Programme ramped up delivery of aid in the Darfur region. “People were lined up on the side of the road cheering as the trucks rolled in,” a WFP official told the BBC. Residents of the camp had resorted to desperate measures, including eating crushed peanut shells, to survive. Experts warned that as many as 2.5 million people could die before the end of the year if aid delivery isn’t increased. The war in Sudan has displaced more than 14 million people, with many fleeing to similarly destitute countries such as neighboring South Sudan.

LinkedIn posts increasingly AI-made

More than half of all posts on LinkedIn may be artificial-intelligence-generated. Analysts examined 8,795 posts and found that a rapidly growing number of them showed AI hallmarks. LinkedIn may be the front line of AI-generated content, WIRED reported: Chatbots’ corporate style is hard to distinguish from “genuine human-penned Thought Leader Blogging,” and no one goes on the site “expecting profundity, hilarity, or sincerity” anyway. LinkedIn users “strive to be the most anodyne versions of themselves… Artificiality [is] what everyone is expecting.” The company itself may agree: It told Australian lawmakers that it should not be subject to a proposed social media ban for under-16s, because it “simply does not have content interesting and appealing to minors.”

• Egypt’s president meets the Qatari prime minister and Jordan’s king in Cairo.
• The Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization summit opens in Kazakhstan.
• Riyadh Metro, the world’s longest driverless metro system, launches its first three routes.

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The number of people that have registered to run for Mexico’s Supreme Court after the government approved a law to dismiss all judges and replace them by elected ones. Analysts worry that the ballots could lead to the ruling party — which already controls the other two branches of government — dominating the judiciary. Critics also fear the process could lead to the country’s powerful cartels imposing their candidates. “You don’t elect a doctor or a surgeon for an operation based on their popularity. You elect them based on their technical expertise, their ability, their knowledge,” a legal expert told The Associated Press. “That also applies for a judge.”

The City and Its Uncertain Walls, by Haruki Murakami. The much-loved Japanese author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’s recent work has been inconsistent, Priscilla Gilman wrote in The Boston Globe, so “it is with unabashed joy that I am here to report” that his latest is “one of his best… sweeping and intimate, grand and tender, quiet and charged with feeling.” Buy The City and Its Uncertain Walls from your local bookstore