Flagship

OPEC+ set to hold fire

The OPEC+ grouping of oil exporters is expected to extend output cuts when it meets today, cautious of US President-elect Donald Trump’s upcoming policies as well as projections for lower prices. The bloc is artificially curtailing about 6% of global oil supply, and wants to see how Trump’s priorities — from tariffs, which should hurt prices, to new sanctions on Iran, which should help them — play out. “The prudent course of action would be to continue to watch and wait,” one analyst told the Financial Times. The longer-term outlook is bearish: Slowing economic growth in China, new supplies from Canada and Guyana, and global efforts to decarbonize are forcing downward pressure on oil prices, Bloomberg noted.

China invests in nuclear

China could approve 100 new nuclear reactors over the next 10 years, according to its state-run industry body. The country has added 34 gigawatts of nuclear capacity in a decade, enough to power 30 million homes, and approved 11 additional plants this year, putting it on course to have the biggest nuclear sector in the world by 2030. The economist Adam Tooze, writing in the Financial Times, said that China is now the world’s climate leader: “America’s preferred energy policy is more, more, more, as cheaply as possible,” he wrote, whether oil, gas, or renewables, and President-elect Donald Trump is skeptical of environmental concerns, but China “has mastered the green energy supply chain.”

China penalizes US defense

China imposed sanctions on 13 US defense companies, including AI developers and drone manufacturers, over arms sales to Taiwan. Beijing urged Washington to “recognize the serious danger” of arms sales to Taipei, the South China Morning Post reported: The US approved an arms deal worth almost $400 million last month. The sanctions came shortly after Taiwan’s president spoke with a top US lawmaker and visited Hawaii. Beijing regards Taiwan as a renegade province and angrily denounces its leaders whenever they visit the US, seen as unofficial acknowledgment of the self-ruling island’s sovereignty. “They want other countries — the United States or Europe — to know that this is their sphere of influence,” a senior Taiwanese official told the Taipei Times.

Ukraine peace talk gathers pace

Growing signs point to Western powers readying for peace talks to end Russia’s war in Ukraine once US President-elect Donald Trump takes office. An aide to the Ukrainian president met with senior members of Trump’s national-security team, The Wall Street Journal said, to discuss the contours of a settlement with Moscow. Kyiv has major differences with Trump, fearing his desire for a deal would require it to give up territory. The NATO chief meanwhile called for weapons for Ukraine with the explicit goal of garnering a stronger bargaining position, while Germany said Ukraine may have to concede land in exchange for NATO membership. All the while, Russia is making battlefield gains, though it is suffering huge casualties, Meduza reported.

Mexico makes record drug bust

Mexican authorities announced their biggest-ever fentanyl seizure and 5,200 migrant detentions, a week after US President-elect Donald Trump threatened sanctions unless Mexico stemmed the flow of drugs and people across the border. Trump has warned of tariffs as high as 25% on Mexico — which sends almost 80% of its exports to the US — should it fail to meet his demands. The threats have pummelled the Mexican stock market, weakened the peso, and contributed to a downgrading of Mexico’s credit rating, though analysts have warned that the US’ growing reliance on Mexico means it, too, would suffer economically were such restrictions to be put in place.

Africa’s Trump upside

A Donald Trump administration could bolster US relations with Africa, a prominent analyst argued in Foreign Affairs. US-Africa relations have been stunted by an overriding focus on “aid, humanitarianism, and democracy promotion,” Ken Opalo wrote, adding that the US president-elect’s “naked transactionalism” could, counterintuitively, benefit the continent — though he warned that such an approach may also undermine Africa’s strategic significance to Washington. The piece came as outgoing US President Joe Biden visited Angola on a long-promised trip to the continent: Such a visit “would have been unimaginable five years ago,” one African executive told The Wall Street Journal.

Trump’s transition tensions

US President-elect Donald Trump’s presidential transition began in an uncharacteristically orderly fashion, but has descended into chaos. He has withdrawn his attorney-general choice, his selection for defense secretary looks likely to withdraw over scandal allegations, and his pick to head the Drug Enforcement Administration declined the offer. There are also questions over whether former Democrats Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard as well as loyalist Kash Patel — Trump’s choices for health, intelligence, and the FBI — will get past the Senate. Administration sources are divided over the extent of the problems: One told Semafor that the delays were “just par for the course,” while another said people were using more evocative phrases, such as “shit show” and “dumpster fire.”

Incoming Senate Republican leader John Thune outlined an ambitious 2025 agenda for the party, spearheaded by two filibuster-proof bills designed to spend on border security and cut taxes, Semafor’s Burgess Everett reported. These plans, Everett wrote, “will run up against the limits of both senators’ stamina and the party’s slim majorities in both chambers of Congress.”

Global impact of SKorea crisis

With South Korea having warded off the imposition of martial law, analysts parsed the global consequences of the country’s crisis. “This political instability comes amid escalating tensions with North Korea and its growing strategic alliance with Russia,” an expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted, warning that political transitions in the US and Japan — key allies of Seoul’s — could further undermine a trilateral defense pact agreed last year. The South Korean president’s decision to deploy troops without informing Washington “raises serious questions for alliance management,” and means chaos could have ensued if Pyongyang took advantage militarily, a Carnegie scholar added. A potential successor may also seek to be more accommodating to China or Pyongyang, she noted.

AI weather forecasting milestone

Google DeepMind’s artificial intelligence weather prediction model outperforms the best-in-class forecasting system. Traditional forecasting uses physics models which simulate the atmosphere using programmed-in rules and vast amounts of data on air pressure, cloud coverage, etc. DeepMind’s GenCast relies on generative AI that uses a snapshot of existing weather as a prompt and creates realistic potential outcomes. Both traditional and AI forecasts begin their simulations from many subtly different starting points, to determine the uncertainty in the outcomes. GenCast now more accurately predicts weather 15 days out than the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, considered the current gold standard, both for day-to-day weather and extreme events.

Pope gets first EV popemobile

Pope Francis received the first all-electric popemobile, a modified Mercedes-Benz G-Class SUV. Pontiffs were once carried in a sedan chair, but Paul VI in 1965 began using a white Lincoln Continental. Since the 1981 assassination attempt on John Paul II, popemobiles have usually had bulletproof glass, and some are tall so the Pope can stand and greet large crowds. Mercedes has built several popemobiles, and this version has a swiveling central seat to allow Francis to address audiences on all sides. The delivery marks “a rare bright spot” for the company’s struggling EV division, Bloomberg wrote, although it continues to experiment: This month Mercedes said it was testing “solar paint” that could allow its cars to charge themselves.

• The sixth annual Milken Institute Middle East and Africa Summit begins in Abu Dhabi.
• South America’s Mercosur trade bloc meets in Montevideo to discuss a EU trade deal.
• A special edition of The Dragon Reborn, Robert Jordan’s fantasy epic, is published.

The number of companies that have left the London Stock Exchange this year. The LSE is shrinking at its fastest rate in over a decade, Bloomberg reported, driven by companies merging or moving abroad, but also going private: A record $66 billion’s worth of public companies have been bought up this year, including a $1 billion deal for an educational technology company yesterday, according to City AM. The take-private rush is partly driven by economic weakness, as firms’ low share price make them vulnerable to buyouts.

Return to My Native Land by Aimé Césaire. The Martiniquais poet, politician, and anti-colonial campaigner died in 2008, and although his various texts are widely read, he is “caught between worlds,” Musab Younis wrote in the London Review of Books: Too literary for the politically minded, too political for literary circles. But his language is full of “propulsive metre, baffling images and joyfully declarative passages.” Return, his most celebrated poem, faces up to the “reality of his underdeveloped homeland” from the perspective of Paris, where he lived for years.