Flagship

Turkey sparks US, Israeli concern

Israeli and US officials are increasingly concerned over Turkey’s rising influence in Syria. The sudden fall of Bashar al-Assad has strengthened Turkey’s hand in the region and sparked renewed fighting between Kurdish factions and Ankara-backed rebel groups. A Turkish military buildup near a majority-Kurdish Syrian city has set off alarm bells in Washington, The Wall Street Journal reported. Israel, whose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday visited territory the country’s military had seized from Syria, is worried an emboldened Turkey could exploit the power vacuum in Damascus to target Kurdish groups throughout the region, Al-Monitor reported. “We might end up missing Assad,” an Israeli official said.

Trump’s rise mirrors history of US South

Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party echoes the American South after the Civil War, a Tablet Magazine essay argued. White Southern political history provides a lens for exploring Trump’s rise: In the late 19th century, the ascendance of development-focused “Redeemers” who wanted to build a “New South” sparked a populist revolt in Southern states, led by anti-elitist firebrands who were known for “shouting the unsayable.” There is a straight line from the pro-business Redeemers to the politics of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, academic Walter Russell Mead wrote; Trump’s victories mark the reaction. The “tradition of the purposefully transgressive, flamboyant, and above all entertaining populist rebel is what Donald Trump has revived.”

Beijing plans deficit increase

China plans to raise its budget deficit to a record high next year in a bid to revive its slowing economy, Reuters reported. Increasing the target deficit to 4% of GDP, up from 3% this year, is in line with Beijing’s pledge last week to pursue a “more proactive” fiscal policy — plans that will take on greater urgency with Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Trump has pledged sweeping tariffs on Chinese goods, and Beijing’s economic woes give the US more leverage to pressure allies to follow suit and impose their own trade controls, Rhodium Group analysts argued. If US-aligned countries don’t react to the expected measures, it “will cause spillovers of those [Chinese] exports into their own markets,” they said.

China could probe more US tech firms

China is expected to expand antitrust scrutiny of US tech companies, even as it signals that it wants more outside investment. Beijing’s investigation into chipmaker Nvidia, launched last week, could be the first of many such probes, The Information reported, as the country retaliates against Washington’s import and export controls. China is simultaneously working to shore up confidence among foreign businesses and increase investment: As it launched the Nvidia probe, the Chinese government hosted leaders from 10 international economic organizations, while state media reported this week that “multiple foreign companies are upbeat on China’s growth.”

Temu tops US apps list

Chinese-owned Temu was 2024’s most downloaded app on Apple’s US App Store, its second year on top. The online retailer’s enduring popularity reflects its strength despite increased scrutiny in Washington and intensifying competition from Amazon. Temu went on a marketing tear in 2024, as some US officials pushed to hike tariffs on Chinese goods and end a trade loophole that enables the e-commerce platform to sell imported products at super-low prices. Another Chinese-owned app, TikTok, took the No. 3 spot, even as it fights to avoid a forced divestiture or US ban. Apps owned by American tech companies — Meta’s Threads, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google — rounded out the top five of Apple’s most downloaded.

Pig transplants could see clinical trial

The successful transplant of a genetically modified pig kidney into a US woman is encouraging doctors that the procedure could one day become standard medical practice. Since the surgery, the 53-year-old has survived without dialysis for several weeks, her medical team said. While other people have received pig organ transplants in the last few years, the practice is controversial: Patients died within weeks or months of their operations, and some scientists are concerned about unintended side effects, including disease. The biotech firm that provided the pig kidney is asking the FDA to greenlight a clinical trial that could begin as soon as next year. “It would change everything,” said a surgeon involved in the operation. “I think it would revolutionize medicine.”

Biodiversity woes are interconnected

Global economic and social crises are deeply intertwined with environmental challenges, a sweeping new United Nations report found. Biodiversity, water, health, and climate change “interact, cascade and compound each other in ways that make separate efforts to address them ineffective and counterproductive,” the Nexus Report concluded. Among the findings: More than half of global GDP — at least $50 trillion — is “moderately to highly dependent on nature.” But global biodiversity is in decline, threatening the industries that depend on it, while the costs of addressing the problem are rising. The report proposed 70 potential solutions to address the challenge: For example, tackling health problems in Senegal not through medication, but by addressing water pollution that spreads disease.

Young talent managers are professionalizing Africa’s fast-growing content creator market, as top creators in Nigeria earn upwards of six figures from comedy videos, travel recaps, and cooking shows, Torinmo Salau reported in Semafor Africa. The market boom is “driven by a certainty that the move to self-made creators is just beginning to take hold,” Salau wrote.

Geothermal prices to drop: IEA

Geothermal energy could cost about as much as solar and wind within a decade, thanks to technology developed for fracking. Previously, geothermal drilling was only possible in specific places where hot rocks lie near the surface, like Kenya, making it both expensive and limited as an energy source. Fracking uses high-pressure water to create cracks in rocks deep underground, and the same technique, along with better drilling methods, can create suitable conditions for geothermal energy in new regions, the International Energy Agency said. “Costs for next-generation geothermal could fall by 80 per cent by 2035,” or down to around $50 per megawatt-hour, the IEA said, making it competitive with other renewables.

LG drops Blu-ray line

LG became the latest tech firm to discontinue its line of Blu-ray players. The South Korean company’s move follows Samsung, Sony, and Panasonic in ending production of standalone players. Gaming consoles, which once had Blu-ray players as standard, now often come without them, too, as more people download games from the internet. Some consumers still want the disks — partly out of nostalgia, and partly because they want to control the media they own. Streaming platforms’ price hikes, policy changes, and changing content libraries have “led people to yearn for a simpler time,” Ars Technica reported, and in some niches, such as collectors’ editions, Blu-ray sales are actually growing.

Probability may not exist

Probability might not actually exist, a professor of probability argued. We say things like “there is a 50-50 chance a coin comes up heads,” or “there is a 70% chance that it will rain tomorrow,” as though those are facts about the world. But they are really our own subjective uncertainty, put into numbers: If the person flipping the coin is a stage magician, you might make a different estimate. Subjective doesn’t mean made up, David Spiegelhalter wrote in Nature: A probability estimate is like a bet, and bets can be good or bad. “Probability probably does not exist,” Spiegelhalter noted, “but it is often useful to act as if it does.”

Dec. 18:

• Thailand hosts representatives from six countries for a meeting on border security and crime.
• Chinese leader Xi Jinping attends a ceremony on the 25th anniversary of Macau’s return to China.
• Julia’s Stepping Stones, a documentary by Oscar-winning filmmaker Julia Reichert, who died in 2022, premieres on Netflix.

A new exhibition catalog spotlights Leonardo da Vinci’s under-appreciated fascination with smell. From inventing flying machines to designing a city with features that were centuries ahead of his time, the Italian polymath’s many interests embodied the spirit of the Renaissance — including his obsession with perfumery. Leonardo da Vinci and the Perfumes of the Renaissance traces the influence of scent on da Vinci’s work, which saw him devise recipes for fragrances and draw “technological sketches for alembic distillation mechanisms,” Hyperallergic wrote. In doing so, it recreates an 15th-century olfactory world that was both sumptuous and putrid, with myrrh, cinnamon, and musk sold in cities dominated by the stench of overcrowding, disease, and decay.