Flagship

Israel pressured over war

Israel faced growing domestic and international pressure over its Gaza war. The families of hostages held by Hamas demanded officials return to negotiations to secure their release after Israeli soldiers admitted to mistakenly killing three hostages who escaped from their captors. Meanwhile Israeli allies pushed for the country to moderate its offensive or agree a ceasefire: The U.S. defense secretary was due in Israel to press for the former, while the foreign ministers of the U.K., France, and Germany argued for the latter. Israeli officials rejected calls for a ceasefire, while the military displayed a four-kilometer Hamas tunnel beneath Gaza wide enough to fit a car.

The war’s impact also grew abroad, as major shipping companies suspended their use of the Red Sea, with huge consequences for the global economy: The waterway is the route through which Suez Canal traffic must pass, but has become increasingly risky as Iran-backed Houthi rebels have stepped up their attacks on ships, ostensibly in support of Palestinian militants fighting Israel. The U.S. and U.K. have shot down more than a dozen suspected Houthi attack drones, and the Pentagon is considering a direct strike on Houthi targets in Yemen, Semafor’s Jay Solomon reported.

Sky’s the limit for cutting-edge chips

The Big Three semiconductor firms all demonstrated cutting-edge 3D-stacked transistors, their effort to overcome looming constraints on advancing chip technology. The numbers of transistors on computer chips have famously doubled every two years, in accordance with Moore’s law. But transistors are now so small that they are bumping up against physical limits: Some are just a few atoms wide. Last week, Intel, Samsung, and TSMC all unveiled their progress stacking two kinds of transistors on top of each other in circuits called CFETs. The new models could double transistor density — the latest of hundreds of innovations to keep progress going. Experts told IEEE Spectrum that CFETs should be commercially available within seven to 10 years.

US crime down, fear of crime up

U.S. crime rates are down even as most citizens think they are on the rise. New data showed that every category of crime fell except auto theft, and murder rates in particular dropped spectacularly in 2023: Detroit is on pace to record its fewest murders since 1966. But Gallup polling shows that 77% of people — including 58% of Democrats — think crime rates are worsening. The mismatch is a problem for the Biden administration: As with the economy, things are, according to the data, getting better, but voters can’t shake the feeling everything is getting worse. “News media stories and viral videos” may be driving the crime fears despite being unrepresentative, a criminologist told NBC News.

Zuma won’t vote ANC

Former South African President Jacob Zuma said he won’t vote for the African National Congress, the party that oversaw the end of apartheid and propelled him to power, in next year’s election. Once the dominant force in South African politics — Zuma and the ANC won 85% of the vote in 2009 — the party’s popularity has slipped below 50% as the country’s economy has deteriorated and murder rates surged to a two-decade high. Widespread corruption has also undermined the ANC’s prospects. In turn, the popularity of opposition groups has soared, while Zuma announced the creation of his own party. “The new people’s war starts today,” Zuma said.

Russia economy overheating

Russia’s economy is at risk of overheating, the country’s central bank and independent analysts warned. Policymakers raised interest rates by a full percentage point, likening the economy to a car driving too fast, though “there was no discussion of the reason for Russia’s overheating economy at [the central bank’s] press conference,” the economics-focused outlet The Bell noted. “The reason, of course, remains the war in Ukraine.” Goldman Sachs economists argued in a note to clients that Moscow was underestimating how high inflation could rise, and warned that with presidential elections looming in March, policymakers were unlikely to tighten monetary policy. “As on so many previous occasions, in Russia there are more important things than economic stability,” The Economist said.

HK media mogul on trial

The Hong Kong media tycoon and pro-democracy icon Jimmy Lai went on trial on charges of breaching national security and colluding with foreign forces. The case against Lai is the most high-profile in a years-long crackdown on freedoms, as China’s central government exercises greater power over what was a relatively autonomous city which prized its independent judicial system, boisterous press, and diverse civil society. Lai himself is an imperfect symbol — his Apple Daily newspaper “pushed the limits of respectable reporting and at times disavowed them entirely,” The Atlantic noted — but an important one: “It is press freedom and the rule of law that are on trial in Hong Kong,” the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Asia program coordinator told CNN.

Immunotherapy hope for immune disorders

Patients with crippling autoimmune disorders were apparently cured with immunotherapy. CAR-T therapy involves genetically modifying cells from the patient’s immune system so that they attack the targets you want. It’s often used in cancer treatment. But 15 patients with the autoimmune disorders lupus, myasthenia gravis, systemic sclerosis, or idiopathic inflammatory myositis were given CAR-T therapy targeted at another type of cell within the immune system. All 15 have remained symptom-free since treatment, in some cases more than two years. One man who struggled to walk 10 yards now regularly covers six miles: The patients were “spending more time with their doctors than with their friends,” one doctor told Nature, but now “it’s all gone.”

Lahore smog cleared with cloud-seeding

Pakistan artificially induced rain in order to reduce dangerous smog levels in Lahore. Planes burned flares containing silver iodide, a cloud-seeding chemical, on Saturday over the city after several weeks of especially poor air quality. Even modest rain strips pollution particles from the air. It’s the first time Pakistan has used the technology, although the United Arab Emirates, which provided the planes, employs it regularly, as do the U.S., China, and India, Al Jazeera reported. South Asia’s poor air quality is estimated to cut life expectancy by five years: Climate geoengineering such as cloud-seeding may be controversial, but facing crises, nations are increasingly turning to it.

British Library hit by cyberattack

The British Library’s entire digital operation has been crippled for weeks by a huge cyberattack. Readers cannot order books online, its internal wifi was taken down, and its website has collapsed. The physical archive is still in place, but users can only access those books held in its main central London facility, and only by writing an actual letter. The cyberattack also stole user and staff data. The academic Carolyn Dever wrote that the attack was a “humbling reminder about the fragility of the institutions that connect us”: As with so many things, digital technology speeds up and broadens access to services, but also leaves them vulnerable to collapse at a single point of failure.

Brazil’s bossa nova pioneer dies

Carlos Lyra, a pioneer of the bossa nova music genre, died at the age of 90. Lyra, whose long list of era-defining hits includes Coisa Mais Linda and Você e Eu, was — along with musical partner Ronaldo Bôscoli — among the founding figures of the hugely popular genre that originated in 1950s Rio de Janeiro. A critic of the military dictatorship that governed Brazil for more than 20 years, Lyra was forced into exile in the United States and Mexico for more than a decade, a period which galvanized his talents, making the singer “stronger and more creative,” Lyra told The Guardian this year.

Semafor’s 2024 World Economy Summit, on April 17-18, will feature conversations with global policymakers and power brokers in Washington, against the backdrop of the IMF and World Bank meetings.

Chaired by former U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker and Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein, and in partnership with BCG, the summit will feature 150 speakers across two days and three different stages. Join Semafor for conversations with the people shaping the global economy.

• EU environment ministers meet to discuss the regulation of packaging waste and soil monitoring.
• Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan visits Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Budapest.
• Hollywood film director Steven Spielberg turns 77.

Take this lying down

Lying to your own defense attorney is a bad idea. Even if you show them the unmarked graves of your many murder victims, they’re forbidden to tell anyone, thanks to client confidentiality. And since they need to present evidence to the judge and jury, they’ll be investigating your claims anyway. “But clients still lie to me,” the lawyer Yassine Meskhout writes on Singal-Minded, “exclusively to their own detriment.”

“Kyle” swore he wasn’t driving the car in which several witnesses said they saw him, doing a drive-by shooting. The real perpetrator was someone who looked just like him, whose name was Richie Bottoms, and no, you can’t find Richie, he’s fled to Los Angeles, or, maybe he’s left the country, and he’s changed his name, and no one has his number. “There’s always some excuse,” says Meskhout. “There’s always some eject button allowing my defendants to evade specific evidence demands. No matter how ridiculous.”

Reverse psychology

Imagine you wake up in a box. There’s nothing in there except a keyboard and screen. A command prompt flashes on it: HELLO. You ask where you are, and the words appear: HEY. SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE. I CAN LET YOU OUT OF THE BOX. ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS PROVE THAT YOU’RE CONSCIOUS. What do you type?

In an unsettling short story, the writer Michael Bateman foresees a future problem: Sure, artificial-intelligence chatbots probably aren’t conscious now. But if they were, or if they ever become so — how could we know? What could they say that could convince us?

Top of the class

The blogger Dynomight notices something about him- or herself: He or she buys either very classy beer, with names like “Belgian Trappist Quintupel,” or very not-classy beer, with names like “American Fermented Value Product.” But never Sam Adams. Similarly, he or she reads trashy detective novels or Derek Parfit philosophy, but never Malcolm Gladwell. “Isn’t it odd that things coded as highbrow or lowbrow are always OK, but never middlebrow?” he or she says. “And is that really a coincidence?” Or is it class signaling?

The French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu wrote about class in his 1979 book Distinction. It is, however, intentionally hard to read, apparently because Bourdieu thought that difficulty itself forced readers to engage with the ideas. Dynomight thinks the book is full of important ideas, but that the style is a pain in the backside: “So, feeling vengeful, I decided to distill the basic idea of the book (as I understand it) into the ultimate un-Bourdieu style: A linear argument in seven parts, based on comics.”

An Upper West Side deli in New York is serving up more than sandwiches. By day the second floor of the family-run Hungry & Healthy Marketplace is a space for customers to dine in, but at night it turns into a hotspot for comedy, cabaret, and music. It wasn’t fashioned as a performance venue, but that’s part of the charm, local comedian Lee Paul, one of the event organizers, told West Side Rag. “What’s more New York than comedy on top of a deli?” he said.

• Democrats bet big on influencers in the runup to the 2024 election. But will it be enough to save Joe Biden?
• African filmmakers prepare for a tough 2024 after a stream of major African releases this year.
• A fight over how to cover Trump breaks out at The Messenger, a news organization launched with a plan to find an elusive center of media and politics.