Flagship

Trump ‘insurrection’ legal row deepens

Calls grew for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on whether former President Donald Trump can run for office. States are disagreeing on the issue: The Colorado state supreme court ruled this month that Trump’s involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots should be considered “insurrection” and thus disqualified him for the presidency, while Michigan said Wednesday that the state lacked the authority to prevent him running. The Colorado Republican party called for the Supreme Court to intervene, as did Michigan’s secretary of state. A political scientist told the Associated Press that a national legal ruling was probably necessary to avoid “a patchwork of some states doing some things and other states doing other things.”

Israel warns Lebanon over Hezbollah

Israel will attack more targets in Lebanon if the Lebanese government does not stop Hezbollah militants from launching rockets, an Israeli minister said. There have been constant exchanges of fire between Israeli forces and Hezbollah across the border between the two countries since the Oct. 7 attacks. Benny Gantz told reporters that “the stopwatch for a diplomatic solution is running out,” and that Israeli forces were prepared to intervene in Lebanon to remove Hezbollah from the area. Hezbollah attacks have killed four Israeli civilians since Oct. 7, while at least one Hezbollah fighter and two relatives were killed in Israeli strikes in Lebanon. The growing tensions, as well as violence in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq, add to fears of a wider regional conflict.

US-Mexico border deal close

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said unspecified “important” deals on migration were struck with the U.S. after talks with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Mexican officials have pushed for the U.S. to reopen border crossings closed last week in response to a surge in migration. Customs and Border Protection agents have encountered a record 2.5 million migrants — including some from as far as Southeast Asia and Africa — crossing from Mexico this year. Although stemming migration is a key issue in next year’s U.S. elections, several Latin American economies remain reliant on remittances sent by economic migrants. Nicaraguans abroad transferred a record $4.2 billion in remittances this year, close to a quarter of the country’s total GDP.

NYT sues OpenAI over ChatGPT

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged copyright infringement by artificial-intelligence chatbots such as ChatGPT. The Times said that chatbots allowed readers to circumvent the site’s paywall, and made up facts which it falsely attributed to the Times. Ars Technica was able to reproduce some of their complaints, successfully asking ChatGPT for the second paragraph of a paywalled article. The Times said that journalism is expensive and that the chatbots undermined its revenue stream. One academic, though, said the suit “fundamentally misunderstood” how AIs work: “Judges getting this wrong will do huge damage to AI,” he said.

Use Russian assets to fund Kyiv, says US

The U.S. proposed that G7 officials explore ways to seize $300 billion in frozen Russian assets as the White House looks for alternatives for funding Ukraine amid opposition from Congress. The proposal has been met with concern from several countries in the European Union, where the majority of the assets are held. Underlining the impasse in Washington, yesterday the U.S. announced a $250 million support package for Ukraine, far short of the $60 billion President Joe Biden had asked Congress to approve. “There is an alternative,” Simon Kuper wrote in the Financial Times. Replacing U.S. aid to Ukraine — almost $81 billion in the first 21 months of the war — would cost each citizen of NATO’s European countries just $80 a year. “We could find that if we wanted,” he said.

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.

China’s foreign investment flees

Almost 90% of the foreign investment that flowed into China’s stock market this year after pandemic-era restrictions were lifted has already left, reflecting global pessimism over the outlook of the world’s second-largest economy. The capital flight comes despite signs of a thaw in relations between Washington and Beijing, as well as a run of positive economic data in China, and a pause on interest rate hikes across much of the west. “It’s so counterintuitive… the general environment should be quite positive for Chinese stocks,” an analyst told the Financial Times. “Frankly there’s no reason for this other than investors basically giving up.”

US mercenaries look to replace Wagner

U.S. private military company Bancroft Global Development is in discussions with the Central African Republic over providing security, highlighting the waning influence of Russian mercenary group Wagner. Although Bancroft denied having deployed personnel to the region, Le Monde previously reported that Washington offered the CAR a security agreement in exchange for distancing the country from Wagner, on which the country’s security forces relied. Although the mercenary group’s position in the continent has weakened since the death of founder Yevgeny Prigozhin in August, Wagner’s assets in Africa, including gold and mineral mines, continue to fund Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Prigozhin “may well have been killed” as punishment, a Russia expert wrote on Foreign Policy, “but also to bring the Wagner Group’s lucrative African operations under direct state control.”

Au revoir to Europe’s ‘craftsman’

Jacques Delors, one of the architects of modern Europe, died aged 98. France-born Delors, European Commission president from 1985 to 1995, helped create the single market which now allows the free movement of goods, services, and people within the European Union, and was crucial to setting up the euro. To proponents of European integration, he was a hero — French President Emmanuel Macron praised him as an “inexhaustible craftsman of our Europe” — while to euroskeptics he was a symbol of faceless Brussels bureaucracy. Famously, the British tabloid The Sun once ran a front-page headline saying “UP YOURS DELORS” after he proposed a European single currency. Delors told a French journalist that he “might deplore the style” but he approved of any “lively grassroots debate on Europe.”

Green fertilizer boost

Food producers are turning to green fertilizer to reduce their carbon footprint. The world is reliant on ammonia, a compound of nitrogen and hydrogen, to boost crop yield: Half the globe would starve without it. But it accounts for about 5% of carbon emissions. From January, European Union companies will have to report their supply-chain carbon footprint, and the U.S. is working on similar rules. The industry, hoping to avoid regulation, is stepping up efforts to produce lower-carbon fertilizer, such as investing in startups which use renewable energy to get hydrogen from water rather than natural gas. One producer told the Financial Times that there was a “potential explosion” in demand, although none of the technologies have been shown to work at scale yet.

Ancient hunter-gatherers built fortresses

Archaeologists discovered the world’s oldest known fortresses in Siberia. Stone-age hunter-gatherers built the complex defensive earthworks around their settlements 8,000 years ago. The discovery reshapes some assumptions about prehistoric life, notably that permanent settlements — and the complex social structures required to organize the building of monumental architecture such as fortresses — would only have arisen with agriculture. The roughly 10 sites found so far have pit houses surrounded by earthen walls and wooden palisades, “suggesting advanced architectural and defensive capabilities,” Phys.org reported.

• SpaceX is set for another attempt to launch the U.S. military’s secretive X-37B robot spaceplane.
• Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani welcomes his Spanish counterpart in Baghdad.
• Britain’s Royal Mint reveals 2024 coins.

The number of Glock handguns sold since production began in the 1980s. Gaston Glock, the firm’s founder, died this week aged 94: The gun made the reclusive Austrian engineer a billionaire. Glock pistols are a staple of popular culture — they are namechecked in songs by Snoop Dogg and the Wu-Tang Clan, and appear in films from Die Hard 2 to The Matrix Reloaded. They are also widely used by armed forces around the world — Saddam Hussein was found with one — and by criminals: According to the Violence Policy Center, the Glock is a “favorite of mass shooters.”

An online archive showcases the strange and even disturbing images used to illustrate Charles Dickens’ Christmas stories. The Victorian novelist all but created the festive book trade with 1843’s A Christmas Carol, and then wrote another one each year until 1848. The other four, while less well known, follow similar themes of memory, the supernatural, and personal transformation: Dickens was interested in the “ideals of selflessness and forgiveness,” Michael Goodman, the curator of The Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery, told the BBC. But the images used to illustrate them were sometimes dark, with goblins, war scenes, and violence. “Anyone looking at the illustrations to the Christmas books after A Christmas Carol and expecting similar images to Mr Fezziwig’s Ball is going to be disappointed,” said Goodman.

• Israel is willing to let the Palestinian Authority govern Gaza after military operations against Hamas cease. Despite Netanyahu’s contempt for the PA, it may be Israel’s best bet for stabilizing Gaza.
• 2024 will be the year AI moves from hype to helpful, Semafor’s tech journalists write in their forecast for next year.
• Semafor asked experts for their forecasts in real estate, dealmaking, antitrust enforcement, and more.