Flagship

Trump sworn in, vows ‘golden age’

Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th US president Monday, promising a new “golden age.” In his inaugural speech, Trump decried “American decline” wrought by the Biden administration and said he would sign a flurry of executive orders on his first day in office, including declaring a national emergency at the border, moving to speed up pipeline permitting, and officially establishing the Elon Musk-led “Department of Government Efficiency.” During Trump’s first term, pundits were uncertain how he would approach the job; this time around, “neither party is wondering how Trump will treat the Oval Office,” Semafor’s Dave Weigel wrote. “He’s the leader of a Republican Party that has re-built its agenda around him.”

Business optimism over Trump 2.0

The US business sector appeared upbeat as Donald Trump returned to power. Global CEOs, including Elon Musk and Bernard Arnault, who were seated alongside cabinet nominees on Trump’s inauguration dais boasted a collective market value of $12 trillion, The Wall Street Journal reported. Stock market futures rose as investors bet Trump’s tenure would boost the banking and energy industries; traders were also encouraged by his decision to not impose new tariffs on his first day, CNBC wrote. Bitcoin reached a record high Monday, while Trump’s newly created cryptocurrency hit $10 billion in market value. Business titans expect Trump’s presidency to be “filled with deals of all sorts,” but his trademark unpredictability will pose a challenge, Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote.

Trump holds off on Day 1 tariffs

Donald Trump held off on targeting China with tariffs on his first day in office, instead ordering a review of global trade practices. The move signaled a willingness to engage with China and a shift “into a negotiating mode,” Bloomberg wrote. Despite his fiery tariff threats and incoming cabinet of China hawks, Trump’s inauguration held other signs of softening US-China ties: Chinese leader Xi Jinping held a call with Trump on Friday and sent a trusted adviser, China’s vice president, to attend Trump’s swearing-in, as state media hailed a “new starting point” in the relationship. On Monday, Beijing also suggested for the first time that it would be open to a sale of TikTok’s US operations.

Global investment diverges

The US-China rivalry will increasingly split the global economy into two distinct camps, analysts say. China is pouring more money into developing markets like Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and Vietnam, while investing less in the US and other advanced Western economies, Nikkei Asia reported. “The most likely scenario four years from now is that the global economy will still be coalescing into two blocs centered on the US and China,” an Asia economist said. Such divergence, Nikkei wrote, could force companies to duplicate supply chains to minimize geopolitical risk, leading to higher inflation in some markets.

Trump faces a changed MidEast

Israel freed 90 Palestinian prisoners on Monday as part of the six-week ceasefire agreement with Hamas. As Hamas is set to release more Israeli hostages on Jan. 25, the wider conflict is far from settled, and much could depend on US President Donald Trump’s approach to the Middle East amid a changed regional dynamic. Trump will face a dilemma “between competing visions of the region’s future,” The Economist wrote: “Whether to enable Israel’s hard right, or constrain it in pursuit of a grand bargain with Saudi Arabia.” Hamas, meanwhile, signaled a rare openness to a dialogue with the US, as the weakened group turns to “deal-making diplomacy” to survive, The Atlantic wrote.

Life imprisonment in India hospital murder

A former police volunteer was sentenced to life in prison for the rape and murder of a junior doctor in India, capping a case that renewed mass protests and concerns over women’s safety in the country. Prosecutors sought the death penalty for the crime that “shook India,” but a court in Kolkata ruled the offense didn’t meet the standard required for capital punishment. The killing of the 31-year-old woman last August sparked nationwide outrage from doctors demanding justice and better protection. The crime evoked a similar incident from 2012 that “brought to the fore the same questions,” a prominent lawyer wrote in The Indian Express: “Are women really safe in the streets? Are even doctors going about their work safe?”

More risks endanger insurance system

The US insurance system is showing signs of breaking down, as expensive risks become more common. The California wildfires caused an estimated $50 billion in damage, but JP Morgan estimates only $20 billion was insured: Rising property values and increased wildfire risk raised insurers’ exposure, but regulators limited premiums, so they stopped renewing many policies, The Wall Street Journal reported. Disaster risks are up in Florida too, but insurers were discouraged from rate hikes. Health insurance is similarly difficult: Aging populations mean greater health risks, but insurers are constrained from raising premiums. The result is increasingly socialized risk, and thus “weakens one of the main benefits of insurance: Encouraging the insured to mitigate their risk so as to reduce premiums.”

Senegal to rename French street names

Senegal plans to remove French colonial-era street names, 65 years after achieving independence. About 60% of Dakar’s streets are named for French figures — “administrators and governors, commanders, but also French writers and doctors,” according to Le Monde. But President Bassirou Diomaye Faye wants to rename them for Senegalese “national heroes,” including individuals or groups such as the tirailleurs who fought in the French army in the World Wars. Other former French colonies are also distancing themselves from their former rulers: In 2023 alone, French troops were forced to leave Burkina Faso and Niger, while Mali blocked French media, and anti-French sentiment has been rising in the Sahel region.

AI usage becomes Oscars fault line

Two Oscar contenders came under fire for their use of artificial intelligence technology. The editor of The Brutalist said AI software was used to tweak Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones’ Hungarian-language dialogue, making it so perfect “that not even locals will spot any difference.” Emilia Pérez, the musical about a Mexican cartel leader, used AI to increase actress Karla Sofía Gascón’s vocal range. The incidents reflect the contentious debate over AI’s role in Hollywood, with some suggesting its usage should exclude a film from Oscar consideration. “It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn’t be,” The Brutalist’s editor countered. “We should be having a very open discussion about what tools AI can provide us with.”

African publishing is revitalized

African publishing is undergoing a rebirth, revitalized by a new ecosystem of publishers, sellers, and books festivals. For decades the only real path to success for African writers was to get a book deal with a Western publisher, The New York Times reported. But a renaissance sparked by the rise of the Kenyan literary magazine Kwani? started connecting the continent’s authors, and now many promising young writers and their agents are signing deals with African publishing houses. The shift has widened the range of stories told about Africa, one writer told the Times: “The West is not discovering us. We are discovering us and then telling our stories.”

Jan. 21:

• Netflix reports fourth-quarter earnings from 2024.
• Angola’s central bank makes its first interest-rate decision of the year.
• Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio meets with the foreign ministers of Australia, India, and Japan.

A neurosurgeon’s trove of early medical textbooks is going up for auction. The star item in the six-decade-old collection is a 1476 Italian first edition of Pliny the Elder’s Historia naturalis, which spans medicine, zoology, mathematics, and physics, and is expected to fetch up to $150,000. Rare medical books are soaring in popularity — and value, The Wall Street Journal reported, suggesting readers “brush off those old guides to bloodletting and treating a gunshot wound with boiling oil.” One cardiac surgeon-collector even bid on a text while performing a surgery, he told the Journal: “I can look at these books and I feel like I’m enveloped by their wisdom, like part of their spirit is in the room with me.”

The key Washington lobbying group for news organizations and publishers is gearing up for legal action against a major artificial intelligence company that it believes has been egregiously copying publisher content to power its large language model, Semafor’s Max Tani scooped.

Proponents of the move said that the current ambiguity of laws around copyright infringement by AI necessitates legal action by news publishers who feel that many LLMs have been trained on their work without any (or adequate) compensation.