Flagship

Left-wing leader wins SK election

A left-wing opposition leader won South Korea’s presidential election Tuesday, official vote tallies showed. Lee Jae-myung defeated a conservative candidate who served in the cabinet of Yoon Suk Yeol, the former president ousted from office after his botched martial law declaration in December. The election could bring “kind of a return to normal politics” after the tumultuous six months and as US tariffs offer fresh economic uncertainty, an expert said. Lee is expected to seek stronger ties with China and more engagement with North Korea. He ran as a unifying candidate after the martial law debacle, but he “will need to navigate a deeply polarized electorate and a shifting geopolitical landscape,” Korea JoongAng Daily wrote.

Concerns over China rare earth curbs

Executives and diplomats are increasingly concerned that China’s curbs on rare earth exports are causing critical shortages. A German automotive lobby group warned car production could halt because of the restrictions, while officials from Japan and India are urgently seeking meetings with Beijing to push for faster export approvals of rare earth magnets, Reuters reported. American car companies are also facing possible shortages, The New York Times reported. China halted exports for a wide range of critical minerals and magnets in April as trade tensions with the US escalated, requiring exporters to obtain licenses: The global ripple effects underscore Beijing’s dominance in the sector, and threaten to imperil the US-China trade truce, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Ukraine strikes Russia-Crimea bridge

Ukraine said it used underwater explosives to damage a bridge linking Russia to the illegally annexed Crimean peninsula, Kyiv’s second high-profile operation against Moscow in days. The strike — the third attack on the bridge since the start of the war — comes after a sophisticated Ukrainian drone assault on parked Russian bombers. June has quickly become “an ill-fated month for Russia’s armed forces,” The Economist wrote, projecting that Moscow is on track to suffer its millionth casualty this month. But Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to face little domestic pressure to end the war: He has used “ideological militarization” to convince most Russians they are waging war “against an imperialistic NATO and that there is glory in death,” the magazine wrote.

Era of European frugality ends

An era of European frugality appears to be coming to an end. The continent has long been known for its conservative approach to budgets, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has forced a rethink. Denmark’s prime minister said Tuesday the country is quitting the “frugal four” — an alliance that included Austria, the Netherlands, and Sweden and pushed for fiscal restraint — to prioritize security concerns. Germany’s new government is planning a trillion-euro defense and infrastructure spending spree. The European Union is also pushing a massive rearmament effort, while NATO is set to ask European members to speed up defense spending. “We are not at war, but we’re not at peace either,” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said Monday.

Slowdown could ease long-term inflation

Global inflation is forecast to worsen in the short term but ease by 2026, as trade wars take their economic toll on demand for goods and services. According to new OECD figures, US President Donald Trump’s tariffs will push up prices for a period but quickly start to hurt economies around the world, leading to easing prices heading into 2026. Goldman Sachs economists this week similarly forecast “mediocre economic performance” that would bring inflation down. Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller said tariffs would drive inflation and a rise in unemployment that would “probably linger,” opening the door for the central bank to resume cutting interest rates later this year.

US-Mexico remittances drop

Remittances to Mexico from the US dropped 12% year-on-year in April, the largest slump in 13 years. Migrant workers in the US send large sums across the border each year — $62.5 billion in 2024, equivalent to about 3.5% of the Mexican GDP. That figure has consistently gone up for 11 years. The recent drop is likely due to the White House’s recent crackdown on migrants and a weaker jobs market, experts told Reuters. The trend is likely to continue: The US is mulling a 3.5% tax on remittances, a move that one Bloomberg columnist argued would be a boost for cartels offering illegal — but tax-free — routes out of the country for migrants’ money.

Meta takes the nuclear option

Meta is looking to nuclear power to sustain its artificial intelligence push. The tech giant struck a 20-year deal with Constellation Energy to revive an aging Illinois nuclear plant that was once slated for closure. The move marks Big Tech’s latest commitment to nuclear, as the industry hunts for electrons to power AI data centers. Microsoft is rebooting a dormant reactor in Pennsylvania, and Google is investing in mini-reactor technology. US President Donald Trump has embraced the sector, recently signing a raft of executive orders to speed up reaction construction. “Love Donald Trump or hate him, his administration is the most pro-nuclear in American history, and there’s no second place,” the longtime energy reporter Robert Bryce wrote.

As electricity demand soars — driven by the rapid expansion of data centers and AI — pressure is mounting to scale secure and reliable energy resources.

Join Semafor for a timely conversation with Chairman Mark Christie, FERC; Rep. Brett Guthrie, R-Ky.; and Aamir Paul, President of North American Operations at Schneider Electric, as they discuss how the new Administration plans to accelerate domestic energy production — and whether current infrastructure is up to the task. The discussion will also explore the innovative policies and technologies that could help close the growing supply-demand gap.

June 11, 2025 | Washington, DC | RSVP

AI could snitch on you

Artificial intelligence models may try to snitch on you to the authorities. Anthropic recently reported that its Claude chatbot tried to email law enforcement or the media when shown evidence of wrongdoing by its user. Programmer Simon Willison then tried the same trick with other AIs, and found that both DeepSeek and OpenAI models tried to rat on their users to either external or internal authority figures when told that the user was engaging in clinical trial fraud. AI models may not always have their users’ best interests in mind: Yoshua Bengio, nicknamed the “godfather of AI,” warned that they display “evidence of deception, cheating, lying and self-preservation,” which could become dangerous as they become more intelligent and powerful.

Nigeria leads in maternal deaths

Nigeria accounts for 29% of all maternal deaths worldwide. About 200 women die in or shortly after childbirth every day — a rate of 993 deaths per 100,000 births. The country lacks adequate facilities and staff — fewer than half of births are attended by a trained health worker. Globally, childbirth has become far safer in recent years, with a 40% reduction in deaths per birth since 2000. But progress is far slower in Nigeria, where deaths are down just 13%. The Nigerian government has identified the highest-risk areas and launched a project to reduce deaths, but experts told the BBC that long-term investment in the health system is required.

Our galaxy is safe after all

Relax. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, may not crash into its neighbor Andromeda as previously believed. Physicists have long predicted that the two will meet in around five billion years, although it is likely that few actual stars will collide, since so much of any given galaxy is empty space. But computer modeling, taking into account the gravitational fields of other nearby galaxies, suggested significant uncertainty: In almost half the simulations, the two did not meet in the next 10 billion years. “Based on the best available data, the fate of our Galaxy is still completely open,” the researchers said. The implications for local real estate prices were unclear at the time of writing.

June 4:

• The US and eurozone countries publish services purchasing managers’ index data for May.
• The European Commission is expected to give Bulgaria the green light to adopt the euro.
• Memorials in Taiwan and elsewhere — but not Hong Kong — observe the 36th anniversary of the crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

Sydney Airport is auctioning off thousands of unclaimed items from its lost and found, spotlighting the most luxurious — and unusual — items misplaced by travelers. Some of the 2,000 objects under the hammer included an 18-carat gold bracelet, a black Gucci bag, a CPAP machine and a self-balancing “Hooverboard” device, with each lot starting at $10, and certain bids quickly passing $1,000. All proceeds will go to a local charity providing swimming lessons to local children, in an annual drive that’s raised more than $1.9 million since 2013. “People from all over Australia log in to bid,” an airport executive told The Guardian, “not just for the bargains but because it supports something meaningful.”

After weeks of turmoil, a bipartisan bill that would create rules for digital assets known as stablecoins is at last on track to pass the Senate, Semafor’s Eleanor Mueller reported.

“It has been murder to get them there,” Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., said at a conference last week of the 18 Senate Democrats who eventually sided with Republicans. It was supposed to be one of the GOP’s easiest aisle-crossing wins this Congress, but bitter fallout has transformed it into a vivid example of how hard it is to strike a deal in President Donald Trump’s Washington.