Flagship

Trump sends National Guard to LA

US President Donald Trump deployed 2,000 National Guard troops to the Los Angeles area following protests against immigration raids targeting local businesses. The move marked an intensification of Trump’s immigration crackdown; past National Guard deployments to California have happened amid widespread civil unrest, and at the request of the state’s governor — not isolated protests that saw clashes with police, The Los Angeles Times wrote. Democrats criticized the president’s order, with California’s governor saying administration officials “want a spectacle.” Others called for discipline: Writer Matthew Yglesias said protesters should “take the authoritarian threat seriously and exert maximum self-control.” The deployment, The Economist wrote, signals to other cities that “retribution awaits those who would stand between immigrants and the administration’s deportation machine.”

Russia’s multi-pronged retaliation

Russia launched a massive drone and missile attack on the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv Saturday, as US officials warned that Moscow plans a multi-pronged assault on the country. Russia has escalated strikes on Ukrainian urban centers in recent weeks as peace talks between the two sides have stalled; the fresh onslaught on Kharkiv was “the most powerful attack” since 2022, its mayor said. Despite the bombardment, Washington believes the Kremlin hasn’t yet retaliated in earnest for Ukraine’s drone strike on Russian bombers last weekend, Reuters reported. “It will be huge, vicious and unrelenting,” one Western diplomat said, with analysts predicting Russia will target Ukrainian government buildings.

UK parallels in Trump-Musk feud

US President Donald Trump’s falling-out with Elon Musk holds parallels to former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s relationship with one of his top advisers. Dominic Cummings was a chief Brexit strategist and close Johnson ally, but quit in 2020, turning on his former boss. Unlike Musk, Cummings was a seasoned political operative, but both “believed that you can run the government as a high-performance startup” and that past attempts at reform “hadn’t smashed enough things quickly enough,” London Centric editor Jim Waterson wrote for Semafor. The UK drama could hold lessons for Washington: Ultimately, Cummings fatally undermined Johnson’s leadership. “When someone who was inside the room … says it’s all a sham, the damage can be significant.”

US, China to hold trade talks in London

Chinese and US officials meet for trade talks Monday that will likely center around export controls, not tariffs. Following the détente in the superpowers’ trade war earlier this year, the focus has shifted from high import duties to export restrictions on goods like semiconductors and rare earths: Analysts believe Washington will use the London meeting to push Beijing to speed up sales of minerals and other crucial components for manufacturing, while China is expected to argue for easing technology sales curbs, including on artificial intelligence chips. Chinese state media struck a cautious note, saying that there is “an important opportunity for relations to return to the right track,” but the “true test” for the US lies ahead.

Colombia presidential candidate shot

An assassination attempt on a Colombian senator and presidential hopeful Saturday stirred echoes of a dark period in the country’s history. Miguel Uribe Turbay, a right-wing politician and critic of current President Gustavo Petro, remained in serious condition Sunday after a 15-year-old hitman shot him in the head at a campaign event, authorities said. The attack has “revived a nightmare from 35 years ago,” El País wrote: Three presidential candidates were assassinated in the runup to Colombia’s 1990 election as cartel-driven violence gripped the country. Whoever ordered Uribe’s shooting “had the intention of throwing gas onto a fire” ahead of next year’s presidential vote, one expert said, “trying to be incendiary in an electoral context that is already deeply polarized.”

Pentagon officers misled on UFOs

The US Pentagon and some military officers misled their own personnel and the public about the existence of UFOs for decades, The Wall Street Journal reported. Waves of hype over extraterrestrial phenomena — and alleged government coverups — have rippled through recent history, especially during the Cold War. Now, the Journal reports how US military officials used UFOs as cover for real secret military programs — and even as a “bizarre hazing ritual.” These efforts were uncovered by a Pentagon office established in 2022 to investigate reports of UFOs, but weren’t publicly disclosed. The sprawling disinformation campaigns have “unleashed within the halls of the Pentagon itself a dangerous force,” giving rise to a “paranoid mythology” that some senior officials believe to be true.

Football comedy reflects US-China ties

A new Chinese comedy film about a ragtag American-football team reflects how US-China cultural ties have evolved. The film appears to have been based on a 2014 New Republic article by Christopher Beam about a real football team in Chongqing and their foreign coach. A studio bought the rights to Beam’s piece at a time when Beijing was more open to Hollywood, but it fizzled in production, partly because Chinese audiences weren’t interested in an American story about “how the Chinese aren’t all that different from us.” The new adaptation “blatantly lifted the premise” of the original article, Beam wrote in The Atlantic, but smartly reframed it for a domestic audience, centering the Chinese players rather than the American coach.

The global workforce is at an inflection point. New tech continues to impact how we work, and managers are struggling as organizations undergo major changes.

Join Judy Gilbert, Chief People Officer at ŌURA; Maureen Conway, Executive Director of the Economic Opportunities Program at The Aspen Institute; Mark Rayfield, President & CEO of Saint-Gobain North America; and additional leading voices to discuss the state of workplace productivity, resilience, and well-being, examining how leaders and policymakers are responding to rapidly shifting expectations around work.

Semafor will host newsmaking conversations in partnership with Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report to explore new data on how employees and managers are navigating ongoing uncertainty in the global labor market.

June 12, 2025 | Washington, DC | RSVP

Energy supplement benefits in doubt

A massive study in humans, mice, and monkeys pours doubt on whether a supplement has the anti-aging properties it was thought to hold. Taurine is an abundant amino acid and a key ingredient in energy drinks like Red Bull. It is also marketed as a dietary supplement for healthy aging: A 2023 paper found taurine levels fall as we age, and that mice fed extra taurine lived longer. But new research indicates taurine levels rise over time, suggesting the amino acid is not a useful measure of aging after all. The contradictions, Stat News wrote, are “a reminder of just how messy and complicated longevity studies can be, and how elusive treatments, or even just reliable markers, for aging remain.”

Rooting out bad science

A new project seeks to root out poor science used in official health guidelines. Many scientific papers’ findings are unreliable, sometimes due to mistakes, lack of reproducibility, shoddy methods, or even fraud: One review found serious concerns with 6% of the studies it assessed. In medicine, that can have life-or-death consequences. European health guidelines previously recommend using beta blockers for some surgeries; later analysis found that advice may have cost 10,000 lives a year in the UK alone, Nature reported. The Medical Evidence Project will examine publications used in literature reviews that inform policy, and provide an outlet for whistleblowers concerned about influential papers. Identifying bad research is generally a volunteer effort, and corrections or retractions can take years.

Japan wolf plan gains support

A plan to reintroduce wolves to Japan is gaining support as a possible solution to the country’s out-of-control monkey population. The last Japanese wolf was killed in 1905, but other large mammals — notably monkeys, deer, and wild boar, which damage farmland and forests, as well as cause road accidents — have exploded as rural Japan depopulates and hunting declines, the South China Morning Post reported. Proponents argue that wolves would rebalance ecosystems, and similar projects have seen success in Europe and North America. Others worry they might attack humans. One expert noted that past reintroductions in Japan have not worked out as planned: “If the same thing was done with wolves, there are no guarantees that they would only hunt deer and boar.”

June 9:

• Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off in California.
• China releases inflation data for May.
• The United Nations Ocean Conference begins in Nice, France.

A musical composed entirely by artificial intelligence — but edited, directed, and performed by humans — premiered in South Korea. The Voice of Hamlet: The Concert reworks William Shakespeare’s classic play about a Danish prince tortured by visions of his dead father as a solo performance accompanied by a five-piece rock band. For the humans behind the project, AI was a critical tool, Korea JoongAng Daily reported, with the reviewer noting that if it hadn’t been disclosed, its use would not have been obvious: “As long as we asked the right questions with the clear intent of the show in mind… [AI] was very good at producing a basic, but solid, starting point from which we could build,” the work’s producer said.

David Gitlin turned around US air conditioning and refrigeration group Carrier Global, earning him a reputation as one of the country’s most effective industrial executives — and one of the highest-paid. But when aerospace giant Boeing shortlisted him to be its new CEO, he declined.

“I was flattered to be considered,” Gitlin told Semafor’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson of the Boeing nod. But, he said, Carrier was “in the midst of doing something that history will prove is very, very special.”