Flagship

BRICS summit spotlights Russia

Russian President Vladimir Putin today opens the BRICS summit of mostly developing economies, reflecting both his diplomatic heft and the limits of his power. The talks will include the group’s original members as well as new joiners Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the UAE, making it the biggest meeting in Russia since Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The summit will focus on eroding the dollar’s dominance of the global financial system, and leveraging what Russian analysts call the “world majority” to promote Moscow’s interests. Yet Putin’s power is also hemmed in: He increasingly serves a subservient role to China, for example, and has already said he will not attend November’s G20 talks in Brazil.

China’s softening diplomacy

China is building diplomatic bridges with several countries it has sparred with in recent years, possibly because of concerns among its leadership over its softening economy. Beijing has agreed a border deal with India, held conciliatory talks with Britain, and softened its stance towards Japan, Pekingnology’s Zichen Wang noted. In part, we are seeing “a more cautious China that’s not looking for fights until it can get its economy back on track,” Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group said in a note to clients. Western powers remain skeptical, though: Australia yesterday announced a $4.7-billion deal to acquire US precision missiles and “safeguard” Australians (read: “from China”) while Washington is upgrading airfields in the Pacific and challenging Beijing’s minerals dominance.

The new wars

World leaders must prepare for a new era of war — one in which states fight each other, rather than insurgents, and deploy technology in ever-more deadly ways, the latest edition of Foreign Affairs warned. In one piece, a former Biden administration defense official argued that the types of conflict that defined the post-9/11 era, against nonstate groups, were giving way to “an age of comprehensive conflict… akin to what theorists in the past have called ‘total war’.” In future, another wrote, “war will be defined in large part by the deployment of huge numbers of uncrewed systems, whether fully autonomous and powered by artificial intelligence or remote-controlled, from outer space to under the sea.”

Israel targets Hezbollah’s finances

Israel launched strikes it said targeted Hezbollah’s financial infrastructure to further kneecap the Lebanese group in its widening conflict. This week, it carried out airstrikes in Lebanon against a bank that Israeli authorities allege helps finance Hezbollah, and later said an attack in Syria resulted in the death of one of the Iran-backed group’s top financiers. Israeli officials also said Hezbollah was holding hundreds of millions of dollars in gold and cash below a hospital in southern Beirut, allegations the hospital’s director denied. The latter accusation cast a spotlight on Lebanon’s collapsing health infrastructure: Persistent Israeli attacks are devastating the country’s already fragile health-care system, according to The New York Times.

Warnings of US election violence

US officials are voicing growing concern over the prospect of violence at next month’s presidential election. The country is experiencing what Reuters described as the “biggest and most sustained increase in political violence since the 1970s,” with 51 incidents so far this year, ranging from assassination attempts on ex-President Donald Trump to brawls and property damage. Several judges have, meanwhile, warned that “the political climate is ripe” for a repeat of the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol, according to the Associated Press. And in Arizona, election offices have added metal detectors, armed guards, and drone surveillance: “You’d have to be a psychopath to say you enjoy this,” one election official told The Wall Street Journal.

— For more on next month’s election, subscribe to Semafor’s daily US politics newsletter.

Mozambique’s election protests

Police in Mozambique fired tear gas at an opposition politician and his supporters during a protest against a disputed presidential election. Venancio Mondlane called for a nationwide shutdown in response to the killing of two close aides after the vote. Preliminary polling showed the Frelimo party — which has ruled the country since independence from Portugal in 1975 — held a commanding lead, although Mondlane said the results were fraudulent. Pacifying the country will top the agenda for Mozambique’s next president: An Islamist insurgency in the north has sparked a humanitarian crisis, leaving 1.3 million people in need of aid, and also threatens a multibillion-dollar gas project.

First patient receives sickle-cell therapy

A 12-year-old US boy became the first patient treated for, and hopefully cured of, sickle-cell anemia since a new gene therapy was approved. The genetic disease, which causes misshapen red blood cells, leads to excruciating pain, damaged organs, and shortened lives. The therapy involves removing bone marrow, editing the cells, and reimplanting them. It was, reported The New York Times, an arduous process: Kendric Cromer was in hospital for 44 days, with his existing marrow destroyed by chemotherapy, leaving him in agony. Other patients who underwent the new therapy refused to talk about it. But it worked for them and is believed to have worked for Kendric. Gene therapies are changing other diseases too: Cystic fibrosis, once a death sentence, could become curable.

Airbnb’s Global Head of Policy and Communications, Jay Carney, will speak at the Future of Technology session at the Fall Edition of Semafor’s World Economy Summit on Oct. 24. The conversation will explore the breakthroughs in AI, quantum computing, and robotics that are disrupting industries, reshaping consumer behavior, and pushing policymakers to adapt to new challenges.

RSVP to this session and the World Economy Summit here.

Colombia opens biodiversity summit

Colombian President Gustavo Petro warned of a “great battle for life” as he opened the COP16 biodiversity summit in Cali. The country’s first leftist president has made protecting the environment a priority, but deforestation has soared recently as powerful armed groups use the Amazon rainforest as a bargaining chip in peace negotiations. Colombia is also enduring a historic drought that could force the economy, which relies on hydropower, to turn to fossil fuels. Experts worry the Amazon deforestation crisis exacerbates the challenges facing millions of people who live in the rainforest, mostly in extreme poverty. “We talk a lot about the climate emergency, but there is a social emergency in the Amazon territory,” one told Bloomberg.

Hunting the Med’s great whites

Researchers are racing to document and save the Mediterranean’s endangered great white shark population. Great whites are usually oceanic creatures, and gather near seal colonies, as off California, South Africa, and Cape Cod. But there is no such aggregation point in the Med, meaning that the sharks’ lifestyle there must be unusual: They presumably feed on tuna and other fish, rather than fatty seals, making it impressive they can reach their two-ton size. The team, looking off the coast of Sicily, Italy, detected the sharks five times, but never saw them — it was like searching for “a grain of sand in the sea.” Top predators are vital to ecosystems, and the sharks’ population has been hit by fishing.

Anime boosts Japan’s soft power

Anime is Japan’s next big export industry. Japanese animation and comics were already mainstream — Pokémon is the highest-grossing media franchise ever — but have expanded hugely. The market for anime doubled in the decade from 2012, to over $20 billion, mainly driven by overseas sales. Franchises like One Piece and Dragon Ball are huge international brands and new Studio Ghibli releases, such as The Boy and the Heron, are global events. Anime has long been a form of Japanese soft power, Australia’s ABC News reported in June, vital in changing its postwar image, and — alongside video games — establishing the country as a cultural superpower while its post-1980s economic dominance waned.

• Singapore International Energy Week is underway, attended by industry executives and energy ministers from around the world.
• Polish President Andrzej Duda begins a state visit in South Korea.
• Hasan Minhaj: Off With His Head, a new comedy special, is released on Netflix.

The value of the largest known prime number: Two multiplied by itself 136,279,841 times, minus one. It was announced yesterday by the unfortunately named Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS). Mersenne primes, named after the 17th-century French monk Marin Mersenne, take the form 2^n-1 — that is, two times itself n times, minus one. Hunters of big primes look for Mersennes because they’re relatively easy to find and check (although confirming 2^136,279,841-1’s primality still required several days’ work for a cloud-based supercomputer). The number contains 41,024,320 digits: If printed out on A4 sheets in size 12 font, it would take up about 10,000 pages.

Dan Da Dan on Netflix. Vulture named this “horror-meets-sci-fi-meets-action-meets-romantic-comedy” show one of the best anime series of 2024 so far: It could seem “unwieldy and unfocused,” the reviewer said, but “each episode tackles the paranormal with an irreverent sense of humor.” Watch Dan Da Dan on Netflix.

Abu Dhabi-based AI firm G42 has built up four times more computing capacity in the US than in the UAE, Semafor Gulf’s Kelsey Wagner scooped. The huge scale-up in computing power “underscores the seriousness of the UAE’s ambitions in AI,” Kelsey wrote.

Semafor Gulf today hosts its first live journalism event in Washington, where speakers include regional government and business leaders.

You can register here to attend. Sign up here.