Flagship

COP27 reaches bad-tempered end

The COP27 conference agreed that rich nations will pay poorer ones compensation for the damage caused by climate change. That was seen as a breakthrough, but many nations were left frustrated by the lack of progress on cutting carbon emissions. The summit came close to collapse after host Egypt refused to allow discussion of phasing out fossil fuels, and European Union ministers threatened to walk out. More fights await: Not least over whether China, now the biggest greenhouse gas emitter, contributes to the fund.

Unwelcome full shelves

Reduced shopping during the U.S. holiday season and “back to normal” supply chains have led to overstocked American stores with worldwide implications. Inflation may be slowing but U.S. shoppers are watching what they spend, fearful of a coming recession. Retailers expected a bountiful sales period after more than a year of supply-chain problems. Instead, they may slash prices to get rid of excess inventory. That is forcing suppliers in places like Vietnam to shut or fire hundreds of staff, while others “have put up their homes and cars as collateral for loans,” the Vietnam-focused journalist Michael Tatarski writes.

Russia runs up bills over Ukraine

Russia borrowed $13.6 billion, its largest-ever one-day debt issuance, to fund its invasion of Ukraine. The U.K. Ministry of Defence says Moscow’s 2023 military spending will reach $84 billion, more than 40% over budget. U.S. support for Ukraine, by contrast, is “an incredible investment” — for just 5.6% of its defense budget, the Center for European Policy Analysis says, Washington has “destroyed nearly half of Russia’s conventional military capability.” During the Cold War, Russia struggled to match U.S. spending in the arms race. The Ukraine war could bankrupt the Kremlin once more.

China’s youth set their sights higher

Younger Chinese are spurning the factory jobs that helped their parents out of poverty. Youth unemployment in China is high, but manufacturers face labor shortages in part because the new generation is choosing either less repetitive jobs or a minimal “lying flat” lifestyle, Reuters reports. It’s causing problems because older workers find it harder to “keep up with the faster gear, or read the data on the screens,” according to one factory boss. Over the last 20 years, the number of Chinese university graduates has gone up tenfold, and the economy has grown 15 times larger. The aspirations of young workers have lifted accordingly.

Malaysia’s growing Islamist faction

Malaysians voted in a hung parliament, rebuking the country’s historically dominant party while a hardline Islamist group won record levels of support. The election could deliver Malaysia’s fourth prime minister since 2018. UMNO, which has mostly led Malaysia since the country’s independence in 1957, won fewer than 15% of seats. A multiethnic grouping won the most, but coming in second was an alliance which included an Islamist party that has advocated ardently pro-Muslim policies in the religiously and ethnically diverse country. The leader of its youth wing once said that music concerts invite the “wrath of Allah.”

New head of Latin America’s bank

Latin America’s main development bank elected a former Brazil central bank head as president after its prior leader was ousted for workplace misconduct. The Inter-American Development Bank funds hundreds of projects across the region, which is struggling with sluggish growth and the aftermath of the pandemic. Officials hope Ilan Goldfajn’s election turns a page on the leadership of Mauricio Claver-Carone, who had an intimate relationship with a senior staffer and awarded her pay rises. Goldfajn’s selection also bodes well for incoming Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s leadership, suggesting he will opt for moderation, analysts say.

AI’s double-edged capabilities

Meta released a new artificial intelligence system designed to write scientific literature reviews, but quickly had to take it down. Scientists were concerned that the model’s output was so human-like that undergraduates would use it to cheat. Users ultimately employed it to churn out plausible but false articles. Meanwhile, industry rumor has it that GPT-4, the next edition of OpenAI’s language model, will be released in the next three months, AI analyst Alberto Romero writes, and could pass the Turing test, reliably fooling humans into thinking that they’re having a conversation with another human.

Tuning out the World Cup

World Cup fever is scarce in the West: In Germany pubs are boycotting it, half of fans won’t watch, and merchandise sales are down 50% from the last men’s tournament. Other European countries are forgoing public screenings, while the BBC covered corruption and human rights instead of the opening ceremony. World Cups in authoritarian states aren’t new but the nakedness of the corruption that led to tiny Qatar, with its lack of a “tradition of football,” being awarded the tournament drives indifference, one football writer told DW. In the opener, the hosts lost to unfancied Ecuador in a three-quarters-empty stadium.

Young nation, old leaders

Joe Biden celebrated his 80th birthday. He’s not the only octogenarian in U.S. politics. The outgoing House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, is 82. Mitch McConnell, Senate minority leader, is 80. Biden’s once and possibly future rival, Donald Trump, is a spring chicken at 76. The average senator is 64 years old. This sort of gerontocracy is unusual. In the U.K., the average MP is 50, while the average French representative is 48. All of Britain’s living ex-prime ministers are younger than Biden, including John Major, who left office in 1997.

Death of a diplomat

A panda gifted by Beijing to Taiwan 14 years ago — during a period of improving ties — died. After Tuan Tuan suffered seizures and was put under anesthesia, the medical team at Taipei Zoo let him “continue to sleep.” The panda and his mate, Yuan Yuan, were gifted in 2008, their combined names meaning “reunion.” Beijing’s “panda diplomacy” is now well known, but the strategy started out with difficulties: At the height of the Cold War, for example, one panda was blocked from transport to Brooklyn Zoo because of U.S. regulations that noted her “Communist background,” Sixth Tone writes.

• Kenya’s President William Ruto sets off for Seoul, hoping to sign a series of trade deals and win greater access to the South Korean market.
• Serbia and Kosovo’s leaders will meet with the European Union’s foreign policy chief to lower tensions over a license-plate dispute that threatens wider unrest.
• Joe Biden will “pardon” two turkeys ahead of the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, part of a White House tradition that dates back to the Abraham Lincoln administration.

Me, myself and eye

We don’t notice what a miracle vision is. Our brains take a strange, distorted, upside-down images of the world that shines through our eyes’ lenses onto our retinas, and turn them into a pin-sharp motion picture. Even more amazingly, we do it with two, slightly different, images, one from each eye, and combine them to form a 3D model. As babies, we have to learn to take all that buzzing, blooming confusion of information and make sense of it. James Phillips, who was born blind in one eye, explains in his newsletter what it’s like when that process goes wrong.

Science instead of sex

Beauty companies have long been criticized for over-sexualizing their predominantly female customer base — sex, as the saying goes, sells. But shifting consumer demands and cultural mores have made those sales tactics untenable. Instead, the beauty culture critic Jessica DeFino writes, they have begun to sell “science,” medicalizing consumer products. “At least in terms of beauty industry advertising,” she writes, “the medical gaze is the new male gaze!”

A blast of common sense

The risk of a nuclear exchange sparked by the war in Ukraine has provoked understandable fear. The physicist Max Tegmark put the risk of a full-on nuclear war at one in six; a group of superforecasters were more circumspect but still thought it was one-in-10. The anonymous author of In the Sight of the Unwise believes those risks are “dramatically overstated” and that the true risk is one in several thousand at most. If you want well-reasoned reassurance that we’re not about to be vaporized to salve Vladimir Putin’s pride, it’s a worthwhile read.

Sonic wins back hearts in Japan

Sonic, the world’s most famous hedgehog, has finally shaken off a “20-year curse.” The video game debuted in Japan in 1991, soaring to fame as a blue blur that became a worldwide hit. But in recent years it has struggled to sell in its native country. Sonic Frontiers, the latest edition of the series, broke that trend, becoming the fastest-selling game in the Sega franchise in Japan in two decades. That was achieved, in part, by rewriting the dialogue and adopting a more serious tone for Japanese fans less keen on the “goofy direction” of earlier games, TheGamer reports.

If you enjoyed Flagship, please share it with your family, friends, and colleagues — it makes a big difference to our mission to cover the world with intelligence and insight.

To make sure Flagship hits your inbox every day, add flagship@semafor.com to your contacts. In Gmail, drag our newsletter to your “Primary” tab.

You can always reach us on that address, or by replying to this email. We’d love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, and see you tomorrow.

— Tom, Prashant Rao, Preeti Jha, and Jeronimo Gonzalez

Want more Semafor? Explore all our newsletters at semafor.com/newsletters