Flagship

SKorea’s twin crises

South Korea was hit by upheaval as authorities sought an arrest warrant for the country’s president while investigators launched a wide-ranging inquiry into a plane crash that killed 179 people. The former development is the latest chapter of a far-reaching political crisis following the brief imposition of martial law this month, resulting in the impeachment of the president and his prime minister and spurring questions over the future foreign policy of a country that had hardened its stance against China and in favor of Ukraine. The tragic crash, meanwhile, has triggered an outpouring of sympathy domestically even as authorities began inspecting all Boeing 737-800 planes — the model at the center of the disaster — alongside a broader safety review.

Carter’s death symbolizes US shifts

Tributes poured in for former US President Jimmy Carter, who died aged 100, with analysts noting his passing highlighted deep changes in American politics. Carter — whose approval rating in office was the second-lowest in the post-World War II era — was admired for his work as a humanitarian. His death notably marked the end of “progressive evangelicalism,” an expert argued in Politico, with religiosity now dominated by the right in US politics. And while all five living US presidents spoke warmly of him and occasions such as his state funeral have historically prompted “a ceasefire in America’s fractious political wars,” as The New York Times put it, it is unclear if President-elect Donald Trump will attend.

Croatia’s NATO critic wins

Croatia’s head of state, a critic of NATO and the European Union, won the first round of his country’s presidential election. Zoran Milanović narrowly missed out on the 50% threshold required to win outright, but is widely expected to take the final round in two weeks. His success is the latest sign of Europe’s eroding support for Ukraine ahead of US President-elect Donald Trump’s return to office: Europeans’ willingness to countenance peace negotiations has risen markedly, and the numbers who say they care about Kyiv has dropped, according to YouGov. “Europe has promised to stand by Ukraine,” a Le Monde correspondent wrote. “In reality, it is more than ever caught” between the whims of Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

China’s expanding defense capacity

China unveiled cutting-edge aerial and maritime military capabilities. Analysts pored over blurry images that appeared online late last week of advanced fighter jets that seemed to have new stealth capabilities, with designs that Reuters said were “novel relative to the rest of China’s fleet.” The jets were seen flying over a major Chinese city and showcase the country’s “willingness… to experiment and innovate,” one analyst said. Separately, China’s navy announced the launch of a top-end amphibious assault ship, underscoring Beijing’s push to expand its maritime defense capacity. The rest of the region isn’t sitting tight: India last month tested a hypersonic missile.

The geography of AI power

Growing electricity demand from artificial intelligence-focused data centers is amplifying domestic power issues across the US. More than 75% of all distorted power readings across the country are from homes that lie near data centers, Bloomberg reported, and new facilities are “adding stress to already fragile grids.” In Atlanta, data center construction was up 76% in the first six months of 2024 compared to a year ago, driving local political opposition: The city council this year banned new construction of such facilities in key areas, The Wall Street Journal noted. Not everyone is opposed, though. Cities in the Midwest and the south with well-educated workforces, cheap housing, and affordable workers could benefit, a new report argued.

Mali’s ‘sunshine journalism’

Reporters in Mali — a country which has for years been ruled by a pro-Russia military regime — must practice “sunshine journalism” to avoid prison or death, a regional journalist argued in the London Review of Books. The piece pointed to the varied costs being borne by the country, which has struggled economically and where security has by some measures worsened, despite Mali’s military leaders arguing that curbing militia control was one of the main reasons for their initial drive to power. Domestic journalists must now not simply be mouthpieces for the country’s rulers, but also for allied, neighbouring military regimes: “The message that journalism can be considered a crime in Mali has been received loud and clear,” an analyst said.

Cocaine’s relentless growth

The cocaine trade is bigger and more international than ever. Whereas the drug had primarily been consumed in the US in prior years, cocaine seizures in Europe increased fivefold in the decade to 2021 and overtook America the following year, The Washington Post reported. Nearly all of Latin America’s major nations either produce or traffick the drug, South America produces double the amount of cocaine it did 10 years ago, and the record amount of cocaine manufactured in 2022 was a 20% increase on the figure from a year prior. “A few years ago, people were saying the future was synthetic drugs,” a United Nations official said. “Right now, it’s still cocaine.”

Join us for our largest convening at Davos yet, featuring a world-class lineup of live journalism at the World Economic Forum 2025. Semafor editors will engage with industry leaders to discuss key themes, including global finance, blockchain, AI in the Gulf, Africa’s growth trajectory, and much more.

Mexico-France artefact debate

An Indigenous Mexican nation’s appeal to France for the return of a centuries-old manuscript sparked a political debate in Paris. French President Emmanuel Macron in 2017 was by Western standards a rare leader to have promised the return of artefacts held in France to African nations from which they were taken, but far-left lawmakers have criticized delays to that pledge. More recently, the Nahñu community of central Mexico’s Hidalgo state wrote this month to France’s legislature calling for the return of a codex it said described what are still their contemporary practices. French authorities have previously rejected such requests, but Le Monde reported that far-left legislators will support the Mexican group’s request.

Corporate efforts at risk

Progressive corporate efforts on climate and diversity faced a difficult year — but 2025 will offer little respite, analysts said. On both sides of the Atlantic, but particularly surprisingly in Europe where environmentally-friendly policies had made progress, “the green march began to stumble” in 2024, a Financial Times columnist argued. The coming accession of US President-elect Donald Trump, seen as more climate skeptic than his predecessor, means that “fraught green politics are by no means at an end.” Trump’s incoming administration is also readying to target diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, with one of his advisers telling The Wall Street Journal, “The pendulum is swinging back and swinging back very hard against DEI.”

Media mogul dies

US media and entertainment mogul Charles Dolan died aged 98. Dolan founded HBO in 1972, pioneering a subscription model for TV that made cable television an “economic, social, and cultural force” in the US, according to one media expert, paving the way for modern streaming services. As a businessman, he was prolific, The New York Times wrote: Dolan bought the New York Knicks basketball team and Madison Square Garden (his son James now runs the Knicks, MSG, and the New York Rangers ice hockey team), as well as the newspaper Newsday. Dolan was admired by fellow media executives as a character not to be underestimated, with one describing him as “Darth Vader dressed up in a Howdy Doody outfit.”

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returns to court to testify in his corruption trial.
• India’s space agency launches two satellites in order to complete a rare docking demonstration mission.
• Times Square in New York City tests the drop of its iconic New Year’s Eve ball.

Lucky strike

“What happens if, at some point, our luck runs out?” That’s the question Brian Klaas asks of the risk that progress can present: Artificial intelligence, global pandemics, mirror bacteria, and climate change all trigger such dilemmas. If humanity were to die out in a hard-to-comprehend amount of time, like a million years, that would do little to change individual behaviour, but if it were at risk of being eradicated in a matter of generations, one’s choices might change.

Such worries about extinction are “relatively recent in Western thought,” Klaas notes. “However, for too long, little attention was paid to these risks.” There is an alternative to doomerism, though, even if it may seem far-fetched at first glance: Some form of global agreement and regulation of existential risks. “We don’t have to accept reckless courting of existential risk,” he continues. “We have the power to stop it. It’s a choice.”

Conflict resolution

Wars, conflict, and upheaval have differing impacts on countries worldwide — and can be interpreted differently globally. The legacies of the 2011 Arab revolutions in the Western world have been hyper-analyzed, but their consequences on the foreign policies of other nations have been comparatively less studied. The timing of the Arab Spring was critical in particular for China: The country’s leader Xi Jinping came to power soon after, and the lessons Beijing learned from the overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammer Gaddafi, for example, “influenced [its] approach to multilateral diplomacy and conflict resolution,” the China analyst Jesse Marks wrote.

Ultimately, China has softened its insistence on non-interference in other countries’ affairs, a “pragmatism” that has “allowed China to expand its influence in the Middle East by presenting itself as a reliable and impartial partner.” The country may now face a quandary in the region because of its ties to Iran — which has been weakened in recent months by the losses suffered by its proxies — but the “Libyan experience underscored… a lesson that continues to inform its diplomatic engagements across the Arab world.”

Statistically significant

The aesthetics of major American sports are changing, and longtime fans love to blame the most analytically minded analysts: Professional basketball is being redefined by a proliferation in the number of three-pointers, top-flight baseball has seen a slower, but still noticeable decline in the proportion of balls being “put in play,” and (American) football teams are increasingly taking risks such as passing in what had been running situations and “going for it” on fourth down.

But are the sports worse for those changes? That’s far from clear. “Modern analysts may have added different insights, but the goal is and has always been finding better ways to score points for your team and prevent the opponent from doing the same,” Neil Paine, an analytically focused sportswriter, argued in his newsletter. “It’s easy to romanticize a past where sports were ‘freer,’ untethered by optimization and the influence of external strategists. But the truth is, sports have always been shaped by those who innovate.”

To cap 2024, we’ve asked members of the Semafor newsroom for a recommendation of a book, TV show, movie, or podcast they enjoyed this year.

Big Science: ­Ernest Lawrence and the Invention That Launched the Military-Industrial Complex by Michael Hiltzik. I recently re-read this enjoyable page-turner, which takes you back to the moment the American innovation cocktail was first mixed, combining pioneer problem solving with basic science and garnished with a slice of private capital and government funding. Today’s moment bears a striking resemblance to the pre-World War II era: Artificial intelligence has reached a stage similar to that of nuclear physics in the 1930s, when it went from elegant theoretical research to “big science.” The US and China are both embarking on a race, and the winner will be the one that best combines academic prowess with industrial capability and raw capital. Buy Big Science from your local bookstore.

Semafor got many things right about technology in 2024, including a tech war with China, heightened AI regulations, and more quantum computers, Reed Albergotti reported. But he missed a major story on the potential of a “Manhattan Project” for AI in 2025, much to Albergotti’s regret.