Category: Semafor

Hosts Mexico beat South Africa 2-0 in a promising opening game of the men’s soccer World Cup. The tournament has been beset with fears over seat pricing and turnout, but the Azteca stadium was full and in carnival mode, with beer and paper sombreros raining from the stands. Concerns about ...

The Scoop OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was expected to visit Abu Dhabi this weekend but called it off, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, as the ChatGPT maker, which has deep ties to the UAE, prepares for its public market debut. Uncertainty pervaded the potential visit, ...

The News Elon Musk is set to become the world’s first trillionaire as SpaceX goes public today in the biggest IPO in history. Musk’s confidants and colleagues will get a lot richer, too. The company sold $75 billion worth of shares at $135 a piece, valuing it at $1.77 trillion ...

US President Donald Trump said he had reached a “great settlement” with Iran that would stop the Islamic Republic from obtaining a nuclear weapon, though Tehran said nothing had been finalized. An Iranian state outlet published what it said was a draft of the agreement, saying it included negotiations over ...

The UK defense secretary resigned Thursday after accusing the prime minister of being too frugal with military spending at a time of “rising threats,” adding to Europe’s defense woes. Italy’s defense chief said peers across the continent are “grappling with the very same challenges,” as calls for increased military spending ...

Europe’s AI buildout is orders of magnitude too small, and if it does not step up it will be left as an economic backwater, a group of AI policy thinkers warned. Europe hosts just 5% of global AI compute, compared to the US’ 80%, the group said. The EU’s flagship ...

Chinese regulators accused leading e-commerce platforms of misleading marketing tactics ahead of 618, the country’s second-largest annual shopping bonanza. The scolding dented shares of Alibaba and JD.com and came weeks after regulators told the companies to avoid an aggressive price war that has squeezed profits and set the government back ...

China is a growing hub for medical tourism, offering cutting-edge procedures cheaper than Western patients can access at home. An infusion of CAR-T cancer immunotherapy costs up to $475,000 in the US; in China, as little as $150,000. China has set up a special international medical tourism zone in Hainan, ...

The globalization of professional soccer has turned players into polyglots, even as global entertainment is increasingly siloed. As soccer professionalized, clubs realized that verbal communication was an “essential working tool,” the Financial Times wrote: “Some multinational businesses could learn from the linguistic sophistication of football teams.” De facto polyglots, Belgians ...

Private credit giant Blue Owl Capital is opening a regional headquarters — somewhat of a loaded term in the Gulf — in Abu Dhabi, an indicator that Wall Street firms are still betting on the UAE capital despite uncertainty over the Iran war. The firm, which manages $315 billion in ...