Category: Semafor

Companies are second-guessing their aggressive spending on AI, as the tech weighs on margins. AI has been pitched partly as an avenue for businesses to save money because of increased productivity — but corporations are now facing ballooning IT costs. Uber blew through its entire 2026 AI budget in four ...

More than 1,000 Bahraini citizens have sent messages of support to King Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa in recent weeks, praising a clampdown on those accused of being sympathetic to Iran. In what appears to be a well-coordinated campaign, the first cables were sent in early May, soon after the king ...

Abdullah bin Hamad Al Attiyah, the architect of Qatar’s LNG industry that transformed the country from a declining oil producer into one of the world’s wealthiest nations, died in London on Wednesday. The former energy minister was born in 1953, nearly two decades before Qatar’s independence. He grew up in ...

Saudi Arabia’s $1.5 billion pledge this month to help Syrians return from refugee camps is a major boost to the government in Damascus, which is working to consolidate power and restart the economy after more than a decade of war. The package — tied to housing, infrastructure, utilities, and small ...

Liz’s view Looking around at our casino economy, I keep asking: Who is all this for? The long tail of nonsense bets on prediction markets can’t possibly be what Dwight Eisenhower had in mind when he endorsed the “people’s capitalism” put forward by America’s greatest Cold War propagandist, Theodore Repplier. ...

The News A multibillion-dollar outsourcing agency used by European countries to process visa applications in Africa has amassed millions of dollars in profits from services that are often sold without proper disclosure to applicants, a new investigation alleges. VFS Global, which is majority owned by US asset manager Blackstone began ...

The pope’s tour through Africa last month cemented the continent as key to Catholicism’s future — but it is not even the fastest-growing form of Christianity there, and soon may not be the biggest. The number of Catholics in Africa grew about fivefold from 1975 to 271 million last year, ...

The growing global use of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs is forcing entire sectors beyond the pharmaceutical industry, from fashion to food, to adapt. Major clothing brands are increasingly designing their goods for “body fluctuation and ‘size volatility’,” The Business of Fashion reported, forcing a rethink of supply chains and inventory management. ...

Oil prices were back on the rise Thursday after the US and Iran traded a fresh round of airstrikes. Despite signals earlier in the week that negotiators were making progress toward a ceasefire, tensions are now escalating again, with Washington and Tehran deeply divided over potential future rules of transit ...

Global shipments of clean-energy products reached a record $479 billion in 2025, overcoming major headwinds to cross-border trade. After falling 7% between 2023 and 2024, trading volumes rose 1% this year, suggesting that US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on the energy transition sector — however frequently imposed and revised — ...