Category: Semafor

Walmart posted the slowest US sales growth in six years on Thursday, the latest sign that consumers are feeling strapped. Same-store sales missed analyst estimates, with CFO John David Rainey telling CNBC “consumers have been more pressured” than earlier this year. Walmart’s sheer scale makes it a bellwether for Americans’ ...

A tiny biotech deal announced in July is suddenly attracting a lot of attention. Tempus AI agreed to acquire Personalis, a Merck-backed company which provides advanced genomic sequencing and analytics for cancer treatments, for $1.5 billion. It would have passed by without much notice, but Personalis’ technology is crucial to ...

A big hiccup is moving through the global oil trade that’s likely to cause another surge in prices, especially in Asia, over the next few weeks. With tanker traffic out of the Persian Gulf constricted over the past six months, higher exports from other countries, especially the US, have helped ...

The State Department is warning of the “long and challenging” road ahead in addressing the Ebola crisis ravaging parts of Africa, after the epidemic became the deadliest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s history earlier this week. The grim milestone has renewed scrutiny of the US response to the ...

The News When the Carlyle Group decided to get into the madcap data-center dash, it didn’t start by courting hyperscalers or Emirati royals. It called the US Army. This spring Carlyle won a 50-year lease of federal lands in Fort Bliss, Texas, and is negotiating the development of a data ...

President Donald Trump’s latest step away from military escalation in Iran comes as the US side sees talks between Iran and Oman — which had appeared to be a rare fruitful negotiation path — as having stalled in recent days. A US official and a White House official told Semafor ...

President Donald Trump’s on-camera openness to US market access for Hyperliquid, a Singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange that allows its users to trade anonymously, won’t thrill its domestic competitors. Intercontinental Exchange Inc. and CME Group Inc. recently urged US officials to rein in the exchange, which they warn could be used to ...

An experimental vaccine prevented the return and spread of cancer in high-risk melanoma patients, Moderna and Merck announced Wednesday, a milestone in the pursuit of cancer therapies. Built on the mRNA platform that allowed Moderna to quickly roll out COVID-19 vaccines five years ago, intismeran is a genetically personalized vaccine ...

China on Wednesday ordered organizations and individuals not to comply with an EU probe of e-commerce giant JD.com’s acquisition of a German electronics retailer, escalating tensions between Brussels and Beijing. It’s the first Chinese takeover to be investigated under the bloc’s rules that scrutinize firms receiving foreign subsidies. Beijing said ...

Israel’s military said Wednesday it was launching criminal investigations into attacks that killed a Palestinian child and 15 Palestinian paramedics, the first such probes into troop conduct in Gaza. The incidents had provoked international scrutiny of the country’s assault on Gaza. The rare move, The Wall Street Journal wrote, reflects ...