Category: Semafor

Far-right activist Laura Loomer went from criticizing Ukraine to meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a rapid transformation that came as a pleasant surprise to Europe and Ukraine’s backers. The roots of Loomer’s pivot, which she began a month ago by acknowledging on her show that she “fell for Russian ...

Former West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin is launching the Independent Leadership Council, a new effort to elect independent candidates to Congress that will focus first on competitive seats this election cycle. “We’re trying to build a true independent network,” Manchin told Semafor. “Not a third party, but a movement of ...

Economists predicted that the US’ sweeping new tariffs, which take effect Friday, will not seriously disrupt the global economy. Tariffs’ inflationary effects are “likely to have already peaked,” Commerzbank wrote, pointing to the Trump administration’s propensity for exempting key consumer goods and failing to implement certain threatened levies. While higher ...

India’s government will likely quell the student-led Cockroach protests, but it will have a harder time suppressing the underlying frustration fueling them, prominent Indian commentators argued. The movement, which began as a satirical campaign after a judge derided India’s unemployed youth as “cockroaches,” has transcended grievances about the education system’s ...

The US tech industry is divided over how Washington should handle the rise of open-source AI from China. OpenAI and Anthropic, the two leading AI startups that both make “closed” models, have in recent weeks sounded the alarm on what they see as the risks stemming from their cheaper Chinese ...

Chinese nationals were awarded the prestigious Fields Medal for the first time, in the latest sign of the country’s growing academic prowess. Hong Wang and Yu Deng, both Peking University grads, were among the four winners of the prize, a Nobel-like honor for the world’s top mathematicians under 40. The ...

US regulators on Thursday said they plan to develop rules to address the safety risks linked to the hidden electric car door handles popularized by Tesla. Investigations from Bloomberg have uncovered more than a dozen deaths from crashes in which people became trapped inside a Tesla because the doors wouldn’t ...

by Cate Hall with Sasha Chapin. A couple of years ago, we highlighted Hall’s Substack on how to be “agentic,” the master of one’s own destiny. She now has a book out on the same subject — we’d like to think we were the agents of destiny there — on ...

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s uneasy truce with New York’s business elite was tested again Wednesday when he appointed antitrust crusader Lina Khan to a formal post in his administration. Khan will chair the city’s economic development board, which oversees the leasing and use of huge chunks of city property, including Hudson ...

Sports betting is degrading the financial health of the most vulnerable households, according to a new study that tees up an emerging political issue. The study, which draws on transaction data from more than 180,000 households, found that sports betting doesn’t replace shopping or other gambling, like lottery tickets or ...