Category: Semafor

The US has left more than 40 African nations without a Senate-confirmed ambassador, hampering Washington’s efforts to engage in security and diplomatic missions across the continent. Some 41 African countries currently lack a confirmed envoy, including Nigeria, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, and Sudan. While there are vacancies ...

The top Democrats on five Senate committees are rebuking President Donald Trump for making $1.3 billion off of cryptocurrency as lawmakers prepare to take up a long-awaited digital assets bill. “The disclosures heighten concerns about the president pushing Congress to pass crypto legislation in favor of the very industry he’s ...

The end of a Democrat’s disastrous bid for a must-win US Senate seat has blunted the party’s efforts to oppose President Donald Trump’s agenda. Graham Platner’s populist campaign ignited the Democratic grassroots but many soured on the scandal-plagued candidate, underscoring the deepening rift between the party’s moderates and the left ...

Russia and China are seeking the capability to disable and eventually destroy Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network, an investigation found, as the allies deepen their clandestine military cooperation. The report by The Insider, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde highlights documents revealing a partnership “to build weapons neither country could develop ...

China is considering restricting global access to its top AI models, Reuters reported, echoing US efforts to limit access to frontier AI technologies, as both countries look to erect a “silicon curtain” around their most advanced tech. Chinese officials discussed curbing foreign access to homegrown open-source models too, which could ...

A slate of second-quarter earnings could present the clearest corporate scorecard of the Iran conflict’s impact to date. US oil majors and refiners are expected to report record profits as higher crude and fuel prices “trigger a wartime windfall,” The Financial Times reported, likely boosting US President Donald Trump’s case ...

The fading prospect of a durable US-Iran ceasefire is forcing investors and energy companies to reassess their post-truce optimism and brace for prolonged instability in the Middle East. Qatar is delaying plans to ramp up LNG production after attacks on vessels near the Strait of Hormuz renewed fears of shipping ...

An SDNY judge dealt a blow to Kalshi and Polymarket this week, ruling that New York’s gambling regulations do apply to Kalshi’s sports-event contracts, and making it all but inevitable that the states will be squaring off against prediction markets operators at the Supreme Court in the future. The decision ...

Liz’s view A few weeks ago, an Anthropic executive was asked a question on every CEO’s mind: Why should we trust that you won’t steal our business? “It’s a fair question,” Syed Mohiuddin, Anthropic’s head of healthcare, said at a venture-capital event I attended last month on Cape Cod. “Because ...

A chart this week from Bank of America ricocheted around Wall Street and Silicon Valley, capturing the “generational transfer” of profits in the AI ecosystem. Huge capital expenditures are collapsing big tech companies’ free cash flow, a metric prized by shareholders. Meanwhile, the less sexy companies that make the processing ...