Flagship

SKorea lawmakers target acting president

South Korean lawmakers moved to impeach the acting president, Han Duck-soo. The motion — filed on the eve of already-impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol’s first constitutional court hearing — comes after Han vetoed several opposition-backed bills, including one to authorize a probe into Yoon’s short-lived declaration of martial law. The court will decide whether to formally remove Yoon from office and call a snap election. If a vote is called and the leftist opposition won, it could benefit US President-elect Donald Trump, Foreign Policy wrote: A left-leaning leader may be more open to engaging in dialogue with North Korea, meaning Trump “might find a willing partner for a new approach to Pyongyang” that includes fewer US troops stationed in the South.

Israel strikes Houthis in Yemen

Israel launched air strikes across Yemen, hitting key infrastructure believed to be controlled by the Iran-backed Houthi militia. Israel’s leadership are reportedly divided over how to best target the Houthis, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu favoring strikes on militia-controlled infrastructure, while the head of Israel’s spy agency has advocated attacking Iran directly. Speaking to Jewish Insider, experts argued that the Houthis are unlikely to be meaningfully weakened by aerial strikes, in part because Israel lacks the intelligence needed to target Houthi leadership as it did Hamas and Hezbollah. “Israel can take out capabilities, but as long as the Houthis can get additional supplies from Iran... they can keep this up,” a former US official said.

Russia-Ukraine talks gain Western support

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Slovakia has offered to host peace talks with Ukraine, adding that Moscow was “not against it.” The comment came as Russia stepped up attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure over Christmas in a widely denounced assault. European support for Ukraine in the nearly three-year war is waning, however: YouGov polling found that a majority of respondents in Germany, France, Spain, and Italy now see a negotiated settlement — even one where Ukraine cedes territory — as preferable to other options. The growing likelihood of such an agreement means “Europeans must act swiftly to consolidate a unified position on future security guarantees for Ukraine” and protect Europe’s interests more broadly, researchers at the Atlantic Council wrote.

Finland seizes Russian oil tanker

Finnish authorities seized a Russian oil tanker suspected of damaging undersea electricity and internet cables. It’s the latest in a series of suspected attempts to sabotage cables running on the Baltic Sea floor. The European Union is reportedly mulling sanctions targeting Russia’s so-called “shadow fleet” — unregistered clandestine vessels that often carry sanctioned Russian oil and which Brussels believes are being used to deliberately damage undersea cables. But international law is “neither formulated to adequately protect subsea data cables from sabotage nor hold perpetrators accountable,” Carnegie Endowment researchers argued, and it’s unclear what the EU can do to curb these incidents. Meanwhile, NATO is testing ways to protect internet communications by using satellite-based solutions instead, IEEE Spectrum reported.

China EV sales to soar in 2025

Electric vehicle sales in China are likely to overtake gas-powered cars in 2025, years ahead of the West. Chinese EV sales are expected to grow 20% year-on-year to more than 12 million units in 2025, the Financial Times reported, far above Beijing’s internal forecasts. Meanwhile, EV sales growth in Europe and the US is slowing: Consumers are worried tax credits and subsidies for EVs may soon disappear as governments tighten their belts, while trade restrictions limit those markets’ access to cheap Chinese EVs. The upward trajectory signals China’s status as a leader in developing green tech, one renewables industry analyst said: “They want to electrify everything… No other country comes close.”

India’s rupee hits all-time low

The Indian rupee fell to an all-time low of 85.25 to the dollar Thursday, a 1.74% drop in value since October. The slide reflects Donald Trump’s election win in the US boosting the dollar and India’s ballooning trade deficit. Global investment into India has also dropped significantly, Nikkei Asia reported. Despite the “challenging environment,” India’s economy is still expected to grow 6.5% in the fiscal year 2024-2025, Reuters reported, on the low end of what officials had projected. “India’s GDP will keep growing strongly in the long term,” Goldman Sachs India economists predicted in a recent report, “but with a speed bump next year as government spending and credit growth slow.”

Civil servants brace for Trump

Donald Trump wants federal employees back in the office or else, but government workers could put up a “furious resistance,” The Washington Post reported. Trump and allies including billionaire Elon Musk have vowed to slash the number of government employees, but many civil servants have union representation and contract protections that could make any effort to oust them a challenge. Some labor groups have already launched information programs to make federal employees aware of their rights and learn how to protect themselves online, the Post reported. Other obstacles to Trump’s RTO order are more fundamental, one union attorney said: “At a lot of these agencies, the reality is, they don’t have the place to put people to force them back five days a week.”

To cap 2024, we’ve asked members of the Semafor newsroom for a recommendation of a book, TV show, movie, or podcast they enjoyed this year.

The Town. The biggest media shift of the last decade is the transfer of business power and cultural influence from the old New York and Hollywood power players to the tech platforms and the people making media on them. No podcast has covered this fascinating transition better than The Town, the excellent weekly podcast hosted by Matt Belloni and regularly featuring Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw. The duo bring deep knowledge and aggressive points of view that are rooted in best-in-class sourcing. It’s the kind of media that’s in direct dialogue with its subjects and material, where you know that every episode yields angry calls and texts from PR people and executives furious when their company or movie or faulty decision-making is taken apart on the show. I can’t stop listening, and am a better beat reporter for it. Listen to The Town on Spotify.

Max Tani is Semafor’s Media Editor. For more of his reporting on the fast changing industry, subscribe to our weekly Media newsletter. →

Huge ‘tube’ TV recovered in Japan

Perhaps the last surviving example of the largest cathode-ray tube television ever built was recovered from a Japanese noodle restaurant. Flatscreen TVs have eclipsed the boxy old CRTs, which were hard to scale up to meet demands for ever-bigger screens. The recovered 1980s 45-inch Sony model is “the stuff of legends” for retro tech fans, Ars Technica wrote: When first released, it sold for $100,000 (inflation adjusted), but the model had seemingly disappeared — until it was discovered in an Osaka eatery due for demolition. Enthusiasts raced to save the 440lb set and ship it to the US, where they reportedly found it to be much better than old adverts for the set had suggested.

AI could help decode animal sounds

The race to translate animal sounds into human language using artificial intelligence will take off in 2025. Writing in Wired, Cambridge University scientist Arik Kershenbaum predicted that more efforts like the Coller-Dolittle Prize, which offered cash awards to anyone who could successfully “communicate with or decipher an organism’s communication,” will launch in the next 12 months. These efforts reflect “a bullish confidence” that AI advances could make animal translation possible, Kershenbaum wrote. The challenges are many: Large language model-based AIs need huge datasets, but there are relatively few recordings of different animals chattering to one another, and human biases could get in the way of interpretation.

Former Indian PM Singh dies