US and Israel to reschedule meeting to discuss Rafah operation / Amazon invests $2.75B in Anthropic / Sam Bankman-Fried to be sentenced today

Plus, Cargo ship requested help before Baltimore bridge collision

Inside Daily Brief For March 28, 2024

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Here’s your daily news briefing: 🗣️Israel agreed to reschedule a meeting in Washington to discuss its military plans in Rafah. 🤖Amazon invested $2.75B into artificial intelligence startup Anthropic. ⚖️FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried will be sentenced today for defrauding investors.  Thanks for reading! Gregory p/Gregory_Bridgman

1 Israel agreed to reschedule a high-level meeting in Washington to discuss its possible military operations in Rafah. Israel canceled a previous meeting to discuss the issue after the U.S. declined to block a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding a cease-fire in Gaza. More: U.S. and Israeli officials are planning a date for the meeting, the White House said on Wednesday.  The meeting may take place as soon as next week, reports The Hill citing an official. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not yet approved his delegation's departure, his office said.  The rescheduling comes after Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant spoke with U.S. defense secretary Lloyd Austin on Tuesday. Zoom Out: The U.S. has warned Israel against sending its military into Rafah, a Gazan city where over 1 million people are seeking shelter from the Israel-Hamas war.

2 What the numbers say: The Japanese Yen traded as weak as ¥151.97 to the U.S. Dollar on Wednesday. The currency is testing lows last seen in 1990. The Yen's declining value is partly driven by the interest rate gap between Japan and the U.S. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) hiked interest rates this month for the first time since 2007, but the Yen has continued to fall. The BOJ has provided little guidance on future policy tightening, which may have prevented the rate hike from stemming the Yen's decline. The Yen has slid below levels that triggered interventions from policymakers in October 2022. Japanese authorities spent $60.6B (¥9.2T) to shore up the Yen that year. A weak Yen may contribute to weakness in other Asian currencies, according to Brad Setser, an economist at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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3 Amazon invested an additional $2.75B into artificial intelligence startup Anthropic. The deal marks Amazon's biggest-ever venture investment in another company. More: Amazon initially invested $1.25B in Anthropic in September. The latest injection brings Amazon's total investment in the startup to $4B. Amazon will serve as the "primary cloud provider" for Anthropic, which will develop and deploy its AI on custom Amazon chips. Amazon is using Anthropic's technology to help its cloud business customers build their own AI applications. Zoom Out: Anthropic was founded by a group of former OpenAI researchers in 2021.  Anthropic said its Claude 3 chatbot performs better than OpenAI's GPT-4 on several industry benchmarks.

4 GOOD NEWS: Scientists in Thailand are breeding coral in labs as part of a project to restore degraded reefs. The initiative was launched in 2016 after a mass bleaching event affected up to 90% of the reefs in Thailand's waters. More: The coral is bred from sperm and eggs that are released only once per year.  The scientists need to wait up to five years before transferring the lab-grown coral to the seabed.  The project has restored over 4,000 coral colonies around Thailand's Mun Nai island. Zoom Out: The world's coral reefs are on the verge of a mass bleaching event, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

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5 FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried will be sentenced today after being convicted of fraud and money laundering. He may face decades in prison after stealing billions in deposits from customers of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange platform that went bankrupt in 2022.  More: A jury found Bankman-Fried guilty of illegally using customer money to cover expenses that included property purchases and political donations. Bankman-Fried's lawyers seek leniency, arguing that FTX investors are set to recover significant amounts of their funds. Bankruptcy lawyers and FTX's creditors have argued that claims of minimal loss are illegitimate.  Prosecutors have recommended a prison sentence of 40 to 50 years. Bankman-Fried's defense team seeks a 6.5-year prison term. Zoom Out: FTX filed for bankruptcy amid a plunge in cryptocurrency prices.  Investors are set to receive money based on what their holdings were worth when FTX went bankrupt. The repayment plan will cause FTX investors to miss out on a recent cryptocurrency rebound.

6 The Dali cargo ship requested tugboat help before colliding with Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge on Tuesday. The insight was revealed by audio footage from the ship's "black box" recorder, which authorities recently reviewed.  More: The Dali reportedly lost power before crashing into one of the bridge's support pylons. The bridge's old design made it vulnerable to collapse, the National Transportation Safety Board said. Divers found a pickup truck containing the bodies of two workers who went missing when the bridge collapsed. Authorities have suspended efforts to retrieve more bodies despite sonar images revealing other submerged vehicles. Zoom Out: The Port of Baltimore was "directly associated" with 8,000 jobs before it was closed, according to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Authorities are focusing on reopening the port, Buttigieg said.

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Gregory Bridgman Writer / Editor Gregory Bridgman is a politics and technology researcher with a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. He also holds a Master of Science from University College London and a Bachelor's degree from the University of Cape Town.  Feel free to follow him on Twitter or drop him an email at gregory@inside.com. This newsletter was edited by Gregory Bridgman

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