Sentinel minutes for week #28/2024
Although the Trump assassination attempt was shocking, it did not succeed, and forecasters did not anticipate events spiraling into global catastrophes this week.
Geopolitics
US
Former president Donald Trump survives an assassination attempt. His ear was clipped by a bullet, but the former president appears to be otherwise fine. At the time of writing this report, one audience member was killed, volunteer fire chief Corey Comperatore, 50, who reportedly had dived on his family to protect them. After the attack, Trump is trading at 69-70% on Polymarket, up around 6% since last week.
While Trump disavowed Project 2025 last week, a newly surfaced video from 2022 shows him supporting the platform.
The new US RNC platform does not mention Taiwan, for the first time since 1980.
Biden continues to be under significant pressure to step aside, this pressure has increased with Biden’s recent gaffe, calling President Zelensky “President Putin”, and VP Kamala Harris “Vice-president Trump”.
Russia-Ukraine
US and Germany foiled a Russian plot to assassinate the CEO of a German arms manufacturer sending weapons to Ukraine, including vital 155mm artillery shells. This is just the latest in a series of suspected Russian sabotage plots on the continent of Europe.
At its summit, NATO said that there is an irreversible path to membership for Ukraine, but no timeline was given. We previously forecast a 20% chance (range: 15-25%) that Ukraine would join NATO by 2030. Forecasters thought that still seems reasonable.
Chinese troops participated in an “anti-terrorist training” drill in Belarus, after Belarus joined the Shangai Cooperation Organization, a Chinese-led alliance pact. Belarus and China have previously developed the Polonez multiple rocket launcher.
Western Pacific
Japan, the US, and South Korea have begun military drills.
A Japanese destroyer entered Chinese waters, seemingly accidentally, and the incident is now under investigation by the Japanese.
37 Chinese aircraft were detected near Taiwan, later increased to 66, in one of the biggest shows of force of the year.
The Philippines rejects use of force to undermine its interests in the South China Sea, but it does not want any conflict and has agreed with China to ease tensions in a contested shoal.
China rehearsed attacks on models of American jets.
A prominent South Korean politician, Na Kyung-won, has called for South Korea to arm itself with nuclear weapons; with pundits also considering an arrangement like Japan’s, where the US transfers the technology needed to create such weapons, but South Korea doesn’t create them yet. This ended up de-escalating with a US/South Korea nuclear deterrence pact.
Other
Myanmar has introduced conscription, as the civil war continues to intensify.
Ceasefire talks with Hamas are still ongoing, with Hezbollah saying they will accept any Hamas truce decision.
Houthis threatened Saudi Arabia over moving banks outside a region within their control.
Technology
Artificial Intelligence
A former safety researcher at OpenAI, William Saunders, has spoken out about his reasons for leaving the company, likening OpenAI to the Titanic, and expressing concerns about GPT-5.
OpenAI is reportedly working on an advanced reasoning technology codenamed Strawberry, though this seems to be a renaming of the Q* project.
Members of OpenAI’s safety team report they felt pressured to speed through safety protocols to meet the release date of GPT-4-Omni (GPT-4o).
A new AI company, Harmonic, is getting good results on mathematical reasoning.
Cyberattacks
Cyberattacks seem like an ongoing feature; this week we found a massive data breach revealed metadata for calls and texts for nearly all AT&T cellular customers in parts of 2022 and 2023, a health department in Florida, attacks on autodealers (they paid the ransom), Frankfurt university, local water systems, healthcare providers across the US,
Biorisk
H5N1 continues to spread in dairy cattle and poultry in the US. Three poultry workers who were involved in culling chickens at an affected farm are presumptive positive for H5N1, and 55 symptomatic poultry workers are also being tested. If many of these cases are positive, forecasters would consider an H5N1 pandemic in humans to be significantly more likely, but with a lower expected infection fatality rate.
Some dairy farmers in Michigan are resisting efforts to track the spread of H5N1.
Governor Polis has declared a disaster emergency to deal with outbreaks of avian flu in Weld County, Colorado.
On the less alarming end, new variants of covid seem more infectious, there was a case of plague in Colorado, an outbreak of a new strain of monkeypox in Congo, and Guatemala has a dengue epidemic.
Other
122 die after stampede in which Indian cult leader convenes crowd of 250,000; jail break in Niger in which hundreds or terrorists escape.