Taiwan

Crude oil prices were on course for a sizable weekly gain today, as the Strait of Hormuz remains almost entirely paralysed and the Yemeni Houthis target tankers in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea. To make matters worse,...

China’s memory chip industry has emerged as one of the biggest beneficiaries of the global artificial intelligence boom, transforming once loss-making manufacturers into powerful players with growing influence over pricing, supply chains and technological development. The rapid rise of companies...

The American-Israeli aggression against Iran has significantly altered the global balance of power. The economic damage inflicted by these military operations is immense, and its effects are still being felt on world markets; eliminating the repercussions of the damage may...

From Pax Silica and WAICO to India’s open digital rails, Southeast Asia’s overlapping alignments could strengthen regional bargaining power—if interoperability turns diversity into agency. When President Prabowo Subianto and Prime Minister Narendra Modi met in Jakarta in July, they welcomed...

Coverage of the conflict between Iran, Israel and the United States has largely focused on battlefield developments, political statements and international diplomacy. However, another story has been unfolding on the streets of Iran. Despite fears of further military escalation dominating...

Elle’s story is one of personal sacrifice, deciding to help people despite the risk of attack by the military. Her story reflects that of a healthcare system in peril When Myanmar’s junta seized power in a 2021 coup, Elle* and a...

By: Andy Wong Ming Jun Last week’s successful maritime strike carried out by US Central Command against Iran’s major Bandar Abbas Naval Base is a significant maturing step for US naval drone warfare capability, with the US Navy finally beginning to...

In May 2026, OpenAI released a new math result that sent shock waves throughout the world of mathematical research. A major unsolved problem called the “unit distance conjecture” had just been resolved by generative AI. Since then, there’s been a...

For decades, U.S. support for Israel rested on one of Washington’s strongest bipartisan assumptions: that military assistance was strategically necessary and politically untouchable. But Gaza has weakened that consensus. Critics now see Israeli military aid as a misguided strategy and...

If you communicate with people overseas – friends, family, coworkers – the federal government will likely never acknowledge it collected your communications. Unless, perhaps, you have a large cable TV audience and politicians willing to demand answers. That at least...

U.S. and NATO leaders have waged a multi-year propaganda campaign to convince Western publics that Ukraine is a splendid democracy and that President Volodymyr Zelensky is an extremely popular elected leader who epitomizes those values. Multiple aspects of that carefully...

Lithium prices have sunk to a five-month low as the return of previously idled mine capacity triggered fears of a massive market oversupply. Lithium prices on the Guangzhou Futures Exchange (GFEX), the most active lithium carbonate contract, fell to 136,800...

The Trump administration is studying the deployment of offshore nuclear power generation, with the Marine Minerals Administration and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission agreeing this week to coordinate on any future developments. The announcement comes amid surging electricity demand driven by...

Today’s top items: 1. CSRC Symposium on Party Building and Regulatory Work - According to a readout today, the China Securities Regulatory Commission “held a symposium on Party building and regulatory work to thoroughly study and implement Xi Jinping Thought on...

Central Claim The US-Saudi nuclear deal is not so much an energy deal as it is Washington’s most significant admission yet that the non-proliferation architecture it has constructed since Hiroshima is not compatible with the post-Iran war Middle East geopolitical...

Global unit shipments of PCs and smartphones were both down versus a year ago in the 2nd quarter of 2026, according to IDC. PCs were down 4.9% and smartphones were down 6.7%. Both PCs and smartphones showed growth in 2024...

OPEC+ is expected to approve another production target increase when eight key producers meet on August 2, extending a months-long campaign to unwind voluntary supply cuts that have existed largely on paper since the Iran war upended Gulf exports. Reuters...

The face of EDA is changing. For forty years, this industry has focused on optimizing algorithms for design, verification and implementation of chips. That work has delivered some ground-breaking innovations. Logic synthesis is a good example. There are so many...

Artificial intelligence is a double-edged sword for the energy sector. The rapid buildout of data centers to support widespread integration of large language models in virtually every economic sector imaginable, from our energy grids to your electric toothbrush – yes,...

In 2024, Max Bergmann wrote, “NATO Missed a Chance to Transform Itself,” where he argued NATO’s leadership needs to facilitate a strong European pillar of the alliance through structural reforms in European institutions. Two years later, we asked Max to...

Global insurers had just shaken off the ESG push from earlier this decade when the Middle East conflict upended oil and gas upstream project coverage. The world’s lowest-cost oil and gas producing region became a war zone at the end...

The best performing asset class of this decade is also the most under owned. Since October 2020, when we first called for a decades-long super-cycle in commodities, the broad commodity indices like the S&P GSCI are up 200 per cent;...

Kazakhstan should, in theory, be one of the major beneficiaries of Russia’s growing isolation from global energy markets. Its crude is unsanctioned and European refiners need alternatives to Russian barrels. Yet instead of gaining a clear geopolitical advantage, Kazakhstan has...

The Question Islamabad Has Not Answered On the night of 16 March 2026, Pakistani warplanes struck a walled compound in Kabul’s ninth police district. Afghan officials say more than four hundred people died. The United Nations mission in Afghanistan has...

This year, DAC will be buzzing about AI from every direction. The debate of build vs. buy will also be a popular topic. And the debate of who owns the intellectual property embodied in chip designs and how to control...

There is major potential to develop hybrid renewable energy projects on existing hydropower sites, according to a new report by the think tank Ember Energy. We often think of renewable energy projects as standalone operations rather than resources that can...

A missile strike by Yemen's Houthi movement on a Saudi oil tanker in the Red Sea, accompanied by the announcement of a maritime blockade, has created what the author describes as a new window of opportunity for Russia. Houthis Launch Blockade...

As the war in Ukraine trudges through its fifth year, deaths there now outnumber births at a nearly four-to-one ratio. According to figures published by the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice this week, Ukraine recorded 73,292 births and 259,853 deaths in the...

Photo by Steve A Johnson on Unsplash The American left tends to include a lot of groups that, frankly, shouldn’t be all that tight. In particular, Muslims and the LGBT crowd. Islam has very harsh sentiments toward gays and lesbians, and Islamic...

Humanitarian support keeps families buying food, shops trading and clinics open when crisis hits, says Abdullahi Nur Osman Foreign Office figures showing that the UK will almost halve bilateral aid to Somalia by 2029 ( Report, 16 July ) come as...

For several days, American and Israeli media have been discussing a Reuters report citing four sources within the U.S. intelligence community. According to the report, Washington is investigating whether Russia may have assisted Iran in strikes against CIA facilities in...

Bronco AI builds AI agents for chip design and verification. Our goal is to get teams from spec to RTL-freeze as fast as possible by surfacing the nastiest bugs sooner and fixing them faster. Our agents work the way strong engineers...

The last EU agreement about the latest sanctions package against Russia is being presented by Brussels as another demonstration of European unity and determination to sustain economic pressure on the Kremlin. Since February 2022, sanctions have been one of the...