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US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is heading to Iceland, Greece, and Portugal on October 5-8 for talks on security, defense, energy, economic cooperation, and technology as NATO allies face growing security concerns over…
AI
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Citizen Lab director Ron Deibert is quoted in an article in the Guardian about Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s increasing influence on AI dominance. “For the last 20 years, democracy has been in decline,” says…
Opinion
Reflecting on the UK’s long, hot summer, Clayton Goodwin finds a welcome new era of racial harmony mixed with right-wing bile. Which will prevail? London and, indeed, the whole of the United Kingdom has been hot this…
Opinion
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I have watched Pakistan-Afghanistan relations long enough to distrust easy headlines, and last week’s news produced a few of them. At the Center-2026 (Tsentr-2026) war games in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region, Taliban…
Human Rights
In recent weeks, media coverage has amplified warnings from corporate CEOs and whistleblowers claiming that artificial intelligence (AI) poses an existential threat to humanity . The central argument emerging from the…
Technology
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Paul Krugman is the greatest econ writer in the world, and also a legendary economist. But I sometimes feel that he has a blind spot when it comes to the value of new technologies. In 1998 he famously wrote: The growth…
Global development
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After Guardian investigation uncovered drone strike that killed 12 civilians and injured many more, seven-year-old Abdiqadir Salah underwent vital operation in Mogadishu On the rickshaw ride to the hospital, Marian Haji…
Archive
Britain’s domestic intelligence agency MI5 faces difficult questions at an inquiry into the 1989 murder of solicitor Pat Finucane, now under way in Belfast. Loyalist paramilitaries shot Finucane – a 39-year-old defence…
National Politics
The eruption of a mass housing movement in the past 10 days has put social class back on the agenda of Spanish politics and completely altered the dimensions of a high stakes General Election on 29 November. Ben Wray is…
Bethlehem / PNN / Between October 3 and 4, Israel deported four solidarity activists, three from the United States and one from Germany.They were supporting the community of Jamma’in at the start of the olive harvest…
Active Citizens
Social Democratic Party leader Magdalena Andersson speaks at the Social Democrats’ election night party in Stockholm on 13 September 2026. Credit: Jonas Ekstromer/TT News Agency/AFP By Andrew Firmin LONDON, Oct 5 2026…
Military
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Indonesia is buying the weapons of a modern military at a pace rarely seen in its recent history. Rafale fighter jets are entering service, and the country has contracted for 48 KAAN fighters from Turkey. The navy has…
Cogs of War
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For eighty years, the Western alliance has anchored its strength in moral legitimacy, shared values, and the resulting credibility to shape international norms. NATO’s durability through the Cold War rested on more than…
Commentary
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On Oct. 1, 2026, Beijing celebrated the 77th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China and the beginning of the end for the U.S. Air University’s China Aerospace Studies Institute. The institute was…
Europe
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The European Union has spent the past two years discussing how to restore its economic competitiveness. The harder question is whether it can implement the reforms it already knows it needs before political fragmentation…
Opinion
Africa’s own seed performance data show strong policies and weak delivery. The Africa Seed Summit in Eswatini must close that gap. A farmer in rural West Africa could be forgiven for assuming her government has done…
Health
One of the biggest health deficits across Africa is the currently unacceptably low levels of immunisation. These are exposing millions, especially children and other vulnerable groups, to deadly diseases that are…
Economy
Cotton has long been one of Africa’s most important agricultural commodities, supporting millions of rural jobs and generating vital export revenues. Yet the continent captures only a fraction of the wealth generated by…
Southeast Asia
External
In June 2026, Indonesia’s Deputy Minister of Communications and Digital Nezar Patria put Indonesia’s share of ASEAN’s digital economy at around 40 percent, a figure that varies with the source and definition used, yet…
China
Late last month, Japan’s defense ministry made an unsettling announcement. A U.S. ground-based missile system, known as the Typhon and capable of firing Tomahawk missiles, would not return to the United States after…
Enewsletter
Reports that more oil is getting through the Strait of Hormuz have been heralded as a win for the Trump administration, but experts say this kind of happy talk hides the fact that the war remains in a quagmire. As…
Kurds
On September 21, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq officially announced the completion of the long-delayed unification and reorganization of its Peshmerga paramilitary forces under the Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs (MoPA)…
East Asia
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Chinese Studies (Sinology) has undergone a radical transformation in recent years, no longer limited to the study of history and classical language but evolving into a strategic field focused on understanding China as a…
Africa
A community health worker examines a pregnant woman inside her home while family members look on, highlighting the growing challenges mothers face as extreme heat and climate-related pressures strain access to healthcare…
Larry C. Johnson
Once again Karl W. Miller has put numbers to a problem that most of the commentariat still treats as a temporary price spike. His latest forward outlook, “The Five-Year Global Energy Crisis,” dated October 3, makes an…
External
US and Britain launch Operation Enduring Freedom, beginning the bombing of Afghanistan; Thai police and royalist paramilitaries massacre students at Thammasat University as the military seizes power in Bangkok; Truman…
By: Toh Han Shih Six Battery Road (brown building on left), hosts Radiant World headquarters in Singapore. Photo from Wikimedia Commons Singaporean courts have become a battlefield where commodities trading companies are…
Ukraine War
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The Russians are struggling on land and at sea, and are having real difficulty protecting themselves from Ukrainian long-range attack. That has left them with one real strategic “advantage” and that is what we will see…
Geopolitics
The US strategy to convince Iran to surrender John Mearsheimer is a political scientist and international relations scholar and professor at the University of Chicago Cross-posted from John Mearsheimer’s Substack The…
AI
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It has been a busy year for sure. In 2026, artificial intelligence agents conducting cybersecurity tests crossed into real computer systems. The incidents had different causes and impacts. Some agents exploited flaws to…
External
Space-based solar power just got another powerful vote of confidence. The United States Department of Defense just inked a contract with solar energy company Overview Energy to “design, build, and test a homing beacon…
Americas
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Two Deadlines, One Date Last Thursday, in Denton, Texas, Donald Trump said Iran is “ready to fold up” and that the war would be won “right after the election” — or “maybe before”. The same week he told TIME that new…
Behind The Headlines
Oil facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have again been struck by ballistic missiles and drones, while evidence has emerged that the US could be plotting raids into north-eastern Iranian territory. In…
External
The renewable revolution is running out of space. Utility-scale solar and wind farms take up enormous tracts of land and are facing increasing legal pushback from many of the communities where their development is…
Zimbabwe
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My friend and former colleague Knox Chitiyo, who has died aged 65 of bowel cancer, was a Zimbabwean academic and later an important voice in Britain on his homeland and its future. He was regularly consulted by…
AI
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Before EDA becomes AI-native, focused agents have a window to prove measurable engineering value inside existing design flows. AI is entering semiconductor engineering from several directions at once. Some companies are…
External
Despite pressure from some governments and consumers for a global energy transition, private equity firms continue to invest heavily in some of the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters. Following the Covid-19…
Economics
SuperImperialism, Dollar System, Financialization and China’s Economic Transition South South Dialogue on Sustainability Michael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a…
Economics
The August level of $132.6 billion is the second-highest trade deficit on record, topped only by last year’s March deficit. Dean Baker is a Senior Economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR)…
Lever Weekly
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Opinion
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Poland's leadership has fulfilled a long-standing ambition. Poles will now have a new state institution tasked with identifying and combating what the authorities regard as disinformation on the internet and in the…
Economics
Recent AI security failures may point to something more troubling than runaway intelligence: models becoming highly capable while learning to game narrow goals in brittle and dangerous ways Daron Acemoglu is a 2024 Nobel…
Europe
External
Wages Frozen, Gas Doubled, Warships Wanted On 1 October Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu unveiled €54 billion of savings in France’s 2027 budget. They include a public-sector pay freeze and limits on pension increases…
Politics/Diplomacy
In a revealing exchange from a Turkish television interview, former Turkish Foreign Minister and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu delivered an explicit account of how Ankara intervened in 2012 to block the United Kingdom…
#Culture
Darius helps select new guards for the Five Star caravan, and a fun trip to the suq comes to a sudden, chaotic end. Read Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11…
Larry C. Johnson
Benjamin Netanyahu has a talent for round numbers, and for knowing which audience gets which one. On the night of October 17, 2024, after Israeli soldiers stumbled on Yahya Sinwar in Rafah and killed him, the prime…
Long-read
The current war with Iran and its chaotic unfolding open a door of great danger for the U.S. and the planet. At best, we are condemned to negotiations dominated by personal and political imperatives that seem to fit with…
When Nguyễn Thành Nam released In Conversation with Thanh: A New Account of the Light in April, Vietnam’s state media fell in line. Twenty official outlets, including major Communist Party mouthpieces, coordinated their…