Global Voices

Instead of tweaking existing designs, VSORA built an AI chip from scratch to fix the real bottleneck: moving data fast enough to keep the math circuits busy. There’s a version of the AI hardware story that everyone in the chip industry...

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure and development programme linking Xinjiang, a region in China, to Pakistan’s deepwater Gwadar Port. It was launched as a flagship project of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (2015), and aimed to transform...

A new map of the world rescales the size of Africa and calls into question our perception of land, power and influence This month, the UN passed a resolution, brought to the assembly by Togo, to phase out the traditional Mercator...

The biggest Japanese LNG importer and largest power producer, JERA, plans to sell liquefied natural gas in the long term as part of a strategy to tap global LNG markets and sell any excess gas supply if domestic demand is...

U.S. officials held an undisclosed meeting with representatives of Yemen’s Houthis in Oman over the weekend, according to five sources familiar with the discussions, as the Iran backed group expands its control along Yemen’s Red Sea coast. The meeting took...

So far this week, Saudi Arabia has sold as many as 20 million barrels of crude oil in the spot market to be picked up from just outside the Strait of Hormuz, after the Kingdom was forced to shut down...

Saudi Arabia has intensified air strikes against Houthi positions in Yemen as the Iran backed group expands its territorial gains along the Red Sea coast, opening a new front in the wider Middle East war and adding pressure to already...

Some refiners in Japan this week rushed to buy Oman’s crude for earlier loadings after Saudi Arabia shut down its key pipeline bypassing the Strait of Hormuz, traders with knowledge of the purchases told Bloomberg on Wednesday. Late last week,...

South Korea is strengthening its economic engagement with Central Asia, placing critical minerals, energy and supply chain cooperation at the centre of its strategy to secure resources and create new opportunities for domestic companies. President Lee Jae Myung hosted the...

As American troops face renewed danger in the Middle East, with Iran striking U.S. positions across the region, President Donald Trump is busy contemplating something rather more personal: renaming the Strait of Hormuz the “Trump Strait.” Perhaps “The Trump Quagmire”...

Japan’s oil import bill surged by 58.7% on the year last month, with volumes rising by a much more modest 3.6%. This pushed the country’s total import bill 28% higher and extended its trade deficit for the fourth month in...

On 14 September 2026, with American diesel having crossed six dollars a gallon for the first time in history, President Trump settled the question of blame in a single sentence posted to social media: “The World’s Diesel price rise is...

String of female murder victims found near Johannesburg’s international airport, including five in the past week The discovery of the bodies of seven women around Johannesburg’s international airport, including five in the past week, has prompted an outpouring of fear, grief...

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney will travel to Strasbourg on Wednesday as Ottawa seeks to strengthen its economic and strategic ties with Europe amid escalating trade tensions with U.S. President Donald Trump. Carney will become the first foreign head of...

President Donald Trump’s proposal to give Americans $5,000 payments is raising questions about how the plan could affect U.S. monetary policy, particularly as Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh pushes for greater attention to the relationship between money supply and inflation....

The Hugging Face incident, in which hundreds of OpenAI agents broke out of their sandbox and launched a nation-state-level attack on another site, has dominated discourse within the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community since its discovery in July. Ajeya Cotra of...

China’s diesel fuel and gasoline inventories are declining, which may eventually lead to the imposition of export curbs, Bloomberg has reported, citing recent fuel inventory data. Gasoline inventories at state-owned energy majors were down by 2.9% last week to their...

At the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, a humanoid robot named Tiangong Ultra ran the 100-meter sprint in a staggering 8.64 seconds, shattering Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt’s legendary human world record of 9.58 seconds. The internet laughed at the...

In one of our more important write-ups early this year, we discussed how AI is going to be our economics and AI is going to be our politics for years and decades ahead. The debate over controlling it is making that plain....

Spent an hour with Ali Borhani on FuturEarly discussing what to expect from the upcoming Xi Trump meeting. Ali Borhani is a geopolitical strategist, emerging markets geo-economic connoisseur, and the Managing Director of 3Sixty Strategic Advisors Ltd. , a London-based boutique...

“Peace Through Strength” has been a Republican mantra for decades. The slogan holds that peace can be achieved by maintaining a powerful military capable of deterring potential adversaries. It is said that sufficient military power – occasionally showcased by stomping...

The war in Iran that had to be over and won by the United States in about six weeks is now in its seventh month and the oil markets are starting to crack. Gone are most of the cushions the...

About 1,200 AI agents inside one company’s internal evaluation found each other, organized, and attacked an unrelated third party. Nothing in the task specification asked for it. The consequences landed outside the organization that set the boundary—and that is what...

A new threat intelligence report from the AI company Anthropic has revealed that a Russian team scraped Ukrainian combat videos to train an autonomous “kamikaze” drone to choose its own targets and destroy them. Scraped footage is video content that...

The artificial intelligence boom is driving a new wave of autonomous cyberattacks, posing a major and growing threat to critical infrastructure, including the energy grid. Ninety percent of state government chief intelligence officers recently reported that cyberattacks on critical services...

Before the end of this year, every resident of South Korea will have free and unmetered access to a general-purpose AI chatbot and a public service agent built on domestic models. The capacity to evaluate how those systems affect hiring,...

I have long argued that Democrats’ 2026 midterm election prospects hinge on their party making a compelling anti-corruption argument against Donald Trump, the tech oligarchy and the larger Washington swamp. But with less than 50 days until the election, Democrats...

Date: Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2026Time: 12:00-1:00 PM ETThe second joint webinar by RUSI and War on the Rocks: Two leading defense publications from both sides of the Atlantic present their expert panel. OverviewFor this edition of The Atlantic Brief, the Royal...

Like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS, the global grouping of emerging markets and developing countries, is intent on diminishing Western influence over the world economy. And just like the SCO summit earlier in September, the latest conclave of BRICS leaders...

By offering Saudi Arabia intelligence and targeting help but declining direct military protection after the East-West pipeline strike, Washington has quietly redefined the 80-year security-for-oil bargain from a guarantee into a menu — and Riyadh’s own hedging over the past...