Global Voices

China and the United States are competing to lead the development of increasingly powerful artificial intelligence systems, but both countries are also confronting a growing concern: what happens if advanced AI becomes capable of acting beyond effective human oversight? Recent...

Middle East diplomacy has hit another setback as a planned regional meeting on the Strait of Hormuz was postponed, while attacks around the region’s two major oil transit routes increased concerns about global energy supplies. The meeting had been expected...

The recent spike in crude oil prices will likely result in a fresh rate hike by the Fed this week, according to data from CME Group, cited by The National today. As much as 90% of respondents from trading circles...

Major powers are increasingly trying to shut out their rivals. Russia invaded Ukraine in part to prevent the latter’s further integration with the West. The United States is restricting China’s access to advanced semiconductors and encouraging allies to do the...

Japan is edging closer to a once-unthinkable choice: whether nuclear propulsion should underpin its next generation of undersea deterrence. This month, the Japan Times reported that Japanese Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi confirmed that Japan is keeping the option of acquiring...

This was the week that AI safety hit the big time. A 27-year-old AI researcher named Jacob Coxon quit his job at Anthropic, declaring that OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to create technology that could destroy the human race: Other...

A report that Iran obtained satellite imagery of a U.S. military base in Jordan from Chinese entities before a deadly attack has raised questions about the extent of China’s ties with Tehran and whether Chinese commercial or other entities are...

For most of modern history, the household was a bundle. Under one roof, families pooled rent and meals, raised children, cared for parents, kept each other company and insured one another against bad luck. Nobody itemized it, and national accounts...

By: Ainur Rohmah Photo from tribun-medan.com In Indonesia under President Prabowo Subianto, political power and private wealth are finding a new point of convergence. Few businessmen illustrate that shift more clearly than Andi Syamsuddin Arsyad, known as Haji Isam, a former truck...

China can leverage its membership in the BRICS group and its direct investments in Africa as complementary tools to build growing economic influence that gradually translates into sustainable political, security, and strategic influence. Although Beijing consistently emphasizes that its partnerships...

This week’s oil price surge sharply raised the odds of a Fed interest rate hike next week and re-launched the recession conversation, for the first time since the early weeks of the Iran war. The price spike this week saw...

The United States’ existing dams could produce an additional 15.2 terawatt-hours of electricity per year, enough to power more than 1.4 million homes across the country. A new study from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory found that...

On February 1st, the G7’s price cap on Russian crude oil quietly reset itself to $44.10 a barrel — down from $47.60, and a long way from the $60 ceiling the coalition set with great fanfare back in December 2022....

Jensen Huang’s declaration that “AGI has arrived” is less a scientific verdict than a compressed statement about infrastructure, economics and momentum. His evidence is OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, reportedly trained on more than 100,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell NVL72 systems, followed by...

Construction on a trade corridor seen as the lynchpin of the Armenian-Azerbaijani peace deal is facing a delay, according to a top Azerbaijani official. The provisional peace agreement was signed in Washington in August 2025. At that time, the Trump...

Egypt can leverage the US-China rivalry and its strategic partnership with Beijing to bolster its national security and its position as a global logistics hub through several strategic avenues: 1) Enhancing its status as a global logistics and trade center,...

The United Kingdom has dramatically increased its wind energy capacity over the last decade, producing record levels of wind power in 2025. With several more projects in the pipeline, wind power is expected to contribute a significant share of the...

The Pentagon’s extraordinary use of polygraph tests on senior military personnel is not merely a hunt for leakers; it is a warning that loyalty to the president may increasingly matter more than loyalty to the institution, accelerating the ultimate American...

A decade of financial sanctions barely dented China’s discounted-Iranian-oil trade. Physical strikes on the tankers themselves might close it within months — because Beijing has a legal playbook for ignoring a Treasury designation, and none for re-floating a struck ship....

Why ecosystem diffusion may matter as much as frontier supremacy On 3 September, two announcements offered different views of AI power. OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, and company president Greg Brockman closed the briefing by declaring, “Welcome to the AGI era.”...

General Secretary and President To Lam’s official visit to France on September 10, 2026, was significant not simply because it produced a new round of agreements between Hanoi and Paris, but because it illustrated how Vietnam is adapting its foreign...

China is heavily utilizing its economic tools and infrastructure financing to build deep strategic influence in Africa, integrating the continent’s nations into its Belt and Road Initiative. This economic and logistical presence represents a key means for China to expand...

Perhaps we all neglected to read the footnotes. When Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey unveiled their grand architecture of collective defense in Mecca, the language was magnificent: fraternity, deterrence, solidarity, common security. An attack on one, the world was told,...

There is a particularly dark irony, at least from our perspective, in seeing the port of Mocha change hands again. This is the town that gave the world its coffee, where ancient Yemeni beans used to be loaded onto Ottoman...

By: Pham Phan Long On paper, the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) mechanism is a success. Since its launch in 2016, trade between China and Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam has risen sharply, reaching a record $500.9 billion in 2025 – 150...

The New Delhi Declaration, adopted unanimously at the 18th BRICS Summit on September 12, will be read mostly through a geopolitical lens: Gaza, Security Council reform, sanctions, the drift toward a multipolar order. That reading isn’t wrong. It just misses...

Human rights organizations used the opening week of the UN Human Rights Council’s 63rd session to press delegates on a conflict they say has been deliberately set aside, calling for an independent investigation into chemical weapons allegations in Sudan and...

What does it mean to say we are in a ‘polycrisis’? Under an increasingly undemocratic capitalism, the countries of the rich world all confront a similar bundle of crises that have sprung up more or less unnoticed. Underlying them is...

Photo: Creative Commons The 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon has resulted in a catalogue of self-inflicted disasters for the US. It was exploited by the worst elements of our political system to create a surveillance society, increase...

Nuclear power is growing in popularity once again as governments worldwide look to diversify their energy mix and reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Several countries are now looking to develop or expand their nuclear energy capacity over the coming decades....

The People’s Republic of China achieved a historic and unprecedented participation in the second edition of the El Alamein International Aerospace Exhibition (EIAS 2026), which was held at El Alamein International Airport from September 8 to 10, 2026. The Chinese...

Heat pumps are becoming an increasingly popular alternative to gas-powered central heating systems and are increasingly being used in new construction, often driven by government incentives. A heat pump uses technology similar to that found in a refrigerator or an...