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Easter celebrations around the world – in pictureshttps://t.co/d3XmtwXFhu

— BBC Scotland News (@BBCScotlandNews) March 31, 2024

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Good Friday commemorated across the world – in pictures#Religion #Christianity #Catholicism #GoodFriday #AroundTheWorld #InPictures #photography #Photos
https://t.co/CdugfdS4y1

— Richard Norman Poet (@ElmerPalaceSE25) March 29, 2024

Silence. Last September, when I visited a makeshift hospital in Adré, Chad, where young Sudanese refugees were being treated for acute malnutrition, that was all I heard: an eerie silence.

I had tried to prepare myself for the wails of children who were sick and emaciated, but these patients were too weak to even cry. That day, I saw a 6-month-old baby who was the size of a newborn and a child whose ankles were swollen, and whose body was blistered, from severe malnourishment.

It was equal parts newly horrific and tragically familiar.

Twenty years earlier I had visited the same town and met with Sudanese refugees who fled violence in Darfur, where the janjaweed militia, with backing from Omar al-Bashir’s brutal authoritarian regime, carried out a genocidal campaign of mass killing, rape and pillage.

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Even after aid groups designated Sudan's humanitarian crisis to be among the world's worst, little attention or help has gone to the Sudanese people.

The world’s silence and inaction need to end, and end now.

My piece in the @nytimes ⬇️https://t.co/ie90VMmIzX

— Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield (@USAmbUN) March 18, 2024

During the next year, the United States faces an increasingly fragile global order strained by accelerating strategic competition among major powers, more intense and unpredictable transnational challenges, and multiple regional conflicts with far-reaching implications. An ambitious but anxious China, a confrontational Russia, some regional powers, such as Iran, and more capable non-state actors are challenging longstanding rules of the international system as well as U.S. primacy within it. Simultaneously, new technologies, fragilities in the public health sector, and environmental changes are more frequent, often have global impact and are harder to forecast…The world that emerges from this tumultuous period will be shaped by whoever offers the most persuasive arguments for how the world should be governed, how societies should be organized, and which systems are most effective at advancing economic growth and providing benefits for more people.

—Read it all.

The Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community notes that the Chinese state-owned media targeted American political candidates on TikTok in the 2022 Midterms. Here's our investigation on how these accounts generated tens of million views https://t.co/yqNJHItzE7 pic.twitter.com/QIEhtnFzvQ

— Iain Martin (@_IainMartin) March 12, 2024

Russia appears on track to produce nearly three times more artillery munitions than the US and Europe, a key advantage ahead of what is expected to be another Russian offensive in Ukraine later this year.

Russia is producing about 250,000 artillery munitions per month, or about 3 million a year, according to NATO intelligence estimates of Russian defense production shared with CNN, as well as sources familiar with Western efforts to arm Ukraine. Collectively, the US and Europe have the capacity to generate only about 1.2 million munitions annually to send to Kyiv, a senior European intelligence official told CNN.

The US military set a goal to produce 100,000 rounds of artillery a month by the end of 2025 — less than half of the Russian monthly output — and even that number is now out of reach with $60 billion in Ukraine funding stalled in Congress, a senior Army official told reporters last week.

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Exclusive: Russia producing three times more artillery shells than US and Europe for Ukraine https://t.co/7Q2OG8b0V3

— Harmine Pak M.D (@PakHarmine) March 12, 2024

Two scientists at Canada’s high-security infectious disease laboratory – Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng – provided confidential scientific information to China and were fired after a probe concluded she posed “a realistic and credible threat to Canada’s economic security” and it was discovered they engaged in clandestine meetings with Chinese officials, documents tabled in the House of Commons reveal.

Dr. Qiu, who worked at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, was dishonest when confronted with her actions, making “blanket denials” and “half-truths, and personally benefited from the arrangement,” the documents state, noting that she repeatedly lied to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and “refused to admit to any involvement in various PRC [People’s Republic of China] programs.”

The two infectious-disease scientists were escorted out of the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg in July, 2019, and later had their security clearances revoked. They were fired in January, 2021. Their whereabouts are not known.

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Censored documents about Winnipeg scientists reveal threat to Canada’s security. Two scientists at Canada’s high-security infectious disease laboratory – Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng – provided confidential information to China. ⁦ https://t.co/H8VviJnRfx pic.twitter.com/Vk7EAMXjSR

— Bruce Hale (@hale_bruce) March 1, 2024

No two ways about it: We are making ourselves wretched. We are more affluent than ever, but riches—and power, the only point in having riches—do not make people happy. Ask a psychiatrist. Or take a look at the face of Vladimir Putin, who has, alas, the power of life and death over millions of people and is the owner of the most expensive toilet-paper dispenser in the world. No, affluent as we are, we are also more anxious, depressed, lonely, isolated, and lacking in purpose than ever. Why is this? I suggest it is because we no longer have the foggiest idea what human life is about. Indeed, there is a sense in which we no longer live in a world at all, but exist in a simulacrum of our own making.

Leaving nuance aside, and condensing three decades of research and a vast body of supporting evidence into a phrase: We are now mesmerized by the least intelligent part of the human brain. For reasons of survival, one hemisphere of the brain, the left, has evolved over millions of years to favor manipulation—grabbing, getting, and controlling—while the other, the right, has been tasked with understanding the whole picture. So conflicting are these goals that in humans the hemispheres are largely sequestered, one from the other. Our seeming ability these days to hear only what comes from the left hemisphere does not arise from the brain’s having changed radically in the last couple of centuries, though it is indeed always evolving. It’s more like this: You buy a radio set, and you soon find a couple of channels worth listening to. After a while, you find yourself listening to only one. It’s not the radio set that has changed; it’s you. In the case of the brain, it would not matter so much if we had settled on the intelligent channel—but we didn’t. We settled on the one whose value has nothing to do with truth, or with courage, magnanimity, or generosity, but only with greed, grabbing, and getting. Manipulation.

And no, the difference between the hemispheres is not a myth that has been debunked, as I have explained at length elsewhere. What does need to be debunked is the old pop-psychology myth wherein the left hemisphere “does” reason and language, and is dull but at least reliable, like a slightly boring accountant, whereas the right hemisphere “does” emotions and pictures and is apt to be flighty and frivolous. All of this is wrong. We now know that each hemisphere is involved in everything and that, for the record, the left hemisphere is less emotionally stable, as well as less intelligent—I mean cognitively, as well as emotionally and socially—than the right. The right hemisphere is a far superior guide to reality; delusions and hallucinations are much more frequent, grosser, and more persistent after damage to the right hemisphere than after damage to the left. Without the right hemisphere to rely on, the left hemisphere is at sea. It denies the most obvious facts, lies, and makes stuff up when it doesn’t know what it’s talking about. And it is relentlessly, vacuously cheerful in the face of disaster.

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If we are not to become ever more diminished as humans, we need to remain in control of machines, not come under their control. I am not talking about an apocalyptic future; I am talking about apocalypse now. | @dr_mcgilchrist https://t.co/2IQhsJYcEu

— First Things (@firstthingsmag) February 14, 2024

Why is the global economy so oblivious to the new world disorder? High interest rates have managed to bring down inflation from a peak of more than 10% across the rich world to about 6%. This not only raises households’ purchasing power; it also raises their spirits. Indeed, having hit an all-time low in 2022, rich-world consumer confidence has risen sharply. Higher borrowing costs have been muted by the fact that a lot of household and corporate debt is on fixed interest rates.

There is also a more intriguing possibility: after so many shocking global developments, the world no longer minds chaos as much as it once did. This is consistent with academic evidence, including a recent paper by two researchers at the Federal Reserve, which suggests that the hit to output from a spike in economic uncertainty fades after a few months.

Good economists remain vigilant. Higher interest rates may have a delayed impact on growth. Escalation in the Russia-Ukraine war or the Red Sea could provoke another round of shocks to energy supply, feeding into inflation. All bets are off if Xi Jinping decides to move on Taiwan. Yet on the flipside, falling inflation and a potential boost to productivity from generative artificial intelligence could prompt gdp to accelerate. Moreover, the global economy has already demonstrated its resilience. Polycrisis, what polycrisis?

Read it all (registration or subscription).

Why is the global economy so oblivious to the new world disorder? https://t.co/EWpg2dGdg4 ⬇️

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) February 13, 2024

Russia, China and other U.S. adversaries are using the newest wave of artificial intelligence tools to improve their hacking abilities and find new targets for online espionage, according to a report Wednesday from Microsoft and its close business partner OpenAI.

While computer users of all stripes have been experimenting with large language models to help with programming tasks, translate phishing emails and assemble attack plans, the new report is the first to associate top-tier government hacking teams with specific uses of LLM. It’s also the first report on countermeasures and comes amid a continuing debate about the risks of the rapidly developing technology and efforts by many countries to put some limits on its use.

The document attributes various uses of AI to two Chinese government-affiliated hacking groups and to one group from each of Russia, Iran and North Korea, comprising the four countries of foremost concern to Western cyber defenders.

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"#Russia, #China & other U.S. adversaries .. using .. #ArtificialIntelligence tools to improve their #Hacking abilities & find new targets for online espionage, according to a report Wednesday from @Microsoft .. close business partner @OpenAI." @josephmenn https://t.co/V06CVI0Mvw

— Christina Ayiotis, Esq., CRM, CIPP/E (@christinayiotis) February 15, 2024

The global footprint of criminal groups from China¹ has expanded along with China’s economic and geopolitical presence around the world. North America’s fentanyl crisis thrust China-linked criminal networks and their expanding international connections, such as with the Sinaloa Cartel, to U.S. policy forefront.

However, the scope of organized crime from China extends far beyond global drug trafficking and money laundering. Internationally, Chinese criminal groups engage in poaching and wildlife trafficking, cybercrime, and elaborate fraud and scams, also featuring people trafficking and enslavement. Long experienced in illegally bringing people to the United States and Canada, criminal networks from China have intensified activities at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Chinese fishing vessels, often illegally devastating protected marine areas and other countries’ exclusive economic zones, can facilitate drug trafficking and serve as the Chinese government’s maritime militia proxies in extraterritorial claims and military confrontations. They can also augment Chinese espionage around the world.

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China-linked criminal networks in 2024 are likely to expand their geographic reach and deep role in various illegal economies.

Read more from @VFelbabBrown @Diana_Paz99 & Vibha Bajji:https://t.co/dNlE3qnpUg

— Brookings Foreign Policy (@BrookingsFP) February 2, 2024

The first shot of the next war between the world’s big powers, it is often said, will be fired in space. As conflict spreads on Earth, ill omens are emerging in the firmament. As countries race to develop new capabilities in space, some are also building the forces and weapons to fight beyond the atmosphere. On January 28th Iran said it had launched three satellites; Western countries fear they could be used in its ballistic-missile programme. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has opened a new chapter in space war. But America’s biggest dread is China, which seeks to match if not surpass America’s primacy in the heavens. Admiral Christopher Grady, vice-chairman of America’s joint chiefs of staff, explains it bluntly: “Space has emerged as our most essential warfighting domain.”

American generals scrutinise the cosmos from Space Command’s headquarters in Colorado Springs. “Guardians”, as America’s new breed of space warriors call themselves, monitor about 15 daily missile launches, from Ukraine to Iraq and North Korea, at the Joint Operations Centre (joc). They also watch the fast-growing deployment of satellites, heaps of orbiting junk and the re-entry of objects into the atmosphere. Above all, they look for danger.

Among the most closely observed objects are two recently launched robotic space planes, smaller versions of the space shuttle. America’s x37-b lifted off from Cape Canaveral on December 28th (pictured). China’s Shenlong, or Divine Dragon, was lofted a fortnight earlier. Both missions are largely secret.

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War in space is no longer science fiction. My report on the growing danger that earthly conflict will spread to space–and vice versa. Countries are tooling up.🧵 1/6 https://t.co/7xh4gNQMYL

— Anton La Guardia (@AntonLaGuardia) February 1, 2024

The post-Cold War era began, in the early 1990s, with soaring visions of global peace. It is ending, three decades later, with surging risks of global war. Today, Europe is experiencing its most devastating military conflict in generations. A brutal fight between Israel and Hamas is sowing violence and instability across the Middle East. East Asia, fortunately, is not at war. But it isn’t exactly peaceful, either, as China coerces its neighbors and amasses military power at a historic rate. If many Americans don’t realize how close the world is to being ravaged by fierce, interlocking conflicts, perhaps that’s because they’ve forgotten how the last global war came about.

When Americans think of global war, they typically think of World War II—or the part of the war that began with Japan’s strike on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. After that attack, and Adolf Hitler’s subsequent declaration of war against the United States, the conflict was a single, all-encompassing struggle between rival alliances on a global battlefield. But World War II began as a trio of loosely connected contests for primacy in key regions stretching from Europe to the Asia-Pacific—contests that eventually climaxed and coalesced in globally consuming ways. The history of this period reveals the darker aspects of strategic interdependence in a war-torn world. It also illustrates uncomfortable parallels to the situation Washington currently confronts.

The United States isn’t facing a formalized alliance of adversaries, as it once did during World War II. It probably won’t see a replay of a scenario in which autocratic powers conquer giant swaths of Eurasia and its littoral regions. Yet with wars in eastern Europe and the Middle East already raging, and ties between revisionist states becoming more pronounced, all it would take is a clash in the contested western Pacific to bring about another awful scenario—one in which intense, interrelated regional struggles overwhelm the international system and create a crisis of global security unlike anything since 1945. A world at risk could become a world at war. And the United States isn’t remotely ready for the challenge.

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“If many Americans don’t realize how close the world is to being ravaged by fierce, interlocking conflicts, perhaps that’s because they’ve forgotten how the last global war came about.” https://t.co/pRqf2quAes

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) January 27, 2024

International trade is constrained by eight primary maritime chokepoints, hard realities imposed by immutable geography. The United States has long recognized a vital national security interest in ensuring freedom of navigation through each of them. This strike helped protect those interests.

Half of these eight global chokepoints are dispersed widely. Only one each can be found in Europe (the Strait of Gibraltar), in Africa (the Cape of Good Hope), in East Asia (the Straits of Malacca), and in the Americas (the Panama Canal). Unfortunately, the other half of these critical chokepoints are all concentrated in a relatively small region where southwestern Asia meets Europe and Africa: the Bosporus Strait, the Suez Canal, the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, and the Strait of Hormuz. This area also happens to be the most important single source of the energy required to sustain global economic growth. Those two facts explain why US presidents keep rediscovering the need to focus disproportionately on the Middle East, despite their often-heartfelt desires to do otherwise.

Today, the greatest threat to these chokepoints is Iran and its proxies. The regime in Tehran has long threatened to shut down Hormuz and repeatedly attacked shipping in the area. Most recently, it even threatened to shut down Gibraltar. The Houthis, Iran’s partner and proxy in Yemen, had repeatedly attacked ships transiting the Bab. The Biden administration recognized the threat, laid the diplomatic predicate, assembled the multilateral coalition, deployed the assets, issued clear warnings, and then took action. This is what professional policymaking looks like. One hopes that the right lessons will be learned in both Sanaa and Tehran.

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The US can no longer afford to underestimate the threat posed by the Houthis, much less the threat posed by the wider network that supports Iranian malign behavior, writes @ACMideast’s @WillWechsler.

Read more. ⬇️ https://t.co/OX8fyHaik7

— Atlantic Council (@AtlanticCouncil) January 12, 2024

Take a look at them all.

Midnight Mass, NFL and Santa runs: Pictures of Christmas around the world https://t.co/fGJWWthpuF

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) December 25, 2023

Christian groups have welcomed an international agreement, the first of its kind, in Dubai, on a transition away from fossil fuels. The speed and scale of this transition remains in question, however. Developing countries represented at the COP28 climate summit say that there is a lack of funding to help them to decarbonise their economies.

Although this was the 28th COP, the words “fossil fuels” had never previously been included in a final-outcome agreement. Patrick Galey, a senior fossil-fuels investigator at Global Witness, wrote on social media: “Imagine a global process to tackle malaria where it took 30 years for the word ‘mosquitoes’ to appear in decision texts, then that being hailed as a win. That’s how low the bar has been set for climate talks and fossil fuels.”

Talks at the two-week summit ran through the night and ended on Wednesday morning, nearly 24 hours after the proposed closing time.

The final agreement calls on countries to make a commitment to “transitioning away from fossil fuels” and to accelerating action in this “critical decade” to achieve net zero by 2050. It is hoped that this will send a political signal to investors, markets, and the world at large that countries are committed to decarbonising the global economy.

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“It is clear that the era of fossil fuels is coming to a close. We may not have driven the nail into the coffin here at COP28, but the end is coming for dirty energy." https://t.co/HTHzgkgIVJ

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) December 13, 2023

Just south of Baghdad, the urban sprawl gives way to glimpses of green, with lush date palm groves bordering the Euphrates River. But few risk spending much time there. Not even the Iraqi military or government officials venture without permission.

A farmer, Ali Hussein, who once lived on that land, said, “We do not dare to even ask if we can go there.”

That’s because this stretch of Iraq — more than twice the size of San Francisco — is controlled by an Iraqi militia linked to Iran and designated a terrorist group by the United States. Militia members man checkpoints around the borders. And though sovereign Iraqi territory, the area, known as Jurf al-Nasr, functions as a “forward operating base for Iran,” according to one of the dozens of Western and Iraqi intelligence and military officers, diplomats and others interviewed for this article.

The militia that controls the land, Khataib Hezbollah, uses it to assemble drones and retrofit rockets, with parts largely obtained from Iran, senior military and intelligence officials say. Those weapons have then been distributed for use in attacks by Iranian-linked groups across the Middle East — putting this former farmland at the center of fears that the war in Gaza could grow into a wider conflict.

Read it all (my emphasis).

Thick palm groves near Baghdad hide a base where an Iranian-backed militia assembles drones, retrofits missiles and stores them for use regionally against U.S. targets. https://t.co/I3RahEWkQ1

— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) December 9, 2023

This week, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London published the latest edition of its authoritative annual Armed Conflict Survey, and it’s not predicting much peace for the holidays. It paints a grim picture of rising violence in in many regions, of wars chronically resistant to broking of peace. The survey — which addresses regional conflicts rather than the superpower confrontation between China, Russia, the US and its allies — documents 183 conflicts for 2023, the highest number in three decades.

It highlights “intractability as the defining feature of the contemporary global conflict landscape.” Nonstate armed groups, of which Hamas in Gaza is only the most immediately conspicuous, play a baleful role. In many places these forces are supported by disruptive major powers, notably Russia and Iran.

Although the world is not immediately threatened by a great war, such as those of 1914-18 and 1939-45, tensions are rising, especially between the US and China. I would identify an issue that seems to me, as a historian, especially important and dangerous. One of the primary reasons Europe went to war in 1914 is that none of the big players were as frightened as they should have been, of conflict as a supreme human catastrophe. After a century in which the continent had experienced only limited wars, from which Prussia had been an especially conspicuous profiteer, too many statesmen viewed war as a usable instrument of policy, which proved a catastrophic misjudgment.

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An authoritative new study from the International Institute for Strategic Studies finds there are 183 regional and local conflicts underway in 2023, the highest number in three decades, Sir Max Hastings writes https://t.co/CeckeihcVY via @opinion

— Bloomberg (@business) December 10, 2023

In 2030, if current projections hold, the United States will drill for more oil and gas than at any point in its history. Russia and Saudi Arabia plan to do the same.

They’re among the world’s fossil fuel giants that, together, are on course this decade to produce twice the amount of fossil fuels than a critical global warming threshold allows, according to a United Nations-backed report issued on Wednesday.

The report, which looked at 20 major fossil fuel producing countries, underscores the wide gap between world leaders’ lofty promises to take stronger action on climate change and their nations’ actual production plans.

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The world remains on track to produce far more oil, gas and coal than would be consistent with relatively safe levels of heating, a new report found. https://t.co/jmFx4hY1FN

— NYT Science (@NYTScience) November 8, 2023

The world economy is lumbering from one shock to another as two brutal wars, stubborn inflation and high borrowing costs pockmark the post-pandemic recovery. The next source of turbulence in the polycrisis era: a packed 2024 election calendar.

Starting with Taiwan in January and running through the US presidential election in November, the year will bring 40 national elections—a busy lineup even in calmer political times. Bloomberg Economics calculates that voters in countries representing 41% of the world’s population and 42% of its gross domestic product have a chance to elect new leaders next year.

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Brace for elections: 40 countries are voting in 2024 https://t.co/pHjTaaUgLQ pic.twitter.com/mtfQjs83nJ

— Bloomberg UK (@BloombergUK) November 1, 2023

As Bishops of the Church of England we condemn the terrorist actions of Hamas on 7th October. Hamas has killed civilians without mercy, defiled their bodies, treated the most vulnerable brutally and taken hostages. Its continued indiscriminate rocket attacks against Israeli targets puts civilian structures and individuals at risk. All this is built on its denial of the right of Israel to exist. Hamas has oppressed the people it was originally elected to serve and has put them in harm’s way by using them as human shields. Its actions are a violation of international law.

We must also reflect on the actions that Israel has taken in response. We affirm absolutely Israel’s right to self-defence. We wholly support the duty of the Government of Israel to protect its citizens. We echo the concerns raised by President Biden about understandable anger and deep trauma not determining strategy and actions. Israel’s right to self-defence needs to be exercised in adherence to the key principles of international humanitarian law.

The huge number of civilians killed in three weeks of bombardment, principally in Gaza City, and the immense suffering of a people herded south with no escape, are a humanitarian catastrophe. Even defined evacuation routes have been hit. Places of sanctuary and gathering have been bombed. Aid workers have been killed and wounded in large numbers. Critical services like healthcare, water, and electricity have been cut, while the military siege of Gaza has meant that no adequate humanitarian response has been possible.

Also gravely concerning are the reports of rising numbers of Palestinians killed in the West Bank by inhabitants of settlements which are illegal under international law. In mixed communities in Israel, where people have generally lived peacefully side by side, Israeli Arabs now find themselves subject to abuse, harassment and discrimination.

Read it all.

https://t.co/3QWpjPCAcJ

— Revd Dr Brenda Wallace (@BrendaW36187388) October 31, 2023

America’s commercial property collapse is becoming a danger to the financial system.

Office blocks purchased with debt remain half empty, 18 months after the end of the pandemic. Thousands of buildings will have to be torn down. Hundreds of regional banks are sitting on crippling losses that they yet to acknowledge.

“It’s a trainwreck in slow motion,” said Professor Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, a property and finance expert at Columbia University.

“The return to the office isn’t happening. Data from turnstile swipes shows that occupancy levels are still just 49pc of where they used to be. It has been stable for a year and a half,” he said. Sensors tracking physical presence in offices tell the same story. Hybrid work is here to stay.

Read it all (subscription).

DT (£) A rising wave of property defaults threatens US banks. “We are starting to see distressed sales every day. Offices are selling for 50pc, 60pc or 70pc discounts. At these values the equity holders are wiped out, and lenders take a 30pc loss,” https://t.co/3JGKK29ku4

— Peter Bill (@peterproperty) October 27, 2023

More than 10,000 people received modern-slavery victim support from the Salvation Army under its government contract last year — the highest in the 12 years since it began. This included more than 3000 new referrals, up by five per cent on the previous year.

The figures are set out in the charity’s annual report Behind the Shield: Protecting and supporting survivors of modern slavery, published on Anti-Slavery Day on Wednesday of last week. It is the 12th year that the Government has contracted the Salvation Army to provide specialist support for adult victims of modern slavery referred from England and Wales.

In that year — between July 2022 and June 2023 — 3533 potential victims contacted the Salvation Army for support: a five-per-cent increase (465 more people) over the previous year. Of the potential victims, one third were women, two-thirds were men, and 1.5 per cent identified as transgender.

The use of the term “potential” means that there is reasonable evidence that the person is a victim, but that this has yet to be confirmed by decision-making bodies in the Home Office, the report explains.

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Modern slavery on the increase, Salvation Army reports https://t.co/xtSnB0LFTl

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) October 26, 2023

Nearly one in four people worldwide — which translates into more than a billion people — feel very or fairly lonely, according to a recent Meta-Gallup survey of more than 140 countries.

Notably, these numbers could be even higher. The survey represents approximately 77% of the world’s adults because it was not asked in the second-most populous country in the world, China.

With the World Health Organization and many others — including the U.S. surgeon general — calling attention to the dangers of loneliness, these data, collected in partnership between Gallup and Meta, provide a much-needed global perspective of social wellbeing.

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Large Gallup Survey: Almost a Quarter of the World Feels Lonely. Nearly one in four people worldwide — which translates into more than a billion people — feel very or fairly lonely, according to a recent Meta-Gallup survey of more than 140 countries. https://t.co/UDl43iqdN1

— Carl Hindy, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist (@DrCarlHindy) October 24, 2023

The ocean floor is shaping up to be the world’s next theater of global resource competition — and China is set to dominate it. The sea is believed to hold several times what land does of these rare metals, which are critical for almost all of today’s electronics, clean-energy products and advanced computer chips. As countries race to cut greenhouse gas emissions, demand for these minerals is expected to skyrocket.

When deep-sea mining begins, China — which already controls 95 percent of the world’s supply of rare-earth metals and produces three-quarters of all lithium-ion batteries — will extend its chokehold over emerging industries like clean energy. Mining will also give Beijing a potent new tool in its escalating rivalry with the United States. As a sign of how these resources could be weaponized, China in August started restricting exports of two metals that are key to U.S. defense systems.

“If China can take the lead in seabed mining, it really has the lock on access to all the key minerals for the 21st-century green economy,” said Carla Freeman, senior expert for China at the United States Institute of Peace.

In the case of polymetallic nodules, that means sending robotic vehicles as deep as 18,000 feet to the vast, dark seafloor, where they will slowly vacuum up about four inches of seabed, then pump it up to a ship.

Read it all.

The ocean floor is shaping up to be the next theater of global resource competition, and China’s diplomatic efforts are positioning it to lead in deep-sea mining. https://t.co/Aa1X8xDKP8

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 20, 2023

BIR REBAA, Algeria—Once-obscure corners of the energy world, from offshore Congo to Azerbaijan, are booming as Europe finds new sources of natural gas to replace the Russian supplies that once powered the continent. The shift is redrawing the world’s energy map at a rapid clip.

In Bir Rebaa, deep in the Sahara, the Italian energy company Eni and Algeria’s state-owned energy company are drilling dozens of wells, producing gas from previously untapped fields in a matter of months.

Three pipelines beneath the Mediterranean Sea connect Algeria’s vast gas reserves to Europe. For much of the last decade, Russian gas giant Gazprom had kept prices low, pushing suppliers like Algeria out of the European market.

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A burst of drilling in the Sahara is part of the West’s rapid pivot toward remote parts of the globe to replace Russian energy https://t.co/arcbo9gZJw

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) September 19, 2023

Read it all.

Analysis: The crisis in Niger could reach a tipping point this weekend. Kiari Liman-Tinguiri, Niger’s ambassador in Washington, spoke about the fraught state of play in an interview with Today's WorldView. https://t.co/Wa7Z9MBUZr

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) August 4, 2023

An industrial arms race is under way. America welcomes it, saying the world needs green technologies and a diversified supply of chips. It is true that an ocean of public money is bound to accelerate the green transition and reshape supply chains in ways that should increase the security of democracies. Alas, the accompanying economic benefits being promised are an illusion. As we report this week, governments that subsidise and protect manufacturing are more likely to harm their economies than help them.

In ideal conditions, promoting manufacturing can add to innovation and growth. Towards the end of the 20th century South Korea and Taiwan caught up with the West thanks to the careful promotion of manufacturing exports. In industries like planemaking the enormous costs of entry and uncertain future demand can justify support for new firms, as when Europe backed Airbus in the 1970s. Likewise, targeted help can boost national security.

But today’s schemes are likely either to fail or to prove needlessly costly. Countries subsidising chips and batteries are not pursuing catch-up growth but fighting over cutting-edge technology. The market for electric vehicles and batteries is unlikely to become an Airbus-Boeing style duopoly. In the 1980s protectionists argued that Japan would dominate the strategically vital semiconductor industry, owing to its subsidised mastery of memory-chip making. It did not turn out that way.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

Governments are not wrong to pursue good jobs, the green transition or national security. But the potential for the manufacturing obsession to backfire is enormous https://t.co/BXCCBI1Ls0

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) July 16, 2023

Every society—even in the West—defines freedom differently,…[Wissam al-Saliby, advocacy officer for the WEA] continued, and the WEA must keep to an international minimum as it represents evangelical opinion. Hate speech is a significant societal problem, and the global WEA body endorses the UN-backed Rabat Plan of Action to determine when it crosses the line into incitement to violence.

The Christian minimum, however, is drawn instead from the image of God.

“Our ability to reject God and his love,” Saliby said, “establishes the absolute right of freedom of expression, religion, and the changing thereof.”

Secure in God’s love themselves, all Christians should condemn Quran burnings.

“Insulting religions does not reflect our Christian witness,” said Saliby. “Our Lord and Savior is bigger than this.”

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“What happened in Sweden was an unwholesome use of the concept of personal freedom,” said one pastor in Baghdad. https://t.co/RyvtD1F0Nz

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) July 12, 2023

When the Chinese government abruptly abandoned its zero-covid policy at the end of 2022, all bets were on a rapid economic rebound. After nearly three years of restrictions, the world’s second-largest economy would, the thinking went, come roaring back.

In the event, China has reopened with a whimper, not a bang. A range of economic indicators, including retail sales and investment, have risen less rapidly than expected. Some analysts now think the economy might not have grown at all during the second quarter. At this rate, the government’s modest gdp target, for growth in 2023 of 5%, will only just be met.

There are several reasons to be gloomy about China’s economic prospects, from America’s export controls on advanced semiconductors and skittish foreign investors, to President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on big tech firms. But the main culprit for the recent weakness is property, which before the pandemic was a crucial source of growth across the economy. Activity slowed, first as the government sought to rein in heavily indebted developers, and then more recently as sales have stayed weak. Between January and May, for instance, real-estate investment fell by 7.2%, compared with the same period a year ago. The danger is that the property bust now becomes an enduring malaise.

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"Even if China wanted to foster more consumption-led growth, it would not easily be able to do so. Many of the government’s economic policies are still designed to promote exports and investment, and to suppress consumption."
https://t.co/CS1xXzSMZV

— Michael Pettis (@michaelxpettis) June 22, 2023

Headline rates of inflation across most of the world’s economies have fallen back sharply since the autumn but core rates — which exclude volatile categories such as energy and food — remain at or close to multi-decade highs.

These rates, seen as a better gauge of underlying price pressures, have sparked concern that central banks will struggle to hit their targets without wiping out growth.

“The next leg of the improvement in the inflation numbers is going to be harder,” said Carl Riccadonna, chief US economist at BNP Paribas. “It requires more pain, and that pain likely involves a recession in the back half of the year.”

Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, added: “The only way to get inflation down to 2 per cent is to crush demand and slow down the economy in a more substantial way.”

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“The next leg of the improvement in the inflation numbers is going to be harder. It requires more pain:” BNP's Riccadonna

Apollo's Torsten Slok: “The only way to get inflation down to 2% is to crush demand.”
https://t.co/8BVmtH9pdm

— Lisa Abramowicz (@lisaabramowicz1) June 23, 2023