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Hostilities between Ukraine and Russia reached an alarming level last week when further Russian troops were deployed on the Ukrainian border. Despite a statement from the Kremlin describing the act as “not threatening,” Kyiv accused Moscow of moving thousands of soldiers to its northern and...
A conflict between the United States and China seems increasingly likely. A trade war that began several years ago has had economic repercussions for both sides. In the South China Sea, Chinese aggression against Taiwan is checked by the US military. In cybersphere, the war has already begun, as...
In terms of numbers, India ranks the third worst after the US and Brazil when it comes to COVID-19 infections. At the time of publishing, the country has recorded over 12.3 million confirmed cases and more than 163,000 deaths. The BBC reports that India is facing a “severe, intensive” second...
In October 1944, with the end of World War II in sight, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin passed a note back and forth to each other at a conference in Moscow. On the piece of paper, Churchill had assigned percentages to several Eastern European countries. Stalin amended the numbers...
Since people invented writing, communications technology has become steadily more high-bandwidth, pervasive and persuasive, taking a commensurate toll on human attention and cognition. In that bandwidth war between machines and humans, the machines’ latest weapon is a class of statistical...
Although things have been quiet in recent months and there has been no active dialogue between North Korea and the United States, developments in recent days suggest that Pyongyang is back on the agenda of the international community. First, it became known that the US has been reaching out to...
On March 18, the world was treated to the spectacle of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken sternly lecturing senior Chinese officials about the need for China to respect a “rules-based order.” The alternative, Blinken warned, is a world in which might makes right, and “that would be a far...
After stepping down as Microsoft CEO in 2000, Bill Gates gradually shifted his focus to the operations of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which set out to improve global health and development, as well as education in the US. Partially through his role with the foundation, Gates came to...
In an AP article last December, Maria Cheng and Aniruddha Ghosal noted that, despite official optimism concerning the capacity of emerging vaccines to provoke the definitive decline of the COVID-19 pandemic, “the chances that coronavirus shots will be shared fairly between rich nations and the...
The rapidly-evolving geopolitical equation in the Middle East just got another layer of complexity added to it. Earlier this month, Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), announced the launch of an investigation into alleged war crimes committed in the...
Past the glow of the Shanghai evening, a single red beam threads its way into the silent stratosphere. It is a laser originating from a laboratory whose machinery few can operate or explain. The laser is meant to bounce off a distant satellite before returning for the purpose of encrypting an...
