The World This Week — Edition 005
Edition No. 005. Saturday, 20 June 2026. Thirteen stories across the week’s sections — from the finale of The Emptied Sea to the High Seas Treaty entering into force.
Edition 005
Edition 005
Narrow Streets, 300 Years of History, and One of the Best Dives in the Caribbean
Ten kilometres south of Guadeloupe, eight small volcanic islands — two of them about the most quietly beautiful places in the Lesser Antilles, and one of the Caribbean's best dives in the channel between.
The Water Beneath the Cloud
We talk about artificial intelligence as if it lived in the cloud. A new UN report measures what it actually consumes on the ground — electricity, water and land — and warns that getting more efficient may only make us use more.
A Law for the Open Sea
Two-thirds of the ocean lies beyond any country's borders, and until this year no law could protect it. The High Seas Treaty has now entered into force — the first real framework for the largest commons on Earth.
A Line Crossed in the Ice
For years scientists assumed less Arctic ice would mean more life. A new study of two decades of data suggests the opposite — and that the ocean may have quietly passed the point of no return around 2009.
The State of the Sea
Five years, 550 scientists, 1,600 pages: the UN's new World Ocean Assessment is the most complete account yet of what we are doing to the sea. Its numbers are large, and most of them point one way.
Nine Declarations and a Photograph
The image the world kept from the G7 at Évian was a signature at Versailles. Beneath it, the summit quietly issued nine declarations — on Ukraine, oceans, minerals, disease and children — that will outlast the photograph.
The Island in the Dark
A US fuel blockade, tightened after the ousting of Venezuela's president, has pushed Cuba into rolling blackouts, collapsing tourism and a failing health system — a slow-motion crisis largely off the world's front pages.
The World That Looked Away
Gang violence has killed some 2,300 Haitians this year and displaced 1.5 million. As a new international force deploys, the UN Secretary-General named the real adversary: indifference.
The War Ends on Paper
Three months of open war between the United States, Israel and Iran has been wound down by a memorandum the parties already read differently. The fighting has largely stopped. Almost nothing underneath it is settled.