Major geopolitical developments — what happened this week that affects the largest number of people.
In January the High Seas Treaty came into force — the first tool able to protect the two-thirds of the ocean beyond any border. The distance between that text and the water, and the big powers still standing outside it, is the story of the year ahead.
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.
The Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo has roughly doubled in a week. There is still no vaccine for this strain, and contact tracing is running at half of what it needs to be.
Two days of open US–Iran strikes gave way to a memorandum the two capitals already describe differently: Washington calls it a settlement to end the war; Tehran says nothing is final — and the Strait of Hormuz stays closed.
Israel and Lebanon's government agreed a US-brokered framework in Washington this month. But the deal binds the signatories, not the gunmen — and on the ground, where Israel keeps striking and Hezbollah keeps flying drones, neither side has stopped.
This spring, Britain convened forty nations to reopen a waterway America used to keep open. In the same months, Europe began drafting legal infrastructure to police dollar-denominated private payment systems. The architecture of the global system is being maintained by hands that did not build it.
For three decades the Pacific has been treated as the calm centre of the world. It is now the centre of the contest between the United States and China — and Australia, New Zealand, and the smaller island states find themselves caught between forces none of them can balance alone.
Colombia voted on Sunday in a first round that will send a Trump-aligned candidate against a leftist senator to a runoff later this month. Meanwhile, a nine-month U.S. military campaign of strikes against alleged drug-trafficking boats off the South American coast has now killed over 200 people.
Sudan's civil war has produced the world's largest humanitarian catastrophe and continues. Next door, Ethiopia voted on Monday in an election expected to consolidate one-party rule. Two of Africa's most populous countries are pulling in opposite political directions while their region holds.
Three months after U.S. and Israeli strikes began the war with Iran, the April ceasefires technically remain in force. On the ground, in three countries, the fighting has not stopped — and this week the war widened again.