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Chocolate has had “mounting problems for years,” Sophia Carodenuto, an environmental scientist at the University of Victoria, in Canada, told me. The farmers who grow them are chronically underpaid. And cocoa trees—the fruits of which contain beans that are fermented and roasted to create chocolate—are tough to grow, and thrive only in certain conditions. A decade ago, chocolate giants warned that the cocoa supply, already facing environmental challenges, would soon be unable to keep up with rising demand. “But what we’re seeing now is a little bit of an explosion”

The simplest explanation for the ongoing cocoa shortage is extreme weather, heightened by climate change. Exceptionally hot and dry conditions in West Africa, partly driven by the current El Niño event, have led to reduced yields. Heavier-than-usual rains have created ideal conditions for black pod disease, which causes cocoa pods to rot on the branch. All of this has taken place while swollen shoot, a virus fatal to cocoa plants, is spreading more rapidly in cocoa-growing regions. Global cocoa production is expected to fall by nearly 11 percent this season,

Already, some West African farmers are racing to plant new trees. But they may not be able to plant their way out of future cocoa shortages. “Climate change is definitely a challenge” because it will make rainfall less predictable, which is a problem for moisture-sensitive cocoa trees, Debenham told me. Furthermore, rising temperatures and more frequent droughts will render some cocoa-growing regions unusable.

“Fifteen years ago,” says Will Burgess, of Practise Music, a management company, “if you wanted to record a song you needed two days in a studio, at £400 a day, plus a sound engineer at £100 a day. That’s the cost of a laptop, on which you can make unlimited amounts of music today.”

These days you don’t need to be able to play a musical instrument to be a musician and you don’t need a studio. All you need is a computer. “I’ve created songs that have gone to No 1 in my daughter’s bedroom downstairs,” says Crispin Hunt, former lead singer of the Longpigs and now a songwriter who has worked with Lana Del Rey, Rod Stewart and Ellie Goulding.

You can sketch out a musical idea on a laptop, you can add instrumentation, you can record your own vocals. If you want to collaborate with others around the world, no problem: when Luke Sital-Singh, a singer-songwriter who works in London, needs drums, he asks a friend with a studio in Lewes to send the files to his computer. He’s working with a guitarist in Santa Fe, to whom he sends a rough version of the song; his collaborator sends him back a guitar track.

he “15-minute city” has become a toxic phrase in the UK, so controversial that the city of Oxford has stopped using it and the transport minister has spread discredited conspiracy theories about the urban planning scheme.

while fake news spreads about officials enacting “climate lockdowns” to “imprison” people in their neighbourhoods, across the Channel, Parisians are enjoying their new 15-minute neighbourhoods. The French are stereotyped for their love of protest, so the lack of uproar around the redesign of their capital is in stark contrast to the frenzied response in Oxford.

Moreno has been working with the Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, to make its arrondissements more prosperous and pleasurable to live in. He says there are 50 15-minute cities up and running, with more to come.

When a CNN reporter asked if Trump had a response to the heroic Navalny’s death, the Trump campaign pointed her to a Truth Social post that wasn’t about Navalny or Putin. It was about how awful America was.

Before Navalny’s death, Tucker Carlson — who scorned Ukraine’s desperate fight for its independence — cavorted in the Kremlin. His interview with Putin was so indulgent that even Putin complained of a “lack of sharp questions.”

At an Axios conference in Miami, Jared Kushner — who was festooned with $2 billion in Saudi investments after he left the White House — called Mohammed bin Salman a “visionary leader.” Asked about the crown prince’s complicity in Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, Kushner replied with exasperation, “Are we really still doing this?”

Both the Soviet Union and United States conducted high-altitude nuclear detonation (HAND) tests in the 1950s and 1960s, including the U.S. Starfish Prime test in 1962 when the United States detonated a 1.4 megaton warhead atop a Thor missile 250 miles above the Earth. The explosion created an electromagnetic pulse that spread through the atmosphere, frying electronics on land hundreds of miles away from the test, causing electrical surges on airplanes and in power grids, and disrupting radio communications. The boosted nuclear radiation in space accumulated on satellites in orbit, damaging or destroying one-third of them.

Russia has been testing weapons that target space capabilities or using them on the battlefield in Ukraine. In November 2021, Moscow conducted an antisatellite test by launching a missile at one of its own defunct satellites. It has also employed systems designed to jam Starlink and GPS to degrade Ukraine’s communication systems, as well as the drones and munitions the country uses to defend itself. It is not surprising that Moscow would seek to develop a more powerful way to cause widespread damage to constellations of satellites.

What appears unprecedented now is that Russia could be working toward deploying nuclear weapons on satellites, which are constantly orbiting the Earth, to be detonated at times and locations of Moscow’s choosing.

I remember when supporters of Operation Iraqi Freedom constantly hyped good news from the battlefield and minimized bad news — right until the bad news became so overwhelming

Before Bush changed tactics and reinforced American troops during the surge in 2007 and 2008, it sometimes felt disloyal in Republican circles to criticize the course of the war.

Could we have changed our military tactics sooner if we had been able to see the battlefield more clearly? Did paradigm blindness — the unwillingness or inability to accept challenges to our core ways of making sense of the world — inhibit our ability to see obvious truths?

Over the past 15 years, China has come to dominate the global market for solar energy. Nearly every solar panel on the planet is made by a Chinese company. Even the equipment to manufacture solar panels is made almost entirely in China. The country’s solar panel exports, measured by how much power they can produce, jumped another 10 percent in May over last year.

But China’s solar panel domestic industry is in upheaval.

Wholesale prices plummeted by almost half last year and have fallen another 25 percent this year. Chinese manufacturers are competing for customers by cutting prices far below their costs, and still keep building more factories.

Last year the Edelman Trust Barometer found that only 20 percent of people in the G7 countries thought that they and their families would be better off in five years.

Another Edelman survey, from 2020, uncovered a broad distrust of capitalism in countries across the world, “driven by a growing sense of inequity and unfairness in the system.”

Why the broad dissatisfaction with an economic system that is supposed to offer unsurpassed prosperity?

the Mediterranean rush is turning Europe’s recent economic history on its head. In the 2010s, Germany and other manufacturing-heavy economies helped drag the continent out of its debt crisis thanks to strong exports of cars and capital goods, especially to China.

Today, Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal contribute between a quarter and half of the bloc’s annual growth. 

While Germany’s economy is flatlining, Spain is Europe’s fastest-growing big economy. Nearly three-quarters of the country’s recent growth and one in four new jobs are linked to tourism