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China’s “One Belt One Road” (OBOR) initiative—yi dai yi lu in Mandarin Chinese—aims to connect seventy-one countries by land and sea. Highways and maritime routes will complement the “networks of connectivity” in trade, investment, finance, tourism, and even education between China and the world. OBOR is meant to be a form of diplomacy, development, and trade incentive all rolled into one. The initiative is constantly evolving in its scope; in fact, the Chinese government recently changed OBOR to “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) in English.

Summers approaches the BRI initiative as a creatively repurposed version of this past. Despite the international media’s portrayal of the proposal as China’s bid for global hegemony, a significant dimension of BRI is domestic. With excess capacity at home, new avenues for sequestering Chinese capital need to be sought abroad. For Yunnan province in southwestern China, this has meant developing cooperation with its immediate neighbors. For example, Summer expects Chinese trade and investment in the Association of South East Asian Nations, including Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, to exceed its trade with the E.U. some time in the 2020s. In the northwest province of Xinjiang, greater economic development is also expected to mitigate extremism among China’s restive Uighur Muslim minority. Linking land-locked interior cities like Chongqing by rail with Central Asia has begun to address regional imbalances within China.

We're in the Brexit endgame -- or so Boris Johnson hopes.

By Thursday evening, the British Prime Minister intends to have done the seemingly impossible and passed a Brexit deal.But whether he is able to do that depends on a series of crucial votes by lawmakers on his Withdrawal Agreement Bill (WAB).

But the government's efforts to force it through in three days are proving controversial, and the bill could be picked apart and reshaped by lawmakers even if it succeeds in its initial vote on Tuesday.

Okjökull—meaning “Ok’s glacier”—which spanned sixteen square kilometres at its largest, at the end of the nineteenth century. By 1978, it had shrunk to three square kilometres

In 2014, Iceland’s leading glaciologist, Oddur Sigurðsson, hiked to Ok’s summit to discover only a small patch of slushy gray ice in the shadow of the volcano’s crater.

Okjökull could no longer be classified as a glacier, Sigurðsson announced to the scientific community.

Evan Osnos explores China’s reluctance to pressure North Korea in a September 2017 New Yorker article.

China’s policy toward its neighbor will critically affect the fate of Asia.

strains in the relationship surfaced when Pyongyang tested a nuclear weapon in October 2006 and Beijing backed UN Security Council Resolution 1718, which imposed sanctions on Pyongyang. With this resolution and subsequent ones, Beijing signaled a shift in tone from diplomatic support to punishment. After North Korea’s missile launch test in November 2017, China called on North Korea to cease actions that increased tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

I was dismissive of the Anthropocene, a proposed new epoch of Earth history that has long since escaped its geoscience origins to become a dimly defined buzzword and, as such (I argued), serves to inflate humanity’s eventual geological legacy to those unfamiliar with deep time.

Wing is on the Anthropocene Working Group, a group of scientists working to define just such an epoch. He hated my essay. In his manner, though, he was extremely nice about it.

the essence of a lot of Faulkner is, before you can be something new and different, slavery is always there, the legacy of slavery is not erased, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past,’

The Byzantine Empire was a vast and powerful civilization with origins that can be traced to 330 A.D., when the Roman emperor Constantine I dedicated a “New Rome” on the site of the ancient Greek colony of Byzantium.

The Byzantine Empire finally fell in 1453, after an Ottoman army stormed Constantinople during the reign of Constantine XI.

The citizens of Constantinople and the rest of the Eastern Roman Empire identified strongly as Romans and Christians, though many of them spoke Greek and not Latin.

Prince Turki Al-Faisal, a former Saudi intelligence chief and an influential royal family member, told U.S. lawmakers to get off their “high moralistic horses” as ties between the historical allies remain frayed a year after the murder of columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Prince Turki criticized congressional representatives on Wednesday for the “horror” and “disdain” they express for Saudi Arabia, saying U.S. lawmakers are unable to perform their jobs to address “issues of racism and racial inequality” and to reform gun ownership laws.

The murder last year of Khashoggi, a U.S resident and Washington Post columnist, as well as the long-running war and humanitarian crisis in Yemen and the detention of Saudi female activists have all strained the kingdom’s relations with much of the Washington establishment outside the White House.

What he and some of his most credulous Western supporters described as a coup was in fact something very different: proof that Bolivians—like the citizens of many other countries around the world—resent arbitrary rule. The longer they have suffered from oppression, the more they have come to value the democratic institutions that are now threatened by populists around the globe.

this is a momentous turning point: one of the first times in recent memory that an authoritarian populist has been forced to vacate his office, because his own compatriots would not stand for his abuses.

Morales’s departure from office marks both a sea change in Latin American politics and a stinging rebuke to the naïveté of parts of the Western left. Even though there had always been strong evidence of their anti-democratic leanings, new socialist leaders such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Morales in Bolivia were widely celebrated throughout the first decade of the 21st century as the future face of Latin America.

The world’s nations are on track to produce more than twice as much coal, oil and gas as can be burned in 2030 while restricting rise in the global temperature to 1.5C, analysis shows

The report is the first to compare countries’ stated plans for fossil fuel extraction with the goals of the Paris climate agreement, which is to keep global heating well below 2C above pre-industrial levels, and to aim for 1.5C.

Scientists have warned that even the difference between 1.5C and 2C of heating will expose hundreds of millions of people to significantly higher risks of extreme heatwaves, drought, floods and poverty.

global carbon emissions last year rose to a record 37.1bn tonnes.

In October, UN scientists warned that within 12 years a target of 1.5C of global heating would be out of reach

temperature increases are predicted to cause colossal disruption: 10 million more people displaced as a consequence of higher sea levels; greatly increased risk of fires, drought and extreme weather of all kinds; shrinkage of plant and insect habitats with massive effects on agriculture as well as nature; the extinction of coral.

If Republicans are nervous about mass migration, consider, as Mattis does, that climate change is a “national security issue because when people have to leave devastated areas, and move elsewhere, the refugee flows, all the humanitarian effort that goes into it, the willingness of some people to take advantage of those people, terrorists in particular, and recruit from them because they feel a loss of hope, it’s a reality we’re going to have to deal with.”

for those who are adamant there’s no climate change, you look at the receding sea ice and have different explanations, why wouldn’t we take out an insurance policy and do prudent steps to make certain the generation that’s coming up is not going to be caught flat-footed by this?”

It’s an unlikely spot for an organic fruit and vegetable garden, tucked away between soulless high-rise buildings that dot the most densely populated country in the world

But this 450 sq m sliver of land is where market gardener Jessica Sbaraglia toils away.

launched her urban agriculture business Terre de Monaco in 2016 and she now has five micro farms on Monaco’s rooftops, balconies and hidden plots of land.

Paris, whose residual influence in the Middle East remains projected through Lebanon, remains tightly focused on reforms that could unlock more than $11bn (£8.4bn) in development money and has seen its demands for transparency to be introduced to state institutions ignored.

Lebanon’s other traditional backers are disinclined to help without fundamental reforms. The US and Saudi Arabia have largely conditioned any help on Iran-backed Hezbollah being defanged in a country where it holds sway over the political process, feeding off the state economy, while at the same time generating its own revenues.

The US’s “maximum pressure” policy towards Iran is also affecting Lebanon. “The Americans have told us we can sink into the sea as long as Hezbollah remains powerful,” said one Lebanese leader.

Over the last decade, migration has become an urgent political issue. The 2010s have been marked not only by the global movement of people across national borders but also attempts by governments to erect walls and fences in their path. We’ve seen nationalism winning votes and the worldview of the far right mainstreamed.

But the 2010s has seen a higher number of people from the south moving towards the north. In particular, Europe has seen hundreds of thousands of people from Africa, the Middle East and south Asia, fleeing chronic poverty, political instability, wars, and the climate crisis in countries often laid to ruin by western-backed institutions.

Throughout this time, when tens of thousands died at sea trying to reach Europe, Europe has imagined itself to be the victim of a migrant or refugee “crisis”

The abandonment of iTunes heralded a broader shift in how Americans are assumed to approach their digital lives. You could call it the victory of Gmail.

it encouraged an approach that, anywhere else, would be called hoarding. “With tons of storage space, you’ll never need to delete an email,” said a recent Gmail tutorial. “Just keep everything and easily find it later.”

The computing realities of the 2000s have displaced the dreams of the ’90s. Instead of the libertarian-communitarian global village that Wired magazine and other prophets of the California ideology once imagined—where people control their individual digital domicile, then freely distribute the fruits of their orchard—we have been displaced to a kind of rentier’s frontier, where there’s enough space for everyone as long as you pay a low monthly fee.

Almost a third of the Earth will need to be protected by 2030 and pollution cut by half to save our remaining wildlife, as we enter the planet's sixth era of mass extinction, according to a United Nations agency.

"Biodiversity, and the benefits it provides, is fundamental to human well-being and a healthy planet," the draft plan reads. "Despite ongoing efforts, biodiversity is deteriorating worldwide and this decline is projected to continue or worsen under business-as-usual scenarios."

The convention aims to stabilize our fragile biodiversity by 2030 and allow ecosystems to recover by 2050, allowing for a final vision of "living in harmony with nature" -- but these goals will require urgent action on both local and global levels.

Chinese leaders stretching back to Deng Xiaoping have often thought in terms of decades. A decade encompasses two of China’s famous five-year plans, and it’s a long-enough period to notice real changes in a country’s trajectory.

Yes, it still has big problems, including the protests in Hong Kong. But by the standards that matter most to China’s leaders, the country made major gains during the 2010s. Its economy is more diversified. Its scientific community is more advanced, and its surveillance state more powerful. Its position in Asia is stronger. China, in short, has done substantially more to close the gap with the global power that it is chasing — the United States — than seemed likely a decade ago.

Incomes, wealth and life expectancy in the United States have stagnated for much of the population, contributing to an angry national mood and exacerbating political divisions. The result is a semidysfunctional government that is eroding many of the country’s largest advantages over China. The United States is skimping on the investments like education, science and infrastructure that helped make it the world’s great power. It is also forfeiting the soft power that has been a core part of American pre-eminence.

Twitter is neither the country’s largest nor its wealthiest social network, but nonetheless it exhibits a curiously tight grip on American culture. In the past decade, it has played a prominent role—if an occasionally overstated one—in the Arab Spring, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the 2016 presidential election

Twitter is especially beloved by the press, and the unfortunate affinity that journalists and policy makers have for the social network means that—as with politics itself—you may not care about Twitter, but it cares about you

The sum effect is that Twitter is both leaderless and influential, little used and widely reviled.

Trump fomented a deadly insurrection against the U.S. Congress to prevent a duly-elected president from taking office. Treason is not a word to be used lightly, but that is its textbook definition.

“We will not take it anymore, and that’s what this is all about,” he told a sea of MAGA fans and Proud Boys on the Ellipse outside the White House at noon. From behind bulletproof glass, he told them: “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Earlier, Trump ally Rudy Giuliani had proposed, to the same crowd, a “trial by combat” to resolve Trump’s election complaints. And Donald Trump Jr. delivered a political threat to lawmakers who don’t vote to reject the election results: “We’re coming for you.”