Human rights and gender equality will be cross-cutting themes of the Summit of the Future

These include a general commitment to integrity in public information; a commitment to ensuring meaningful youth engagement at the United Nations; and a commitment to metrics that go beyond Gross Domestic Product and take vulnerability into account.  

more effective multilateral arrangements.

the Emergency Platform.

outer space

a Declaration on Future Generations.

a Global Digital Compact,

the Pact for the Future.

The Pact for the Future must demonstrate to the world that while we face daunting challenges, we can overcome them with co-operation, compromise and global solidarity.

The Permanent Representatives of the Netherlands and Fiji are developing an elements paper for a Declaration for Future Generations –a major step towards the proposed Summit of the Future. The Permanent Representatives of New Zealand and Oman are leading negotiations on the modalities resolution that would enable that the Summit of the Future to take place.

Futures Lab.

UN Behavioural Science Week

the potential of data for people, planet and the SDGs.

a new culture and new capabilities in data, digital, innovation, behavioural science, and strategic foresight.

the Scientific Advisory Mechanism.

a roadmap for the development and effective implementation of international law.

to ensure legal identity for all

And an upgrading of the United Nations, so that we are better equipped to support governments in finding and implementing multilateral solutions.

An effort to deliver public goods and manage global shocks and crises more effectively;

A focus on the future, with steps to enhance youth engagement and to take future generations into account in policy decisions;

A New Global Deal to redistribute power and resources, and a renewal of the social contract;

Four countries have already defaulted on their debts

the efforts and the pressure over societies - especially in the developing world, will remain very high.

supply chain disruptions, high costs of transportation, high costs of energy,

the triple planetary crisis of climate breakdown, air pollution and biodiversity los

SpaceX has already undercut the rest of the industry with its cheap, reusable Falcon rockets, and regularly flies both cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station.

private-sector “New Space” industry,

Over half of items are returned because they are the wrong size.

The outbound system is highly automated and streamlined; a return must be opened and someone has to decide what to do with it. “A worker in an Amazon warehouse can pick 30 items in a minute, but a return can take ten minutes to process,” says Mr Rogers.

In America 21% of online orders, worth some $218bn, were returned in 2021, according to the National Retail Federation, up from 18% in 2020.

“The Russian word for hospital is bol’nitsa, which comes from the word pain. The Ukrainian is likarnya, from the word to cure. That tells you a story, and there are many other examples like this.”

Millions of Russian-speaking Ukrainians, appalled at what is being done in their name, are making a point of switching to Ukrainian.

Nobody can counter aggression through dollars and semiconductors alone.

Ukraine marks a new era of 21st-century conflict in which the military, technological and financial elements are intertwined.

Given that more countries depend on China than America as their largest trading partner, enforcing a global embargo would be even harder than with Russia.

the West could seize China’s $3trn of reserves and cut off its banks.

The biggest flaw is that full or partial embargoes are not being enforced by over 100 countries with 40% of world gdp. Urals oil is flowing to Asia. Dubai is brimming with Russian cash and you can fly with Emirates and others to Moscow seven times a day. A globalised economy is good at adapting to shocks and opportunities, particularly as most countries have no desire to enforce Western policy.

Energy sales will generate a current-account surplus of $265bn this year, the world’s second-largest after China. After a crunch, Russia’s financial system has stabilised and the country is finding new suppliers for some imports, including China. Meanwhile in Europe, an energy crisis may trigger a recession. This week natural-gas prices rose by a further 20% as Russia squeezed supplies.

But the Russia embargo takes sanctions to a new level by aiming to cripple the world’s 11th-biggest economy, one of the biggest exporters of energy, grain and other commodities.

Sanctions seemed to offer an answer by allowing the West to exert power through its control of the financial and technological networks at the heart of the 21st-century economy.

As well as satisfying Western public opinion, these measures have strategic objectives. The short-term goal, at least initially, was to trigger a liquidity and balance-of-payments crisis in Russia that would make it hard to finance the Ukraine war and thus alter the Kremlin’s incentives. In the long run the intent is to impair Russia’s productive capacity and technological sophistication so that, if Vladimir Putin aspires to invade another country, he would have fewer resources to hand. A final aim is to deter others from warmongering.

regain autarchy in key areas, from cyber components to pharmaceutical products

On the strategic level there were Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I and SALT II); The Anti-Ballistic Missile Agreement (ABM Treaty), Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START I and II) and the «New START» agreement. At the intermediate range level there was INF (Interme

the installation of a «red phone» between Washington and Moscow to be able to speak in a crisis with each other directly and immediately.

The creation of NATO in 1949 (whose purpose it, as a British general put it, was to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down)

Many felt that it would be possible to put the genie back into the bottle.

We must support the international commu-nity in its effort to prevent this, anticipate the impact of such a war on us, and do everything to reduce it

the concepts of comprehensive defence again

has not so many technological inroads into our economy that it can freeze or stop it at will

reduce our economic dependence on Rus-sia and, above all, China

We should form something like half a dozen brigades with national defence as main task; fully equip them with armour, modern artillery, and the latest in infan-try fighting equipment

We can offer Geneva as negotiating table and we have the three Geneva Centers initiated by Switzerland as islands of excellence.

render our world less secure.

they must be understood as tools to formulate and im-plement political strategies

We must, above all, cease to perceive weapons (as the peace movement does) as instruments of the evil, which should be abolished as soon as possible.

Through the use of artificial intelligence and quantum computers it should be possible to throw a cloud of obstacles into their trajectory. Any collision, as small as it may be, would lead to the immediate dis-integration of the glider

Particularly in the US, more recently also in Russia, there is, moreover, a growing attraction of small or very small nuclear weapons that could be used as easily as conventional weapons. That is wrong and it is dangerous.

We must realize that Putin may begin to prepare the ground for a nuclear surprise attack – if he chooses so.

The time of nuclear arms control is over; the time has come for rearmament

As a super-anti-subma-rine weapon. A large hydrogen bomb detonated in an area known to be frequented by US SSBN might be able to destroy, or at least weaken, the US underwa-ter deterrent.

While the West believes that the world ends once the red but-ton is pushed, for the Russians and the Chinese the war enters simply a new phase, once the nuclear exchange has started.

Xi is building the potentially largest ICBM force in the world, roughly the equivalent of the US and the Russian arsenals combined.

attributed to China a total nuclear force of 200–400 warheads, comparable to the arsenals of the UK and of France (but far below the numbers of the US and Russian arsenals)

that are placed under the direct control of the Communist Party’s (KPC) Central Military Commis-sion (CMC), headed by Xi Jinping

It refuses until today to enter into any arms control negotiations.

France, where control of the warheads and the land-based launchers lay not with the armed forces but with the Gendarmerie nationale, shows the same attitude.

based on minimal deterrence, and announced a «No First Use» policy

He believed that even a single nuclear weapon that would hit the attacker in retalia-tion would be totally unacceptable price – and hence constitute a sufficient deterrent.

The hyperve-locity missiles entering the Russian and Chinese order of battle can now bypass the whole collection.

Both projects need, though, still several years until becoming operational while their Russian and Chinese equivalents are al-ready operational today (the Russian models were suc-cessfully used in the war with Ukraine)

The Columbia class boats will displace some 21,000 tons, mount 16 tubes for Trident D5 SLBM each, and be the most sophisticated submarines ever built by the US.

China has tested (and is about to introduce) hypersonic glider systems.

The Sarmat, the Avangard, and the Iskander-M are already deployed.

«Iskander-M»

«Status-6»,

«Avangard»

he airborne «Kinzhal»

«Zirkon» hypersonic glider (GL)

finds itself today – as far as armour is concerned – with two partially equipped, skeleton armoured di-visionstructures with a total of 244 main battle tanks.

Under the impression of having won the Cold War, the West felt it needed no longer armed forces capable to fighting a succession of major conventional battles against powerful Russian invasion forces.

The truth is that the US has, after the end of the Cold War, largely neglected its strategic nuclear forces.

national security cannot be ultimately guar-anteed without the possession of nuclear weapons.

Ukraine is helpless. It can prevail on the battlefield, but it cannot force an end to the aggression

The hell a nuclear war would un-leash would be too close to result in the extinction of the human race, and thus deprive words like «victory» of any meaning.

he ensuing ABM Treaty limited both sides to one field of 100 ABM interceptors. The Russians completed under this regime their ABM defensive ring protecting Moscow, while the US chose to protect an ICBM field in Wyoming

The US went down from a peak of more than 31,000 weap-ons in 1967 to an inventory of 5,428 today (of which 1,744 are deployed and ready to be launched, 1’964 in a stockpile, and 1’720 retired, awaiting dismantling). The USSR/Russia went from close to 40’000 weapons in 1985 down to 5’977 in 2022 (1,528 deployed, 2’949 in stockpile, and 1,500 retired, awaiting dismantling).

diate Range Nuclear Forces), at the conventional level CFE (Conventional Forces in Europe).

The nuclear nightmare would not disappear but be-come less costly

This German unease has always been recognized by the So-viet Union (and later Russia) as NATO’s Achilles’ heel

the US would rather go nuclear than being overwhelmed.

and frozen to death in the «nuclear winter»

would suffice to bomb the attacker back to the stone age.

to be the political destiny of our planet.

De-terrence and Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) had rendered the nuclear confrontation a dead end and hence essentially stable.

Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

U.S. Treasury Sanctions Notorious Virtual Currency Mixer Tornado Cash

blockchain investments these top corporations made from September 2021 to mid-June 2022.

Patrick Hillmann, chief communications officer at the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, claims scammers made a deepfake of him to trick contacts into taking meetings.

Russia’s Yandex to sell off news service as state tightens grip on online media

The TikTok threat to Google’s business isn’t just limited to YouTube, as it turns out. Core Google services, including Search and Maps, are also being impacted by a growing preference for social media and videos as the first stop on younger users’ path to discovery, a Google exec acknowledged today, speaking at an industry event.

Estonia's Battle Against a Deluge of DDoS Attacks

The Candidates to be Standardized and Round 4 Submissions were announced July 5, 2022. NISTIR 8413, Status Report on the Third Round of the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Process is now available. NIST has developed Guidelines for Submitting Tweaks for Fourth Round Candidates.

the Open Technology Fund

hese efforts could be used to improve legislative oversight of Chinese ICT companies and other entities seeking involvement in a host country’s digital information stack

closer to Chinese data policy regulations that focus on state sovereignty over personal data, even when couched in the language of protecting privacy.

extensive training programs at both the popular and elite levels aimed at fostering dependence on, and brand loyalty to, Chinese telecommunications firms like Huawei and ZTE

a state-centric model of cyber governance

The digital information stack consists of five layers – network infrastructure, devices, applications, content, and governance – and each layer of the stack includes several components.

to be more aware of the tradeoffs of China’s involvement in their digital information stacks

Most who implement pqc will not see any difference, and have no need to fuss with the 600-digit numbers in use today.

nist’s new standards are unlikely to be the last, as quantum computers’ strengths develop and protocols are tested to destruction in the white-hat hackers’ white-hot heat.

Eventually the new standards must percolate through every device and service that transmits encrypted data—every browser tab, every nuclear facility, every payment gizmo, every military digital radio.

None has yet become a trusted standard, but now nist has picked a set of recipes that have survived years of tyre-kicking.

“post-quantum cryptography”

Cryptography protocols involve calculations that are harder to undo than do.

the National Institute of Standards and Technology (nist)

When quantum computers reach their potential, decades of secret intelligence, credit-card details, intellectual property and military and medical data will become as easy to read as the words before your eyes.

One defence is to use encryption, but in the fast-approaching era of quantum computers that defence will fail.

We will now allow singular use of data alongside the plural. Specifically, when considered as a concept—as in data is the new oil—the singular will be acceptable, as well as when the data in question is considered as a mass (the data on this mobile-phone plan is insufficient). However, when data points are considered as a group of pieces of information, the plural should still be used: data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicate the hottest summer of all time.

Plural data in the sense of “data points” will probably appear in one kind of story exclusively (ie, those reporting on a study based on a number of observations), and mass-style singular data in others (especially those to do with computing). In any case, our style guide already allows some collective nouns, like council or staff, to be singular or plural depending on whether it is the entity or its constituents under discussion, with no resulting chaos.

Singular data is now more common than the plural in books, and far more prevalent on the web.

Data, as every child at a grammar school once knew, is the plural of Latin’s datum, “something given”.

We will now allow singular use of data alongside the plural. Specifically, when considered as a concept—as in data is the new oil—the singular will be acceptable, as well as when the data in question is considered as a mass (the data on this mobile-phone plan is insufficient). However, when data points are considered as a group of pieces of information, the plural should still be used: data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicate the hottest summer of all time.

As Sino-American tensions worsen, that is a game no one can win.

as well as its games, run the risk of arousing hostility from China hawks in America

Mr Xi’s crackdown on internet firms has hit its gaming arm, its fintech plans and local investments such as Didi. It has to censor itself vigorously.

Tencent is embedded in almost every aspect of life there

are fascinatingly idiosyncratic,

As Ms Chen puts it, it has become an incubator of startups, not a killer of potential competitors.

all of Tencent’s transformational ideas, including WeChat, came from second-tier teams competing against each other, not from the top brass

(“You either wait for someone to kill you or you kill yourself first,” is how he describes the firm’s constant efforts at reinvention)

That threatens its reputation in the West, where it is a huge investor in gaming (among other businesses) and where it is keen to expand its reach.

WeChat is Tencent’s flagship product, a “Swiss Army Knife” of a super app, offering messages, search, ride-hailing, food delivery and other applications on a single platform. But in a paranoid regime, its power is also a threat.

It was a rare moment when WeChat (Weixin within China) was used to express people’s anger and pain, rather than the blander stuff—swanky dinners, clouds at dusk—that people usually post.

"extremely straightforward, very open and friendly. He's got a pretty good sense of humor."

He was CEO of the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based national security think tank, before becoming CEO of Endgame, a cybersecurity software firm that was acquired by the cloud computing firm Elastic in 2019.

to make the case for developing countries to incorporate openness and freedom into their regulation of the internet rather than authoritarian control.

imit the flow of information to and among their citizens.

lighter regulation biased in favor of the free flow of information

It's a battle over who controls the digital environment."

for security and digital policy

The bureau combines three pre-existing policy units within the State Department: International Cyberspace Security, International Information and Communications Policy, and Digital Freedom.

Casting the prosecution of a presidential candidate as a deep-state conspiracy is peculiarly compelling.

Not charging Mr Trump gives him an air of impunity; charging him unsuccessfully would make him look invincible.

But the possibility of prosecution seems to fire Mr Trump and his supporters up, rather than turn them off. They treat it as offering a form of vindication—evidence of how much “the regime” wants him off the scene.

“People are happy—overwhelmingly—with the direction of the party. And that means America First,” says Ms Longwell. “Even if Trump the man loses some altitude…the party has now changed for ever.”

Much of it has come from former Trump donors who think the risk of another loss against Mr Biden is too high.

“We will bring Big Tech down to their knees!” screamed Lauren Boebert, a Republican congresswoman.

The Republican parties in various other potential swing states, including Michigan and Nevada, have chosen to field Big Lie endorsers as their candidates for some or all of the same offices (see chart 2).

Any investigative committees they come to control will abruptly lose interest in Mar-a-Lago’s safes and turn their attention to President Joe Biden’s administration and family.

they will act as fierce Trump loyalists

The party’s base is still devoted to Mr Trump (65% net approval in polls) and to his Big Lie about the 2020 election (70% tell pollsters they believe it was stolen from him), and he can focus their ire on anyone whose head rises above the parapet. His power in the party is not absolute. But it is unquestionable.

“we will live in a world determined by others, with stifling constraints on our ability to shape our future”.

The mantra these days in Brussels is to provide “a Europe that protects”, whether from the vagaries of globalisation, a changing climate or foreign tyrants.

That model largely endures to this day. This is a disappointment to purists of European integration, for whom the project should aim to mitigate the power of selfish national governments, not enhance it.

during the euro crisis Brussels became a venue for national leaders to broker late-night deals rather than the home of institutions which themselves made decisions.

No national watchdog in Europe could boss around an Amazon or Google. The eu’s regulation of such tech giants, in contrast, has given the concerns of Europeans, whether on privacy or rapacious business models, real heft.

national leaders kick things up to the European level because they realise there is no way any single government can tackle them alone.

A decade ago the mantra in Brussels was “more Europe”: every problem had a solution that required power to be handed to the eu

the collective satisfaction of having come through a decennium horribilis in one piece (minus Britain)

Brussels is brimming with confidence, even as Europe’s prospects look more tenuous. What happened?

formula is “right on the cusp of a pharmaceutical”, because it is many babies’ sole source of nutrition. Getting exactly the recommended levels of vitamins—not 90%, not 110%—is crucial.

every foodstuff can be seen as a combination of fat, protein and carbohydrate.

The nascent nbs worked with iron founders to define the precise alloys that railway-builders should use.

They need physical embodiments of the standards they define.

Often they began as repositories for lumps of metal of precisely a kilogram’s mass or a metre’s length, though these fundamental units are now defined in terms of natural phenomena rather than iridium-platinum artefacts.

Standard methods and units are the bedrock of scientific endeavours from atom-smashing to astronomy.

He was saying that nato forces and the Ukrainian government had trained him to “eliminate” peace-loving citizens.

Schools are preparing to start teaching the Russian curriculum

Ukrainian mobile numbers no longer work.

Ukrainians can open accounts at one of two new Russian banks, but only if they get a Russian passport.

such as whether the party responded forcefully enough to the recent visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi

their support for Bo Xilai, a red-song-loving rival to China’s then leader-in-waiting, Xi Jinping.

The neo-Maoists know well that the government watches them warily.

Among officials, the flare-up of neo-Maoist discontent will not be welcome.

Neo-Maoist websites, as well as others run by nationalists of a less ideological hue, often serve a useful purpose for the party.

It is tearing at America’s governing institutions.

the black hole at the centre of its politics.

what was it about Mr Trump that drew people to him like this? “I don’t think about it…” he called back over his shoulder, with a grin. “Whatever it is, it is.”

not giving direct orders that might implicate him but speaking “in a code.” The president who had the foresight to bar the White House photographer from his presence on January 6th, and leave no phone trail that day, seems unlikely to have left incriminating evidence lying around Mar-a-Lago.

The raid appears to stem from an investigation into how he handled classified information

America faces the possibility of an indicted or convicted candidate winning a presidential election while campaigning against the rule of law.

The constitution, which spells out the qualifications for serving as president, is silent on the question of a criminal record.

Mr Trump was able to present himself in his favourite light, as the victim of dark, partisan forces out to protect the establishment by dragging him down.

“Another day in paradise,”

When to use intuition in the workplace rests on its own form of pattern recognition.