The construction of parallel U.S.- and Chinese-backed cables between Asia and Europe is unprecedented,

“It’s like each side is arming itself with bandwidth,” one telecom executive working on the deal said.

it would create a super-fast new connection between Hong Kong, China and much of the rest of the world, something Washington wants to avoid. Secondly, it gives China’s state-backed telecom carriers greater reach and protection in the event they are excluded from U.S.-backed cables in the future.

at least three years to move from conception to delivery.

Countries should prioritize security and privacy by “fully excluding untrustworthy vendors” from wireless networks, terrestrial and undersea cables, satellites, cloud services and data centers, the spokesperson said, without mentioning HMN Tech or China.

undermined the project's viability by making it impossible for owners of an HMN-built cable to sell bandwidth to U.S. tech firms, usually their biggest customers.

slapped sanctions on HMN Tech in December 2021

initially picked HMN Tech to build that cable. But a successful U.S. government pressure campaign flipped the contract to SubCom last year, Reuters reported in March.

The China-led EMA project is intended to directly rival another cable currently being constructed by U.S. firm SubCom LLC, called SeaMeWe-6 (Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-6), which will also connect Singapore to France, via Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and half a dozen other countries along the route.

China’s HMN Technologies Co Ltd

$500 million

EMA (Europe-Middle East-Asia)

China Telecommunications Corporation (China Telecom), China Mobile Limited and China United Network Communications Group Co Ltd(China Unicom)

The first is what sort of targets are chosen

A third test is how well cyber forces protect their arsenals.

Officials and experts have spent years debating how international law, including the laws of armed conflict, apply to cyberspace. The Tallinn Manual, associated with nato, is one such guide.

Another is how well attacks are calibrated. Are they precise in their effects and mindful of escalation?

The ncf’s new paper is important because it spells out a realistic and circumscribed view of cyber power. It says that its main purpose is not so much kinetic—a digital substitute for air strikes—as cognitive.

a certain “selfless ambition”

How do you lay someone off? How do you decline unsolicited and unhelpful advice from a big investor? How do you respond to a nosy journalist?

Only when you know your weaknesses can you act to mitigate them

Students are instructed to observe each other’s behaviour, from emotional expressiveness to problem-solving skills.

assess whether the way they come across to others is the way they want to be perceived.

to hold “multiple overlapping roles” within an organisation, as an assigned reading recommends: it is harder to be defenestrated if multiple teams report to you.

to avoid grooming successors

“insufficient sensitivity to, and skill in, coping with power dynamics” have cost many talented people promotions and even their jobs.

ll three require virtually no number-crunching. Instead they aim to cultivate in students a capacity for hardheadedness, introspection and diplomacy, respectively.

In a speech on March 30th, she said Europe wanted to “de-risk” rather than “decouple” its relations with China.

“a just peace that respects Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

(e.g., Google’s AlphaGo, OpenAI’s GPT-3, Tesla’s AutoPilot)

This language on the “technical infrastructure essential to the general availability or integrity of the Internet” stems from proposals by the Netherlands relevant to the public core of the Internet, which in turns draws from the work of Dutch scholar Dennis Broeders on the topic, later taken up by the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace in its proposal for a norm to protect the public core of the Internet. For the relevant United Nations reports, see footnote 122 above. For the Broeders publication, see Dennis Broeders (2016), The Public Core of the Internet: An International Agenda for Internet Governance, Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy, https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/32439/610631.pdf. For the report of the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace and its advocacy for a norm of non-interference with the ‘public core of the Internet’, defined as including “such critical elements of the infrastructure of the Internet as packet routing and forwarding, naming and numbering systems, the cryptographic mechanisms of security and identity, transmission media [including terrestrial and undersea cables and the landing stations, data centres, and other physical facilities which support them], software, and data centers” (pp. 30–31), see Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace (2019), “Advancing Cyberstability: Final Report”, https://hcss.nl/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/GCSC-Final-Report-November-2019.pdf

According to Subcom, an undersea cable repair can cost in excess of US$ 1 million and typically takes 2 weeks to return the cable to service—or more, depending on permitting requirements, weather, and other factors.

Until just over a decade ago, intensity modulated direct detection was the optical transmission technology most commonly used in subsea cables. This method transmits information over subsea and terrestrial optical fibres by using laser pulses to encode digital data. Since then, further advances in coherent optical transmission have allowed single-channel data rates to increase more than a hundred fold.18 In addition, wavelength division multiplexing has increased the number of channels carried per fibre.19 Cable capacities vary depending on the cable system, but advances such as spatial division multiplexing will allow newer systems to carry as much as 500 terabytes per second.20 In systems longer than a few hundred kilometres, optical amplifiers (housed in watertight containers known as repeaters) boost the signals along the length of the cable roughly every 100 km.

n shallow water (usually defined as less than 1000 m), the cable may also be buried under the seabed to provide further protection from, for instance, ships’ anchors and fishing operations.

eleGeography’s 2022 Submarine Cable Map depicting 486 cable systems and 1,306 landings currently active of under construction; seehttps://submarine-cable-map-2022.telegeography.com/.

DataCenterDynamics (2022), ‘World’s Longest Subsea Cable Lands in Djibouti, East Africa’, https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/worlds-longest-subsea-cable-lands-in-djibouti-east-africa; Reuters (2022), “MTN Lands Subsea Cable in South Africa to Boost Africa’s Connectivity”, https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/mtn-lands-subsea-cable-south-africa-boost-africas-connectivity-2022-12-13/.

In 2022, following significant consultations, the International Cable Protection Committee published its Government Best Practices for Protecting and Promoting Resilience of Submarine Telecommunications Cables to “assist governments in developing laws, policies, and practices to foster the development and protection of submarine telecommunications cables, the infrastructure of the Internet”; see https://www.iscpc.org/publications/icpc-best-practices/.

a more in-depth conversation on subsea communications cables, on the adequateness of the existing cable governance regime, and what might be done to strengthen it. Such conversations are already commencing at regional and national levels

science and technology, engineering, maritime security, public international law, environmental protection, governance and security studies, history, and archaeology to name but a few

Egypt's submarine cable stranglehold

permissionless organization

That means silos and layers can give way to small teams, equipped with all the competencies needed to see a project through from beginning to end.

to adopt structures that are flatter and more reconfigurable than those they’ve traditionally used.

are pushing decision-making ability to the edges of the organization, allowing businesses to adopt structures that are flatter and more reconfigurable than those they have traditionally used.

Australia’s law, passed in 2021, prodded tech firms to make payments to Australian media reportedly worth about A$200m ($135m) in the scheme’s first year.

News organisations, which in the past two decades have seen most of their advertising revenue disappear online, accuse search engines and social networks of profiting from content that is not theirs.

“It’s free and always will be,”

multimodal learning i

we want people to ask better questions. We want students to really to dive into their inquiries. We want teachers to deepen their inquiries. And I think only good things can come from people asking better questions, more questions. And I think that's what, both from an ethical perspective in terms of who has access,

about media literacy and critical literacy that scholars and teachers have been doing for a long time.

should we be citing AI generated text?

All the teachers that I spoke with also felt panic initially, but eventually became strong advocates of not ignoring this tool's presence, but rather using it as a jumping off point to their students to engage in a critical dialogue about technology and academic integrity, the role of writing in their own lives,

ChatGPT doesn't have context.

we want to build this classifier to be specific for education and trained on student essays instead of a general classifier.

these classifiers

so burstiness is measured in variance in writing

the initial version uses these ideas of variance in human writing, that in human writing we have creativity, we have short term memory, which spurs bursts in creativity versus this machine writing is pretty constant over time.

The second thing is that there are many, many ways to have an experience with a piece of text and to demonstrate learning about of a piece of text.

"Bring the end of writing as a gatekeeper, a metric for intelligence and a teachable skill."

who suggested using ChatGPT to generate essays that students can then critique and edit themselves. And that way they can practice the skill of editing, which requires an awareness of what good writing, is in a non-judgmental space.

But an AI chat bot won't judge you for making mistakes

suggested chat AI helped that person get started on writing assignments that were so difficult due to the procrastination that so often accompanies that diagnosis.

they're not worried about producing this product on the receiving end.

"As the computers get smarter, people get increasingly stupid."

I really liked Matt's term of unhackable

using ChatGPT as an invitation to maybe think bigger about what assessment should look like.

And he observes that in his years teaching, there's been so much more of an emphasis on testing and testing and testing students. And instead of having a more expansive idea of what education is, it dialogue based? Should it be rooted in students' personal experiences? Should it be more interpersonal?

a lot of data and research that shows that sort of writing, spontaneous, expressive, reflective writing, can actually be really beneficial for students' wellbeing

And Pia said, maybe ChatGPT is letting teachers know that they're asking the wrong questions.

not only does it call into question what kinds of assignments, what are we asking students to perform and produce in schools, but how are we supporting teachers to ask different types of questions themselves?

Is ChatGPT an author? Is it a sounding board? Is it an editor? Is it a conversation partner?

to recognize and validate the experiences and feelings of teachers and professors right now, especially coming out of the tumult that was emergency remote learning in 2020

While some schools have banned the tech outright, others are embracing it as a tool to teach students how to tell the difference between reality and science fiction.

Though experts quelled fears of a wider contagion, the bank’s collapse could have significant ramifications on the startup and tech sectors.

It was the Cold-War era spy plane that took the high-resolution photographs – not to mention its pilot’s selfie – that reportedly convinced Washington the Chinese balloon was gathering intelligence and not, as Beijing continues to insist, studying the weather.

A commission politician said the instruction to delete the app was made as a precautionary measure, adding there was no immediate threat to commission staff. But the move indicated a sharp change in tone from the continent.

Another Democrat, Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, gave a one-minute speech — written by a chatbot — calling for regulation of A.I.

emphasises the demands of poor countries: including for inclusive growth, climate finance, more “representative” multilateral institutions and progress on the UN’s sustainable development goals, which has been set back by the fallout from covid-19.

As the self-styled “voice of the global South”, it especially wants to emphasise the importance of powerful developing countries in that effort.

Whichever AI platform comes out top, you can’t go wrong selling picks and shovels in a gold rush.

The share price of Nvidia, which designs chips useful for AI applications, is up by 60% so far this year.

Getty Images, a repository of photographs, and individual artists have already filed lawsuits against AI art-generators such as Stable Diffusion. News organisations whose articles are plundered for information may do the same.

Generative-AI platforms may not enjoy the legal protection from liability that shields social media

This happened just as venture capitalists disappointed by the cryptocurrency crash and the empty metaverse were on the lookout for the next big thing.

A spreadsheet maintained by Pete Flint at NfX, a VC firm, now lists 539 generative-AI startups.

One catalogue, maintained by Ben Tossell, a British tech entrepreneur, and shared in a newsletter, has recently grown to include, among others, Ask Seneca (which answers questions based on the writings of the stoic philosopher), Pickaxe (which analyses your own documents), and Issac Editor (which helps students write academic papers).

As Mr Grimes points out, entrepreneurs who are pushing entirely new products are expected to distort reality without overinflating expectations. How they handle hype can help determine whether they can pull off this difficult balancing act.

But the flaws in the technology now attract as much attention.

over 100 new cryptocurrencies have been created that have ChatGPT in their name.

Some think of hype as a public good, vital in enabling new technologies to get going.

venture-capital funds are pouring money into AI startups; established firms are rushing to explain how they will use the technology to do everything from customer service to coding.

As excitement about the next big thing builds, people fall over themselves to get on board. A year and a half ago, the metaverse was the future. Companies appointed chief metaverse officers, and futurologists burbled about web 3.0. The idea has not gone away.

the historical connection between diplomacy and science in Eurasia is a necessary component in understanding the modern notion of science diplomacy beyond a European context and applied more globally both in terms of time and space.

Scientists and intellectuals routinely headed diplomatic embassies sent and received by the Mongol Empire.

All the notions we thought solid, all that made for stability in international relations, all that made for regularity in the economy . . . in a word, all that tended happily to limit the uncertainty of the morrow, all that gave nations and individuals some confidence in the morrow . . . all this seems badly compromised. Never has humanity combined so much power with so much disorder, so much knowledge with so much uncertainty.

Specifically, the organization should engage in active contingency planning on a host of dimensions that include data and networks, internet protocols, people, partnerships, repatriation of funds, and security.

the emergence of pivot geographies, such as India and Vietnam, as additional opportunities for investment amid “friendshoring.”

for an accelerated renewable-energy transition, whereby Europe can potentially lead the world.

gray rhinos are probable events with high impact

External perspectives may range from retaining a political risk advisory group that has an arm’s-length view; to scanning public source materials, such as the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report or govern­mental sources such as the US National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends and similar strategic assessments commissioned by EU institutions; to leveraging insights from academic, policy, media, and nonprofit arenas.

lookouts as an early-warning system and full-scale contingency plans for a core subset of geopolitical risks.

scenario planning is squarely back.

the consolidation of the West is taking place in an increasingly divided post-Western world. 

Rather than expecting them to support Western efforts to defend the fading post-cold war order, we need to be ready to partner with them in building a new one.

In our view, the West would be well advised to treat India, Turkiye, Brazil, and other comparable powers as new sovereign subjects of world history rather than as objects to be dragooned onto the right side of history.

President Lula speaks in favour of preserving his country’s neutrality vis-à-vis Ukraine and Russia, to avoid “any participation, even indirect,” even as he accepts that Russia “was wrong” to invade its neighbour.

today one’s major trade partners are not usually one’s security partners.

Our polling shows that many people in the West see the coming international order as the return of a cold war-type bipolarity between West and East, between democracy and authoritarianism. In this context, decision-makers in the US and the EU may feel inclined to view countries such as India and Turkiye as swing states that can be cajoled into siding with the West.

But the reality is that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine confirmed the renewed centrality of American power to Europe – with billions of dollars spent maintaining the war effort, which has sustained unity across the Atlantic on sanctions and diplomatic positions towards Russia and given a new lease on life for Western-led institutions such as NATO and the G7.

Meanwhile, outside the West, citizens believe that fragmentation rather than polarisation will mark the next international order. Most people in major non-Western countries such as China, India, Turkiye, and Russia predict the West will soon be just one global pole among several. The West may still be the strongest party but it will not be hegemonic.

people in many non-Western countries appear to believe that the post-cold war era is finished.

people in different parts of the world have experienced and interpreted it in diverse ways.

The pursuit of science has helpeddiplomatic interactions and created conditions for cooper-ation and collaboration of ideas, knowledge and industry inEurasia in time and space

Home to a plethora of materials and metals, re-newable and non-renewable sources of energy, the countriesof Eurasia have benefitted from each other through inter-actions in knowledge production along with exchanges ofgoods and peoples which has been at the heart of progressthrough time and space

science informs, cultivatesand produces collaborations within and outside of socie-ties

offer examples of how scienceand scientists have played the role of diplomats and ne-gotiators since before European hegemony.

International or-ganisations and think tanks bring with them Euro-centricconcepts of development, economic and otherwise, and failto take into account the knowledge and technologies thatexist within Eurasia

Even in Soviettimes Central Asian countries remained connected withflexible borders, if any, and shared infrastructure whichfavoured interaction. It is only since the end of the Cold Warthat we have seen Eurasia, especially countries in CentralAsia, question and struggle with their place in the world

defines Resilience as‘the capacity torecover quickly from difficulties and with toughness’.

Magnetic Refrigeration

Multifunctional Composites

Computer Memories and Information Transport

Spin Nematics

he KyrgyzRepublic and Tajikistan, they have vast reserves of Rare-Earth minerals

So resilience is not the end-game, it is a kind of insurance policy.

Countries inCentral Asia, especially, are home to natural resources of thekind that are essential in future technologies, from metals tohydrocarbons

itsmillennia old intrinsic resilience capacity.

theirnatural wealth of vast materials and metals, needed to drivea new era of electronics, refrigeration and energy storageunderpin all other areas of technology can aid in sustainableglobal development.

the region of Eurasia was the dynamo of curiosity ledintellectual development, for example, Al-Khwarizmi’sdiscovery of Algorithm

Production is more oftenrooted in need, not in demand (!), while the need is cor-related to how the society is organised.

An economic understanding of produc-tion is limited, and limited largely to post-facto analysis ofthe production phenomenon and process.

de-contextualised economicanalysis

Silk Road(s) has been a place for manufacturing and hascontributed to scientific, artistic and cultural breakthroughsof global significance historically. However, the region andits peoples have been left out of current discussions of thisregion as a producer, of ideas and goods.

Thus, we see that the medieval ma-drassa system was a fantastic engine not only for attractingstudents from all over the world but also for extendingbenign political and cultural influences within and beyondthe region.

Al Beruni accompanied Mahmud of Ghazani onmilitary campaigns to India and on Mahmud’s behestdocumented not only India’s philosophy, culture and reli-gion, but also its technology,flora and fauna

Despite their multifaceted existence thesescholars perceived themselves foremost as academics andmediators of knowledge, as evident form a remark by AlBeruni, the 10th century scientist and chronicler:

Quite often these intel-lectual leaders had a wider network base than many of thecourtiers, as quite a few came from humble backgrounds.

AlKhwarizimi (AD 780),

top at ascribing the Persian identityto these thinkers.

histories of the Islamic World, the Persian Empire or theSoviet Union

Despitetheir stellar performance, high degree achievement and im-pact, academic traditions and institutions of Central Asiahave been largely misunderstood

seek to displacethe local educational practices with consequences broaderthan just in education itself

hold the purse strings, but are also responsible foreducational policy and its implementation.

making subtlerepresentation

Lastly, the war is driving Russia into the arms of China. In the Soviet era, China saw Russia as a threat. Now that the vast northern border is at peace, Mr Xi can shift military resources elsewhere. China also benefits from a like-minded ally at the UN, where it can take a back seat while Russia acts as a bully. And finally, notes Alexander Gabuev of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think-tank, Russia is a valuable source of commodities that are increasingly being supplied on Chinese terms.

Yet Mr Tokayev has felt no compunction about being courted by Mr Xi, who visited him just before a regional summit where Mr Putin was chided by both China and India.

Mr Menon sees Europe remaining a force in the global economy, but not becoming one in geopolitics.

The rest tend to see the war as a contest between autocrats and hypocrites.

Only a third of the world’s population lives in countries that have condemned the invasion and also imposed sanctions on Russia, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister organisation.

Owing to this new vigour, Mr Pothier says, Europe, always an economic giant, is turning from a political dwarf into a more imposing presence in world affairs.

A view is emerging that NATO’s centre of gravity is shifting from France and Germany towards the east and north. European defence is increasingly being redefined in Poland and the Nordic countries, as well as in Ukraine.

By that he means that America still helps defend Europe through its nuclear deterrent and other high-tech capabilities, but leaves European armies to provide most of the conventional forces.

the need for America to focus on China

the Pentagon may conclude that the diminished state of Russia’s land forces means that America no longer needs a large standing army on European soil.

what role the United States will play in European security, whether NATO’s European members can credibly take responsibility for more of the region’s defence and what the allegiances of the rest of the world will be amid the biggest war in Europe since 1945.

herefore, not registered as being legally associated with any particular nationality.

that governments have taken a less active role in transnational communications infrastructure than in the activities of other strategic industries, such as energy and shipping, where states have traditionally been more heavily involved.

Not only do fibre‑optics transfer data five times faster than satellites but they do so at a vastly lower cost; after all it is rather easier to repair hardware in the English Channel than in orbit

Australia and New Zealand have both passed legislation to prevent interfering with or loitering around undersea cable infrastructure. Canberra also took precautions by installing its own cable to the Solomon Islands.

Russia and China, the continental superpowers that are most hostile to the west, are more controlling of their territorial internet and are less reliant on cables linked across oceans, so are not as vulnerable.

And as Vladimir Putin has long known, the single, physical point of failure in the system that can be overtly threatened is undersea cables.

These cables — which carry an estimated $10tn worth of financial transactions every day — come together at 10 or so international chokepoints, which are particularly vulnerable.

The Hindu religion does actually at least partially stem from the same root as the Greek one! It's an Indo-European religion being heavily influenced by a migration/invasion of Indo-Iranian or Aryan peope into Northern India. These are the people who wrote the Vedas. They were the eastern migration of the same peoples that in the west became the various Slavic peoples, the Norse, the Celts, the Italic peoples, the Hellenic Greeks and so on. The religions evolved very differently across the Norse, Celtic, Indian, Slavic and Greek and Roman strands but you also tended to find them re-combinjng in interesting ways later down the line with the Greek influence transforming Roman culture and religion, and influencing India through Alexander's conquests.41ReplyGive AwardShareReportSaveFollowShow

People (Getty Images, etc.) are suing generative AI companies (Stable Diffusion) saying that copyrighted data was used to train the profit-making ML models. Seems like a slam dunk, right?

a bot can create an account on any platform posing as a fellow human being, it can participate in discourse regarding any subject its AI is trained to focus on, it can like and subscribe to certain channels boosting their seeming appeal to humans and by extension their actual appeal, and it can come into r/philosophy and debate topics with humans.

Sometimes it’s only in the process of writing that you discover your original ideas.

Sometimes it’s only in the process of writing that you discover your original ideas.

The hours spent choosing the right word and rearranging sentences to better follow one another are what teach you how meaning is conveyed by prose.

If the output of ChatGPT isn’t good enough for GPT-4, we might take that as an indicator that it’s not good enough for us, either.

the more that text generated by large language models gets published on the Web, the more the Web becomes a blurrier version of itself.

the re-stating of information in different words.

there’s still the matter of blurriness

When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.

it creates the illusion that ChatGPT understands the material.

Is it possible that, in areas outside addition and subtraction, statistical regularities in text actually do correspond to genuine knowledge of the real world?

Large language models identify statistical regularities in text.

Hutter believes that better text compression will be instrumental in the creation of human-level artificial intelligence, in part because the greatest degree of compression can be achieved by understanding the text.

ChatGPT is so good at this form of interpolation that people find it entertaining: they’ve discovered a “blur” tool for paragraphs instead of photos, and are having a blast playing with it.

This is what ChatGPT does when it’s prompted to describe, say, losing a sock in the dryer using the style of the Declaration of Independence

it looks at the nearby pixels and calculates the average.

that significant portions of what it generates will be entirely fabricated.

It’s also a way to understand the “hallucinations,” or nonsensical answers to factual questions, to which large language models such as ChatGPT are all too prone.

But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable.

Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web.

Reading off of a teleprompter or script? No stress.You can adjust your video after recording and create natural eye contact with your audience.

In addition to the countries mentioned above, other credible co-guarantors include Turkey (which has skilfully mediated Russia-Ukraine talks); Austria, which is proud of its enduring neutrality; and Hungary, which holds this year’s presidency of the UN General Assembly and has repeatedly called for negotiations to end the war.

According to the IMF’s estimates of GDP at purchasing-power parity, the combined output of Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and South Africa ($51.7trn, or almost 32% of world output) in 2022 was larger than that of the G7 nations, America, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.

These countries are neither Russia-haters nor Ukraine-haters. They neither want Russia to conquer Ukraine, nor the West to expand NATO eastward, which many see as a dangerous provocation not only to Russia but perhaps to other countries as well. Their opposition to NATO enlargement has sharpened as American hardliners have urged the alliance to take on China. Neutral countries were taken aback by the participation of Asia-Pacific leaders of Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand in a summit last year of supposedly “North Atlantic” countries.

Neutral nations including Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and South Africa have repeatedly called for a negotiated end to the conflict.

it includes the phased elimination of sanctions on Russia and an agreement by both Russia and the West to contribute to the rebuilding of war-torn areas.

Some compromises would need to be found regarding Crimea and the Donbas region, perhaps freezing and de-militarising those conflicts for a period of time

to make a peace agreement acceptable, credible and enforceable

Russian leaders believes that NATO would use any pause in fighting to expand Ukraine’s arsenal. They choose to fight now, rather than face a stronger foe later.

Ukraine and its Western allies have little chance of ousting Russia from Crimea and the Donbas region, while Russia has little chance of forcing Ukraine to surrender.

In a peace agreement, Ukraine would need to be assured of its sovereignty and security, while NATO would need to promise not to enlarge eastward.

Weil and Cioran left their writings. Mishima achieved not only literary greatness but also the spectacular, violent death that had been his erotic obsession throughout his adult life. Gandhi liberated India.

Emil Cioran

the likes of Vladimir Lenin and Maximilien Robespierre, whose utopian dreams were realised as nightmares.

“alarmingly imperfect behaviour” (mainly egotism and undue fixation with chastity).