America and its allies and partners aim to advance peace, protect human rights, promote sustainable development and defend the open internet for the benefit of all

Digital dashboards and data visualisation software can be used to improve peacekeepers’ situational awareness and help missions evaluate and improve their own performance.

the security and the success of UN peacekeeping missions

we must widen access to reliable and affordable internet, accompanied by training in digital literacy and cybersecurity.

connecting those in need with aid workers and humanitarian services

aid of those affected by ongoing crises.

precision farming and ensure the efficient use of resources.

Smart tractors

satellites

to the growing environmental changes that threaten global security.

we should use every tool in our toolbox to alleviate human suffering.

low or no connectivity in rural areas, infrastructure deficits, gender inequality, and a lack of technical skills and literacy that are essential for food systems to deliver on the promise of sustainability and food security

Online platforms can connect farmers and equip them with the latest information about supply chains. Satellite imagery can improve our understanding of weather patterns and crop yields. High-quality seeds and agricultural inputs ensure farmers can produce enough food for everyone.

how technology can boost international peace and security.

Upon reflection, Macron’s speech was the opening curtain for Europe’s approach to Internet regulation, and by pointing his finger at both the United States and China, he made it clear that neither model was fit for the contract he had made with the French people. “We, therefore, need, through regulation, to build this new path where governments, along with Internet players, civil societies and all actors are able to regulate properly,” he declared.

The UN Security Council is an artefact of the cold war. It needs overhauling so it becomes more representative. Africans must have a voice and cease to be passive spectators as global events pummel our continent.

strong external pressure on warring parties to talk and to keep talking until there is a resolution; an internal willingness among all parties to prefer peace to war; and, possibly most important, strong leadership willing to bring the peace process to a conclusion and to accept necessary compromises.

It is nevertheless limited in how much it can charge for its products by the emergence of a new challenger: risc-v. This is a novel chip architecture that lacks royalties and licence fees.

Low prices were one reason why Arm’s technology triumphed over rival chip architectures. New Street reckons that Arm earns royalties of just $1.50 from the sale of a high-end smartphone, for which consumers fork out $1,000 or more. Cheaper gadgets might earn it a few cents.

Simon Segars, who stepped down as Arm’s boss this year, used to describe the firm as the neutral “Switzerland of the tech industry”.

Removing the need to design a chip—a complicated, highly specialised job—has made Arm’s off-the-shelf designs popular, especially as chips have become more and more complicated. New Street Research, a firm of technology analysts, reckons Arm has a 99% share of the $25bn market for smartphone chips. Its products are widely used in everything from drones and washing machines to smart watches and cars. Arm says it has sold just under 2,000 licences since its founding (see chart). More than 225bn chips based on its designs have been shipped. It hopes to hit 1trn by 2035.

Unlike firms such as Intel, which sells chips that it both designs and manufactures, Arm trades only in intellectual property (ip).

Look at Arm’s finances and the interest seems puzzling. Its sales rose by 35% last year to $2.7bn—not bad, but peanuts next to the giants of chip design. Its valuation, as implied by the Nvidia deal, has risen by a quarter in six years. In the same period Qualcomm’s market capitalisation is up by half and Nvidia’s has risen 13-fold, recent market carnage notwithstanding.

Some British politicians argue that Arm is so critical that the government should take a controlling “golden share”.

Deposits with crypto lenders are not insured.

regulators provide a safety-net

the lack of a liquidity backstop to prevent a free-fall in asset prices

bitcoin sank by 25%, partly on fears of contagion.

When the price of one asset falls, the effects cascade through the system.

interconnectedness

there are no established valuation models.

valuations.

Crypto platforms, and the risks they take with their assets, may soon come under regulatory scrutiny.

Recent events have also shown how three weaknesses in crypto can amplify trouble: fuzzy valuations, incestuous relationships and the lack of a liquidity backstop.

Bangladesh’s losses are limited by a piece of blind luck: a destination bank for the stolen money is located on Jupiter Street in Manila, and “Jupiter” happens to be the name of a shipping firm involved with Iran, which trips anti-fraud systems. The stolen Bangladeshi loot is laundered through the vip baccarat tables of a Filipino casino; gangs of money mules pose as high-rollers yet seem oddly bored and listless while placing enormous bets.

wearables, health records, health-related artificial intelligence (ai) and the ultimate challenge of extending human longevity.

as Google Health, which included Google’s other health ventures, and was again dismantled last year

Techno-pharmacopoeia

Alphabet is the fifth-highest-ranking business in the Nature Index, which measures the impact of scientific papers, in the area of life sciences, behind four giant drugmakers and 20 spots ahead of Microsoft, the only other tech giant in the running.

Amazon runs an online pharmacy and its telemedicine services reach just about everywhere in America that its packages do, which is to say most of it. Apple’s smartwatch keeps accruing new health features, most recently a drug-tracking one. Meta has scrapped its own smartwatch plans earlier this year but offers fitness-related fun through its Oculus virtual-reality goggles. Microsoft is expanding its list of health-related cloud-computing offerings (as is Amazon, through aws, its cloud unit).

America’s labyrinthine health-industrial complex consumes 17% of gdp, equivalent to $3.6trn a year.

Advanced economies typically spend about 10% of gdp on keeping their citizens in good nick, a share that is rising as populations age.

in July 2020 of a €750bn ($793bn) fund, known as Next Generation eu (ngeu), which resulted in large transfers of money from richer countries in the union to poorer ones.

divining censors’ thought processes is becoming an ever bigger part of doing business in China.

Mr Wang’s sin may well have been to fail to consider all the possible interpretations of his post.

So do new rules requiring internet platforms to review user comments before they are posted, a draft of which was unveiled on June 17th.

In recent months Chinese authorities have been signalling that their two-year crackdown on the consumer internet—which at its worst lopped some $2trn off the market value of Chinese tech firms, compared with late 2019—was easing

The implication is that societies cope better with turmoil when they have good institutions and the rule of law.

They also find that unrest motivated by socioeconomic factors (such as inflation) is associated with more severe contractions than unrest sparked by political factors (such as a disputed ballot). When the unrest has both political and socioeconomic motivations, the damage to gdp is worst of all. A good example was the rioting that rocked South Africa in 2021, when covid-19 was causing economic hardship and a rogue ex-president was urging his supporters to protest against his being put on trial for corruption. In the quarter when the looting occurred, gdp shrank by 1.5%.

To crush dissent they must divert ever more resources to the security forces and patronage, reducing their capacity to respond to economic shocks.

No one expects protests to get out of hand in China, for example.

Peru had relied on Russia for 70% of its imports of urea, the most commonly used sort. Now farmers struggle to get hold of the stuff, and they are livid.

“no more poor people in a rich country”

Tunisia’s democratic revolution initially went well. But last year the president, Kais Saied, assumed autocratic powers. Falling living standards have turned the country into a powder keg once more.

Sri Lanka gives a taste of how quickly things can spiral out of control

Take Pakistan, where squeezed living standards help explain why in April parliament ousted the prime minister, Imran Khan, with a nod from the army. He has since led mass rallies to get his job back. In India riots erupted over a plan to reduce the number of jobs for life in the army. (When times are hard, people particularly crave job security.)

Some, such as Laos, are on the brink of default. Our model suggests that many countries will see a doubling of the number of “unrest events” in the coming year (see map).

We found that rises in food and fuel prices were a strong portent of political instability, even when controlling for demography and changes in gdp.

The iep calculates that 84 countries have become less peaceful since 2008; only 77 have improved. Its measure of violent protests is up by 50% over the same period. Using a different method—counting mentions in the media of words associated with unrest across 130 countries—the imf estimated in May that social turmoil was near its highest level since the pandemic began.

All around the world, inflation is crushing living standards, stoking fury and fostering turmoil. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has sent prices of food and fuel soaring. Many governments would like to cushion the blow. But, having borrowed heavily during the pandemic and with interest rates rising, many are unable to do so. All this is aggravating pre-existing tensions in many countries and making unrest more likely, says Steve Killelea of the Institute for Economics and Peace (iep), an Australian think-tank.

In all of this, Africa will become even more important both from strategic point of view and for the resources, both natural and human, that it has.

most Europeans seldom did, and over a third had never left their own country.

Mandating how phones are juiced is a case of the eu getting closer to the daily concerns of citizens—but also further from where it can be most useful.

mobile-phone roaming charges

The balance between innovation and purported convenience is incidental here.

Standardising chargers might make sense if they have reached the end-state of their development, like electric plugs.

Whoever invents the best system will have to convince officialdom, not consumers, that it is indeed better.

Standardising chargers might make sense if they have reached the end-state of their development, like electric plugs.

But the eu is in a dirigiste mood these days (the official leading the charge on chargers, Thierry Breton, is the French internal-market commissioner).

The model selected is known as usb-c, an industry standard which most manufacturers already use. The big exception is Apple, which has stuck to its own system. It will either have to make Europe-only gadgets with a usb slot (which many Apple tablets and laptops already feature) or switch over all its iPhones globally to suit the edict.

by 2024 makers of devices including smartphones and cameras will have to switch to a single type of charger mandated by Brussels.

much of what happens in Brussels is noted primarily by policy wonks

have financed roads, electricity grids and whatnot in poorer bits of the continent.

there is peace

You can cross most of its borders without a passport, too, though people take them on holiday anyway

Click here to view original web page at timesofindia.indiatimes.com

premium Cambria headset

could actually be present in a virtual rendering of a period location, the ancient Rome in this case, and actually examine how people interacted at that time, how debates

using sensors on their fingertips

could help the students (especially surgeons) practise on a virtual 3D organ before actually going for the real surgery.

shows a university lecture

look beyond the hype and bluster of the crypto industry and understand not only its inherent flaws and extraordinary defects but also the litany of technological fallacies it is built upon.

They are the inevitable outcomes of a technology that is not built for purpose and will remain forever unsuitable as a foundation for large-scale economic activity.

threats to national security through money laundering and ransomware attacks, financial stability risks from high price volatility, speculation and susceptibility to run risk, massive climate emissions from the proof-of-work technology utilized by some of the most widely traded crypto-assets, and investor risk from large scale scams and other criminal financial activity.

have been the vehicle for unsound and highly volatile speculative investment schemes

this technology has been a solution in search of a problem and has now latched onto concepts such as financial inclusion and data transparency to justify its existence, despite far better solutions to these issues already in use

for fraud mitigation and allow a human-in-the-loop to reverse transactions; blockchain permits neither.

Blockchain technology cannot, and will not, have transaction reversal or data privacy mechanisms because they are antithetical to its base design.

Not all innovation is unqualifiedly good; not everything that we can build should be built.

that protects the public interest and ensures technology is deployed in genuine service to the needs of ordinary citizens.

are an innovative technology that is unreservedly good

The madeup study shows that technology lies at the heart of this squandered time. Technology can also help. Services that sync up diaries and autocorrect options already do; passwords will doubtless end up being replaced by facial recognition and fingerprint logins. Whether the time thereby saved would be put to more productive use, like reading this column, is a reasonable question. But years of workers’ lives are wasted on utterly pointless activities. All improvements warrant heartfelt thnaks.

Shakespeare wrote “King Lear” in the time an average office worker spends changing font sizes during their career.

Deleting emails takes up about six weeks of your life. Clicking on Slack channels to read through messages that are not meant for you, or clearing notifications on your phone screen for articles that you will never look at: tasks like these each eat up several days.

But months are wasted trying to remember passwords, entering them wrongly or updating them.

Correcting typos takes up an average of 20 minutes in every white-collar worker’s day, the equivalent of 180 days, or half a year, over a 45-year career.

you will spend one-third of your life asleep, almost a decade looking at your phone and four months deciding what to watch on streaming services.

how much time people spend on a specific activity over the course of their lives.

Myopia and insularity abound. But if you are a consumer of global goods and ideas—that is to say, a citizen of the world—you should hope globalisation’s next phase involves the maximum possible degree of openness. A new balance between efficiency and security is a reasonable goal. Living in a subsidised bunker is not.

esilience comes from diversification, not concentration at home

rampant protectionism, jobs schemes and hundreds of billions of dollars of industrial subsidies.

encouraged by governments that from Europe to India are keen on “strategic autonomy”.

are adopting dual sourcing and longer-term contracts.

from efficiency to resilience

what the Germans call “change through trade”—have been dashed: autocracies account for a third of world gdp.

to a dependency on autocracies that abuse human rights and use trade as a means of coercion.

Covid-19 was a shock, but wars, extreme weather or another virus could easily disrupt supply chains in the next decade.

mostly they keep costs low, but when they break, the bill can be crippling.

Volatile capital flows destabilised financial markets. Many blue-collar workers in rich countries lost out.

All this kept prices low for consumers and helped lift 1bn people out of extreme poverty as the emerging world, including China, industrialised.

the lodestar of globalisation was efficiency

keeping the benefits of openness while improving resilience.

new kind of globalisation is about security, not efficiency

to the fight for workers as global firms shift from China into Vietnam.

a once-in-a-generation reimagining of global capitalism in boardrooms and governments.

No one knew if globalisation faced a blip or extinction.

“slowbalisation”

Increased economic integration did not bring about the greater global harmony that some had hoped it would.

The world economy could become less vulnerable to shocks at a time when climate change and geopolitical tensions are increasing their frequency and intensity. Improving resilience could be a case of running to stand still.

Redesigning supply chains takes time, and noticing an effect takes even longer. The boss of a giant American manufacturer which now produces 90% of its products in China says it plans to boost investment in American and European manufacturing dramatically over the next five years. That will still leave China producing about half its goods. But the shift is under way.

The share of American multinationals’ staff based in China is drifting downwards. At the same time those companies are boosting recruitment in other parts of Asia. They employ nearly 400,000 people in the Philippines, a 10% rise since 2016. Nearly 1.4m people in India work for American companies, a 14% rise from 2016.

Chinese firms have a dominant position in both the production of batteries and the processing of minerals required for them.

The American computer sector is about 50% more vertically integrated than in the mid-2000s, as measured by the share of the industry’s gross revenues accruing to companies in that industry (rather than outside suppliers).

Fully 81% of supply-chain leaders surveyed by McKinsey this year are now sourcing raw materials from two suppliers, rather than depending on merely one.

The European Commission is dangling subsidies in front of makers of batteries and semiconductors.

More than 100 countries accounting for over 90% of the world’s gdp now have formal industrial strategies, according to a survey by the un, with a particular frenzy of activity in recent years.

biotechnology software and the wherewithal for producing advanced semiconductors.

“We cannot allow countries to use their market position in key raw materials, technologies, or products to have the power to disrupt our economy or exercise unwanted geopolitical leverage,”

ew infrastructure and long-term contracts are pushing a global, fluid system in the direction of one less efficient but more secure.

It has also made manifest the geopolitical risks of dependence on an autocracy with aggressive ambitions. That has further intensified concerns about China.

he disasters in Japan “did not lead to reshoring, nearshoring, or diversification”.

In 2000 China’s average annual income per person expressed in dollars, a reasonable proxy for the wage costs facing a multinational firm, was 3% of America’s. That is one reason why the country’s accession to the World Trade Organisation the following year was so transformative. By 2019 that had risen to 16%.

One reason was automation, which reduced the labour intensity of manufacturing and therefore the competitive advantage of lower-wage countries that had become offshoring hubs in the 1990s and 2000s. Another was that wages in those countries rose.

In the two decades to 2008, trade as a share of global gdp jumped from 37% to 61%.

There are centrifugal and centripetal forces that pull the world together or apart,”

The market-based and Sino-centric system that started to emerge towards the end of the past century is being transformed into something which, though still global, is less unitary and more costly

Companies, for their part, are buying up suppliers at home and abroad in the name of vertical integration.

Decision-makers are increasingly concerned that supply chains should be robust, not just efficient.

First came America’s tariffs on Chinese exports. Then the covid-19 pandemic boosted demand for a particular constellation of goods while constraining their production and transport. Most recently Russia’s war in Ukraine sent commodity prices soaring and reminded firms how quickly a political shock can close one market and wreak havoc in others.

Supply chains are the fibres out of which the past decades’ globalisation is woven.

“We have to stop creating [regional] organisations based on the ideology of the governments of the day,” Chile’s Gabriel Boric argues. “It’s important that Latin America once against has a voice in the world.” For that, it needs to rediscover a path of progress.

more intra-regional trade is one of the best routes to economic growth.

The Biden administration, and many Latin Americans, believe that negotiation with Mr Maduro, hard though that will be, is the only option.

Today Mr Maduro is stronger than before, and the economy is reviving thanks to de facto dollarisation.

wo core institutions that link Latin America and the United States, the idb and the Organisation of American States, are troubled, with leaders who do not command support and deep divisions over the treatment of Venezuela.

Mercosur, founded in 1994 as a putative customs union, was a cornerstone of Brazilian foreign policy. But it is declining into irrelevance, partly because agribusiness (whose main market is China) has eclipsed manufacturing.

Mr Fernández visited Russia and China shortly before the war began. He said his country should be the “gateway” for Russia in Latin America. Venezuela and Nicaragua are close allies of Vladimir Putin. “We don’t want the multilateral order to fall apart,” says a Mexican official, who opposes Russia being kicked out of the g20. “But that doesn’t mean we’re not on the side of democratic institutions.”

Latin America’s preference for a multipolar world to one of geopolitical confrontation has led some to question whether it is still part of the West

Most Latin American countries do not want to have to choose between the United States and China, as Donald Trump once suggested.

China is now a bigger trading partner than the United States for all the main Latin American economies except Mexico and Colombia.

The final plan calls for 15 quays and a large industrial park that would make Chancay the biggest port on the Pacific coast of South America, with the aim of becoming a trans-shipment centre for the region.

The agency said it had discovered that Russian intelligence was using smartphone games to induce unwitting youngsters to snap and upload geotagged photos of critical infrastructure, military and civilian. In exchange, players receive virtual prizes of no value outside the video-game world. And Russia gets to wreck their country.

Olga Khmil, one of Molfar’s intelligence analysts, says Russia is now using group channels in messaging apps like Telegram to aim its artillery better. Russians pretending to be Ukrainians on these channels feign fear of shelling in order to elicit information about infrastructure that has and has not been hit. On May 24th the sbu revealed an even more devious approach to such espionage.

Training people to use this sort of kit will take three weeks. But Ukraine is unlikely to receive the 60 launchers that an adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky, the country’s president, has said would be needed to halt Russia’s advance.

the French caesar system (pictured above), made by Nexter, a firm in Versailles. This can hurl shells about 40km, which is 16km farther than the firm’s previous model, the trf1, could manage. So far, France has anted-up five or six of a promised dozen caesar howitzers, enabling Ukrainian crews to smash targets 50% farther away than they could manage just a few weeks ago.

America’s share of the “hash rate”—the computing power on the network—rose from 11% to 38% in the year to January.

After China banned bitcoin mining last year, a lot of Chinese mining computers ended up in places like Kazakhstan. But that equipment is ageing and the power it consumes is not so cheap.

When the price falls, it is the miners with the least efficient equipment and the most expensive energy who are wiped out. But since the amount of bitcoin created is fixed, that means the remaining firms in the market each win more, counteracting the fall in price.

In recent months, the cryptocurrency boom has deflated dramatically. Bitcoin has lost 70% of its value since November; it dropped by 17% on June 13th alone. Many firms that had flourished are in trouble. Coinbase, a big bitcoin exchange originally from California, which went public last August at a valuation of $86bn, this month has rescinded job offers and is cutting 18% of its staff. But mining projects, curiously, still seem to be growing. Computer farms making use of solar power, wind power and, more worryingly, gas and coal continue to be set up. In New York legislators are concerned enough about the prospect of redundant fossil-fuel plants being resurrected for crypto mining that on June 3rd they passed a law banning such projects. It remains to be seen whether Kathy Hochul, the governor, will sign it.

when a business is built on lies, there are always clues. You just have to be willing to see them—even if that means swallowing some national pride.

Mr Braun has been charged with fraud, breach of trust and accounting manipulation; he denies wrongdoing. Mr Marsalek is on the run, wanted by Interpol.

its perma-optimistic, turtleneck-wearing chief executive, Markus Braun, and Jan Marsalek, the cunning, narcissistic chief operating officer.

he business newspaper of record, mostly swallowed the firm’s line that the attacks on it were illegal moneymaking schemes, or part of an Anglo-Saxon plot to destroy a continental European champion

Many investors, caught up in the general tech optimism, refused to believe Wirecard could be rotten, even as the incriminating evidence mounted.

according to an ex-policeman the author interviewed, Wirecard had more than 30 private detectives “running round London” and trying to dig up dirt on Mr McCrum, ftcolleagues and the short-sellers.

Over seven years, aided by a handful of short-sellers and carefully cultivated whistleblowers, he pieced together a picture of a firm built on fraud, with fake customers, invented profits and cash balances that looked flimsier the closer you got.

to assess candidates’ soft skills rather than their intellect alone, or screening candidates for emotional traits such as empathy, motivation and resilience through questionnaires, letters or essays

Some are tailoring classes for the Zoom age, for example pointing out the common traps of virtual negotiations.

More than a third of their communications was via video chat, email or the phone. The difference now is that everyone else spends just as little time in the office—if not less

anecdotal evidence suggests that hybrid work may be skewing executives’ workday even more towards people management

They find that bosses spend 25% of their working lives on fostering relationships with insiders and outsiders, more than they devote to strategy (21%), corporate culture (16%), routine tasks (11%) and dealmaking (4%).

Prince Harry is the “chief impact officer” of a Silicon Valley firm. Clifford Chance, a law firm, has appointed a global “wellbeing and employee experience” chief. Nearly 5,000 people on LinkedIn, a social network, describe themselves as “chief happiness officers”. Still, most high-ranking managers will almost certainly need to perform each of these novel tasks to a greater or lesser extent.

ever-expanding list of credentials and competences.

to a growing number of “stakeholders”, from employees to social activists, and face public scrutiny on their companies’ environmental, social and governance (esg) record

used to focus on number-crunching and business strategy. Executives must still master these skills.

does an America so polarised at home have the will to sustain its dominance abroad?

instead of a nato-like treaty in Asia, a small nato-like military structure.

Another prize is asean, the ten-country South-East Asian club. It includes fence-sitters such as Indonesia. “We do not believe in alliances that could in the end threaten other countries,” said Prabowo Subianto, its defence minister. Indonesia holds drills with America but does not want to upset a “benevolent” China.

India, the world’s largest democracy, is the trophy in America’s quest for stronger alliances. It is increasingly at odds with China. Its help in controlling the Strait of Malacca would be invaluable in any war with China. The Quad, which has started meeting at the level of leaders, seeks gradually to draw India in. Yet India is wary of an alliance, and remains close to Russia, which supplies a lot of its weapons.

This web may not be strong enough to contain China.

“It’s not hub-and-spokes. It’s not nato. It’s a spider’s web.”

The “Five Eyes” (with Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand) share intelligence; aukus (with Australia and Britain) is developing nuclear-powered submarines and other weapons; and the Quad (with Australia, India and Japan) discusses everything from vaccines to maritime security.

a “networked security architecture”,

lled a “non-treaty organisation”: a hub-and-spokes system of bilateral defence agreements with Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines and Thailand, which do not have obligations towards each other.

“The message is that security in Europe and Asia cannot be separated.”

nato’s summit in Madrid on June 29th-30th will focus on the threat from Russia but will keep an eye on Asia

He has stopped talking about helping Ukraine “win”. The blurry aim is something less—giving it “the means to deter and to defend” itself.

Many foreign-policy experts think the war in Ukraine, if it results in a defeat for Russia, would strengthen the West’s hand against China.

America thinks only China can challenge its global supremacy. Yet Russia is consuming much of the country’s attention, and billions of dollars, as America seeks to help Ukraine and strengthen nato.

He flew on an e4-b, “the Doomsday plane” from which American leaders can wage nuclear war, trailed by a c-17 transporter.

“guardrails”

The British English alternative to the subjunctive—using “should”, as in It is essential that every parent should remain supportive—has declined on the islands as the subjunctive has returned.