the importance of “renewal”, the habit of keeping staleness at bay by taking risks, by learning from others and by innovating.

with characteristics such as sensitivity and how good teams are at giving everyone time to speak.

But musically, nothing works without him, and as a team member he softens conflict and bridges divides.

that propolis serves as more than just a building and embalming material. This evidence indicates that it also has antimicrobial properties which help bees fend off a range of dangerous diseases, including American foulbrood, a bacterial infection, and chalkbrood and nosemosis, which are caused by fungi.

But if the engineering works, and can indeed be scaled up, ship’s propellers may one day look as old-fashioned as sails.

the necessary compromise between stiffness and flexibility.

Submarines are often detected by the noise they make, much of which comes from the propeller and the shaft driving it.

Velox can travel on the surface, underwater, and also across mud or ice, with its fins then acting in the manner of a pair of robotic caterpillars.

That means they can get big enough to push a lot more water around.

Fins have thus become evolution’s go-to accoutrement for marine propulsion.

But the bigger a propeller is, the harder it is to accommodate to a hull and the more it risks adding to a ship’s draft and thus snagging the seabed.

You’re signed up

Can H1 and Meta title be exactly the same ?

China is seen as a disrupter of the rules-based order: willing to use instruments of commerce and diplomatic intercourse as weapons, even as Chinese leaders talk up multilateralism and free trade.

needs more “win-win” co-operation

Which is The Economist’s country of the year for 2021?

The pandemic is like a doorway. Once you pass through, there is no going back.

Many people like to work from home. Remote services can be cheaper and more accessible. The rapid dissemination of technology could bring unimagined advances in medicine and the mitigation of global warming.

Likewise, in a world that is grappling with global warming, countries that have everything to gain from working together continually fall short. Even under the most optimistic scenarios, the accumulation of long-lasting greenhouse gases in the atmosphere means that extreme and unprecedented weather of the kind seen during 2021 is here to stay.

For its part, China, which has recorded fewer than 6,000 deaths, no longer bothers to hide its disdain for America, with its huge death toll. In mid-December this officially passed 800,000 (estimates the full total to be almost 1m).

Amid a burst of innovation around cryptocoins, central-bank digital currencies and fintech, many outcomes are possible.

new technologies become routine in a matter of years.

Remote shopping, working from home and the Zoom boom were once the future. In the time of covid they rapidly became as much of a chore as picking up the groceries or the daily commute.

the world’s predictable unpredictability.

What deserves to be cancelled in 2022?

Best practices for writing descriptive <title> elements

Treasury officials are, however, keeping cautious eyes on Estonia, which was one of the final EU holdouts over the OECD deal amid concerns that it could complicate its tax code.

France is also determined to use its incoming six-month Council presidency for legislative talks to agree on a new tax by April.

Their size and ability to operate across the globe without setting up a physical shop have allowed them to make billions while paying very little to tax authorities.

Another part of the global tax deal would see the world’s largest companies divvy up part of their annual tax receipts by country, based on where these firms have customers.

The OECD package deal includes a levy on the world’s 100 biggest companies, which the Commission on Wednesday said could help pay back the debt the EU raised to finance its €800 billion recovery fund.

Failure to get the bill through Capitol Hill could spell disaster for the global agreement, which is designed to obliterate tax havens and ensure multinational firms pay their fair dues. The efforts are expected to become law in more than 130 countries by 2024.

consumes more energy than traditional systems,

Instead of proprietary systems built by a handful of incumbents, OpenRAN offers new suppliers, both large and small, the opportunity to get into the mobile-infrastructure market.

do not work in cities

OpenRAN provides a way to depoliticise the roll-out of 5G.

The open architecture makes it easy to respond to any problems by switching out software or hardware. Our network has no black boxes.

No single vendor controls the system. Our supply chain is transparent

OpenRAN networks are safer and more secure than proprietary technology

OpenRAN networks cost less to run because many of the proprietary infrastructure components are replaced by software,

The first is lower costs: in our experience, a reduction of 30-40% in capital expenditure and operating costs for 4G networks, and as much as 50% for 5G networks.

OpenRAN networks are completely different: they are software-driven, based on open standards and run in the cloud on commercial, off-the-shelf servers.

one reminiscent of the way personal computers replaced mainframes in the 1980s, and cloud-based apps are replacing traditional software today.

“There is a clear role for UK aid to play in supporting the ‘global south’ during the pandemic and against climate change, but instead the government is chasing colonial post-Brexit fantasies.

But NGOs, already furious at the government’s slashing of the aid budget from 0.7% to 0.5% of gross national income, have condemned not only the rhetoric but also the practical changes to the way in which British aid is spent.

while drawing them closer towards free-market democracies and building a network of liberty across the world”.

Observers said the implicit message was that the government sees BII as offering an alternative to loans from China, which is estimated to have lent about $1.5tn (£1.1tn) in direct loans and trade credits to more than 150 countries around the globe.

their organizations for deep uncertainty and complex futures.

Senegalese President Macky Sall should leverage his upcoming presidency of the African Union to promote ECD.

These conferences should emphasize incremental reforms capable of crafting solid, low-cost, and highly efficient ECD systems

Achieving successes in African ECD requires preparation, strategic reflection, and well-designed roadmaps.

The success of high-level visits will be judged by the number or value of contracts signed by a country’s companies, which would be a more revealing indicator of dynamism than the amount of bilateral loans signed.

ECD should be considered a strategic tool for developing SMEs and become a key element of their political agenda.

Their commercial influence is underpinned by a strong interweaving among the commercial sections of their embassies, trade ministries, business associations, and various other national institutions.

Some developing countries, such as Cambodia, have also embraced the practice.

They often lack a proactive and systematic approach, suffer from poor operational integration, and do not cultivate a culture of results.

They often have commercial attachés in key embassies, and they sometimes encourage their SMEs to attend trade fairs abroad in order to promote their products and services.

Some African countries are already implementing ECD by mobilizing national public institutions and their diplomatic network to create opportunities

This scenario is feasible if policies aimed at controlling the health crisis are combined with government initiatives concentrating all the resources of economic and commercial diplomacy (or ECD) to help SMEs.

a high concentration of exports around a few products, mostly raw materials.

Exports plunged 19 percent in 2020, versus a 12-, 7-, and 5-percent drop for North and Latin America, Europe, and Asia, respectively, while recovery in Africa has not been as strong as on other continents.

African small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) employ 70 to 90 percent of the workforce and are called upon to play a major role in absorbing the hundreds of millions of young Africans who will arrive on the market by 2050.

The council is an independent body, established under the federal government and the Bundestag, and provides advice on legal, ethical, social and scientific issues in Germany.

“only be justified if it is able to mitigate or prevent serious negative consequences of possible future pandemic waves.”

but US airports are forerunners in normalizing its use in public spaces and interactions with the government.

The technology is banned in some places but increasingly normalized in others. That’s likely to continue, because face recognition is unregulated in most of the US, as there’s no federal law covering the technology.

Kissinger’s success was in taking Egypt out of the conflict with Israel.

he introduced a so-called step-by-step approach, which was designed to buy Israel time—time to strengthen itself with American support, and time for the Arabs to exhaust themselves until they would come to accept Israel. And Israel would be strong enough to make the ultimate territorial concessions that could eventually lead to peace.

he introduced a so-called step-by-step approach, which was designed to buy Israel time—time to strengthen itself with American support, and time for the Arabs to exhaust themselves until they would come to accept Israel. And Israel would be strong enough to make the ultimate territorial concessions that could eventually lead to peace.

The DSL and PIPL will make it substantially harder for existing businesses to continue operating with the same degree of autonomy they had enjoyed in the past, and may create steep barriers for new players hoping to enter China’s tech market.

Neither the DSL nor PIPL constrains data collection by China’s state security apparatus – only internet and data companies.

Through Article 7 of China’s National Intelligence Law, Article 77 of the National Security Law, and Article 28 of the Cybersecurity Law, the government is able to deputize internet companies to assist with intelligence gathering.

using these data governance regulations to reassert control.

whether the new regulations will actually apply to China’s “national AI champions,”

In September the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) announced a three-year plan to regulate predictive algorithms, and Chinese companies scrambled to comply with new regulations. News of the plan came on the heels of two other stringent policies – the Data Security Law (DSL) and Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) – which were passed earlier this year and came into full effect in November.

Click here to view original web page at thediplomat.com

a common asset to all humankind.

even more complicated because of the entrance of these new private actors

crowded outer space arena

to small companies and researchers by reducing the cost of access to space and new technologies for exploiting outer space.

Hundreds of these small and nano satellites

India’s Bellatrix

Rocket Lab and Astra, both of which are seeking to make space more accessible to smaller entities such as small private space companies and universities and researchers. R

Virgin Galactic,

Blue Origin

SpaceX,

making space tourism a reality

more than 10,000 private space tech companies

the areas of satellite launches, satellite manufacturing, propulsion technologies, and space-based services.

the rise of private space actors

the rise of private space actors.

And, a 2015 study at St. Lawrence University found that a cluttered bedroom goes hand in hand with a poor night’s sleep.

the Standard Model is not a complete description of the universe—it does not account for dark energy or dark matter, and cannot explain why there seems to be more matter than antimatter in the universe.

the Higgs was the final piece of the jigsaw known as the Standard Model of particle physics, a quantum-mechanical description of all known elementary particles.

will be to measure the properties of the Higgs boson in more detail.

the next set of physics operations—known as Run 3—will begin in March 2022.

By smashing protons together at nearly the speed of light and sorting through the mess of particles created in the collisions, physicists try to probe the building blocks of matter.

to “record the greatest timelapse of the universe ever made”.

Amazon is developing a similar project called Kuiper, though it has yet to launch any satellites.

OneWeb, a rival which emerged from bankruptcy in November 2020, plans to fly 648 satellites of its own.

Some high-frequency traders reckon Starlink might offer a faster way for buy and sell orders to cross the Atlantic than existing fibre-optic cables do.

And because they fly in much lower orbits, communication delays will be reduced too. Mr Musk says Starlink’s goal is to bring broadband to the unserved—those in poor countries, in remote parts of rich ones, in the air and at sea.

The result is that satellite internet is usually treated as a last resort when nothing else is available.

It plans to fill the skies with at least 10,000 low-flying satellites, or around four times as many as are currently active and in orbit. “Starlink”, as the service is known, was due to come out of its beta-testing phase in October.

Until now SpaceX has financed itself by providing rocket launches for NASA, on whose behalf it ferries both cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station, and by launching satellites for private companies such as broadcasters and telecoms firms.

Mr Musk would like to change that by establishing a permanent base on Mars

The perceived threat from China will also push India to use its space programme for military messaging and other “purposes of foreign policy”, predicts Ajey Lele, an expert at MP-IDSA, a think-tank in Delhi funded by the defence ministry.

the success of a big expansion of Russia’s Vostochny Cosmodrome in 2022 has become, he says, “a question of credibility”.

Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic (founded by Jeff Bezos and Sir Richard Branson respectively) both made their maiden suborbital flights in 2021

Countries planning to launch lunar craft in 2022 include India, Japan, Russia and South Korea. NASA, America’s space agency, is sponsoring an astonishing 18 missions in 2022, as it paves the way for a return to the Moon by astronauts as part of a lunar programme called Artemis. Thales Alenia Space, a Franco-Italian firm, is expected to deliver the shell of Gateway, a space station to be put in lunar orbit, to America in late 2022.

a European Space Agency (ESA) probe due to blast off, in mid-2022, for Jupiter’s icy moons.

mRNA drugs could be used for individualised cancer therapies, regenerative medicine, and for a wide variety of diseases such as allergies, autoimmune conditions and inflammatory diseases.

The pandemic has forced people to work better together. Recently initiated projects have seen a high degree of co-operation between institutions such as the World Health Organisation, international regulatory authorities and funding organisations, supported by experts who have been researching the pathogens of interest for more than 30 years. The first mRNA-vaccine candidates for these diseases are expected to enter clinical trials in 2022 and 2023.

The greatest risk to this more optimistic outlook is the emergence of a new variant capable of evading the protection provided by existing vaccines. The coronavirus remains a formidable foe.

The “last mile” problem of vaccine delivery will become painfully apparent as health workers carry vaccines into the planet’s poorest and most remote places.

one of the world’s largest charities, predicts that average incomes will return to their pre-pandemic levels in 90% of advanced economies, compared with only a third of low- and middle-income economies.

Only the Bahamas, a Caribbean nation, and a few of its southern neighbours (St Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, St Lucia and Grenada) have issued a “live” CBDC.

As governments attempt to use stimulus money to reshape the chip supply chain, they will be trying to grab a beast in the midst of transformation.

the blueprints underlying chip designs are published under open-source licences, available for anyone to use.

One important tactic will be the development of more advanced ways of combining and connecting already-made chips, rather than simply pushing to etch individual chips with ever smaller (and thus faster) features.

for this expansion on their soil.

Car manufacturers lost out, having cancelled their chip orders early on in the pandemic only to find themselves at the back of the queue when demand for cars rebounded. As a result, in 2022 chipmakers will still be working overtime to expand supply.

So the contest to be the best regulator in tech is as yet undecided, and highly competitive. It is good to see competition regulators practising what they preach.

Its researchers have published some of the best studies of the market for digital advertising. The CMA also boasts a Data, Technology and Analytics team, which consistently recruits data scientists in order to close the wide knowledge gap between tech titans and their regulators.

The government is working on new regulation, to be passed in 2022, that would empower the DMU, like Germany’s FCO, to give tech firms “strategic market status” and require them to follow stricter rules.

is Germany. Andreas Mundt, who heads the country’s Federal Cartel Office (FCO), has turned his agency into a pioneer of tech regulation, in particular by going after Facebook’s data-harvesting practices.

As in other policy fields, authorities in Beijing have taken more than one page from the EU’s book. Yet enforcement comes with Chinese characteristics.

The main criticism is that the DMA applies the same rules to all tech titans despite the fact that their businesses, and their competition problems, differ.

Its executive branch, the European Commission, had just introduced the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the first law aimed at regulating big tech “ex ante”—that is, constraining firms’ behaviour upfront, rather than punishing them after the fact with antitrust cases.

While lawsuits drag on (and often end with not much to show for all the effort), 2022 will be the year when the world’s parliaments and regulators start to pass substantial rules to govern the tech industry.

educating employees to be wary of suspicious emails; keeping software up to date; and backing up data. That sort of prosaic cultural change is not as sexy as cyber-retaliation or as satisfying as a ransom ban, but it is the only solution in the long term.

A more useful approach would be demanding that companies report both breaches and ransom payments, forcing the issue into the open.

some cyber-ransoms are even tax deductible.

banning digital ransoms entirely, in the same way that many countries criminalise the payment of terrorist ransoms for kidnapping

More than a third of senior executives surveyed in March 2021 by Munich Re, a reinsurer, are considering taking out a cyber-insurance policy, which pays out for ransomware-related losses.

If governments cannot hunt down the attackers, then recovering the ransoms is the next best thing.

Tired of the economic disruption caused by ransomware, governments will strike back. Many countries have developed offensive cyber-forces run by military and intelligence agencies.

In March 2021 eight Western countries, co-ordinated by the European Union’s police agency, attacked and disrupted the Emotet botnet, a network of hijacked servers used by cyber-criminals.

A DIGITAL PANDEMIC swept the world in 2021.

Long before the pandemic a gap was emerging between well-paid, intellectually stimulated workers on the one hand, and poorly paid service workers on the other. The rise of working from home deepens the split between these two types of people—with consequences that no one can predict.

find that employee “engagement” in America, a rough measure of how committed people are to their jobs, is near an all-time high.

companies may place more emphasis on managers who are good at using digital tools to specify exactly what they want doing, and when, to distributed teams.

Some recognise its importance in the fight to retain talent.

It enables a more efficient division of labour between “deep work” (the sort requiring lots of concentration, which may be best done at home) and collaborative work (best done with colleagues, in person, in the office).

firms expect that around a quarter of all work hours will be done from home in a post-covid world—about half what workers want.

Respondents to surveys suggest that they would like to work from home nearly 50% of the time, up from 5% before the pandemic, with the remainder in the office.

on average workers report higher levels of satisfaction and happiness.

many of these novel working practices will endure. And for the better.

Democracy—the combination of demos (people) and kratos (rule)—means “rule by the people”. The “Taiwan model” demonstrates how the use of digital platforms can strengthen democracy, by giving everyone a voice and enabling a government that works not just for the people but with the people.

called Join, hosts debates and helps create consensus in other policy areas. Since its launch in 2015, Join has been accessed by almost half of Taiwan’s population.

An open platform called vTaiwan, created by volunteers, brings together representatives from the public, private and social sectors to devise and debate policy solutions to problems related to the digital economy, from online alcohol sales to ride-hailing.

Through design and usability studies, they create prototypes that showcase suggested improvements.

system of grants to reward community proposals that can potentially benefit the public interest.

one of the largest open-source civic-tech communities in the world.

contact-tracers can retrieve data from the system for quick and effective tracing.

By scanning a QR code using a smartphone camera and sending a text message to the toll-free number 1922, check-in records are created and stored—with no need for an app.

The pandemic has strengthened our model of collaboration between people, government and the private sector, deepening what I call “people-public-private” partnerships.

it would take $100bn to make sure everyone on Earth had more than $1.90 a day. Aid and private philanthropy could cover that sum twice over, with money to spare.

Governments across the globe introduced more than 3,300 social-protection measures between March 2020 and May 2021, according to the World Bank, including cash-transfer programmes targeting the poor

There will be 121 women in poverty for every 100 men by 2030, according to UN Women, up from 118 in 2021.

Women, who are more likely to have precarious jobs, were hit hard by covid-19 lockdowns. The pandemic cost women around the world at least $800bn in lost income in 2020, according to Oxfam, a charity.

But in others, like Ethiopia and Uganda, less than 1% of the population was fully jabbed. That discrepancy will persist into 2022 and beyond.

One in ten people who are poor in 2022 will be in urban areas.

By 2030, over 60% of those living on less than $1.90 per day will be in fragile states. Stable countries, meanwhile, are inching towards ending extreme poverty.

At the end of 2020, the number of people living on less than $1.90 a day had increased to almost 750m, according to the World Data Lab’s World Poverty Clock, a predictive tool which includes World Bank and IMF data. By the end of 2022 they expect that number to edge back down towards where it was before the pandemic, around 685m.

A meeting of a key decision-making body on August 30th noted that the initial crackdown had shown signs of success.

Neither Chinese nor American regulators want Chinese companies to go public in New York. Even initial public offerings in Hong Kong have taken on a new level of risk.

Tencent’s price-to-earnings ratio is expected to fall from a multiple of about 32 in 2020 to 24 in 2022, according to Bernstein, a brokerage.

are being forced to confront many of the monopolistic practices that bolstered their earnings in the past.

The short-video industry, dominated by companies such as ByteDance, Kuaishou and Bilibili, may receive similar treatment.

they should stop focusing on profits and instead concentrate on reducing adolescents’ addiction to playing.

some providers of online after-school tutoring have been forced to convert into non-profit organisations.

a decline in the profitability of China’s tech sector.

But on August 8th the Communist Party issued a five-year blueprint aimed at reshaping China’s tech industry—confirming to even the most optimistic industry watchers that the abrasive changes would continue well into 2022.

More than $1trn was wiped off the collective market capitalisation of some of the world’s largest internet groups,

Entire business models—online tutoring, for example—were laid waste.

What it can hope for is to sustain, with like-minded countries, a world order friendly to democratic values. Whether it can do this will depend on recovering a sense of national identity and purpose at home.

how it affects the partisan struggle.

A far greater test for American foreign policy than Afghanistan will be Taiwan, if it comes under direct Chinese attack.

But the covid-19 crisis served rather to deepen America’s divisions, with social distancing, mask-wearing and vaccinations being seen not as public-health measures but as political markers

American society is deeply polarised, and has found it difficult to find consensus on virtually anything.

The degree of unipolarity in this period has been rare in history, and the world has been reverting to a more normal state of multipolarity

America overestimated the effectiveness of military power to bring about deep political change, even as it underestimated the impact of its free-market economic model on global finance.

The peak period of American hegemony lasted less than 20 years, from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the financial crisis of 2007-09.

The long-term sources of American weakness and decline are more domestic than international

The Kremlin will increase pressure on Google to fall into line: it may slow down its search engine and impose fines. And it will continue to develop its own video-hosting platform, RuTube, to which it can move popular content, then switch off YouTube if necessary. Restoring a monopoly over information is central to Mr Putin’s power. The war over the internet will define Russia’s near future.