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.

Blocking YouTube is problematic. The service is used by millions of Russians who have little interest in politics but would be outraged if it were unavailable.

It has installed equipment and compelled providers to hamper access to Twitter so that pictures and videos do not upload. It has threatened the Russian staff of Apple and Google with criminal proceedings in order to remove Mr Navalny’s app from their stores. Media organisations and journalists have been declared “foreign agents”, making it almost impossible to operate in Russia.

The share of the internet and social media among all sources of information has grown from 18% in 2013-15 to 45% in 2021.

The biggest challenge to the Kremlin comes from the internet

The EU gains its power from its economic clout.

wide gaps in growth rates have emerged between northern and southern Europe in the past two decades,

Resetting the rules, which dictate how much governments can spend, will be the main fiscal battle of 2022.

Under Mr Macron, France has increased its influence on the European stage, but “peak France” still seems some way away.

a more limited coalition of the willing, with some countries agreeing to meld their armed forces further, but without going anywhere near forming the oft-forecast, never-delivered EU army.

Allowing deeper European integration on defence, but in a way that avoids giving the Americans an excuse to opt out, is one possible compromise.

A French-led summit on defence in the first half of 2022, with the European Commission as a cheerleader, will put the topic front and centre.

defence and security

As long as the policy is not revealed to be a ploy to shovel cash at stodgy European enterprises, the liberal countries will play along.

Boosting EU self-sufficiency on things like microchips

economic endeavour

strategic autonomy.

“When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

Gary Gensler, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, America’s main financial watchdog, once taught a class on blockchain technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

As the boundary between financial firms and tech companies blurs further, and the value of amassing customer data increases, protecting privacy and security will be paramount.

Transferring money across borders, such as through remittances from rich countries to poor ones, is still too expensive.

Financial inclusion is a problem even in the rich world: one in five Americans were either unbanked or underbanked in 2018. Small firms regularly struggle to access finance.

More than a hundred DeFi applications are in the works.

to introducing digital currencies of their own.

Novel assets of all kinds associated with the DeFi world, such as non-fungible tokens (nfts) and other crypto-tokens, will continue to proliferate

Facebook’s new digital wallet could make inroads.

to offer an ever-widening range of financial products on a single platform

“decentralised-finance” (DeFi) applications

the need to address inequities that widened during the pandemic is often overlooked.

One-third of surveyed women working in tech said they were interrupted or ignored more often in virtual meetings than in person.

Now that many jobs can be done flexibly, or fully remotely, employers can recruit from a wider pool.

Decisions about pay and promotion must be made in clear and measurable ways.

have access to the same resources as everyone else.

Many employers promise that workers can work flexibly, but leave them to decipher unwritten rules.

at least its rules were clear.

bosses will need to define whether they want procedural fairness (same rules for everyone) or fairness in outcomes (no group suffers as a result of a policy).

Fairness will happen only by design.

women, minorities and parents with young children will spend less time in the office.

hybrid

Fairness—essentially, lack of favouritism—is easier to track when everyone is working in similar circumstances.

the “great leveller”

increased workplace fairness.

Greater productivity, happier and healthier workers and lower emissions are just some of the benefits of the great work-from-home experiment.

To pep up growth, keep people healthy and avert unrest, the smartest thing any government can do in 2022 is to roll out vaccines. Anti-vaxxers will resist, but France and others have shown that insisting on vaccine passports to eat in restaurants can swiftly change minds. Magic bullets in politics are not supposed to exist, but the coronavirus vaccines come awfully close.

Kenya’s election in August will be fraught, too. The pandemic has wiped out tourism jobs. Police have killed curfew-breakers

By contrast, citizens of middle-income countries expect decent public services and are frustrated. They know that the well-off were vaccinated first, including the local elite who flew abroad for their jabs. They are understandably impatient that the vaccine is tantalisingly out of reach for millions.

A study of 133 countries between 2001 and 2018 finds that political unrest tends to peak two years after a typical epidemic starts.

The good news is that a military confrontation seems unlikely in 2022.

this all seems highly unlikely.

And in theory the two sides could make progress in plenty of areas, such as devising a sensible deal on trade and technology to replace the tariffs of the Trump era; agreeing on a common approach to cyber-security, nuclear non-proliferation or the militarisation of space; or finding ways to accelerate the clean-energy transition in the wake of the COP26 climate meeting in Glasgow.

Divergent political and economic performance will dominate the headlines in the coming year.

With covid-19 behind it, its fiscal tightening mostly complete and (assuming some version of Mr Biden’s bill is passed) with a long-overdue effort to improve infrastructure under way, America’s economy could grow smartly, even as its politics frays. GDP growth of 4%, not far off China’s, is plausible.

from a shrinking workforce to a rapidly growing number of old-age dependents, and the economic pressures are considerable. Annual GDP growth could fall to 5%.

The crisis at Evergrande, a huge developer, suggests that this tricky transition is at last under way.

will discourage entrepreneurship and hinder innovation

China’s draconian approach will eventually cause economic damage.

with a zero-covid policy throughout 2022

a living-with-covid mindset.

will lead to little more than Congressional hearings.

erasing as much as $1.5trn in shareholder value

which system delivers the most competent economic management.

if he succeeds in getting a version of his “Build Back Better” package of infrastructure and social spending passed, Mr Biden begins 2022 with his popularity still dimmed by rising inflation and supply shortages.

In Europe a winter of energy shortages, with high prices and even rolling blackouts, will infuriate voters and frighten politicians. France’s presidential election will be an ugly spectacle of populist demagoguery, the tone set by Eric Zemmour, a hard-right, anti-immigrant television personality who is positioning himself as the French Trump. In the end Emmanuel Macron will probably be re-elected, as the populist right-wing vote splits, but a campaign dominated by resentment and culture wars will not feel like an advertisement for democracy.

any whiff of disquiet within the party at Mr Xi’s rejection of any term limit for his rule will be met with brutal purges.

Starting with the Winter Olympics in February and culminating with the 20th Communist Party congress later in the year

“The East is rising and the West is declining,” as Chinese officials have become fond of saying.

by an adversarial rivalry that is not just about each side’s relative power, but has become an existential competition as each side strives to demonstrate the superiority of its system of government.

from hubristic faith that it could be integrated into the existing American-led world order to something closer to paranoid containment, marked by suspicion of China’s intentions and a fearful bipartisan consensus that America’s global pre-eminence is at risk.

in 2015, Graham Allison of Harvard University examined whether the same dynamic would apply to America and China. He identified 16 historical episodes where an established power’s position was disrupted by a challenger. In 12 of those cases the shift ended in war.

“The Thucydides Trap”,

the consequence of growing Athenian power instilling fear in Sparta

based on the idea of a probabilistic universe, in which a particle is neither here nor there until measured, described by the wave function itself.

These experiments have, nonetheless, spawned entirely new disciplines – of quantum information and quantum computing – demonstrating that exploration of seemingly pointless philosophical issues can have profound practical consequences.

‘According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics,’ he wrote, ‘whenever a [wave function] attains a [certain form pertaining to measurement] it immediately collapses.’

Foundational questions were judged to belong in a philosophy class, and there was no place for philosophy in physics.

Research advisers, many already inclined towards empiricism or plain indifference, sought to steer their students towards projects more likely to attract funding, and so more likely to provide a firm basis on which to build careers as ‘professional calculating physicists’.

It would be the bolder, brasher, more empirical ‘hands-on’ style of US theoretical physics that would come to dominate the postwar world.

that Bohr was ‘annoyingly vague, and, indeed, [Bell] felt that, for Bohr, lack of precision seemed to be a virtue’.

‘Shut up and calculate’

the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics

beyond its relevance to the calculation of probabilities.

What we observe is quantum behaviour as projected into our classical world of direct experience.

For Einstein, the lack of any kind of physical explanation for how this is supposed to happen meant that something is missing; that quantum mechanics is in some way incomplete.

All we can do is use the wave function to calculate the probability that the next electron will be detected here, or there, or way over there.

Repeating this with more and more electrons will give us a diffraction pattern – a pattern possible only with waves – made up of a myriad of individual spots, each of which is possible only with particles.

quantum mechanics judges to be merely improbable, lending a fungible quality to reality, and challenging the truth of a universe defined by the physics that came before.

It has obvious wave-like properties, but also obvious particle-like properties, such as mass.

At the heart of the debate was the interpretation of the theory’s central concept – a mathematical object called the wave function.

Mechanics is that part of physics concerned with stuff that moves, and quantum mechanics is the theory of the motion of matter and light at the smallest scales: the realm of molecules, atoms, subatomic particles (such as electrons), and photons, the quanta (or ‘atoms’) of light.

quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity.

underpin almost every aspect of our technologically advanced society.

When Nixon was informed that Chinese premier Zhou Enlai had declared a new era in relations, the president marveled that such an announcement had been made “to a ping-pong team!”

It was a crucial break in the bitter, sometimes bloody, rivalry between the two countries and led to President Richard M. Nixon’s visit to China the following year.

The WHO should continue to apply this approach and work closely with the World Organisation for Animal Health, the Food and Agriculture Organization and countries,

the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) One Health approach recognises that health is connected in humans, animals and its shared environment,

It has also addressed other health challenges, for example in the formulation of International Health Regulations, the Framework Convention of Tobacco Control and Universal Health Coverage. The evolution of the Global Health Security Agenda, the United Nations Political Declaration on the Prevention and Control of NCDs, and the WHO Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of NCDs are some excellent examples of successful health diplomacy in recent years.

Global health diplomacy is what links health and international relations to address health security. It was this diplomacy that delivered political commitments from many corners of the world to push for COVID-19 medicines and essentials, the development of new partnerships and initiatives, and the creation of COVAX the global scheme to vaccinate people in lower-income countries and ACT-Accelerator, dubbed the fastest, most coordinated and successful global effort in history to develop tools to fight a disease .

Both India and Indonesia (with a low GDP) had ten flags, while the United States, China and Japan (with the highest GDP) only had one flag.

They then looked for signs of key factors in international politics: reliability, trustworthiness, material capabilities and continuity.

Additional doors had to be installed so that Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill could enter the fateful meeting room, where decisions about Germany's future would be made, at the same time.

A new study from Lund University in Sweden analyzed over 50 photos from the first virtual G20 meeting in 2020.

as much as half of business travel is gone for good.

In 2022, they want to test the use of a high-altitude balloon to release dust to dim sunlight—a technique that may, at this rate, be needed to buy the world more time to decarbonise.

a three-way fight for the future of finance—between the crypto-blockchain-DeFi crowd, more traditional technology firms and central banks—that will intensify in 2022.

Now China has taken the lead, lashing its tech firms in a brutal crackdown.

the future is “hybrid

divided country is a poor advertisement for its merits.

Which is better at delivering stability, growth and innovation?

‘Table Tennis: the Sport Changed the World’.

I want to let everybody know that the table tennis community can contribute to mutual understanding and peace among our two great nations.

started from a small ping pong ball.

The State Department can help by providing a comprehensive proposal for immediate start-up needs, and congressional authorizers can establish a dedicated cybersecurity capacity building fund and allocated account for cyber and emerging technology foreign assistance to help move this funding in the right direction.

a steady stream of foreign service and civil service professionals have the appropriate technology literacy to conduct effective diplomacy and marshal modern partnerships in a competitive strategic environment

The new Quad Critical and Emerging Technology Working Group, the EU-U.S. Trade and Technology Council, and a January meeting of a U.N. ad hoc committee on a particularly ill-advised cybercrime treaty all provide excellent opportunities for the department to showcase how its newly aligned priorities are creating impactful foreign policy outcomes.

on bringing the right people on board and empowering them.

Second, the department must continue to keep Congress involved. Beyond oversight, Congress needs to codify the establishment of the new bureau and the special envoy.

First, the implementation effort will require high-level attention on the part of the State Department.

Effective diplomacy on emerging issues will need to cut across bureaus, drawing in expertise and equities relating to economics, security, human rights, law enforcement, foreign assistance and more.

This signals attention at the highest levels and a deliberate choice not to silo the new entities underneath the State Department’s existing bureaus.

A newly created Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy will focus on international cyberspace security, digital policy and digital freedom. Meanwhile, the new special envoy for critical and emerging technology will cover topics such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Secretary of State Blinken announced these initiatives in a speech to the Foreign Service Institute, specifying that the leaders of both new structures will report to Deputy Secretary Wendy Sherman for their first year.

My impression is that when scientists communicate scientific information to the public, the difficulty of the concepts and complexity of the data create some barriers. For example, it is difficult for the public to understand the concepts of 1.5 °C and 2 °C of global average temperature rise, as described in the Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC. These abstract concepts should be illustrated through real-life scenarios. For instance, scientists could explain that if the temperature rise exceeds 1.5 °C, some natural disasters which used to happen once in a century will likely occur every year. This explanation will make the temperature rise easier to understand and could help increase support for action.

Maryann Cusimano Love

Gaetan also questions why Nagasaki, the center of Catholicism in Asia, was targeted for the atomic bomb in 1945. The city was not on the original target list, but added to the list at the last minute, without President Truman’s knowledge or consent.

He traces the source of the false stories (for instance, those claiming that the young Jorge Bergoglio was cozy with the Argentine military regime during Argentina’s Dirty War) to Horacio Verbitsky, a double agent paid by the CIA, and who was himself a supporter of the Argentine military regime.

most effective diplomacy on cross-cutting global issues, from combating climate change, environmental degradation, and human trafficking, to advancing humanitarian arms control, including the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

What the diplomatic corps lacks in size it makes up for in flexibility, integrating and working alongside the vast networks of local churches, charities, religious orders, and missionaries.

but takes the long view, seeking common ground and practical, sustainable peace.

“Avoid creating winners and losers. Remain impartial in the face of conflict. Refrain from partisan politics. Pursue dialogue with everyone.”

moved away from just war tradition to just peace

trained in listening and engaging

with 1.3 billion Catholics spread across 193 countries as well as the 49-hectare territory of Vatican City State itself.

But as the world’s oldest diplomatic corps, with over 2,000 years of experience as a global network, the Vatican and its officials prefer a different approach.

if they do not “claim the credit.

Restoring peace and rebuilding communities depend on restoring agency and respect.

Foster peaceful, just and inclusive societies which are free from fear and violence.

in harmony with nature

Protection of the planet from degradation, inclu-ding through sustainable consumption and production, sustainably managing its natural resources and taking urgent action on climate change

that all human beings can fulfil their potential in dignity and equality

‘normative compass’, and refer-ences are made to enlightenment and respect for human dignity.

the emergence of the Brundtland Report in 1987 and the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992,