.
Oceania
Solomon Islands
May 27, 2026 10:07 a.m. ET An ideology spreading, centered on state control. The Fengqiao pilot was suspended after an outcry. Solomon Islands had signed a security pact with China in 2022. Under China’s leader, Xi, Beijing has tried to export its ideas about security to the world in countries like the Solomon Islands, a Pacific nation 3,000 miles away. Where Washington offers treaties that commit American troops to defend U.S. allies against external threats, Beijing offers something different: equipment and tactics for governments to keep order at home. Their solution was to introduce an obscure Mao-era community surveillance system: the Fengqiao Experience. Named after Fengqiao, a town in eastern China, the system encouraged neighbors to spy and snitch on one another to root out political enemies. That pitch has appealed to many authoritarian and weak democratic states in Africa, Southeast Asia and Central Asia that view domestic threats to regime security as an equal, if not bigger, priority than fielding an army. In China, a model police state, the system calls for the police to monitor individual households in sprawling apartment complexes, in one example assigning each unit a color code that denoted whether occupants presented a security risk. ... (Source: The New York Times - U.S.)
United Nations
23 May 2026 After four weeks of negotiations at UN Headquarters in New York, the 11th Review Conference of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) ended on Friday without consensus on a final declaration. (UN News - headquarters in New York)
Global
June 2, 2026, 6:30 AM ET Ahamed, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World - the historian, whose landmark 2009 book chronicled how four central bankers helped cause the Great Depression - was speaking about America’s national debt, now hovering around $39 trillion, and the mounting risks he sees in the global financial system. His new book,1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World, out June 2 from Penguin Press, examines a forgotten financial crisis that swept the United States, Central Europe, and the emerging markets of the Ottoman Empire and Egypt simultaneously - a global contagion that most people have never heard of. The parallels to the present, he says, are hard to ignore. A clear similarity, he said, is the craziness that markets develop when they’re in bubbles, citing a quote from Vanderbilt that, essentially, ’building railroads from nowhere to nowhere is not a viable business.’ You can sort of feel, he added, that one day we will discover that building data centers, willy nilly spending a trillion dollars a year on data centers for the next three years is bound to end in tears in the same way as the dotcom bubble ended in tears. The scenario that worries Ahamed has a precedent - and it nearly happened once before in 2008, at the height of the global financial crisis. Then-Treasury Secretary Paulson was in Beijing when he learned that Russia had approached China with a proposal: dump their massive holdings of U.S. agency debt, and accelerate the financial meltdown already underway on Wall Street. “The Chinese very sensibly said no,” Ahamed recounted. But the episode left a mark on him. Can you imagine, in the middle of a financial crisis, if one of our major foreign holders of our national debt decides, this is an opportune time to launch an attack on U.S. financial supremacy? he said. He did stumble across a parallel in the research for his book. ’That’s essentially what happened between Germany and France in 1873. After defeating France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, as explained in the book, Germany sought to press its advantage financially - deliberately targeting France’s silver reserves in a bid to destroy its economic standing. The move triggered a global collapse of silver prices, froze half the world’s precious metal reserves, and helped ignite the cascading crises of 1873. Ahamed said he was shocked to discover silver’s essential role in the epic crash of 1873, now mostly forgotten. The world ended up dispensing with silver, purely because of a geopolitical accident - in the middle of the crisis, Germany decides to double down by attacking France’s hoard of silver, thinking this is the way, we already beat them in a military fight, now we’ll get them in a financial fight. And it had the totally unintended effect of causing everyone to bail out of silver, causing silver prices to collapse. Germany may have gotten one over on France, but it also had the effect of essentially freezing half the world’s precious metal reserves. The resulting depression lasted two decades. Much like Lords of Finance explained how a fixation on gold in the 1920s led to central banking mistakes. The question Ahamed was left with after his research is how Germany and France set off a butterfly effect in the 1870s: Could China do the same to the United States, at a moment when Washington is least able to absorb it? ’Suddenly, everyone will say, this is crazy - we’ve got a national debt that we cannot afford to service. And it’ll happen very quickly.’ He pointed to the brief, chaotic tenure of British Prime Minister Liz Truss in 2022 as a small-scale preview of what’s ahead for America. When Truss announced plans to fund sweeping tax cuts with borrowed money, bond markets revolted within days, yields spiked, and the pound cratered. She resigned 45 days into the job - outlasted, as one cruel tabloid pointed out, by a head of lettuce. ’There are examples in today’s world of the market suddenly waking up.’ Ahamed draws a careful distinction between countries that have faced down catastrophic debt and survived - and those that have not. Britain, after the Napoleonic Wars, carried a national debt of roughly 200% of GDP, he noted - and spent the next half-century methodically paying it down while the British Empire expanded. The United States itself emerged from World War II with debt exceeding 100% of GDP and grew its way out of that over 25 years. The national debt is now roughly 100% of GDP, crossing that threshold in late April, and is projected to climb to 120% by 2036. Historically, the difference has come down to political discipline, institutional credibility, and the absence of an external shock. Ahamed said he sees fewer of those buffers in place than he would like with geopolitical tensions elevated, the dollar’s reserve-currency status quietly under challenge, and fiscal consensus in Washington essentially nonexistent. The question, then, isn’t whether to get frightened by what’s happening in the world today, but to ask, why weren’t you frightened in the first place? Lords of Finance won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Gold Medal and the Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year Award. (Source: Fortune - U.S.)
Wed, May 27 20268:41 AM EDT Oil prices fall more than 5% after Rubio says U.S. will give Iran talks ‘every chance to succeed’. West Texas Intermediate futures tumbled more than 5% to close at $88.68 per barrel. International benchmark Brent oil also lost more than 5% to settle at $94.29 per barrel. It will take at least four months to ramp oil flows to 80% of normal levels even if the U.S.-Iran conflict ends immediately, said Jaber, head of Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., last week. It will take until the first or second quarter of 2027 for flows to fully normalize, he said. (Source: CNBC - U.S.)
Earth
2 June 2026 Effects of El Niño and human-caused climate change could reshape weather around the world. A new phase of the natural El Niño weather pattern could begin in a matter of weeks, boosting temperatures on the planet, the UN has warned. Several forecasts from national weather agencies suggest it could end up as one of the strongest ever recorded - a possible so-called super El Niño. Scientists have been watching conditions in a tell-tale region of the central Pacific for clues. In December these waters were cooler than average with no El Niño to be seen. But three months later, the central Pacific was warmer, very warm waters emerging off the coast of South America. Sea surface temperatures in the Pacific monitoring region naturally fluctuate above and below average. When they warm or cool by more than half a degree from the baseline over an extended period, conditions for El Niño or its cooler sibling La Niña are present. By April a looming El Niño was unmistakable. Temperatures in the main monitoring region were rising - and these waters have only continued to warm since. El Niño forms when a switch in wind patterns allows warmer waters to spread across the tropical Pacific Ocean. Many scientists believe this one could be unusually powerful. It may even be a record event. Warming above two degrees indicates a very strong or so-called super El Niño. There have been only a handful of these cases since 1950. Forecasts suggest this new El Niño could equal past peaks - or even surpass them. Data from satellites, buoys and ocean floats indicate a huge wave of unusually warm water - more than 6C above average in places - creeping eastwards across the Pacific, hundreds of metres deep. The warmth of these waters rivals some of the strongest El Niño events we have seen, said L’Heureux, a physical scientist at the US science agency NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. That deep-sea heat is often a precursor to warmer waters at the surface - which then heat the air above, helping to disrupt weather patterns worldwide. Different places can be affected at different times of the year. A strong El Niño typically fuels hot, dry weather in parts of South America, South East Asia and Australia, raising the chances of droughts and wildfires. It can also weaken the Indian monsoon and bring drier conditions to northern parts of the Greater Horn of Africa - while heavier rainfall can increase the risks of flooding in the southern US. El Niño can even increase the chances of a mild start and cold end to UK winters. Its links with weather in north-west Europe are not as strong. As El Niño typically peaks in strength around Christmas time, it is impossible to know for sure that it will be a record-breaker with months still to go. Past events have been linked to spikes in food prices and hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars in lost income globally, as crop failures and trade disruptions ripple through supply chains and economies. El Niño is very sensitive to wind patterns, for example, which are difficult to predict far in advance - “the biggest wildcard” for El Niño, according to L’Heureux. Temperatures usually spike during El Niño years - perhaps by 0.2C for a strong event. And they typically fall during La Niña. But these spikes and falls are only temporary. The year 2027 is very likely at this point to be the world’s warmest year on record, said Hausfather, a climate scientist with the Berkeley Earth group in the US. The long-term warming trend is climate change. We have never experienced El Niño on a planet already so hot. It just goes to show how big an impact humans are having on the climate. (Source: BBC - United Kingdom)
Space
International Space Station
05/06/2026 - 18:50 GMT+2 Russia's Roscosmos space agency said that while pressurising the transfer chamber, known as PrK, a leak was recorded. "During an inspection of the PrK, the cosmonauts discovered two potential air leak sites. The first was promptly sealed by applying the first layer of the two-component sealant 'Germetall‑1. The second site is located on the conical part of the PrK. Work is underway to prepare for its sealing," read the statement. NASA and Russia's Roscosmos are two primary operators of the International Space Station. Continuously inhabited for the last quarter-century, the aging ISS is scheduled to be pushed into Earth's orbit before crashing into an isolated spot in the Pacific Ocean in 2030. (Source: Euronews - Based in Lyon, France)
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