Expanding the Legacy
UAE Gathering Scores Few Successes
Beneath our feet, the earth manufactures and hides a treasure trove of clean energy. In Lorraine, a former coal mining region hugging the French-German border, a reservoir containing up to 260 million metric tonnes of natural hydrogen has recently been discovered. The volume equals almost four times that of the...
Political Upset in The Netherlands
In an election upset without precedent, Dutch voters on Wednesday chastised the ruling coalition of longtime prime minister Mark Rutte and handed the levers of power to political provocateur Geert Wilders whose Party for Freedom (PVV) unexpectedly secured 37 seats (+20) in the 150-strong Lower House.The PVV thus became the...
Carrying the Hopes of a Country and a Union
Whilst president of the European Council, Donald Tusk frequently caused a stir with comments that lacked in finesse or diplomacy. After the 2016 Brexit vote that sealed the UK’s departure from the European Union, the former, and likely future, prime minister of Poland speculated that supporters of the plan were...
PiS Hold on Power in the Balance
Clutching at straws. With the slimmest of margins, voters in Poland opened a narrow path for the pro-EU opposition to reclaim power after eight years in the proverbial wilderness. With fear and ill-disguised loathing, the European Union watched as the national-conservative Law and Justice party (PiS) of deputy prime minister...
Jazz: The Rhapsody of Bohemians
Few music genres are so poorly appreciated or understood as jazz. To its (many) detractors, jazz is just pretentious experimentation by pseudo musicians playing, ad nauseam, the same tunes over and over again. As seen by jazz historian Ted Gioia, the problem with jazz is that nobody has tried to...
Binance Teetering
Crypto is having another moment. Binance, the largest exchange for trading the digital currency and its derivatives, is in distress. A dozen senior executives have left and the company fired some 1,500 staff members as trading volumes dropped almost vertiginously. US government agencies, ranging from the Department of Justice to...
Germany Prefers Coal over Nuclear
At about the same time Germany shuttered its last three nuclear power plants, five lignite-burning ones were recommissioned. In another disconcerting sign of times past, earlier this year in North-Rhine Westphalia, energy producer RWE Power began dismantling a wind farm to make way for the expansion of an open-pit lignite...
Deep-Sea Miners Ogling Strategic Minerals
“There’s gold in them thar depths.” Millions upon untold millions of potato-sized rocks lay scattered across 4.5 million square kilometres of seafloor between the Hawaiian archipelago and Clipperton, an uninhabited atoll some 1,300 kms southwest of Manzanillo, Mexico. This ultimate of desert islands belongs to France. Last year, the industrial...
Saudi Arabia Shakes Up Golf and Football
There is a name for that. Sportswashing, or the leveraging of an athletic event to embellish a reputation tainted by scandal or controversy. The term was coined in 2015 to describe attempts by the Azerbaijan government to divert attention from its human rights record with the hosting of the first-ever...
New Security Reality in Europe
The peace dividend, now exhausted, delivered the countries of Europe a windfall of some €4.2 trillion (£3.6 trillion) over the past thirty years – a sum roughly equivalent to a quarter of the European Union’s GDP. The number comes from Bruegel, a non-partisan policy think tank in Brussels. The institute...
