For more than half a century, giant pandas have occupied a special place in Tokyo’s collective imagination. At Ueno Zoo, visitors routinely lined up for hours, often for no more than a minute or two of viewing time, just to glimpse the black-and-white bears chewing bamboo or dozing lazily in the shade. Pandas were never just another zoo attraction. They became part of the city’s emotional fabric, a shared reference point across generations. That is why the recent return of Ue

By early 2026, the narrative surrounding Artificial Intelligence has shifted. The initial awe of generative models like Gemini 3 and Claude Opus has settled into a frenzied industrial reality. The question is no longer just about what AI can  do , but whether the physical world can build the infrastructure fast enough to support it. A January 7, 2026 report from Bridgewater Associates, titled "The Macro Implications of the AI Capex Boom," argues that financial markets are fun

In May 2024, Helen McCaw, a former senior analyst in financial security at the Bank of England, published a detailed white paper through The Sol Foundation titled Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Policy Implications for the Government of the United Kingdom . The forty-plus-page document makes a bold case: UAP—once dismissed as UFOs—are real, physical objects displaying capabilities far beyond any known human technology. McCaw argues that the UK government must urgently prepa

In recent years, much has been written about the decline of American power, the erosion of dollar dominance, and the rise of a multipolar world in which resources, rather than institutions, once again determine strategic outcomes. Against this backdrop, Venezuela re-emerges not as a failed state on the margins of global affairs, but as a country whose geology alone gives it outsized geopolitical relevance. At the center of this reassessment lies a simple but powerful idea: co

On 12 December 2025, a group of countries gathered in Washington, D.C. to sign a declaration few people outside policy circles noticed. There were no flags on podiums, no grand communiqués, no adversaries named. Yet what emerged from that meeting may end up shaping the global technology landscape more durably than many treaties that came before it. The declaration was called Pax Silica. The name sounded deliberately anodyne—almost academic. But behind it lay an idea both simp

The global aerospace and defense sector has entered what many investors increasingly view as a structurally supportive phase. Unlike past cycles driven purely by geopolitics or commercial aviation booms, today’s environment combines multiple long-duration forces: rising defense budgets, sustained geopolitical tension, the normalization of higher interest rates, and a multi-year recovery in commercial aerospace. Against this backdrop, U.S.-listed aerospace and defense equities

The starting point for understanding today’s gold market is central bank balance sheets. Gold is first and foremost a monetary reserve asset, and its dynamics only make sense when viewed through that lens. As of today, global central banks collectively hold roughly 36,000–37,000 tonnes of gold, representing about 17–18% of all gold ever mined. This is close to historical highs in absolute terms, though still below the peak share reached under the Bretton Woods system. Ten yea

Economic decline and loss of competitiveness The recently published US National Security Strategy argues that Europe is experiencing a long-term economic decline that has weakened its global influence and strategic weight. Europe once represented approximately a quarter of global GDP in 1990, but today accounts for roughly fourteen percent. The document attributes this decline to economic frameworks characterized by excessive regulation, rigid bureaucratic structures, and int

In July 2025 the White House released America’s AI Action Plan , a document that redefines how the United States intends to compete in the global artificial-intelligence race. Signed by President Donald J. Trump and authored by senior officials Michael J. Kratsios, David O. Sacks, and Marco Rubio, the plan replaces Joe Biden’s 2023 executive order on “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy AI.” Where the earlier framework emphasised caution, ethics, and civil-rights protections, this

In a recent address, Senator Bernie Sanders delivered a stark warning: artificial intelligence and robotics, if left unchecked, could dismantle the foundations of the modern working class. His argument extends beyond fears of technological unemployment. It raises a deeper structural question about capitalism itself: what happens to a consumer-driven economy when technology renders consumers redundant as workers? Over the past decade, some of the world’s wealthiest figures—Elo

When I wrote The Finding Itihad , I was thinking about unity, not as an institution, but as a revelation. Itihad  for me was never political. It meant the possibility of world harmony through interreligious dialogue: the idea that the divine might still speak across languages, creeds, and histories if we learn to listen. The Finding  itself alludes to the Finding of Jesus in the Temple, the moment of rediscovery, when something once thought lost is glimpsed again, alive, radi

The air over Europe feels charged with menace. In recent months, a pattern of drone incursions, fighter jet provocations, and speculative...

Founded in 1989 by Michael Saylor and Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy began life as a business intelligence (BI) software firm. Its early...

Beyond Meat (NASDAQ: BYND) made an impressive debut on the Nasdaq exchange in May 2019, pricing its initial public offering (IPO) at $25...

In the autumn of 2021, the mood on Wall Street was almost euphoric. The S&P 500 was climbing to new records, the Dow Jones Industrial...

Illusions shattered This article runs a parallel between Mario Draghi’s speech at the Meeting 2025 and The Finding – Itihad , the novel I...

When Geoffrey Hinton, widely recognized as the godfather of AI, left Google in 2023, it was not to retire quietly. It was to sound the...

Quantum computing is no longer science fiction. Its rapid progress has the potential to break the very foundation of Bitcoin’s security....

From science fiction to futurism By the 1930s, Wells’s warnings became more urgent and more direct. The Great Depression had shattered...

US President Trump has just announced that a ceasefire between Israel and Iran has been agreed. This marks the end of what may be...