📣 Germany's close to reversing its opposition to mass surveillance & private message scanning, & backing the Chat Control bill. This could end private comms-& Signal-in the EU.

Time's short and they're counting on obscurity: please let German politicians know how horrifying their reversal would be.

UN data shows surge in civilian deaths in conflict globally, highlights pervasive discrimination GENEVA  - Civilian deaths in conflict surged 40% globally in 2024, according to new data released by the UN Human Rights Office. The findings also reveal widespread and compounding discrimination and ...

Today, the annual #UNSC debate on #WPS takes place, against a backdrop of violence against children & women in armed conflicts surging. It quadrupled btw 2023-2024 compared w/ 2021-2022, with 80% of child deaths & 70% of women's deaths recorded in #Gaza alone 👇
www.ohchr.org/en/press-rel...

‘I’m leaving,’ Trump said. ‘There’s no reason to be here any more’: inside the meeting that brought Nato to the brink Former secretary general Jens Stoltenberg recalls the rollercoaster ride of dealing with Donald Trump – and how close the US president brought the alliance to the point of collapse

Holy smoke. This is something else: www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o.... If you read anything today, read this. Just ordered the book.

"to see these uprisings as South Asia’s Arab Spring is misleading. They are not clones of one another, nor do they herald a uniform democratic tide. Each is written in its own dialect ... What unites them is the collapse of patience with elites, what separates them is the path that follows collapse"

Five global hinge points Among those sayings that encapsulate political wisdom but are either inaccurate or apocryphal (such as the ancient Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times’ that is neither Chinese nor anc…

An interesting synthesis of how geopolitics, the ecological crisis, technological change, demography and populism intersect & boost the need for cooperation even while they currently seem to make it harder 👇

dansmithsblog.com/2025/09/22/f...

To be consistent w/ limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees, governments collectively need to produce less than half of the fossil fuels they are planning for 2030 (5 years from now) and then double down to halve production again by 2050, @unep.org, @sei.org, @climateanalytics.org & @iisd.org show 👇

We are missing the peace in climate action Climate adaptation must involve peace negotiators, prioritise flexible local funding, and look to the people already leading on the ground.

"We are missing the peace in climate action " 👇: a great overview by @nazaninemoshiri.bsky.social in the @newhumanitarian.bsky.social on the importance of the Climate, Peace and Security agenda, in #Africa and beyond.

www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/2025...

The World’s Shame in Gaza | International Crisis Group Israel’s Gaza campaign has entered an even more nightmarish phase. The world must press Israel harder to stop the war regardless of “day after” questions – lest its offensive destroy Palestinian life ...

The Gaza strip’s population, serially uprooted, starved and bombed, is reeling from a war whose cruelty has few parallels in modern history.

www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-...

Devastating earthquake in Afghanistan leaves locals displaced, aid workers scrambling NPR's Juana Summers talks with the International Rescue Committee's country director of Afghanistan, Sherine Ibrahim, about the 6.0 magnitude earthquake that hit the eastern mountainous region.

"Before the earthquake, Afghanistan had 23 million people in need, many suffering from acute food insecurity and lacking basic health care. So the resources that exist are very stretched."

IRC Afghanistan Director Sherine Ibrahim on @npr.org with @jsummers.bsky.social:
www.npr.org/2025/09/01/n...

Lieber noch einen Kilometer Stadtautobahn mehr 🫠

Und bitter

Technical question: does GPT 5 rely on the average or the median spelling of US states by tech bros?

Yes We Can!

Scientists for the first time have attributed a number of deaths due to #climate change to the recent heatwave in #Europe.

Heatwaves kill. But climate change increases death toll by making heatwaves even hotter & more frequent.

These are literally thousands of people who would still live.

ECC Newsletter | Issue 06/2025 In this edition of the ECC newsletter, we turn our focus to the Asia-Pacific.

Latest @climatediplo.bsky.social newsletter 👇, featuring
- new report on Climate, Peace and Environmental Resilience in the #Asia #Pacific
- podcast on water diplomacy & climate finance in South & Central Asia
- LCAW event on green finance in fragile contexts

climate-diplomacy.org/magazine/coo...

Arria-formula Meeting on Critical Minerals and Resource-Driven Insecurity in Africa

Later today, the #UNSC will discuss how "to strengthen international awareness of the link between critical #minerals and insecurity in #Africa and to identify actionable policy measures to address the issue", convened by #SierraLeone 👇

www.securitycouncilreport.org/whatsinblue/...

Visualization showing vertical colored lines corresponding to temperature anomalies from 1921 to 2024 for the Arctic Ocean. The colors have year-to-year variability, but generally go from blue to red through time, especially in recent years.

No surprises here - #Arctic Ocean stripes are off the scale. The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else in the world. #ShowYourStripes

➡️ Explore your own climate change stripes from around the world! showyourstripes.info (Global) and observablehq.com/@climatecent... (U.S.) What's in your area?

Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America The reactionary blogger’s call for a monarch to rule the country once seemed like a joke. Now the right is ready to bend the knee.

ICYMI: very nice read on Moldbug 👇

"Whatever gift #Yarvin has for attracting attention, his work does not survive scrutiny. It is full of spurious syllogisms and arguments retconned to match his jaundiced intuitions."

Comes across as rather whiny & incoherent ...

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Global climate predictions show temperatures expected to remain at or near record levels in coming 5 years

"There is a forecast 70% chance that the five-year average warming for 2025-2029 will be more than 1.5°C, according to the report. This is up from 47% in last year’s report (for the 2024-2028 period)", driving heatwaves, extreme rainfall events, droughts, rising seas etc. 👇

wmo.int/news/media-c...

"What you can say about the new aid plan is that this is way of moving from an ad hoc and chaotic deprivation strategy to a more systematized and regularized one", Rob Blecher summarizes in good update on the military, diplomatic and humanitarian situation 👇

Global map showing surface air temperature trends for each May period from 1975 to 2024. Only land areas are shown. Red shading is shown for warmer temperature trends, and blue shading is shown for colder temperature trends. Data is from NOAA/NESDIS/NCEI NOAAGlobalTempv6.0.0. The temperature trend scale is from -0.5°C/decade to +0.5°C/decade. Most areas are warming, though there is some spatial variability.

Over the last 50 years, temperatures have been warming across most land areas during the month of May. However, there is also some spatial variability (not too surprising).

Data from NOAAGlobalTemp v6.0.0 (www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/lan...).

Until Next Time? The India-Pakistan Truce | International Crisis Group This week on Hold Your Fire!, Richard speaks with Crisis Group experts Praveen Donthi, Samina Ahmed, and Pierre Prakash about the India-Pakistan ceasefire after days of clashes sparked by militant att...

Great episode analyzing the latest clash between #India & #Pakistan 👇
Much of the military action remains murky amid both sides claiming victory, but the sense that domestic politics rather than strategy drives dynamics is uncomfortable wrt/ the likely next clash
www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-a...

Pope Leo XIV's Inaugural Homily will be pored over by people much more expert than me, but a couple of things struck.

First - a warning against being "an autocrat". Sadly no reaction shot from JD Vance.

"it’s really the combination of authoritarian political institutions and an economy based on fossil fuel extraction that seem to make authoritarian regimes incapable of developing strong climate change mitigation policies" 👇

Plausible, though I wonder whether it's not ultimately a ? of rationality

He is just wedded to his Popperian scientific training 😉

A nice overview on the history and dynamics of and incentives in the #Kashmir conflict 👇
TL;DR: While #India & #Pakistan have managed to limit escalation, bouts of fighting have achieved very little

Idealismus ist bekanntlich deutsch 😉

Great synthesis 👇 on where negotiations stand: the #US proposal (v vague on key issues), the response by #Ukraine & #Europeans, the positional adjustments on all sides, the #Trump administration's (potential mis-)reading of the #Russian position & interest, and its internal frictions. Listen in!

This is truth social.. Same same but different

"the EU has a unique opportunity to show even greater soft-power leadership – standing in contrast to Chinese transactionalism and US isolationism", @casparhobhouse.bsky.social writes 👇, and the policy is starting to pay off in terms of climate ambition, prices for renewable energy & derisking