When Arab leaders sit down with US President Joe Biden in Riyadh this week, one topic they will no doubt be eager to raise is the threat posed by Iran and how Tehran’s nuclear ambitions can be thwarted or contained.
The Mediterranean region in question
The Mediterranean is etymologically the “sea in the middle of the land“. (1) The Romans called it Mare Magnum (‘Great Sea’) or Mare Internum (‘Internal Sea’) and, starting with the Roman Empire, Mare Nostrum (‘Our Sea’). The term Mare Mediterrāneum appears later in the work of Gaius Julius Solinus in the 3rd century, (2) but the earliest extant witness to it is in the 6th century, in Isidore of Seville. (3)
Iran getting the Bomb is not necessarily a bad thing, though in a perverse way.
An Israeli physicist who worked at Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor, which produces the plutonium for the country’s nuclear warheads, published a Haaretz article declaring the the US and Israeli policy of “maximum pressure,” has utterly failed. Instead of preventing an Iranian bomb, Trump’s abandonment of the nuclear deal has permitted Iran to pursue one.
As the Ukraine war has entered its fifth month, and two decades after Iran, Russia and India signed the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) in 2002, Dariush Jamali, head of the Iranian-Russian Port of Solyanka in Astrakhan Oblast, announced that the first transit shipment from Russia to India had been sent through Iran by way of the INSTC (Mehr News Agency, June 11). This shipment passed on a multimodal route through Astrakhan Port, specifically the Solyanka part (Russia); Bandar Abbas and Chabahar ports (Iran); and Nhava Sheva Port (India).
This past June, the leaders of the world’s largest IMF economies and wealthiest liberal democracies gathered at Elmau castle in Germany’s picturesque Bavarian Alps for the annual G7 summit. Besides discussing obvious topics such as the Ukrainian war and global economic recovery, the gathering was an opportunity to unveil a major infrastructure development program—the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII).
A Gambian court has sentenced five former members of the intelligence service to death for the murder of a political activist during the rule of ex-dictator Yahya Jammeh.
High Court Justice Kumba Sillah-Camara pronounced the sentence against the former head of the National Intelligence Agency, Yankuba Badjie, after finding him guilty of murdering Ebrima Solo Sandeng, an important figure in the opposition United Democratic Party, in 2016.
The United Nation’s latest global population projection predicts there will be 8 billion people on the planet by November and that the population will gradually increase to 8.5 billion by 2050 and to more than 10 billion by 2080. That growth will come with significant economic and environmental implications.
More than half of the projected increase in the global population up to 2050 will be concentrated in eight countries, the UN has said, five of which are in Africa.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Tanzania, the new UN report – World Population Prospects 2022 –released Tuesday shows will contribute more than half to the increase leading the human population to the 8 billion mark on November 15 of this year.
Generally speaking, younger people trust in governments and the EU more than older age cohorts. Governments, however, are doing little to prove themselves worthy of that trust.
Socially and economically, young people have suffered disproportionately in the crises of the past decade and a half.
As the US energy sector’s reliance on digitalization grows, its vulnerability to cyberattacks also increases. To better understand current and future threats, the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center convened the Atlantic Council Task Force on Cybersecurity and the Energy Transition to develop a cybersecurity framework designed to protect US energy infrastructure—and by extension, national security—against cyberattacks.