French Senator Claude Malhuret: "Washington has become Nero’s court, with an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers and a jester high on ketamine... We were at war with a dictator, we are now at war with a dictator backed by a traitor."

The liberal conundrum: Ivan Krastev compares liberals to football game fans that are constitutionally prone to root for the referee--and not the players.

Predicting 2025: Ivan Krastev makes some very astute observations here. Contextualizes and reevaluates 1989 from other perspectives and gives thus a sense of what it is that’s happening now. Starts getting interesting from 9:00 #Ukraine #demographic #Russia #Europe www.youtube.com/embed/CNdGxA...

Critical ocean current AMOC weakest in 1,600 years and even without an imminent collapse its weakening will have a devastating impact on billions Prof Niklas Boers "in the short term, it doesn’t really matter if we have a strong weakening, say 80%, or a collapse.” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Who’s the American Navalny going to be?

US-based Japanese artist Kei Ito has created wonderful and impressive installations to commemorate the horrors of the nuclear bomb in his home country. His work is part of a cultural diplomacy that citizens can engage in, providing access to history through aesthetics boldjourney.com/meet-kei-ito/

Jimmy Carter is being eulogized as the citizen diplomat par excellence by the editorial board of the @asahi.com shimbun www.asahi.com/ajw/articles...

Reading about scaling laws recently I came by the interesting point: Focus on a balance between models' size and performance is more important that aiming for larger models Tsinghua University and ModelBest Inc propose the idea of “capacity density” to measure how efficiently a model uses its size

[63] Population Distribution The world is unevenly populated. People prefer coastal regions and riverbanks for settlements. More than half of the world’s population lives on a relatively small territory spreading from northern India to China. world-processor.com/wp1-200#/063/

US-based Japanese artist Kei Ito has created wonderful and impressive installations to commemorate the horrors of the nuclear bomb in his home country. His work is part of a cultural diplomacy that citizens can engage in, providing access to history through aesthetics boldjourney.com/meet-kei-ito/

"bamboo diplomacy" an interesting moniker for "official" citizen diplomacy between Vietnam and Laos. (it may not be as much as a contradiction in terms as it appears face value) english.vov.vn/en/politics/...

"The discussions in Lhasa...were the 2nd phase of the Dialogue on China-India Relations. 1st was held at Fudan University in Shanghai last month. The dialogue is an example of “track 2” diplomacy, which brings together non-state actors from both sides for discussions" www.scmp.com/news/china/d...

T2 diplomacy is an alternative to Western-led mediation: which often focuses on short-term conflict resolution, overlooking historical nature of conflicts. T2 initiatives focus on (re)building relationships and can address historical + complex grievances + contentions. mecouncil.org/publication/...

You will find our resouce page updated every few days at this address: www.trackii.org/russia-ukrai... we select and curate meaningful news and analysis sources in an effort to better understand the dynamics of conflicts. Our current focus is on Russia/Ukraine but we are monitor the war in Gaza.

T2 diplomacy is an alternative to Western-led mediation: which often focuses on short-term conflict resolution, overlooking historical nature of conflicts. T2 initiatives focus on (re)building relationships and can address historical + complex grievances + contentions. mecouncil.org/publication/...

Another environmental catastrophe caused by Russians east of Crimea, after one of their decaying oil tankers broke apart on high seas 2 days ago, 35km of pristine coastline has been contaminated in true Russian style. And these tankers are now all over the world.