It would behoove Big Tech to spread the potential benefits of AI to the public. In the short term, this might include investments in grid upgrades, workforce retraining and community benefit agreements in places where data centres are built. www.ft.com/content/525c...

1973-74, Ölembargos iJom-Kippur-Kriegs, Versorgungslücke rund acht Prozent. 1979 bis 1980, während der Iran-Revolution und des Ausbruchs des Irak-Iran-Kriegs, waren es rund sieben Prozent. In der aktuellen Krise wird der Ausfall auf zehn bis elf Prozent geschätzt. www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/s...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... Unlikely Companions of Energy Transitions? Opportunities and Challenges of Triangular Cooperation Between the EU, the GCC, and Hydrocarbon-Poor Countries From the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)

"Analysts contend that it is possible to run a cost-effective electricity grid where the vast majority of power comes from renewables in concert with batteries."

"Spain has managed quite a feat. ... The country’s electricity prices only reached or exceeded the average cost of gas-fired electricity 15 per cent of the time, according to analysis by Ember. In Italy, gas set the price of electricity 89 per cent of the time." giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

The AI economy looks...really precarious. So @matteowong.bsky.social & I did a bunch of reporting to try to figure out what happens when a potential bubble collides with a war in Iran and a potential resource shortage. The answer is...arguably the most dire stuff i've heard from smart ppl in a while

"Storage is patchy: the UAE aims to have reserves equivalent to just two days of normal consumption by 2036, which could be stretched to around a month by strict rationing." www.economist.com/middle-east-...

"Bis die Welt einmal gründlich aufgebohrt, aufgeteilt, verheizt und verscherbelt war, gab der Raubtierspirit keine Ruhe. So war es. Der Tisch wurde ohne verabredeten Spielabbruch nie fürs Abendbrot frei." www.zeit.de/feuilleton/2...

"Meloni said after meeting Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune that they agreed their state-controlled energy companies should develop new joint projects, including shale and offshore gas exploration." 44% of electricity from gas vs. 17% in EU giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

"Gulf states account for 49 per cent of globally traded urea and 30 per cent of ammonia. When that supply chain stops, the effects accumulate quietly in soil chemistry and planting decisions over the months that follow." giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Insider trading at work. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... "The well-timed trades echoed the flurry of large highly profitable bets made on prediction market Polymarket on the timing of the US’s attacks in recent months on Iran and Venezuela."

"The Dead Sea is also the world’s largest source of bromine, a chemical that helps score patterns on to silicon wafers. South Korea imports virtually all of its supply from Israel."

"Roughly half of global seaborne sulphur — an element used for chip cleaning and etching — transits the strait. "

"About one-third of global helium supply — a byproduct of natural gas processing that is used to cool silicon wafers — is from Qatar." giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

"Middle Eastern benchmarks such as Dubai and Oman have surged far beyond the global markers, with spot barrels changing hands near $170 a barrel. That extreme pricing underscores just how tight Gulf-origin supply has become." giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

"Iran has allowed a limited number of cargo ships carrying grains and other agricultural goods through the Strait of Hormuz since the start of the war with the US and Israel, as Tehran tries to shore up critical supplies." giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

www.economist.com/finance-and-... "The region accounts for nearly 45% of global seaborne naphtha flows and 23-30% of exports of other key plastic inputs, including styrene and polyethylene. Several Asian plastic-makers have already declared force majeure."

giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... "About a third of global urea exports pass through the Strait of Hormuz, according to CRU. About 45 per cent of global sulphur exports — a key input for phosphate fertilisers — are also shipped through the vital waterway, which has in effect closed."

Piro couldn't write this book until he retired from the FBI, but it will be interesting to see how two decades later, his account engages with the work based on the captured records, insights from which were only emerging at the time he interrogated Saddam. www.simonandschuster.ca/books/The-In...

"Produziert die Golfregion ein Drittel der weltweit verkauften Urea-Menge, dazu fast die Hälfte des Schwefels, ein Fünftel des Phosphatgesteins sowie rund ein Viertel des weltweit gehandelten Ammoniaks". www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft...

Come work with us! Tenure track position for development economics + postcolonial political economy, feminist economics, critical macrofinance. jobs.univie.ac.at/job/Tenure-T... @univie.ac.at @divdececon.bsky.social @econ4future.bsky.social @econgeo.bsky.social @economicethics.bsky.social

‪Strategic petroleum reserve release, possible impact: “The maximum we have ever seen is 1.3mn barrels a day across all the IEA countries combined,” said Rats. “Theoretically, they might be able to do 3mn to 3.5mn b/d but that has never been done before.” giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

"The Epstein connection was business as usual. In his professional life at MIT, Chomsky was well used to finding positive features in people he considered to be criminals." www.counterpunch.org/2026/02/06/t...

Markus-Lanz-Sondersendung zum Krieg in #Nahost: #GIGA-Forscherin Diba Mirzaei ist heute Abend in der Expert:innenrunde zu Gast. Sie ordnet die innenpolitische Lage im #Iran ein und teilt ihre Einschätzungen zur Stabilität des Regimes. ➡️ Ab 23:40 Uhr im ZDF: www.zdf.de/video/talk/m...

📣 CFP | Populist World Order Narratives, Hamburg, 24 to 25 Sept 2026. I am organizing a workshop on #populism and #WorldOrder narratives as part of our WONAGO project. Submit your abstract by 31 May 2026. Travel and accommodation funding available. Please circulate widely.

“1984 (…) the leftwing Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv declared that Iran’s “atomic bomb” had entered the final stages of production “with German assistance”, according to a copy of that front page archived at the National Library of Israel.” giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Gum arabic mainstay of Sudanese economy, present in virtually every packaged food, fueling atrocities in Sudan. www.ft.com/content/ec8a...

"The water supply of Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, is heavily dependent on the operation of two large desalination facilities." giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

This article uses the concept of geonarratives and a dataset of nearly 3000 newspaper articles from Egypt, the Gulf countries, Iraq and Lebanon to analyse the space framing assumptions that are at play, how history is mobilized to support them. 2) www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The codebook and the dataset of 2890 newspaper articles that was used for the article can be accessed here: 3) Dima, Abu Alkheir, and Eckart Woertz. 2026. Codebook and Dataset Russian Geonarratives and Arab Media (RUGAME). Harvard Dataverse, doi.org/10.7910/DVN/...

The global order is in flux towards multipolarity, a process that is accompanied by an increasingly diverse narration of geopolitical imaginaries. Russia and the Arab world are key regions of contestation in that process with a long history of entanglements. 1) www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

"Companies across the sector are pulling three levers to ensure future growth: stepping up exploration, striking access deals with resource-rich countries, particularly in the Middle East, and pursuing mergers and acquisitions." giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

"So schimpften Bush und Putin gemeinsam auf die damalige rot-grüne Regierung von Kanzler Gerhard Schröder und Joschka Fischer: zu soft gegenüber Iran. Die Mullahs seien »verrückt«. Sobald sie die Atombombe hätten, griffen sie erst Israel an, dann die USA, sagte Putin" www.spiegel.de/politik/wlad...

Zusammen mit #mindsofpeace, Dr. Sapir #Handelmann u @ssinijlawi.bsky.social haben wir an der @akademieloccum.bsky.social einen 🇵🇸-🇮🇱 Dialog begonnen. Wichtige Initiative u „nur“ der Kick-off für weitere Vorhaben – stay tuned! www.ndr.de/nachrichten/...

His PhD at LSE was on "THE ROLE OF CIVIL SOCIETY IN THE DEMOCRATISATION OF GLOBAL GOVERNANCE INSTITUTIONS" with a little help from consultancy Monitor. Particularly noteworthy was chapter 5.7: "The ‘3x3=3’ model as a system of multi-level governance". www.ft.com/content/8b70...

‘Yes, they would execute a child’: the film about a girl who has to bake a birthday cake for Saddam Hussein

Shoutout to the fact checkers and editors who made me remove references to Trump’s bottomless corruption when discussing why he liked Gulf states

Academic AI conferences flooded by AI generated papers and reviews..... www.ft.com/content/54e2...

Interesting comparison of urban warfare practices: "So, why did the Israeli military repeatedly accept levels of uncertainty and civilian risk that American commanders would not? One plausible explanation lies in how Palestinian civilian life was assigned value." warontherocks.com/2026/01/gaza...

Rest in Peace Alex Jeffrey Pretti🙏🏾 The VA ICU Nurses send him off right 💔

What can possibly go wrong? www.ft.com/content/3eb8...

Maybe Greenland could invade us instead?

X/Twitter's rough full volume is around 500 total million posts every day, or 182 (and a half) billion posts per year. By contracts, we found 11.2 million research posts in all of 2025 on there. In other words, 0.000006% of Twitter appears to be sharing research. Basically zero.

Europe plays a limited role in Gulf investments & geopolitical considerations behind them. International mediation is urgently required in #Gaza & #Sudan. #Lebanon & #Syria are threatened by fragmentation. In our #GIGAFocus, we present 10 things to watch in #MENA: www.giga-hamburg.de/en/publicati...

An analysis by #GIGA researchers Dima Abu Alkheir, @hagerali.bsky.social, André Bank, Ardahan Özkan Gedikli, @housseinalmalla.bsky.social, Diba Mirzaei, Elianne Shewring, @hakkitas.bsky.social, and @eckartwoertz.bsky.social.