World politics
fromThe Cipher Brief
1 day agoThe Next Battlefield Is Perception, Not Territory
The Gray Zone has become the primary arena for strategic advantage, influenced by AI's speed and amplification of narratives.
There'll be some idiosyncratic risk in there from folks who don't have good credit standards, but I don't think it's a systemic issue. Where it gets a little more concerning would be if the Middle East crisis goes on for a long time, and you see a convergence of the concerns on AI valuations.
The opening text informs us that Soso, father of the family, was originally an engineer but has chosen to pack in his profession and take up farming partly because the Georgian government is offering attractive credit incentives, particularly for those who work the land near the border with Abkhazia, once part of Georgia but effectively a puppet state of Russia since the 2008 Russia-Georgia war.
US crude oil is on track to rise by 9% when trading resumes, according to data from the broker IG, after Tehran said on Saturday it had effectively closed the strait of Hormuz, a key oil chokepoint, reportedly prompting the halt of some oil shipments.
Never to be mistaken for a "smaller" version of its summer cousin, the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics kicked off with a characteristically bombastic opening ceremony that featured, among other things, bobble-headed representations of Italian composers, a '90s-core DJ spinning on an ice block, supersized golden rings that couldn't help but evoke Sonic the Hedgehog, and an extended Sabrina Impacciatore-anchored sequence that started on a verrrry low note with a seemingly generative-AI-produced animation, and eventually ended on a veerrry high note with Impacciatore doing of a full-on clown routine. The whole spectrum of the human experience, indeed.
At the outset of the Kalevala, Finland's national epic, a singer bemoans his separation from a beloved friend who grew up beside him. Today, the friends rarely meet "näillä raukoilla rajoilla, poloisilla Pohjan mailla" - lines which translator Keith Bosley renders "on these poor borders, the luckless lands of the North." The Kalevala, a poetic masterpiece of nearly 23,000 lines, first appeared in 1835. Now, nearly 200 years later, those "luckless lands of the North" are an increasingly tense border zone.
A series integrating border politics, accessibility, secrecy, and the complexities of human nature by New York-based photographer Michael Valiquette. Valiquette is a multidisciplinary artist, photographer, book maker, and graphic designer. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Siena College and has worked as a Graphic Designer and Photographer at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. For the last two years, Valiquette has been making images in "places that divide"-barriers (real and imagined) across Mexico, the United States, and Canada.
The US Dollar index remained near multi-year lows as geopolitical tensions eased and investor sentiment improved, indicating a shift in safe-haven demand.