4: Italy has reformed its voting rules four times since 1993, and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is now considering a fifth change. Meloni wants to end the first-past-the-post system, which remains in place for a third of seats. The goal: pre-emptively halting a left-wing alliance at the next election in 2027.
$7: As protests over Iran’s worsening economic crisis rage on, the government has come up with a plan it hopes will cool tempers: handing cash to citizens worth $7 a month. Demonstrations began after Iran’s currency lost more than half its value against the dollar and inflation topped past 42%. Seven dollars may not cut it for most Iranians, whose basic expenses start at $200 a month.
6: Local authorities in the Swiss Alps acknowledged that they hadn’t carried out any safety inspections for nearly six years at the bar where 40 people died on New Year’s Eve as a result of a fire. “We bitterly regret this,” said the local mayor. Swiss investigators believe sparklers used in the basement initiated the blaze.
10: The Pentagon is commissioning a review of female soldiers serving in ground-combat roles, affecting thousands of women in the Army and Marines. The memo calls for military leaders to provide “all available metrics describing that individual's readiness and ability to deploy,” 10 years after the US lifted all remaining restrictions on women serving in combat roles.
Is China’s economic model reaching a breaking point? In GZERO’s 2026 Top Risks livestream, Cliff Kupchan, Chairman of Global Macro at Eurasia Group, highlights mounting pressures on the Chinese economy.
2026 is a tipping point year. The biggest source of global instability won’t be China, Russia, Iran, or the ~60 conflicts burning across the planet – the most since World War II. It will be the United States.
While surgeons remain fully in control, technological advances are expanding the use of surgical robots in operating rooms. As adoption accelerates, so do the expectations for patient outcomes and surgical care. Track medical innovation trends with Bank of America Institute.
Europe enters 2026 under mounting strain as it confronts external threats, internal political pressures, and a weakening relationship with the United States. In GZERO’s 2026 Top Risks livestream, Mujtaba Rahman, Managing Director for Europe at Eurasia Group, describes a continent that is “exhausted, fatigued, weak, and vulnerable.”