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12,000,000: This week, Rwanda became the first low-income country to provide universal eye care to its 12 million citizens. Two decades on from civil war, the would-be Singapore of Africa has an ambitious agenda to become a middle-income country by 2020.


2024: By 2024, AI could eliminate the jobs of 260,000 customer service representatives, 210,000 assemblers and fabricators, and 76,000 tractor-trailer drivers in the US. That’s just six years from now. Not 20.

70: The Taliban actively operates in 70 percent of the districts in Afghanistan, according to the BBC. America’s longest foreign warslogs on.

47: US oil production has returned to a record high last reached forty-seven years ago. Shale technology has put the US on course to overtake Saudi Arabia and Russia as the world’s largest crude producer.

4: In the past month, four prominent electoral challengers to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi have quit the presidential race, in large part because of pressure from the country’s security services.

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​CEO and Co-Founder of Anthropic Dario Amodei in Davos, Switzerland, on January 20, 2026.

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REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
One month ago, the White House made their feelings about artificial intelligence regulation clear: they didn’t want it. In its legislative framework for AI regulation, published March 20, the Trump administration took an accelerationist stance toward the burgeoning technology, aiming to largely give US companies free rein as a way to ensure they [...]
​A view of Iranian-flagged cargo ship Touska from USS Spruance (DDG 111) in a location given as the north Arabian Sea, in this screen capture from a video released on April 19, 2026.

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CENTCOM/Handout via REUTERS
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The US Senate is suddenly in play
The prevailing view a few months ago was that Democrats were likely to retake the House of Representatives in November's midterm elections. In recent decades, these cycles have tended to cut against the party in control of the White House, and Republicans held a razor-thin House majority in a political environment that was already tilting blue.The [...]