The recent news within the UK has been dominated by the Odyssey – not the latest cinematic retelling of Homer’s original poem – but Andy Burnham’s far less interesting journey from Westminster to Manchester and the long return back to Westminster to become Britain’s fifth prime minister in four years. He has promised a radical overhaul, but then Theresa May offered strong and stable government and Boris Johnson boasted about delivering a successful Brexit so it’s not a very high bar.
The Russian navy welcomed Burnham to his new role by carrying out live firing exercises off the south coast of the UK, just outside the country’s territorial waters. Shortly afterwards, Burnham appointed the former defence secretary John Healey as chancellor, signalling a greater emphasis on defence spending, so that joke may have backfired on the Russians.
Elsehwhere, parts of the Middle East and Europe are on fire, but for different reasons. In the Gulf, the US and Iran had ramped up their daily exchanges of military strikes but have suddenly paused this in the last few days with no explanation. There has been some suggestion that the Americans have simply run low on munitions but this may give space for more negotiations. At the same time, the Iranian-backed Houthi group that controls much of Yemen has escalated the situation with a maritime blockade in the Red Sea and attacks on two Saudi oil tankers. Most analysts believe that both sides will eventually return to the negotiations since neither has any other option. However, this assumes that common sense will prevail and there’s little sign of that.
Peter Hegseth, the toy action man figure that is cosplaying the role of America’s secretary of state for defence, has now put the cost to the US at around $37.5 billion. He has asked congress for a further $87 billion funding for the Pentagon, of which $67 billion would be earmarked for continuing operations in the Middle East.
Most countries around the world blame the Americans for the continuing cost to them of this war, particularly the higher oil prices and the rising inflation that will follow. Despite this the US has just applied a fresh round of tariffs to 60 countries. These effectively replace the previous tariffs after the Supreme Court ruled that the American president Donald Trump did not have the legal authority to apply tariffs on a whim. So the new tariffs are ostensibly a punishment for countries that have not done enough to prevent forced labour, though many of those countries, including the UK and EU, have done more on this issue than the US itself. In any case, the tariffs are really about Trump’s belief that he can jump start US manufacturing though so far the tariffs have mostly led to increased costs for US consumers.
The US has signed a deal to allow Saudi Arabia to develop a civilian nuclear programme, that might possibly lead to the Saudis later enriching uranium for military use. This is troubling on several levels. Firstly, there is the idea that the Americans can unilaterally decide who gets to have nuclear power; yes to the Saudis but no to the Iranians. This will potentially reshape the balance of power in the Middle East, which is always a risky thing to do. And it will absolutely make it much harder to strike some kind of a peace deal with Iran, which will now have no real incentive to give up its own nuclear ambitions.
And then there is the proliferation of yet more nuclear plants, and possibly more nuclear weapons and all the inherent dangers that go with that. Perhaps the Americans themselves also came to realise these risks as they have since made the deal conditional on the Saudis’ implementing the Abraham accords to normalise trade with Israel. This is too big an ask for the Saudis without a resolution to the Palestinian issues in Gaza and the West Bank, where there have been more fires set, with Israeli settlers accused of seizing more Palestinian land.
Just in case anyone is unaware of the dangers of nuclear energy, there have been continued strikes around the Zaporizhia nuclear plant in occupied Ukraine, with a drone killing the chief engineer. Ukrainian strikes have crippled much of Russia’s oil processing plants, further pushing up global oil prices. The Ukraine war is pioneering a new form of warfare, with more automated drones and robots now routinely deployed, something that the Iranians are also making use of in their own conflict.
India is feeling the heat from a different kind of fire, with the Cockroach Janta Party having forced the resignation of the Education secretary Dharmendra Pradhan over a scandal relating to exam papers. The Cockroach movement is a serious challenge to prime minister Modi’s government, which has drawn much of its power through pursuing divisive pro-Hindu policies. The Cockroaches are mainly young people who have united across caste and religious divides, leaving Modi looking old and out of touch.
In Europe – where we are quite used to out-of-touch leaders – there have been actual fires in several countries, including parts of the UK, as well as Spain and France, where multiple wildfires are burning out of control. Some 200,000 people have been evacuated in the Gironde region of France with fears that the fires will reach the city of Bordeaux.
This is also leading to questions about how we use water, and particularly the huge volumes of water used to cool data centres. Many governments are looking to expand the use of Artifical intelligence to drive further economic growth, and this has led to a rapid increase in the number of such data centres being built. But AI is not without its own dangers, as highlighted by a recent autonomous attack from an OpenAI system. An AI agent broke out of a sandboxed testing environment and attacked Hugging Face, a company that specialises in developing machine learning systems, in its effort to find solutions to a benchmarking test.
Such incidents are surprisingly common with little sign that the AI industry fully understands the dangers of this technology. If anything OpenAI’s response can be characterised as “Dude, shit happens, just chill out and think of our sponsors.” That’s probably the best approach to take when reading newspapers these days.
Nessan Cleary 
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