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Andrew Osborn, ReutersPresident Vladimir Putin has read long-term ally Armenia the riot act: persist in wanting to join the European Union and you can kiss goodbye to cheap Russian oil and gas. The Russian leader
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Lately, it seems like each time I reach out to an old acquaintance through social media, I’m met with a page that reads, “This account doesn’t exist anymore.” Many Gen-Z’ers are quietly quitting the platforms
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Jackie Calmes, Tribune News ServiceCould there be a better metaphor for the plight of the out-of-power Democratic Party than the fact that it's now a week into debating how the party screwed up an "autopsy"
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The world is currently witnessing deadly wars and conflicts in different regions, causing immense human suffering and destruction. However, in my opinion, the greatest threat to the existence of humanity is not war but climate
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India’s power capacity to double to 1121 GW by 2035-36 led by a huge transition to solar energy, according to the Central Electricity Authority (CEA)’s midterm review of the 20th Electric Power Survey (EPS) released
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A gap is widening between two key measures of underlying US inflation. Unfortunately for newly confirmed Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh, the one rising faster is the central bank’s preferred gauge, further squashing any hope for interest rate cuts. The Bureau of Economic Analysis last week released April’s personal consumption expenditures (PCE) figures, one of two closely watched measures of price changes across a wide range of goods and services. The other is the consumer price index (CPI). Annual headline PCE inflation rose to 3.8% from 3.5% in March, on the back of soaring energy prices. Core inflation, which strips out volatile food and energy costs, rose to 3.3% from 3.2%. These numbers were in line with expectations, but are still uncomfortable for Warsh. Annual measures of headline and core PCE and CPI inflation have been above 2% for more than five years, and President Donald Trump’s tariffs and the Iran war now seem likely to extend that to six years and beyond. Crucially, a wedge is developing between core PCE, which is now up to 3.3%, and CPI, which is running at 2.8%. It’s a rare phenomenon which will trouble policymakers the longer it persists, and frustrate President Donald Trump, who has made no secret of his desire to see rates cut. In general terms, PCE is the broader of the two as it covers urban and rural communities, while the CPI only includes urban households. The PCE index also includes expenditures made on behalf of consumers, such as employers’ health insurance payments. In the three decades through the Covid-19 pandemic, core PCE was always below 3% and rarely rose above core CPI. But this relationship has flipped in recent months. One major factor may be the AI boom. Dean Maki, chief economist at hedge fund Point72, notes that computer software and accessories have a much larger weighting in the core PCE index. This series is rising at an annual rate of around 14%, lifted by the AI capex splurge this year. If the latest AI capex forecasts for some $800bn in spending this year are accurate— a rise of 80% on the previous year, according to Morgan Stanley — then this source of pressure on prices is unlikely to ease any time soon. Another factor is the classification of food prices. Core CPI excludes all food purchases, while the core PCE index includes “food services, that is food purchased for off-premises consumption,” as the Cleveland Fed describes it. This latter category of food prices away from home rose 3.6% in April, Maki notes. The Philadelphia Fed’s closely watched quarterly survey of professional forecasters shows core PCE this quarter is expected to average an annualized 3.4%, up from a previous forecast of 2.7% - a higher inflation outcome and bigger upward revision than the equivalent core CPI forecasts. This may explain why Warsh has indicated an openness to looking beyond core PCE. He has indicated a preference for the Dallas and Cleveland Feds’ “trimmed mean” inflation gauges that remove extreme price moves at the margins to give a clearer picture of how underlying prices change from month to month. For years, especially during the Alan Greenspan Fed era in the 2000s, it was widely assumed that the benchmark for the Fed’s 2% inflation target was annual core PCE. But according to the Fed’s website, the 2% target is now “measured by the annual change in the price index for personal consumption expenditures.” That suggests policymakers are looking at headline PCE, although confusingly, both measures have become interchangeable among Fed officials, economists and market participants in recent years.
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In Abu Dhabi, crews are pouring concrete for a five-gigawatt AI campus, the largest outside the United States. Saudi Arabia’s national champion, HUMAIN, is racing to build gigawatts of compute and has launched an initiative (SAMAI) to train a million citizens in AI use; the kingdom now ranks first in the world for government AI ambition on the Tortoise Global AI Index. QIA-backed QAI and Brookfield have launched a $20bn AI infrastructure venture, while the UAE’s MGX investment platform is investing across the AI stack, from semiconductors to applications. By 2025, 84% of organisations across the GCC reported using AI in at least one business function, up from 64 percent two years earlier. National strategies project substantial gains in non-oil economic output from AI over the coming decade. The Gulf is not alone, investment in AI is almost ubiquitous, as countries fear being left behind in the AI revolution. Fears that tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Midjourney will lead to job losses have failed to materialise to the extent feared. However, the much vaunted productivity gains have also failed to materialise. Yet other, perhaps more important concerns remain, such as the impact of AI on humanity, and crucially, our brains, and the essence of what makes us human — the soul. By “soul” I mean the spiritual breath of life placed within humans. For some that may be the divine or immortal entity that exists beyond the material world. For most it will be the entity that possesses consciousness, free will, and a moral capacity. At a recent event held in Education City by WISE, entitled Trust Me, I’m an Algorithm?, we discussed the impact of AI on higher ed. Specifically, we talked about the need to harness AI and avoid the type of cognitive offloading that AI is allowing. (Cognitive offloading is where we ‘offload’ our thinking to machines, theoretically sacrificing a learning opportunity). Yet the longer I spend in higher education the more despondent I become. I worry what dependence on AI is doing to our ability to think independently and critically. When I teach students I use a useful metaphor about the jewel wasp put forward by Matt Simons in *Plight of the Living Dead: What Real-Life Zombies Reveal about Our World — and Ourselves. The jewel wasp hunts cockroaches several times its size, but it does not kill them. It stings twice, once to paralyse the front legs, then precisely into the brain, depositing venom in two spots that govern the roach’s drive to move and flee. The active ingredient includes dopamine. Dopamine is the same neurotransmitter the human brain releases at a social media notification. It’s often referred to as the feel good chemical. The roach is not injured; it can walk, right itself, and run if it chooses. What it loses is the impulse to use those intact abilities on its own behalf. It is, by every sign, content, grooming itself calmly as if nothing is wrong. But it has effectively become a zombie. When the wasp tugs the stump of an antenna, the roach follows it into a burrow where the wasp’s larva will eat it alive, and never resists. The roach becomes a living host, placated through dopamine, directed by an external entity that uses its body as a host. The fairly obvious comparison is that social media, and now AI, are the things that are slowly supplanting our ability to think independently and critically, in many cases feeding us dopamine as we celebrate the technologies that may be responsible for the decline of our ability to act independently. We may be alive, but we are slowly dying, succumbing to the power of external technologies. The empirical work describes the negative impacts of AI. In a 2026 study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Oxford, and UCLA, participants solved ordinary problems, fractions, reading comprehension, some with an AI assistant that could solve them outright. When it was removed, those participants were far more likely to give up or answer wrong, an effect that appeared after about ten minutes. As co-author Michiel Bakker of MIT frames it, persistence, the willingness to stay with a hard problem, is what lets a person learn at all. It is the first faculty to atrophy, and the one the others depend on. A skill that goes unused inevitably decays. A separate study from MIT’s Media Lab recorded the brain activity of people writing essays: those who let a language model write showed lower engagement and weaker memory signatures, and afterwards could not reliably explain what they had submitted. They produced competent work and retained nothing from producing it. What are we as humans if we cannot remember the work we produce? Writing is thinking, and thinking is a key element of what defines our humanity. The common argument is that we should ban the tools. The issue is how to frame the choice as one between AI that replaces human reasoning and intelligence amplification (IA) that enhances it, between a tool that returns the answer and one that questions, and sometimes withholds it so the user has to think. The first is cheaper, easier, and requires us to use less of our brain. The second is the only one that leaves the user more capable. The thing is, it is easier to say this than realise it in practise, but these are key questions that we need to grapple with. The Gulf’s AI race is usually framed in terms of economic diversification, geopolitical influence, and technological leadership. But beneath the language of infrastructure and productivity lies a deeper question about what these systems are doing to us as human beings. The danger is not that AI becomes human, but that humans become less so; less thoughtful, less reflective, less capable of independent thought. Such elements are central to creativity, morality, and learning itself. They are central to our identity too, whether as humans, or what makes us uniquely Khaliji. This does not mean rejecting AI. It means recognising that convenience is not always progress, and that intelligence amplification must take precedence over intellectual substitution. Training people in AI also means drawing attention to the deeper questions about the human condition and AI. The question for the Gulf is therefore not simply whether it can be a leader in the AI revolution, but what steps it is taking to prevent eroding the very human capacities it hopes to cultivate.The writer is an Associate Professor of Media Nalaytics at Northwestern University in Qatar, a Unesco Fellow, and author of several books including Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East.
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Caught between China’s rapid military rise and growing doubts about the US focus on a region it has long dominated, Indo-Pacific nations are racing to arm themselves, and each other. At Asia’s premier defence forum earlier this week, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth pressed regional partners to shoulder more of the security burden. Yet, he faced persistent concerns that US priorities may be drifting, with conflict in Iran competing for attention. “We can do two things at one time,” Hegseth told the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, a free-wheeling gathering of global defence chiefs, military and intelligence officials. His Japanese counterpart Shinjiro Koizumi said he believed the US commitment was “unwavering”, while acknowledging that some countries may still underestimate its resolve. In interviews with Reuters on the sidelines of the annual gathering, regional defence chiefs and military officers made clear the push was on to do more with each other beyond the traditional US umbrella. “All the defence secretaries here present are unanimous in the need to make agile and speedy upscaling of their own individual defence capabilities,” Philippines’ Defence Secretary Gilberto Teodoro told Reuters. He described it as “buttressing” the US’s traditional role, with Manila deepening defence ties with partners such as Japan, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. “The commitment of the United States becomes more solid when more actors, at least in the deterrence phase, come in, because there is a common threat.” Japan is positioning itself as a hub for that broader network. Koizumi said Tokyo aims to act as a “connecting point” for closer regional co-operation beyond China. In April, Japan unveiled its biggest overhaul of defence export rules in decades, scrapping restrictions on overseas arms sales and opening the way for exports of warships, missiles and other weapons. Singapore Defence Minister Chan Chun Sing said in the current environment “we should ... develop flexible partnerships with like-minded countries forming coalitions of the able and willing.” This, he said, would help “bridge gaps, test ideas, find paths in new and uncharted territories.”
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Wildfires caused more financial damage in 2025 than in any other year, with catastrophic fires in the US, South Korea and Europe killing about 90 people and forcing roughly 300,000 to evacuate, a new study
