Michael Brown, director of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) within the U.S. Department of Defense, declares war rather matter-of-factly. “It’s just not war in the way we typically think,” says the longtime Silicon Valley executive who transitioned into government service in 2016. But when adversaries get to the point of “shutting down pipelines and creating other damage,” he says, you’re seeing the “kinetic effects of cyber.” When Brown and I chat in August—at a picnic table in a glade of cedar trees behind a tan brick building in Mountain View, California, that houses both the 341st Readiness Division of the…

At an economic and finance conference on Tuesday, Chinese President Xi Jinping highlighted the need to advocate for moderate affluence for everyone — or the notion of “common prosperity.”  This concept, experts say, is the one to blame for the current regulatory check on technological firms. Significantly, this was Xi’s first public meeting after a two-week hiatus. Chinese officials usually spend the early days of August conducting political meetings at a resort in Beidaihe, approximately three hours east of Beijing. According to a CNBC translation, the conference should decide for “reasonable adjustments of unsustainable earnings of the wealthy and urging…

 In April 1983, the U.S. National Commission on Excellence in Education, a special commission appointed by the secretary of Education, conducted an in-depth analysis of the state of American education and revealed their conclusions in one of the most memorable titles of a government report ever: "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform." As governors and business leaders who serve on the board of Jobs for America's Graduates (JAG), a national organization that has always operated on a bipartisan basis and has served more than 1.5 million of the nation's most vulnerable youth over 40 years, we are…

Fought on 7 October 1571, the great sea battle between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire was seen as a pivotal moment in history. Have its consequences been exaggerated? The message arrived at Philip II’s pharaonic complex at El Escorial, still under construction, at 2pm on 31 October 1571, having travelled 3,500 kilometres at an average of 150 kilometres a day: a record. The king was at prayer, since it was All Souls Day, and, on his orders, the choir immediately sang the Te Deum. Philip’s chief minister hailed it as ‘the greatest naval victory since Pharaoh’s army drowned in the…

he pandemic downturn has heightened one of the gravest challenges facing Africa on its development path—the high costs of perception premiums—the overinflated risks perennially assigned to Africa, irrespective of its improving macroeconomic fundamentals, the global economic environment, and individual countries’ growth prospects. The global nature of the pandemic downturn offers an opportunity to scrutinize the extent to which perception premiums are shaping the distribution of sovereign risk across countries and regions; the disproportionately larger number of African nations affected by procyclical downgrades further supports the premium hypothesis. Over 56 percent of African countries rated by at least one of the big…