Pär-Ola Zander

Make no mistake: destroying world-class universities, like the US just did with Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, isn't just an attack on Iran but it's literally an attack on all of us, on all of humanity. It's not Iran that "won" when Maryam Mirzakhani made her discoveries that won her a Fields Medal: it's all of mathematics, and everything mathematics is used for. Human progress won, technology won, we all won. It's the same type of stuff the Mongols did during the sack of Baghdad and their destruction of the House of Wisdom: we ALL lost something irreplaceable back then, entire fields of human knowledge set back. That's what bombing a university does. It doesn't just destroy buildings. It destroys us, all of us.

TRUMP: EPSTEIN FURY 2/28: War is about nukes 3/1: Declared victory 3/3: War is about US elections 3/4: War is about human rights 3/7: We’re winning war 3/11: Declared victory 5x 3/14: War is won, allies need to help 3/13-15: War is won & liberating LGBTQ 3/16: Khamenei is gay

Something is happening to journalism. And it’s ugly. This week the Washington Post gutted itself—over 300 people laid off, offices shuttered, including the bureau in Ukraine. The despair was loud and real. I feel for every colleague who got the axe. I wrote op-eds for the Wapo for a year and was genuinely proud of it. Then they quietly stopped running non-staff opinion pieces. That was the first loud warning sign. The paper was turning in a different direction. From then on, voices about Ukraine mostly came from safe, Washington-based commentators—people who said exactly what the algorithms and the dominant online mood wanted to hear. Convenient. Predictable. Approved. Here’s the harder truth: convenient journalists have always existed, but now the addiction is different. Too many reporters are hooked on social media the same way their audiences are. They crave approval so badly they won’t touch anything that might get them ratioed, attacked, or called out—even when it’s true. They repeat lines they don’t believe because the alternative is being uncomfortable, ostracized, or “canceled.” They end up prisoners of whatever the current consensus happens to be, even when that consensus is visibly detaching from reality. On Ukraine especially, the journalists who say the uncomfortable things—the ones who get piled on—are frequently telling you more truth than the ones staying safely “on message” for certain politicians and their online cheering squads. Journalism is in freefall. Trust numbers are grim: Gallup’s latest (2025) shows only 28% of adults have real confidence in newspapers, TV, and radio to report fairly and accurately. Historic low. The old business model is broken, social media has rewired how people consume information, and audiences have walked away. Blaming Jeff Bezos or any one villain misses the point. The problem is deeper. Until we face why journalism can’t sustain itself financially and why it keeps losing trust, the bloodbaths will continue—and the truth will keep getting quieter.

Almost all discussions I read about China focus on its military expansions—fleet growth in the South China Sea, advanced missiles, and tensions around Taiwan. But a more fundamental risk lies in China's concerted efforts toward technological independence and superiority. The true concern for Western interests is not immediate armed conflict, but interconnected initiatives that could undermine economic foundations, innovation edges, and strategic positions: scalable, cost-effective nuclear fusion; domestic chip lithography rivaling ASML's standards; indigenous AI hardware; and AI systems potentially outstripping Western counterparts. Unveiled in late 2025, the 15th Five-Year Plan shifts toward "high-quality development" and technological self-reliance. It channels resources into "new productive forces" with support for AI and chips, aims to broaden AI use across sectors, and foster original breakthroughs in foundational tech. Energy resilience is also key, with pledges for sustainable technologies like fusion. Central to China's energy strategy is its push for nuclear fusion reactors providing abundant, clean, and eventually cheap power. As of 2026, China leads globally, with facilities like the EAST tokamak sustaining plasma toward commercial viability. Funding has surged from $1.5 billion to $13 billion since 2023, supporting public and private efforts. The 15th Plan commits to "extraordinary measures" for fusion. Viable fusion could grant China energy self-sufficiency and near-limitless cheap energy for industry and computing. China's ambition to match or exceed ASML in chip-making equipment underscores its semiconductor self-reliance drive. By 2026, reports indicate a prototype system which crosses the EUV threshold, that will eventually enable advanced chip production. Integrated into the plan's chip focus, it prioritizes manufacturing autonomy. While doubts remain about quickly closing the gap, the prototype represents substantive progress toward ending ASML's dominance. Alongside lithography, China advances homegrown AI chips to challenge Nvidia. In 2026, companies like Huawei are closing the gap. The plan reinforces this through investments, aiming to bridge the compute divide—U.S. at 75% global AI capacity versus China's 15%. China's AI chip sector is booming, projected to exceed $31 billion by 2030, risking market erosion for firms like Nvidia as China builds separate ecosystems. China's AI goals extend to systems superior to Western ones. By 2026, models like DeepSeek demonstrate efficient performance, with deployment leads via the "AI+ Initiative" across industries. The plan sets targets for AI integration in core sectors by 2027, prioritizing practical application. Though the West holds frontier leads, China's scale advantages could reverse this, with revenue surges signaling upgrades. Each initiative is strong alone, but interlinked under the 15th Plan, they pose a powerful threat. The West risks complete tech subordination. The implications are more than just far-reaching.

This is largely being ignored but it's easily one of the biggest China news of the year. What China is doing with Hainan - a huge island (50 times the size of Singapore!) - is pretty extraordinary: they're basically making it into a completely different jurisdiction from the rest of the country, and an extremely attractive entry gate for the Chinese market. You can now import most products in the world (74% of all goods) entirely duty free into Hainan. And, if you transform the product and add 30% value locally, you can then send it to the rest of mainland China completely tariff-free. So for instance: import Australian beef into Hainan tax free. Slice it and package it for hotpot in Hainan: it can enter all mainland supermarkets duty-free. They also have insanely low corporate tax rates: 15%, lower than Hong Kong (16.5%) and Singapore (17%) or the rest of the mainland (25%). That's not all, Hainan now has different rules from the rest of China in dozens of areas: HEALTH: Basically the rule is that if a medicine or medical device is approved by regulatory agencies anywhere in the world, it can be used in Hainan - even if banned on the mainland. Which undoubtedly makes it THE place in the world with the widest range of medical treatments available. NO FIREWALL: Companies registered in Hainan can apply for unrestricted global internet access OPEN EDUCATION: Foreign universities can open campuses without a Chinese partner VISA-FREE: 86 countries get visa-free entry, probably one of the most open places in the world CAPITAL: Special accounts let money flow freely to and from overseas - normal mainland forex restrictions don't apply So they're running a pretty extraordinary "radical openness" experiment there. They're basically building a "greatest hits" of global free zones: Singapore's tax regime, Switzerland's medical access, Dubai's visa policy - all in one giant tropical island attached to the 1.4 billion people Chinese consumer market.

🇨🇳 A woman in China tried to hog a parking spot for her husband. So the driver just got out of the car and walked away and let his car finish the job.

4x greater probability of being born in Africa than in Europe, North America (inc. Mexico), and Australasia combined. 11 babies have been born in Antarctica to date (all Argentines and Chileans).

Giving new life to an old book [📹 WainwrightBookbinding]

Afghanistan has reportedly completely shut down its Internet as of yesterday. Dystopianism aside, it's a fascinating sociological experiment. Is this sustainable in 2025 - even in one of the world's most backwards and least literate countries?