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Analysis

The deep, long-form source work on the structures that move money, power, and risk. The distilled takeaways live in Articles. Where a piece touches the country-risk scores, it cites them; where it doesn't, it doesn't pretend to. RSS.

Analysis

Refresh: two African wars reopened and the oil war reached the exporters' budgets

Fifteen days, six parallel sweeps. Ethiopia's Tigray war reignited as the TPLF seized three airports. South Sudan's Kiir dissolved the whole unity government before December elections. The US-Iran war's damage landed on the oil exporters, with Saudi growth forecast at minus 3.6 percent and Iraq facing its toughest budget in decades, while Oman gained as its ports bypass Hormuz. Oracle invoked force majeure on a data-centre lease. Thirty-one countries, forty-four sub-factors.

  • live-data
  • refresh
  • ethiopia
Analysis

Rebuilding the internet

A from-scratch internet already exists. Reticulum moves traffic over the existing internet, LoRa, packet radio, WiFi, or anything else that carries bytes, and no ISP assigns its addresses, no DNS resolves them, and no company sits in the middle, a network owned and run by the people on it. What it did not have was the layer that makes a network somewhere you can live, the search engine, the news, the maps, the clock, the encyclopedia, the store. This is the account of building that layer, service by service, and how building a search engine kept forcing the next one into existence.

  • reticulum
  • mesh
  • self-hosting
Analysis

Refresh: the pause that failed, and the war that got wider

Nine days, six parallel sweeps, and the biggest board move yet. A ceasefire proposal died on the table, a US strike pause collapsed, and the war reached Egypt, Iraq and a refinery on the Saudi coast. A hawkish Fed rattled markets, a Russian missile landed a hundred kilometers inside Poland, and a central bank governor in Jakarta walked out without a word. Forty-nine countries moved or were re-verified.

  • live-data
  • refresh
  • iran
Analysis

Off by an hour and no errors were raised

The Sunshine Protection Act passed the House on 14 July 2026 by 308 to 117. It does not leave the clock on the summer setting; it redefines what standard time means, turning the string EST from UTC-5 into UTC-4 and Guam from UTC+10 into UTC+11. That distinction is the whole story, because the offset is not stored in one place. It is copied into the IANA database, into every operating system, into a dozen language runtimes that each ship their own copy, into vendored data files inside applications, and into firmware that will never be updated again. The last time Congress moved daylight time it cost somewhere between $350 million and a billion dollars to patch, and that change was easier than this one. This is how the change actually reaches your code, why the broken data will still validate, and what it costs.

  • daylight-saving-time
  • time-zones
  • software-infrastructure
Analysis

Refresh: a courtroom, a tariff, and a ceasefire on the table

A one-day window, so most of the board held. But the day carried three things worth recording: a US federal judge ordered the National Guard out of Washington, reversing the deployment we had scored as a fresh institutional low; Washington hit Canada with 50% tariffs; and, even as the tenth straight night of strikes fell on Iran, a 10-day ceasefire proposal reached Tehran, the exact exit the framework refused to score away. Seventeen countries moved.

  • live-data
  • refresh
  • iran
Analysis

Refresh: the war that didn't break

Last pass caught the ceasefire cycle snapping into escalation. This one records the escalation refusing to break: a ninth consecutive night of US strikes on Iran, the first American combat deaths of the war, Iran hitting Kuwait's water and power for the first time, and the Houthis opening a maritime blockade on Saudi Arabia. Around it, the EU froze the Russia oil cap rather than let it lapse, Nicaragua's Ortega declared there would be no more elections, DR Congo's Ebola outbreak began outrunning its own contact-tracing, and a claim we excluded on sourcing turned out to be true. Thirty-four countries moved.

  • live-data
  • refresh
  • hormuz
Analysis

Refresh: the week the cycle broke

Three days after the last pass, the ceasefire cycle stopped cycling: three consecutive nights of US strikes across Iran, retaliation on six Gulf and Levant states, and a reinstated naval blockade with a transit toll the UN's maritime agency calls baseless. Around it, the EU formally opened Ukraine's and Moldova's next accession cluster the same week its Russia sanctions package failed, Colombia's rupture reached the inauguration itself, Venezuela's constitutional clock ran out unanswered, and Washington extended a military deployment in its own capital through the next inauguration. Forty countries moved.

  • live-data
  • refresh
  • hormuz
Analysis

Refresh: the ceasefire that keeps collapsing, and a wider net

Four days after the last pass, the US-Iran ceasefire turned over again. It follows the same announce-then-collapse cycle it runs almost weekly: Hormuz tanker strikes, OFAC revoking the oil waiver the same day, US strikes on ninety Iranian sites, Iranian retaliation on four Gulf states, and then talks resuming. Around it, a fuller sweep found Russia turned fuel importer, Colombia's transition ruptured, Syria came off the terror list, Ethiopia and Eritrea mobilized, and a European instability cluster surfaced. This pass widened the net past the prior watch-list and kept every source it could verify.

  • live-data
  • refresh
  • hormuz
Analysis

Refresh: the reversible ceasefire, and the news we stopped throwing away

The US-Iran ceasefire proved repeatedly reversible. A remote MoU and a 60-day roadmap were punctuated by strikes on US bases in Kuwait and Bahrain and fresh tanker attacks, even as real sanctions relief landed and Hormuz volumes recovered. Russia's fuel and budget crisis deepened, Venezuela took a twin shock, and Peru and Colombia certified contested elections. This pass also starts a persistent news store behind the ratings.

  • live-data
  • refresh
  • hormuz