I would actually love to see Saudi Arabia take the lead on food engineering. They might lack fresh water, but they have immense amounts of land and sun to play with.

The only alternative I can see is a mass reforestation project.

Caps on Russian oil price, restoration of original Ukraine borders, prosecution of Russian “war criminals”

It’s what you’d expect from a country that’s completely winning the war and not stuck in a stalemate while losing support

A fair bit, actually. China’s political system is basically a popularity system from bottom to top. At the lowest level, politicians only stay in power if their population is happy. This trickles up to the provincial level, where politicians again only stay in power if their population is happy. At a national level, the national leaders stay in power by building, essentially, large cabinets out of different provincial and regional leaders - thus, their entire position relies on keeping the provinces happy.

It’s not the perfect system, but Chinese citizens can fairly easily impact local and even provincial policy and, by extension, influence national policy (recently, by repealing the COVID lockdowns with mass protests).

The CCP isn’t an absolute monarchy or something. At the end of the day, it serves it’s people. The power of the Chinese economy is in its industrial capacity, after all, not in its wealth: the needs of the people need to be addressed to keep the country stable.

The Guardian is indeed Kremlin propaganda. Ever since Ole Jacob Sunde took over (with known ties to the Kremlin), The Guardian has very slightly shifted their editorial stance to be marginally more pro-Russian.

Do Australians have a choice? We in Canada have had to put up with American military bullshit while they’ve been looking at our Northwest Passage with suspiciously greedy eyes.

That’s our fucking sea, go get your own.

Source: 🤷‍♀️