Ilona Szabó de Carvalho at TED Countdown Summit 2025. June 16 – 18, 2025, Nairobi, Kenya. Photo: Humphrey Gateri / TED   What if the future of global power didn’t depend on extracting and depleting the planet,  but instead on restoring and regenerating it? That…

In Brazil’s Yanomami Indigenous Territory and across other parts of the Amazon Basin, illegal gold mining has metastasized into a transnational criminal enterprise. What starts with illegal deforestation and mercury poisoning ends with laundered gold flowing into global supply chains. The trade finances organized crime, corrupt officials,…

Haiti is sliding into the abyss. Violence has intensified since the beginning of the year as gangs continued to overrun communities and paralyze basic services. The capital, Port-au-Prince, and several other cities are now largely controlled by powerful gang coalitions, most notably Viv Amsanm and Gran Grif. The country’s Transitional Presidential Council (TPC), formed with CARICOM over a year…

Brazil’s federal police recently pulled back the curtain on a criminal web that had infiltrated the country’s fuel distribution chains. What looked like ordinary gas stations were, in fact, outposts of a vast laundering machine, washing dirty money with diesel and ethanol. According to Justice Minister Ricardo…

Earlier this month, Juliette Dorson, a 50-year-old Haitian caterer, was shot while working an event in Port-au-Prince. Her business partner, Luc, died in the attack. She survived, but barely. For residents of Haiti’s capital, such horrors are tragically routine. Gangs now control four-fifths of the city, wielding not…

The global development industry is facing a reckoning. Long reliant on Western donors, the sector is grappling with deep and sudden cuts to official development assistance. The crisis in aid affects tens of thousands of workers and service users with cascading effects on food security, poverty reduction, health and education provision,…

On a gray afternoon in November 2021, Metropolitan Police officers pulled over a vehicle on a highway north of London, acting on a tip about a suspected drug deal. In the car, they found 250,000 pounds in cash, according to the investigators involved. A sweep…

In a remarkable achievement, Nigerian policy analyst Mr Dapo Oyewole has received the Richard von Weizsäcker Fellowship Award at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, Germany. Oyewole, who is the pioneer Secretary-General of the Conference of Speakers and Presidents of African Union Legislatures (CoSPAL), remarked…

Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa moved quickly to impose the rule of law immediately after his surprise election victory in 2023. In the short-term, the results of the country’s youngest ever leader were impressive, including a reported 18% decline in murder in 2024. The president’s administration also…

As policymakers and tech luminaries descend on Paris for next week’s AI Action Summit, they are already finding their carefully crafted agenda upended by an unexpected gatecrash: DeepSeek. The Chinese firm claims to have developed a large language model rivaling the best American offerings, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT,…