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Picard

World

Trump ‘flips & flops’ with Iran between making a deal and threats to attack in ‘devastating fashion’

François Picard is pleased to welcome Barbara Slavin, Distinguished Fellow at the Stimson Center. She describes the US-Iran conflict as a dangerous combination of military escalation, diplomatic ambiguity and political calculation. Slavin sees an absence of true diplomacy: The recent indirect contacts between Washington and Tehran, mediated by Qatar, has been too limited and too fragile to produce any serious breakthrough. For her, this amounts to “kabuki diplomacy”: they half engage while positioning themselves against any appearance of compromise.

World

‘Most powerful force is human potential’: Ukraine's military prioritises new tactics, technologies

François Picard is pleased to welcome Kyrylo Berkal, Deputy Commander of Ukraine's Third Army Corps, He sees Ukraine’s struggle centred on human potential, adaptation and will. While Ukraine is outnumbered, outgunned and sometimes outflanked, their answer is to make human initiative a weapon: giving soldiers and sergeants room to innovate, developing technology from the tactical level upward, and trying to outthink their adversary. Berkal says that Operation Vivaldi embodies that philosophy.

World

When climate mitigation becomes politicised: The Guardian uncovers IPCC links to Saudi oil industry

François Picard is pleased to welcome Eoghan Gilmartin, an award-winning investigative journalist and part of The Guardian team whose investigation examined links between IPCC authors and Saudi Arabia’s oil industry, including Saudi Aramco. Their findings take us to the intersection of climate science, political and economic interests, and institutional credibility, and into the politically consequential terrain of climate mitigation: how societies decide to respond to climate change.

World

Trump admin's hardline deportation policy an 'attempt to break the global refugee and asylum system'

François Picard is pleased to welcome Washington Post national security reporter Adam Taylor. The Forbidden Stories consortium, involving France 24 and 25 other media outlets, has spent six months investigating the thousands of people abruptly deported from the United States to third countries, amid concerns over due process and their ability to challenge their removal. The investigation examines how the Trump administration has made deportation a major focus of both US immigration and foreign policy.

World

Intent not malicious, it's indifference: Thousands, if not millions, of books sent to AI woodchipper

François Picard is pleased to welcome investigative journalist Emanuel Maiberg, Co-founder of 404 Media. As we embark on AI's uncharted waters, Maiberg has made a most unexpected discovery:: the mass acquisition, dismemberment and scanning of rare books for use as training data. His investigation reveals a globalised and deliberately opaque supply chain in which books purchased through anonymous marketplaces can ultimately arrive at large-scale scanning facilities, where their bindings are removed so that pages can be processed at great speed.