If you follow Indian politics, chances are you expect news of political horse trading every major election cycle. Horse trading is the phenomenon of elected representatives switching their party affiliations, often in exchange for money or roles in government. When there are simultaneous elections in several states, and the time that lapses between elections less, the machinery of all our political parties is devoted to churning out strategies for winning.

On December 21, the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, spoke to Congress in an effort to get more financial and military support from the American government. Zelenskyy spoke of peace, freedom, and interconnection as the main goals of the Ukrainian fight but that Ukraine needed American resolve. Zelenskyy stated:

I’m rereading Brave New World as we’re kind of living in it. I loved it at school more and preferred it over 1984 because the characters were better developed, and the plot development more skillful, although each had a profound effect on me that has lasted throughout my life, and I often remember key scenes from each of them.

President Barack Obama returned from the 2010 G20 Summit held in Toronto having failed to convince world leaders that more “economic stimulus” was needed to cure what ails the world’s economies. Walking a seeming tightrope between too much spending and spiraling deficits, on the one hand, and too little spending and economic recession, on the other, world leaders reluctantly agreed to err on the side of fiscal and monetary caution and to halve deficits in three years.