This Week's Brief

It’s been a week of a lot of global noise. Headlines everywhere, rupture almost nowhere.

That’s usually the moment when the real story hides in plain sight.

This edition connects the dots. If you see the through-lines too, drop a comment, and share it widely.

These are the stories that caught our eye, cause nothing distracts us from connecting the dots!

📌 EU–Mercosur: 25 years later

📌 EU–India finally ink a deal: 19 years later

📌 Everyone’s going to Beijing

📌 China, Iran, and a crowded sky

📌 Meloni’s ICE Headache

📌 Europe’s Far Right Blinks

📌 Japan: Voting But Snowed In

📌 English Church Gets First Woman Archbishop of Canterbury

📌 South Asian Savers Have The Last Laugh: Silver & Gold at Records

📌 Quiet Luxury Doesn’t Do Well In Uncertainty

📌 AI News This Week Is Wild: Connect the dots with Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft & Google

Politics This Week

We kick off with a quick scan of the world’s latest trade-offs, handshakes and hard edges.

EU–Mercosur: 25 years later

After a quarter-century of negotiations, the EU and Mercosur have a signed free trade agreement. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wants bridges to Latin America built sooner rather than later, starting with the EU’s largest-ever trade deal. Covered: all 27 EU member states plus the Mercosur countries: Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.

EU–India finally ink a deal: 19 years later

Nineteen years later, the EU–India trade deal is also officially signed, sealed and set in motion by von der Leyen and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi with agricultural caveats accepted to keep New Delhi sweet.

Everyone’s going to Beijing

Last year, Latin American leaders made a beeline for Beijing. In 2025, after Canada’s visit it is Europe’s turn. Finland’s quick visit resulted in Helsinki being told its companies are welcome to “swim freely” in China’s “vast market”, it’s now the UK’s turn. The British Prime Minister is in Bejing with a 60-strong delegation of officials and business leaders, apparently keen to fina a newer “special relationship.”

China, Iran, and a crowded sky

As US aircraft carriers move towards Iran and US Central Command head General Brad Cooper visits Israel, Beijing is reportedly sending military planes to Tehran. Israeli intelligence cited by newspapers claim more than 16 Chinese military cargo aircraft landed in Iran’s capital within 56 hours. The cargo reportedly included advanced air defence systems, electronic warfare equipment and possibly anti-ship missiles, aimed at strengthening Iran’s defences against a potential US–Israeli strike.

China insists this falls within the scope of its long-term strategic partnership with Iran, including the “25-year agreement” involving major Chinese investment in exchange for oil. In 2024, China–Iran trade reached USD 13.37 billion, with Chinese exports at USD 8.93 billion and imports at USD 4.44 billion.

Meloni’s ICE Headache

Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, self-styled Trump Whisperer of Europe — has a new problem. Italians are furious over confirmation that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents will assist with security at next month’s Winter Olympics.

Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani attempted damage control: “I have been harder than anyone else in Italy on [the ICE raids] … but it’s not like the SS are coming.” Milan’s mayor, whose city hosts several Olympic events, was less diplomatic: ICE, he said, is “not welcome in Milan… This is a militia that kills.” He added: “Can’t we just say no to Trump for once?”

What began as a suggestion that ICE might assist with US Vice President JD Vance’s security has since been confirmed as a far broader operation.

ICE later clarified its role, stating that its Homeland Security Investigations unit would support the US State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service and Italian authorities to counter transnational criminal threats — with all operations remaining under Italian control.

Europe’s Far Right Blinks

Germany’s far-right AfD is distancing itself from Donald Trump. Leader Alice Weidel said Trump’s Greenland posture “violated a fundamental campaign promise: not to interfere in other countries”. Co-chair Tino Chrupalla criticised Trump’s “Wild West methods”. Similar, if more politely phrased unease, is now emerging among far-right parties in France, Italy and the UK.

Voting, But Snowed In

Japan’s snap general election is already colliding with reality and the weather. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi called the vote less than four months into office, hoping to bolster her fragile coalition. Instead, record snowfall has raised fears of low turnout. Ten people have already died due to extreme conditions, campaigns are scaling back, and logistics are strained by the shortest-ever gap, just 16 days between dissolving parliament and election day on 8 February.

A First for England’s 500-Year Church

Dame Sarah Elisabeth Mullally has been confirmed as the new Archbishop of Canterbury, becoming the first woman to lead the Anglican Church in its 500-year history. A lone protestor was escorted out during the televised ceremony. The Church of England also confirmed it will take no further action regarding a complaint about Mullally’s handling of an abuse case in London — an allegation first raised in 2020 that was never fully examined.

Business This Week

All That Glitters

Stick with gold and silver. South Asian savers may yet have the last laugh. Silver surged to triple-digit territory this week, hitting a record USD 117.69 and extending a rally of over 50% year-to-date after rising 146% in 2025. Gold also broke records, punching through USD 5,000. Uncertainty in the United States is creating a steady global move toward traditionally safe haven investments

Also, the euro quietly hit a five-year high against the US dollar.

Uncertainty Might Kill Quiet Luxury

LVMH reported weaker-than-expected fourth-quarter results. Fashion and leather goods sales (think Dior and Louis Vuitton) slipped, as did its alcohol portfolio, including Hennessy. Watches and jewellery, however, rose in sales. Think investment pieces over logo-heavy indulgence, sounds like a luxury version of safe haven investments are here to stay for the year.

Other luxury stocks tumbled too as LVMH cited geopolitical tension and economic uncertainty. Bernard Arnault was blunt: “2026 will not be easy either.”

AI This Week

Even as they warn that humanity may not be ‘Mature enough for advanced AI,’ the seven co-founders of Anthropic have pledged to give away 80% of their wealth. Their’s maybe potentially one of the largest philanthropic commitments in tech. Daniela Amodei, Dario Amodei, Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish and Christopher Olah are each estimated to be worth around USD 3.7 billion.

Connect the dots.

• Researchers say AI could autonomously generate scientific hypotheses and run experiments within five years, according to EPFL’s Robert West and Northwestern’s Ágnes Horvát, even as debates rage over whether machines can ever truly replace human researchers.
• OpenAI just released Prism, a free AI-powered research and writing for scientists to collaborate and write with Prism integrating GPT-5.2. The company says 1.3 million users now engage weekly in graduate-level scientific discussions on ChatGPT, generating roughly 8 million messages.
• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also admitted this week the company “just screwed up” GPT-5.2’s writing quality.
• Also, the company’s focus has been on expanding what ChatGPT can generate by introducing erotica, arguing it wants to “treat adult users like adults” while protecting teenagers. The company also announced a new age-estimation model to apply stricter safeguards for younger users.
• In the meantime Apple and Google are racing to remove dozens of AI apps capable of generating non-consensual nude images after investigations found over 100 such tools still hosted on their platforms.
• All while Anthropic researchers have warned that bad actors could exploit frontier AI models to amplify harmful open-source systems, without prompting those models to produce dangerous content directly.
• Google makes Gemini 3 the default model behind AI Overviews worldwide this week.
• While Microsoft says it expects AI-driven data centre water use to rise 150% by 2030, a sharp strain on its sustainability promises, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times.
• Amazon just laid of 16,000 workers globally and has said this will become a regular feature as it pushes its AI drive.
• The UK is losing more jobs to AI and at a faster rate than its international peers, according to research by Morgan Stanley. The bank’s research has found British companies have suffered net job losses of around 8% over the past year as a result of adopting AI.
• Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser says the company is now training 175,000 employees to ‘reinvent themselves’ as AI takes desk jobs.
• AI will be a “tsunami hitting the labour market”, with young people worst affected, the head of the International Monetary Fund Kristalina Georgieva has warned: “We expect over the next years, in advanced economies, 60% of jobs to be affected by AI, either enhanced or eliminated or transformed – 40% globally.”

So we put it to you: Is this the sum up?

We are using finite resource like water, in exchange for erotica and getting bad writing by a machine to improve and train it up to be better at science since it can’t actually write a decent peer reviewable paper yet.

All so that humans who need that water to survive, also don’t have jobs in the future?

Have we really not thought this through, or is it all looking bleakly dystopian to you?

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