2026-02-23 20:35:58
Using an analysis from Focaldata, the Guardian used the angled arrow approach to map countries that shifted towards China’s voting patterns between 2024 and 2025.
By measuring how closely each country’s voting record correlates with those of the US or China, researchers have been able to map how the geopolitical centre of gravity is further away from Washington and closer to Beijing than at any other point this century.
The total number of countries strongly aligned with the US has crashed under Trump, in contrast to China, which has maintained its allies.
It turns out countries are less enthusiastic about the current U.S. administration’s global approach. This is very shocking.
Tags: China, Guardian, United Nations
2026-02-23 16:12:24
Focaldata calculated United Nations voting patterns by country, relative to the United States and China. The more a country voted the same as the United States votes, the more to the left it appears (as a dot). If voting was more similar to how China votes, the country appears more to the right. Watch the changes from 1992 to 2025.
Tags: China, Focaldata, politics, United Nations, United States, world
2026-02-21 02:24:33
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the administration’s “emergency” tariffs to be illegal. This stacked area chart from Lazaro Gamio and Keith Collins for the New York Times shows the effects of the ruling. I suspect this chart is going to see a lot of flux over the next few weeks.
Tags: law, New York Times, Supreme Court, tariff
2026-02-20 19:04:53
For Bloomberg, Krishna Karra and Stephen Wicary map blackouts in Cuba due to the U.S. administration’s block on fuel shipments.
Available electricity has plummeted since the start of the year. And it’s disproportionately affected rural areas and provincial hubs, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of satellite imagery. The level of light emitted at night in major eastern cities like Santiago de Cuba and Holguin has dropped as much as 50% compared to the historical average.
This analysis and others before it (see also the New Orleans power outage during Hurricane Ida and fading lights in Ukraine from war-damaged infrastructure) are made possible by NASA’s Black Marble, which tracks nightlight around the world and makes the data publicly available.
Tags: Bloomberg, Cuba, electricity, light, satellite imagery
2026-02-20 18:32:42
ProPublica and the Texas Tribune report on the spike of claims over the past year, which make previous volumes seem almost like nothing:
So far this year, immigrants are filing on average more than 200 of these cases, known as habeas petitions, daily across the country, with California and Texas accounting for about 40% of new cases, a ProPublica analysis of federal court filings found. To keep tabs on this historic rise, ProPublica is publishing a habeas case tracker.
Tags: deportation, habeas petition, ProPublica, Texas Tribune, tracker
2026-02-20 04:53:14
Paul Ford, for NYT Opinion, on his outlook for making software by vibe coding:
My industry is famous for saying no, or selling you something you don’t need. We have an earned reputation as a lot of really tiresome dudes. But I think if vibe coding gets a little bit better, a little more accessible and a little more reliable, people won’t have to wait on us. They can just watch some how-to videos and learn, and then they can have the power of these tools for themselves. I could teach you now to make a complex web app in a few weeks. In about six months you could do a lot of things that took me 20 years to learn. I’m writing all kinds of code I never could before — but you can too. If we can’t stop the freight train, we could at least hop on for a ride.
The simple truth is that I am less valuable than I used to be. It stings to be made obsolete, but it’s fun to code on the train, too. And if this technology keeps improving, then all the people who tell me how hard it is to make a report, place an order, upgrade an app or update a record — they could get the software they deserve, too. That might be a good trade, long term.
The trouble is that we don’t know where the train is headed. Some paint a hopeful picture of some kind of utopia, and others point towards a dystopia where a few benefit at the expense of everyone else. I have no idea. I remain cautiously pessimistic.
Tags: code, New York Times, Paul Ford, technology, vibe-code
