In the decade since the world pledged to combat climate change under the Paris Agreement, global energy systems have undergone a revolution. The United States experienced a sixfold increase in solar power, and wind power more than doubled. And there are now more than 40 million electric vehicles on roads worldwide.

But ending our dependence on fossil fuels and adopting this new, greener technology requires a whole lot of metal.

It takes lithium and cobalt to build the batteries that power electric vehicles and e-bikes, nickel and rare earth elements to construct solar panels and wind turbines, and copper to build the wires that move renewable energy from the sunny and windy places it’s generated to the cities and factories where it’s most needed.

The faster we move away from fossil fuels, the more desperately we will need these metals and other so-called critical minerals. In an ambitious energy transition, global demand for them will quadruple by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency. That means digging vast new open-pit mines, building powerful new refineries to distill raw ore, and opening new factories to manufacture batteries and turbines.

Just as the 20th century was defined by the geography of oil, the 21st century could be defined by the new geography of metal — in particular by snarled industrial supply lines that often flow from the developing world to the developed world and back again.

Occasionally, an image from a conflict zone makes the world stop and take notice.

Like in September 2024, when a heart-breaking picture went viral online of 10-year-old Tala Abu Ajwa’s pink rollerblades protruding from her cloth-shrouded body.

Her parents in Gaza City said she had been killed by an Israeli airstrike as she went outside her home to skate.

But what about the huge quantity of online material from conflict zones that most of us don’t see?

Unless it's archived, it's at risk of being lost forever.

Archivists such as Dr Jamila Ghaddar seek to capture and preserve as much online material as they can, from videos shared on Telegram to viral posts on Instagram.

Video games’ influence on popular culture has never been more prevalent. Their effect is visible and audible in today’s music, across the world of TV and cinema, and on the catwalk. Even your favourite language-learning and fitness apps feature progression systems and rewards popularised by games. To reflect the medium’s universal impact, ahead of the 21st BAFTA Games Awards, we asked the public a provocative question : what is the most influential video game of all time?

As more than one responder said, it’s unfair to have to choose just one. Do you pick the pioneers that shaped the early days of the medium, the innovators that were ahead of their time, the ones that proved formative to your own creative journey, or simply the ones that made you most emotional? As might be expected, among the extraordinary number of responses we received was a staggering variety of games — ranging from titles that launched the industry to contemporary giants released mere months ago. The top ten alone spans multiple genres, from platformers to shooters, sandbox adventures to simulations.

So, without further ado, here are the public’s top 21: each of which, it’s fair to say, has had a seismic impact on games and those who play them…

archive.is link

Amazon has put in a last-minute bid to acquire all of TikTok, the popular video app, as it approaches an April deadline to be separated from its Chinese owner or face a ban in the United States, according to three people familiar with the bid.

Various parties who have been involved in the talks do not appear to be taking Amazon’s bid seriously, the people said. The bid came via an offer letter addressed to Vice President JD Vance and Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, according to a person briefed on the matter.

Amazon’s bid highlights the 11th-hour maneuvering in Washington over TikTok’s ownership. Policymakers in both parties have expressed deep national security concerns over the app’s Chinese ownership, and passed a law last year to force a sale of TikTok that was set to take effect in January.

The Trump/Musk regime is traumatizing the economy. It is abducting innocent people and deporting some without due process to a foreign torture prison. It is dismantling essential government agencies and purging good people who’ve served them well. It is extorting universities and law firms. It has upended our status in the world. It has attacked the rule of law.

And this weekend, there’s something you can do about it.

On Saturday, April 5, thousands – maybe even millions – of people will join together in cities and towns across the country in nonviolent protest.

It’s essential that you take part, if you can. Sign up now. Tell your neighbors. Tell your friends.

The event, called “Hands Off!”, was launched by Indivisible, but now has over 200 organizational partners including MoveOn, the Working Families Party, 50501, Common Cause, Public Citizen, the ACLU, and the AFL-CIO.

Tonight, Democrats have their first chance to fight back against Donald Trump and reverse some of their party’s losses in the 2024 election — and Republicans have a shot to score a big judicial victory in a court currently controlled narrowly by liberals, and in a state that is key to the presidency and control of the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s a race everyone is watching and people are spending significant sums on. I’m talking of course about the Wisconsin Supreme Court race between liberal Susan Crawford and conservative Brad Schimel.

Odds are you have probably heard of the election from the coverage of Elon Musk’s involvement, which has included him spending $20 million in television and digital advertising as well as giving away checks for $1 million to random rally goers this weekend (which is, apparently and shockingly, not illegal). But the stakes are significant: The Wisconsin Supreme Court has recently decided cases on gerrymandering, campaign finance, and voting rights, and would have jurisdiction over a pending abortion case and important electoral cases before the 2028 presidential race. Across all parties, nearly $100 million has been spent on the race.

Prognosticators mostly expect Crawford to narrowly win the race, with room for uncertainty and a small Schimel victory. Crawford has led most of the polls conducted of the race, and the line at Split Ticket is that Republicans have an off-year turnout problem that tilts the scales against them. You can apply a similar logic from my ”dual electorates” piece and draw the conclusion that Schimel is likely to have a bad time, though a win is not impossible. The prediction market Kalshi (I know) gives Crawford an 84% chance (the markets tend to overestimate odds for losers, so her real odds might be higher than this).

Whatever the odds, what really matters is who votes, and here is how to watch the results like a nerd pro:

After adding in-app English translations and bilingual subtitles, Xiaohongshu recently opened a Hong Kong office, and posted a role for global business development based in Hong Kong on its official LinkedIn account. The city is often the first step for Chinese companies expanding overseas. Earlier this month, it also launched a global e-commerce pilot program for mainland Chinese merchants that initially targets the U.S., Hong Kong, and Macau.

“RedNote’s pivot signals an evolution to take markets outside China seriously,” Ivy Yang, a China tech analyst and founder of consulting firm Wavelet Strategy, told Rest of World. While the company had been trying to expand overseas, the “TikTok refugee phenomenon likely made this pivot a must-have rather than simmering on the back burner.”

The unexpected surge of global users in January due to fears of a TikTok ban could provide a windfall for Xiaohongshu. But for the platform to compete with Western social media apps, it must retain these users, build cross-border e-commerce functions, and clarify its overseas business strategy, experts and business owners told Rest of World.

The landmark youth-led climate lawsuit Juliana v. United States has come to a close without ever seeing a trial. The case, filed in 2015 by Our Children’s Trust on behalf of 21 youth plaintiffs, faced 10 years of opposition from the federal government because it argued that the U.S. government violated young people’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property through its unwavering support of the fossil fuel industry. Ultimately, the Department of Justice successfully pushed back against the plaintiffs’ efforts. On March 24, the Supreme Court denied the plaintiff’s petition for review, upholding the lower court’s 2024 decision to throw out the case.

“It’s the end of the case, but it’s not the end of the movement,” said Michael Burger, the executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. Burger told Prism that Juliana stood at the “forefront of a global phenomenon of youth-led climate litigation,” preceding other lawsuits based on state constitutions that would see success, including Held v. Montana and Navahine v. Hawai’i. In 2023, a Montana judge ruled that the state must consider climate impacts when permitting new fossil fuel projects, and in 2024, Hawai’i reached an agreement to decarbonize its transportation sector.

Three presidential administrations—Obama, Trump, and Biden—challenged Juliana, but never on the substance of its claims. Administrations argued that courts weren’t the place to write policy, that the government would be irreparably harmed from a trial, and that there are no explicit provisions in the U.S. Constitution that guard against impacts of climate change. Lawyers for the plaintiffs disagreed, basing the suit on what’s known as the Public Trust Doctrine, which requires that governments protect natural resources for the enjoyment and use of the public. The case sought declaratory relief from the court, which is a statement addressing the constitutionality of a policy that could then trigger policy changes from legislative bodies and federal and state agencies. A well-known example of declaratory judgment that led to broad changes is Brown v. Board of Education.

The government’s successful repudiation of Juliana raises questions about the efficacy of pursuing climate action through the judiciary, especially when the defendant is the government itself rather than corporations. But Burger told Prism that there’s much to be gleaned from Juliana.

“I think that this case has served as a model of a type of lawsuit that seeks to hold national or state governments accountable and to increase the ambition of government climate commitments by relying on legal claims and narratives grounded in youth, in climate science, in the impacts of climate change,” Burger said.

Earlier this week, Prism’s environmental justice reporter ray levy uyeda spoke with Juliana plaintiff Sahara Valentine via video call about the significance of Juliana v. United States, what they’ve learned from a decade of climate organizing in the legal realm, and what’s next.