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Up to 90% of young people in Taiwan have myopia but eye experts say the growing global trend can be reversed In the final days of their eight-week bootcamp, dozens of young Taiwanese conscripts are being tested on an obstacle course. The men in full combat kit are crawling underneath rows of razor wire and through bunkers as controlled explosions blast columns of dirt into the air. Pink and green smoke blooms in a simulated gas attack, requiring the conscripts to quickly don gas masks so they can rush the zone. But it’s here where many of them pause, stopping the assault drill to spend precious seconds removing their glasses so the masks will fit. The conscripts mostly look to be in their early 20s. Statistics suggest that means anywhere up to 90% of them have some degree of myopia, otherwise known as shortsightedness. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/sPxvbCm

A cold reality hit us in Washington. Zelenskyy was being forced to buy hope of survival by people who have no care for our freedom It’s warming up in Kyiv. The temperature has risen from -5C to 4C. Sometimes, the sun peeps through breaks in the clouds, but Kyivites are not much cheered by the sunshine. They are not watching for signs of spring as they usually do at this time of year. The atmosphere in the city and in the country as a whole has been one of nervous expectation. This was not an expectation of an end to military action or the signing of a peace treaty with Russia – nothing so specific. Indeed, it was not at all clear what we were waiting for, but it was something connected with Donald Trump and the change in US policy towards Ukraine. Clarity emerged at today’s macabre theatre at the White House: handshakes, a thumbs up and some fist pumps from the US president, before Trump sat side by side with Volodymyr Zelenskyy to discuss a minerals-for-war-support deal and to humil...

Washington’s day of historic diplomacy involved two alleged rapists and then the prime minister of Britain. It said everything about our new era Shortly after Keir Starmer arrived in Washington to fight for the future of Europe, two men who make a mockery of everything he stands for touched down on American soil. The toxic YouTube influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate have spent years under investigation in Romania on charges of rape and human trafficking, which they deny, Andrew is now wanted by British police over allegations of rape , and both brothers for tax evasion in this country. But to MAGAworld they are martyrs, unjustly persecuted abroad for the crime of saying what they think on the internet. Their triumphant homecoming to Florida, following reported US diplomatic pressure on the Romanian government to lift its travel ban, sends a signal to aggrieved young men who voted for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris that the president has not forgotten them . There could hardly have...

The prime minister must handle Donald Trump with tact, but without flinching from a duty to confront falsehoods in the president’s worldview It is hard to set expectations ahead of a summit with no useful precedent. British prime ministers have visited the White House before and in a wide variety of geopolitical contexts, but never has the hosting president been hostile to the transatlantic alliance. Never before could it be said that Washington’s foreign policy regarding European security was closer to a Moscow line than a London one. Conventional platitudes about a “special relationship” and common values are of little use to Sir Keir Starmer in handling Donald Trump. History is not irrelevant, but on matters of substance – most urgently, a settlement to end the war in Ukraine – Mr Trump is behaving more like a mafia boss than a statesman. His method is to demand tribute in exchange for protection. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/XqDAj08

Labour’s ‘pragmatism’ isn’t neutral – it locks the party into fiscal caution, reinforcing stagnation and fuelling the very instability it seeks to avoid Politics is about choices. Some are forced on governments by circumstance. Others are self‑imposed. Labour’s decision to cut the aid budget to “pay” for increased defence spending is firmly in the latter category. It is also wrong – forcing the world’s poor to pay for Britain’s safety. This is a false economy. Cutting aid will make the world more unstable, not less. The very crises that fuel conflict – poverty, failed states, climate disasters and mass displacement – will only worsen with less development funding. Labour’s logic is self‑defeating: diverting money from aid to defence does not buy security; it undermines it. The numbers tell the story. Despite government attempts to inflate the amounts involved, the extra £5bn‑£6bn for defence is tiny relative to Britain’s GDP. The UK could easily absorb this through borrow...

Asteroid 2024 YR4 had reached a 3.1% likelihood of impact but further data has rendered it negligible It was a discovery that lead to panic-inducing headlines: a giant asteroid found to be hurtling towards Earth that , while unlikely to wipe out life, could do some serious damage. But now the world can breathe a sigh of relief. After the odds of a future collision rose earlier this year , the likelihood of an impact is now so low as to be negligible. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/HoC5ZAG

Campbell Scott, a senior director at Fico, was reported missing while in Nairobi for a three-day conference Police searching for a British businessman missing in Kenya have recovered a body, found in a sack in scrubland about 60 miles from Nairobi, reports said. Campbell Scott, 58, a senior director at the data analytics company Fico, went missing on 16 February after arriving in the Kenyan capital to attend a conference at the JW Marriott hotel. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/mx4hBdg