| | | | After British MPs rejected both Prime Minister Theresa May's deal yesterday, and a no-deal Brexit today, they appear to be whittling down the options. The Financial Times concludes that MPs finally must consider alternatives: Ahead of today's vote, the paper wrote that Parliament should slow things down, ask for an extension to the March 29 deadline, and start weighing softer Brexit plans akin to the Norway-style model of remaining in parts of EU like the tariff-free single market, but not the EU itself—and if no such deal can pass, hold a second referendum.
Brexiteers may have reason to be upset at the vote—Nigel Farage called it a "betrayal" of Brexit, in a Telegraph op-ed—but as Parliament progresses through its options, Guardian columnist Owen Jones asks that remainers start seeing more nuance and give a softer Brexit a chance: "While for a remainer like myself no Brexit is desirable, a chasm separates an economically manageable soft Brexit and the economic shock of no-deal Brexit," he writes. | | At the WTO, America Usually Wins | | President Trump has bashed the World Trade Organization (WTO), protesting that it has treated America "very badly" and threatening a US withdrawal—choosing instead to handle trade disputes on his own.
But the Peterson Institute for International Economics finds that, when the US pleads its case at the WTO against its main trade rival—China—America usually wins. The US is 19-0 vs. China on the 23 complaints Washington has brought to the WTO against Beijing since 2002, with four cases still pending. That said, some disputes "fall outside the WTO rulebook," and there remains "a strong need to update international trade obligations to address current disputes over investment, intellectual property rights, and other issues," according to PIIE. | | Will the West Import the Authoritarian Internet? | | Clint Watts, a former FBI counterterrorism officer, Foreign Policy Research Institute fellow, and expert in online information warfare, identifies the next phase in online manipulation: Authoritarian monitoring, with a boost from AI.
China, in particular, will seek to "own" the Internet, using "advancements in AI to rapidly comb through citizen data and detect speech that threatens the regime," folding online-speech detection into its extant "social scoring" system, he predicts.
Those tactics could be imported back to the West, Watts warns, as "multinational corporations will be hard pressed not to adapt to China's methods and combine it with existing financial scoring systems." He envisions a future in which consumers enroll in systems like China's voluntarily—meaning private firms and authoritarian governments will take the lead in setting the Internet's norms. | | Scientists: Hold Off on Germline Editing | | There's no international standard for gene editing, even as CRISPR technology raises hopes and concerns. After the birth of two gene-edited twins in China—and the news that their brains may have been incidentally altered—a group of scientists has called for a global moratorium on editing genes in ways that could be hereditary.
Writing in the Nature international journal for science, they call for an "international framework" in which countries "voluntarily commit" to not doing it for "an initial period of fixed duration," possibly five years, after which they could make their own decisions after publicly weighing concerns.
Their call tracks with the current thinking on gene editing. As several doctors recently wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine, editing the human germline "may ultimately prove a more efficient and effective means of eliminating disease"—but there's a good deal of anxiety around using it to enhance human beings and a thorny set of ethical and social questions yet to be resolved. | | | | | | |
