How dangerous is the US standoff with Venezuela? Is the US economy strong heading into 2026? As the United States economy heads into 2026, the report card emerging on its performance is complicated. By many measures, the world's largest economy appears to be in a strong position. After a tumultuous year marked by President Donald Trump's return to the White House and his swing towards tariffs and protectionism, recent growth has outpaced the expectations of most analysts.

President Joe Biden on Wednesday signed an executive order that will narrowly prohibit certain United States investments in sensitive technology in China and require government notification of funding in other tech sectors. Biden said in a letter to Congress he was declaring a national emergency to deal with the threat of advancement by countries like China "in sensitive technologies and products critical to the military, intelligence, surveillance, or cyber-enabled capabilities". The long-awaited order authorises the US treasury secretary to prohibit or restrict certain US investments in Chinese entities in three sectors: semiconductors and microelectronics, quantum information technologies, and certain artificial intelligence systems. Senior administration officials said that the effort stemmed from national security goals, rather than economic interests and that the categories it covered were narrow in scope. The order seeks to blunt China's ability to use US investments in its technology companies to upgrade its military while also preserving broader levels of trade that are vital for both nations' economies.

This decoupling had baleful economic and social consequences: low paid, insecure jobs held by non-college workers; low participation rates in the labor force; weak upward mobility across generations; and festering earnings and employment disparities among races that have not substantially improved in decades. While new technologies have contributed to these poor results, these outcomes were not an inevitable consequence of technological change, nor of globalization, nor of market forces. Similar pressures from digitalization and globalization affected most industrialized countries, and yet their labor markets fared better."

The strength of ASEAN lies in its numbers. The biggest of those is its population. The 10-nation bloc is home to more than 630 million people, 94% of whom are literate and 50% under 30 years of age. Of those aged 30 and under, 90% have access to the internet. This young, educated, digitally connected base has helped to turn the region into an economic powerhouse, one with a combined GDP of US$2.4 trillion.

My thirties started off in countries ravaged by environmental destruction and dictatorships. Back then, I was a journalist for National Geographic, spending most of my time abroad, even though I still called Los Angeles--my birth city--home. In the 100 countries I visited, I reported on some harrowing stories: the Killing Fields in Cambodia, the near total deforestation of Paraguay, and the tense nuclear stand-off between India and Pakistan. I always hoped my words and on-camera television commentary brought some sanity and peace to the chaos. While on assignment in Vietnam near the demilitarized zone, a near-miss with a landmine that could have been catastrophic sent me back home to the safety of the United States.

Zoltan Istvan didn't have much of a chance at being president, but that didn't stop him from campaigning as the Transhumanist Party's candidate to promote his pro-technology and science positions. Istvan announced this morning that he plans to run for governor of California in 2018 under the Libertarian Party. "We need leadership that is willing to use radical science, technology, and innovation--what California is famous for--to benefit us all," he wrote in a Newsweek article. "We need someone with the nerve to risk the tremendous possibilities to save the environment through bioengineering, to end cancer by seeking a vaccine or a gene-editing solution for it, to embrace startups that will take California from the world's 7th largest economy to maybe even the largest economy--bigger than the rest of America altogether." When we spoke to him in November, Istvan made it clear that he would be looking at the Libertarian Party if he were to run for president again.