As the livestream of Gather25 began, five children stood at the edge of an auditorium stage as a guitar picked a simple introduction to “This Little Light of Mine.” A spotlight focused on a boy who sang the first verse in English, then panned as each took a turn singing a few lines in their own languages.

A 25-hour-long event broadcast last weekend from seven locations around the world, Gather25 is the latest effort to bring together the global church for worship across tribes and tongues.

The global Microsoft computer outage initiated by a faulty CrowdStrike security update gave us a taste of what actual cyberwarfare could do.

Starting soon after midnight New York time, the glitched update brought the “blue screen of death” to PCs across the world.

Microsoft has issued advice to users after a massive outage linked to U.S. cybersecurity company Crowdstrike caused users' systems to suddenly crash.

"We have been made aware of an issue impacting Virtual Machines running Windows Client and Windows Server, running the CrowdStrike Falcon agent, which may encounter a bug check (BSOD) and get stuck in a restarting state," an update posted on the Microsoft Azure website said on Friday morning. "We approximate impact started around 19:00 UTC on the 18th of July."

I’m willing to bet that, until this morning, most people had never heard of CrowdStrike, an Austin-based cybersecurity firm. Only after the company pushed a bad update onto Windows computers, creating the biggest IT disaster in history, did most of us realize how much our lives depend on it. Or how difficult it might be to fix the problem.

Of all the smallish towns I have stayed in along France’s Rhône Valley, Tournon-sur-Rhône is my least favourite. It’s a loud town with an old expressway, Route Nationale 86, running through it.

Klaus Schwab’s departure from the helm of the World Economic Forum has been met with excitement by sections of the Right. As the figurehead for globalism and the elite adoption of a laundry list of progressive causes, the German became something of a bogeyman for conservatives around the world.

But the WEF’s reputation as a progressive champion — which it owes to highly publicised interventions such as the promotion of eating insects and the promise that future generations will “own nothing and be happy” — misses the bigger picture.

The 50th annual Conservative Political Action Conference kicks off this morning, and it will end Saturday with a speech from Donald Trump and a South Carolina primary watch party. But its focus will be global, and its motto: “Where globalism goes to die.”

Trade hawks are sounding wistful for the period of intense corporate trade liberalization from which both the Biden and Trump administrations have increasingly been moving away.

It was one around which a big business consensus had formed over the last several decades and the move toward a less free trade focused chapter has alarmed some of its original architects.

Democrats are sounding increasingly fed up with free trade agreements and some of the basic tenets of globalization that have defined the last several decades of U.S. trade policy, echoing some of the “America First” sentiments that put former President Trump at odds with the economic orthodoxies of his own party and a longstanding policy consensus about the good of trade liberalization.