risks

WASHINGTON: The IMF said the global economy had weathered the energy shock caused by the war in the Middle East better than feared and global economic output was still expected to expand by about 3 percent in 2026, but it cautioned that risks remained high.

Julie Kozack, spokesperson for the International Monetary Fund, said oil and gas prices remained elevated and the energy shock from the war was not over.

Global debt pressures were also mounting and the disinflation process over the 2022 cost-of-living crisis had stalled.

Global inflationary expectations have risen but remain well-anchored ‌over the longer ‌run, Kozack told a regular IMF briefing.

“So far, despite six months of ‌war in the Middle East, the global economy has been resilient,” Kozack said, adding that the use of oil and gas reserves had allowed some countries to cope with energy shocks caused by the war, while others had shifted to new energy sources or acted to curb demand.

“We remain on track for world growth of around 3 percent but uncertainty, as we’ve been saying for quite some time, continues to remain high,” she said.

The IMF in July forecast 2026 global growth at a sluggish 3 percent, compared with an average of 3.5 percent seen in 2024 and 2025, and its April forecast of 3.1 percent.

At the time, it said that forecast assumed ‌the war would wind down in mid-July, but Iran and ‌the US have both escalated their attacks and the war has widened with increased military activity in Yemen.

The ‌global lender will release an updated forecast during the annual meetings of the IMF and the ‌World Bank in Bangkok from Oct. 12 to 18.

Pulled in opposite directions

Kozack said the global economy was being pulled in opposite directions by the negative energy supply shock that was driving prices of energy, fertilizers, food and other commodities sharply higher, while the AI-led technology cycle was providing a positive demand shock.

Risks remain high, with many countries needing to ‌restock their oil and gas reserves, and energy demands set to rise as winter approaches in the Northern Hemisphere, she said.

Pressures are also mounting on global public debt, which is already at nearly 100 percent of gross domestic product — the highest level since World War Two — and is set to rise further, Kozack said. Many advanced economies have particularly high public-debt-to-GDP ratios.

Liquidity problems are also building in developing countries, including in Africa, partly due to a reduction in bilateral assistance, Kozack said.

The IMF is urging central bankers to stick to their price stability mandates, while encouraging fiscal policymakers to develop medium-term consolidation plans, she said.

“We’re not in a situation where fiscal consolidation needs to take place overnight, but having a clear, laid-out plan and strategy for how deficits and debt are going to come down is very important for fiscal authorities,” Kozack said.

The IMF was also urging authorities to focus on lifting growth prospects through structural reforms and removing “self-inflicted” barriers to growth, she said.

Kozack said the IMF would look closely at the impact of new US sanctions against Iran, including secondary sanctions aimed at firms in third countries that support Tehran.

A fuller report was expected in the upcoming global outlook, she said.

TELLURIDE, Colo. — For four days every Labor Day weekend, the Telluride Film Festival turns this tiny mountain town into something of a refuge from the outside world. Tucked into a box canyon and far from the usual machinery of Hollywood, moviegoers spend their days seeing films they may have known little about before arriving and talking about them almost nonstop.

Artificial intelligence, apparently, did not get the memo.

This year, even Telluride’s usually self-contained movie bubble couldn’t keep out the existential anxieties surrounding AI. On Saturday, the festival devoted two events to the subject, beginning with “The Humanity Dilemma,” an hourlong multimedia presentation mixing dire warnings with live music and imagery, and continuing with a panel bluntly titled “AI AI AI,” featuring Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

Introducing “The Humanity Dilemma” at the nearly packed Sheridan Opera House, festival executive director Julie Huntsinger acknowledged that Telluride normally steers clear of taking political sides. “We just let the program speak for us,” Huntsinger said.

But on AI, she made an exception.

“We are a very humanist festival — that’s how we identify,” Huntsinger said. “AI is a threat.” While acknowledging potentially beneficial applications, she urged the audience to become more engaged in the debate over its development.

“We all need to be very alert and vigilant and loving and kind and stop this s—,” she said, earning loud whoops of approval from some in the crowd.

AI already occupies an uneasy place in Hollywood, where filmmakers and studios are experimenting with the technology even as actors, writers and other creative workers fight to protect their jobs and likenesses from being exploited or replaced.

For all of Huntsinger’s warnings, Telluride is not treating AI as off-limits. Its program includes “Love, Rendered,” a short documentary directed by Liz Garbus and produced by Darren Aronofsky about an elderly couple confronting the husband’s memory loss. Using AI along with family photographs and stories from loved ones, the filmmakers recreate the moment the couple first met and fell in love 70 years earlier. On Sunday, the film’s creative team is scheduled to discuss the project at an event titled “Filmmaking and Technology With Empathy: AI for Societal Benefit.”

“The Humanity Dilemma” was presented by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology, who appeared in the 2020 documentary “The Social Dilemma,” along with artist and researcher Joy Mauthe and violinist Andrei Matorin. Harris and Raskin also appear in this year’s “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist.”

The presentation was designed to work on the emotions as well as the intellect. Original songs about humanity’s relationship to AI ran through much of the hour, with Mauthe singing and playing guitar and Matorin on violin, as Harris and Raskin delivered warnings accompanied by images of environmental devastation, poverty and figures in the AI race including Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Larry Ellison.

Their argument was stark: The race to build more powerful AI is moving far faster than governments or the public can keep up. Their deepest fear is that humans could eventually lose control of increasingly capable AI systems altogether.

At the same time, they acknowledged the technology’s potentially transformative benefits.

“AI is confusing because it represents both simultaneous utopia and dystopia,” Raskin said. “Just imagine having to reason about a nuke that could also solve cancer.”

By the end, Harris was calling for a halt to the development of more powerful systems.

“We need to pause frontier AI development and pivot and steer towards a pro-human future,” he said.

The hour concluded with Mauthe leading the audience in a final refrain, singing that the future is “still in our hands.” It was the kind of unabashedly earnest moment that could easily have tipped into awkwardness, but many in the room seemed to embrace it.

A few hours later, Harris and Raskin returned for “AI AI AI,” held outdoors at the Abel Gance Open Air Cinema in Telluride’s Elks Park, joined by Gates and filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer, director of the Oscar-nominated documentaries “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence,” who served as a moderator.

From left, Bill Gates, Aza Raskin, Tristan Harris and filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer discuss the risks and potential benefits of artificial intelligence at the Telluride Film Festival on Saturday.

(Josh Rottenberg)

For Gates, who has spent decades focusing much of his philanthropy and public advocacy on global health and poverty, the rise of AI has forced him to make room for a new priority. In an essay published last week, he warned that the technology was improving faster than he anticipated and called for a new framework to manage its risks.

At Telluride, Gates said he now feels compelled to devote some of the political influence he has long used to advocate for causes such as malnutrition, polio and malaria to raise alarms about AI as well.

“Is this the greatest problem humanity has ever faced?” Gates said. “That is just a fact.”

Gates said his concerns have grown as AI systems have become more capable, particularly at writing computer code, something he has been obsessed with since he was 13.

“The AIs are superhuman, i.e., better than I am at writing code,” Gates said.

He laid out five broad areas of concern: jobs, biotechnology, cyberattacks, psychosocial harms and whether humans will be able to maintain control over the systems they are building.

Oppenheimer said that after spending hours digging into AI risks ahead of the panel, he had come away “absolutely terrified.” He read aloud an answer he had received after asking ChatGPT to estimate the risks if the race toward increasingly powerful AI continued with little regulation.

The chatbot put the chance of “persistent dystopian outcomes for all humanity” at 25% to 40%, a civilization-scale catastrophe at 5% to 15% and human extinction or permanent loss of human control at 5% to 10%.

“That’s what AI thinks,” Oppenheimer said.

Gates stressed AI’s potential upside, citing advances in medicine, education and assistance to farmers in poor countries. But pressed on whether development should be slowed until safety measures catch up, he said he would be open to the idea.

“If there was a credible plan that would cause this to be either slowed down or, you know, even held in stasis for a period of time, I would likely support that,” Gates said.

The difficulty, he said, is that multiple developers in both the U.S. and China are pushing closer to the technological frontier. Still, Gates rejected the argument that competition with China makes meaningful regulation impossible.

“China does not want cyberattacks, bioattacks or loss of control,” Gates said.

The discussion was punctuated by a pair of outbursts from the audience. At one point, as Gates discussed the economic incentives driving AI development, a man shouted that they represented “everything that’s wrong with America” and invoked Jesus Christ. Gates paused before responding dryly: “Anyway, not everything is wrong with America, according to me.”

Gates argued that government and civil society need to move much more quickly.

“This five-year period, in my view, is a very critical period,” he said, adding that responses that take five or six years to get underway could come too late.

Despite the dire warnings, Harris pointed to signs that pressure for safeguards is growing, including calls from AI-industry employees to limit the development of more powerful systems. Just last week, Meta agreed to pay $17 billion to settle claims by 29 states that Facebook and Instagram harmed young users while also agreeing to new child-safety measures on the platforms.

“I just want to leave you with not naive optimism, but momentum,” Harris said.

Near the end, Raskin suggested that President Trump’s well-documented desire to win the Nobel Peace Prize might provide an incentive for him to pursue a U.S.-China pause on more powerful AI systems.

“What’s better than solving one war?” Raskin said. “Saving all of humanity forever from uncontrollable AI.”

Gates, with a wry smile, called the Nobel angle “smart.”

“Whoever really takes the step to solve this AI problem would deserve the Nobel Prize,” he said.

Later that night, the festival would hold an outdoor screening of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” featuring HAL 9000, one of cinema’s most famous rogue artificial intelligences.

Gates framed the current stakes in similarly cinematic terms.

“There are these movies where the aliens are coming, and you see unprecedented levels of cooperation between China and the U.S.,” he said. “Well, believe me, the aliens are here.”

The global ratings agency has also maintained the country’s sovereign rating at AA.

Fitch Ratings has removed Qatar from “Rating Watch Negative” while maintaining its sovereign rating at AA amid the US-Israel war on Iran and the Strait of Hormuz blockade.

The global ratings agency announced the decision on Friday, citing reduced risks to the country’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities since March.

The agency, however, kept a negative outlook on the rating, citing ongoing risks surrounding the movement of gas exports through the blockaded Strait of Hormuz.

“The impact of the war on the credit profile will take longer to discern,” the agency said in a statement.

Qatar, one of the world’s largest gas exporters, continues to face export disruptions and shortages caused by damaged energy facilities during the war on Iran, which began six months ago.

Earlier this year, credit agencies S&P and Moody’s also affirmed Qatar’s ratings, noting that the country’s sizeable financial cushion helps protect it from the economic impact of the war.

Last week, Israel attacked Syrian territory yet again. Israeli forces shelled a hilltop near Beit Jinn in the western Damascus countryside, while soldiers raided a village in Quneitra province.

The attacks came just days after Israeli fighter jets struck the Abu al-Duhur military base in northern Syria, inflicting significant damage. Israel said the strike was intended to prevent a possible Turkish military deployment there, although both Damascus and Ankara disputed these claims. The Israeli attacks have persisted despite Syrian efforts to de-escalate through diplomacy, and criticism from Washington of the Abu al-Duhur strike.

While avoiding confrontation, the government of Ahmed al-Sharaa continues to insist that Israel withdraw from Syrian territory it has occupied and that Damascus must remain free to rebuild its armed forces and cooperate with the partners of its choosing.

All this reveals more than Syria’s military weakness. It suggests that the new Syrian leadership believes sovereignty can be recovered by rebuilding state capacity first. This strategy, however, carries potential risks: Israel may continue to encroach on Syrian sovereignty while taking advantage of Syrian restraint; and the Syrian government may eventually begin to lose the trust of Syrians and the wider Arab public, among whom Israel is overwhelmingly viewed as a threat.

Syria’s weakness is real. In late 2024, after the army of former President Bashar al-Assad collapsed, Israel struck strategic military assets across the country. The new government then had to begin assembling a national security architecture from dysfunctional institutions and a patchwork of armed groups.

For now, a Syrian military response capable of altering Israel’s behaviour is difficult to imagine.

Instead, al-Sharaa has placed economic recovery and international legitimacy at the top of his priorities. His government has focused on rebuilding state institutions, restructuring the security sector, restoring energy supplies, improving foreign relations and reconnecting Syria to the international economy. But rebuilding Syria is an enormous challenge.

The World Bank estimates that reconstructing Syria’s damaged physical assets will cost about $216bn. A state facing needs on that scale cannot restore its authority through military institutions alone. It needs revenue, electricity, functioning administration, banking access, investment and external relationships.

Al-Sharaa has achieved significant progress on the international front. Washington dismantled the broad Syria sanctions programme in 2025, while the European Union lifted its economic sanctions, although targeted and security-related measures remain. On August 24, Washington also removed Syria from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, eliminating another key obstacle to financial normalisation and investment.

For Damascus, these steps expand the resources with which the state can govern; they are not simply an economic dividend of avoiding war.

This also makes the dispute with Israel more consequential. Syria’s reconstruction strategy now depends heavily on precisely the international access that years of isolation denied it. A major military escalation with Israel could undermine investor confidence, complicate Syria’s reintegration into international banking and weaken the diplomatic support on which its recovery depends.

It could also expose Damascus to renewed political pressure by Washington and the EU, even if this does not automatically translate into the reimposition of broad sanctions.

The dilemma is therefore becoming sharper: Restraint helps Damascus preserve the international environment it needs to rebuild the state, but it also gives Israel room to constrain the very military and strategic capacity Syria is trying to reconstruct.

Israel has security concerns about the new Syrian government, whose leadership emerged from an armed Islamist movement, and it is increasingly alarmed by Turkiye’s military relationship with Damascus. But Israeli demands have extended well beyond preventing hostile forces from approaching its border.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for the demilitarisation of Syria’s Quneitra, Deraa and Suwayda provinces. His government has also opposed the deployment of forces belonging to Syria’s new army south of Damascus and has sought to restrict the scope of Damascus’s military cooperation with Turkiye.

Israel clearly wants to limit the rebuilding of Syria’s military capacity. It sees such interference through the prism of preventive security. Damascus sees the same issue through the prism of sovereignty: A state that cannot decide where its army deploys or with whom it trains has not fully recovered strategic autonomy.

This is one of the central risks of al-Sharaa’s strategy. Syria is avoiding an unwinnable confrontation partly to rebuild the capacities of state power, while those same capacities are increasingly becoming objects of Israeli pressure.

There are limits to what restraint can achieve. Syria has the backing of other Arab states, while the United States and EU have supported the reconstruction of a functioning Syrian state as part of their approach to regional stability. Damascus has also repeatedly expressed interest in reaching a security agreement with Israel.

And yet, none of this has stopped Israeli military action.

The other risk concerns Syrian public opinion. Appearing indefinitely unable to respond to Israeli attacks could eventually damage al-Sharaa’s public standing and the legitimacy of his government.

A large survey by the Arab Center Washington DC conducted in 2025 found that 74 percent of Syrians opposed recognising Israel, 70 percent rejected an agreement that did not include the return of the Golan Heights, and 88 percent believed Israel threatened Syria’s security and stability. At the same time, 61 percent said the current government’s foreign policy reflected the views of the Syrian people.

The findings are important precisely because they complicate the picture. The survey predates the latest confrontations and does not tell us whether Syrians favour military retaliation. It establishes political red lines, not a public demand for war.

Wider Arab polling points in the same direction. Across the countries surveyed in the 2025 Arab Opinion Index, opposition to recognising Israel remained overwhelming.

That said, Syria under the al-Assads also generally avoided confrontation with Israel while retaining a reputation for belonging to the regional “resistance” camp. The old model combined avoidance of direct war with alliances and armed networks that gave Damascus regional leverage.

Al-Sharaa’s government appears to be making a different bet, focusing on consolidated institutions, economic recovery, international access and a rebuilt national military.

This does not replace territorial sovereignty. It is an attempt to rebuild the means of exercising it.

The bet will become harder to defend, both at home and abroad, if restored state capacity does not eventually give Syria greater control over its territory, its security choices and its foreign relations.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Late on Friday night, Donald Trump announced what he called “the biggest oil deal in world history.” Under the terms described publicly so far, the US would obtain a controlling interest in a new venture involving 17 Venezuelan oil fields containing more than 65 billion barrels of proven reserves, with an effective 55 percent share of production and preferential access to crude at cost. The Trump administration says the arrangement could mobilize around $100 billion in private investment and eventually generate more than $200 billion in Venezuelan tax revenues. Much about the deal, including its precise legal structure, remains unclear.

There is nothing inherently objectionable about American companies making money from Venezuelan oil. Venezuela desperately needs foreign capital, technology and markets. PDVSA cannot rebuild the industry on its own, and reconnecting Venezuela to the American energy system would be preferable to another generation of dependence on Russia, China or Iran. 

The problem is not that Washington wants investment. The problem is that it seems determined to make that investment possible without first solving the political and institutional problem that made Venezuela uninvestable in the first place.

Recalculating

The original expectation after Nicolás Maduro’s removal seemed straightforward enough. American oil majors would pour tens of billions of dollars into the country and restore production. Nine days after Maduro was captured, Trump gathered oil executives at the White House and invited them back to Venezuela. ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods responded with an inconvenient assessment: under the existing legal and commercial conditions, the country remained “uninvestable.” ConocoPhillips was interested but similarly cautious. Chevron, which never fully left, has continued expanding and is now preparing another significant restructuring of its Venezuelan operations. So far, the broad stampede of supermajors Washington appeared to expect has not come.

So Washington widened the search. Delcy Rodríguez traveled to India in June to court energy investment and deepen ties with Reliance and other Indian companies, in a trip conducted with remarkably explicit American encouragement. India had once again become a major buyer of Venezuelan crude, and Asian capital offered another potential source of the money Venezuela needed.

Under the conditions we have been apprised of so far, it is difficult to imagine a future democratic Venezuelan government simply accepting an arrangement of this magnitude as a fait accompli.

At the same time came operators with a different tolerance for Venezuelan risk. Hunt Overseas Oil and Crossover Energy signed preliminary agreements to develop projects in the Orinoco Belt. Smaller American firms have explored opportunities that Exxon and Conoco have so far declined to pursue. SLB, an oilfield-services company rather than a producer, has now been brought in to reconstruct and analyze PDVSA’s degraded reservoir data, the sort of basic technical infrastructure that should tell us something about how much of an oil industry still needs to be rebuilt.

And then there are the intermediaries. Bloomberg recently reported that Alejandro Betancourt, who rose spectacularly during the Chávez years, emerged as an important facilitator for Washington’s effort to bring smaller American companies into Venezuela. His usefulness is not difficult to understand. Companies entering a market where formal institutions remain weak need people who know the terrain, the networks, the officials and the informal rules through which business actually gets done. 

Betancourt has denied past allegations of wrongdoing and has not been charged with a crime, but his return as an influential gatekeeper hardly advertises the arrival of a transparent, rules-based Venezuelan economy.

Now comes the ultimate recalculation. If investors are still reluctant to absorb Venezuelan political risk, the US government may absorb some of it itself.

Risk instead of certainty

That is what makes Friday’s announcement so revealing. Washington began the year with the proposition that political change would make Venezuela attractive to capital. Now, the Trump government appears increasingly willing to create more and more elaborate mechanisms to insulate investors from risk rather than address the conditions that make the country risky in the first place. At every stage, it has changed the investor, the financing, the intermediary or the allocation of risk. The one variable it has been remarkably reluctant to change is the Venezuelan government.

There is also the small matter of Venezuelan law.

The Constitution establishes that hydrocarbon deposits belong to the Republic and are inalienable. It also requires National Assembly approval for public-interest contracts involving foreign states, foreign official entities, or companies not domiciled in Venezuela. Delcy’s reform of the hydrocarbons law has undeniably widened the space for private operators, granting companies much greater control over production and commercialization. But nothing disclosed so far explains how an arrangement giving the US government a controlling economic position over 17 fields, reportedly with rights potentially stretching for a quarter of a century, has obtained the constitutional authorization necessary to bind Venezuela over anything resembling that period. Reuters itself notes that the legal and financial structure remains unclear and that the proposal faces constitutional questions.

Delcy’s strategy is to survive Trump himself, so that the next American administration treats her as the person guaranteeing oil production, investment contracts and political stability.

Perhaps those questions will eventually receive convincing answers. Perhaps the current National Assembly will be asked to provide whatever approvals the agreement requires. But under the conditions we have been apprised of so far, it is difficult to imagine a future democratic Venezuelan government simply accepting an arrangement of this magnitude as a fait accompli. At a minimum, it would have every reason to subject the contracts to comprehensive legal review and democratic ratification; significant portions could well have to be renegotiated.

That produces a remarkable contradiction. An agreement supposedly designed to provide investors with certainty may create its own enormous source of political risk. 

A future government could inherit century-long commitments negotiated by an unelected predecessor whose authority it contests, with the US itself financially invested in preserving those commitments. Venezuela’s first genuinely democratic administration would then begin its life choosing between endorsing decisions it never authorized or entering an immediate dispute with Washington.

There is a perfectly respectable argument for what the Trump administration is attempting. Venezuela cannot place reconstruction on hold indefinitely while it builds pristine institutions. Oil infrastructure continues to deteriorate. Investment can create jobs, revenue, and constituencies interested in stability. Delcy controls the ministries, PDVSA, much of the security apparatus and the bureaucracy; somebody has to sign the contracts today. Connecting Venezuelan economic interests to American companies could itself help pull the country away from the geopolitical networks that sustained Maduro.

But that argument confuses the need to restart the economy with the need to give an interim government the power to determine its structure for generations.

Washington could have pursued investment while limiting the duration of interim arrangements, requiring future democratic ratification for the largest commitments, creating sunset clauses, tying concessions to institutional milestones or ensuring that Venezuela’s democratic forces had genuine ownership of the framework. Democratic legitimacy is not an obstacle to investment certainty. Properly understood, it is one of its foundations.

The US seems unwilling to own the fact that no amount of financial engineering, political brokerage or well-connected intermediaries can substitute for a democratic government.

Instead, the emerging arrangement gives Delcy Rodríguez an increasingly powerful incentive to make herself indispensable. The more American capital, energy security and political prestige become attached to agreements signed under her government, the more valuable continuity becomes. Delcy’s obvious strategy is no longer merely to survive the transition. It is to survive Trump himself, so that the next American administration treats her not as the temporary caretaker Washington inherited in January but as the person guaranteeing oil production, investment contracts and political stability.

Unreliable partners

There have been meaningful changes since Maduro’s removal. More than a thousand political prisoners have reportedly been released. The government and representatives of the opposition have reached an agreement to renew the Supreme Court. But if the objective on January 3 was a genuine democratic transition, it is increasingly difficult to argue that Venezuela has moved very far from square one. Delcy still governs without democratic legitimacy. Much of the chavista State remains intact. María Corina Machado remains outside the country and outside the US-backed negotiating mechanism. Even senators from both parties in Washington have begun pressing the administration for a clearer path toward elections.

If anyone in Washington believes that another legally dubious agreement negotiated with the cronies who continue to usurp the Venezuelan State—particularly through figures like Alejandro Betancourt, now being mentioned as a facilitator for oil investment—will inspire substantially more confidence than anything Washington has tried since that glorious January 3 night, then they have learned remarkably little about the problem they inherited. Washington took responsibility for managing Venezuela’s transition that night. Eight months later, it still seems unwilling to own the central fact that no amount of financial engineering, political brokerage or well-connected intermediaries can substitute for a Venezuelan government with democratic and legal legitimacy.

There is a broader cost to that refusal. Machado is not merely another Venezuelan politician Washington happens to dislike. She is one of Latin America’s most recognizable democratic figures, with an audience extending across the region’s Right, democratic center and beyond. The administration’s repeated willingness to sideline her while embracing Rodríguez is therefore being watched outside Venezuela too.

If billions begin flowing through institutions and business networks that have never been subjected to democratic accountability, Washington may discover that it has helped recapitalize the very system it intended to replace.

It is particularly telling to see rightwing figures such as Emmanuel Rincón, Orlando Avendaño and Hermann Tertsch—voices that have spent much of the past eight months looking for the glass-half-full interpretation of Washington’s most questionable decisions—struggling to interpret the latest developments as anything other than the US installing a friendlier face atop the chavista state.

That matters for American power. The Trump administration has never pretended that its diplomacy would be delicate. Allies understand pressure, bargaining and the occasional arm-twist. But there is a difference between being a demanding partner and being an unreliable one. Latin American political leaders who have aligned themselves with Washington against authoritarian movements would be perfectly rational to study Venezuela and conclude that the US remains an excellent partner for a business transaction while being considerably less dependable as the guarantor of a political project.

Oil production can rise without democracy. Private investment can coexist with authoritarianism. Venezuela can become much more capitalist without becoming substantially more free. If billions begin flowing through institutions and business networks that have never been subjected to democratic accountability, Washington may discover that it has helped recapitalize the very system it intended to replace.

Chavismo spent a quarter century destroying the institutional ecosystem in which long-term investment could survive. Changing an oil law does not rebuild it. Removing Maduro did not rebuild it. Finding more adventurous investors will not rebuild it either.

Democratic legitimacy is not the prize Venezuela receives at the end of a successful transition. It is part of the infrastructure required for the transition to succeed.

Coral reefs make up just 1 percent of ocean coverage, but host a quarter of all life in the sea.

Coral reefs are experiencing bleaching events so frequently that they no longer have time to recover before the next one strikes, scientists have warned.

Global coral cover is now well below ⁠normal levels and at risk of irreversible decline, the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN) said in a report released on Monday.

“If we give them enough time, they ‌have the capacity to recover,” lead author Manuel Gonzalez Rivero said. “But we haven’t seen that amount of time being allowed. In fact, the frequency of those bleaching events has pretty much doubled.”

Bleaching occurs when corals expel the colourful algae living in their tissues. Without this algae, they become vulnerable to starvation and disease. Bleached coral are not dead, but they need time in cooler water to recover.

“We had 40 years of coral cover around the world that had remained relatively unchanged until 2010,” said Gonzalez Rivero, a scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science. “Since 2010, there has ⁠been a very steep change.”

The latest bleaching in 2023 was the most extensive on record, impacting 77 percent of the world’s coral reef areas.

Rivero warned that another such event is “very likely” this year given elevated temperatures globally.

Coral reefs are critical barometers for global ocean health, supporting more than 25 percent of all marine life despite covering less than 1 percent of the ocean floor.

The GCRMN’s warning came as organisers of the annual Pacific Islands Forum announced that at least five leaders of the 18-nation group will skip the group’s summit.

The forum has been touted for decades as a symbol of regional unity, and is used to discuss pressing matters facing Pacific states, including climate change and ocean health.

The beautiful but small islands of the South Aegean, namely Kos, Santorini and Rhodes, recorded the highest tourism saturation of any region in the European Union in 2024

A set of beautiful European islands face becoming ‘monsters’ as locals grapple with major overcrowding.

The charming but small islands of the South Aegean, namely Kos, Santorini and Rhodes, recorded the highest tourism saturation of any region in the European Union in 2024, with visitors spending more nights per resident there than anywhere else in the bloc, according to Eurostat.

Tourists logged 127.2 nights for every resident last year, the widest gap between visitors and residents found anywhere in the EU. The figures underline the challenge the islanders face in terms of managing their huge popularity, and not losing what makes them so desirable.

When I visited Rhodes in 2023 to see how the island was recovering from wildfires that had forced thousands of holidaymakers to evacuate, a number of independent hoteliers and restaurateurs told me how hard times had been in the past decade. While they cited numerous factors, the biggest one in their minds was the arrival of several large all-inclusive hotels.Do you have a travel story or opinion to share? Email webtravel@reachplc.com

TUI is a big force on the island, running two of its flagship TUI Blue hotels and offering package stays at dozens of others.

Both times I visited, I stayed at the Atlantica Imperial Resort and Spa, a palatial place that stretches its Greek-style whitewashed buildings and lake-sized pool across several acres of coastline in Kolymbia, over in the east of the island.

It was a difficult place to leave, such was the comfort of the beds, the extensive options at the all-you-can-drink bars and restaurant, and the fact it was separated from the nearest sizeable conurbation, Faliraki, by 5km of motorway, with another similarly lengthy stretch to get to the old town.

But when I did make the trip, I found a place that lived up to the Eurostat figures. Quaint alleyways were packed wall to wall with tourists; restaurants were choc-a-bloc full; knick-knack shops were difficult to squeeze into and hard to navigate without accidentally causing a stack of Colossus lighters to tumble to the floor.

At the other end of the island, I found the exact same scenes in Lindos, except the beautiful village and its cliffside acropolis had been swamped by an even denser pack of day-trippers.

The island is home to 115,000 permanent residents and welcomed 3.5 million tourists between January and September 2024, giving a local-to-tourist ratio of roughly 1:30.

Such demand has led to large-scale hotel construction projects, rapidly rising rents that are making it harder for locals to find a place to live, and damage to Rhodes’ natural assets, including by increasing the risk of wildfires.

Action is being taken. The national government has placed dozens of Rhodes beaches under protected status, while some areas are to become ‘red zones’ where new hotels can’t be built.

While Rhodes is struggling with high tourism numbers, Santorini’s problems are on a different scale altogether.

For many months of the year, the postcard-worthy town is taken over by battalions of tourists armed with selfie sticks and phones, jumping off massive cruise ships and making land via dinghies, riding up the steep hills on coaches and donkeys willing to haul them up cobbled streets.

They’re mostly there for the sunset. “This has been my dream since high school,” American tourist Maria Tavarez, 40, told NBC after watching the rays disappear beneath the horizon.

Residents are increasingly worried that the island of 20,000 is being overwhelmed by the nearly four million tourists who visit it each year.

“Our standards of living have gone down. It’s as simple as that,” said hotel owner Georgios Damigos, who warned the “wonder of nature” he lives on risks being turned into “a monster”.

As on Rhodes, work is being done, including a daily 8,000-cruise-passenger limit and a per-passenger €20 fee during the summer, with some parts of the coast now given “Untrodden Beaches” protection, meaning no sunbeds, no commercial activities and no structures.

Whether the South Aegean, along with the rest of Greece, successfully grapples with the challenges that come with its popularity remains to be seen.

If it doesn’t, it risks jeopardising a huge part of its economy. Between January and June, travel receipts across Greece increased by 14.8%, reaching €8.80 billion, while inbound travel traffic rose by 15.4% to 13.49 million travellers.