30,000: The Mona Lisa is moving. The 16th-century masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci will have its own room at the Louvre Museum as the institution readies for a massive, long-overdue expansion. The current structure, last updated with I.M. Pei’s iconic glass pyramids in the 1980s, is crumbling as it struggles to accommodate 30,000 visitors daily, more than twice the intended capacity. President Emmanuel Macron visited the museum on Tuesday to announce expansion plans, but who’s going to pay for the hundreds of millions of dollars required? The answer to this question remains as inscrutable as Mona Lisa’s smile …
120 million: The EU is proposing a ban on any exports of videogame consoles to Russia over concerns that Moscow techies are repurposing the equipment to fly combat drones. Major Western and Japanese manufacturers of gaming equipment suspended sales to Russia in March 2022, but secondhand sellers in Europe continue to ship to Russian buyers. Will the ban have an effect? Chinese companies sold $120 million of this equipment to Russia last year, a fourfold increase over 2022.
3: Pakistani lawmakers have voted to criminalize the spread of “fake news.” Anyone convicted of intentionally spreading misinformation faces three years in prison. The law also creates an agency empowered to block web content that is “unlawful or offensive.” Journalism and civil society advocates are already on edge about this new sweeping power of unelected bureaucrats to decide what’s true and what’s not.
35 billion:Donald Trump on Monday told Indian PM Narendra Modi he wants India to buy more US weapons. The two men have a famously good relationship, but India’s overall trade surplus of $35 billion with the US has caught the mercantilist attention of Trump. India has long been the world’s biggest arms importer, buying mostly from Russia. But as it faces down a potentially hostile China, Delhi has been boosting domestic production instead. Buying more American kit could complicate that strategy.
2026 is a tipping point year. The biggest source of global instability won’t be China, Russia, Iran, or the ~60 conflicts burning across the planet – the most since World War II. It will be the United States.
The UAE and Saudi Arabia were once on the same side in Yemen, but no longer. The split has exposed a larger regional rift between the two oil-rich, Gulf powers.
Walmart’s $350 billion commitment to American manufacturing means two-thirds of the products we buy come straight from our backyard to yours. From New Jersey hot sauce to grills made in Tennessee, Walmart is stocking the shelves with products rooted in local communities. The impact? Over 750,000 American jobs - putting more people to work and keeping communities strong. Learn more here.
Is Venezuela entering a real transition or just a more volatile phase of strongman politics? In GZERO’s 2026 Top Risks livestream, Risa Grais-Targow, Director for Latin America at Eurasia Group, examines Delcy Rodríguez’s role as Venezuela's interim president after Nicolás Maduro.