Month: August 2025

A state of emergency is a declaration that a government has taken due to a crisis. This allows them to act quickly to prevent loss of life, and typically gives them many powers they wouldn’t normally have (such as limiting travel).

It is often invoked during natural disasters, such as hurricanes or wildfires. It is also used in cases of a major disease outbreak, as well as during riots or political unrest. The power to declare a state of emergency is often delegated to the governor, but it can be granted to other government officials as well. The exact details of how a state of emergency is declared vary across countries.

The state of emergency is a law, and therefore can be changed at any time by the executive branch of government. It can apply to the whole country, a specific region, or just a particular sector of the population. The president is allowed to enact regulations during this period, which can include suspending civil rights. These restrictions must be “reasonably justifiable” and are limited in duration to deal with the current situation.

The state of emergency is a powerful tool for dealing with emergencies, but it can be misused to suppress political opposition or to ignore human rights concerns. The Weimar Constitution, for example, allowed states of emergency under Article 48, which was often invoked during the 14-year life of that republic. The state of emergency may also be used to bypass normal procedures for delivering assistance, such as bringing in contractors to help rebuild infrastructure without the usual requests and approvals required under regular conditions.

A daily update is a quick, efficient, and low-impact way for teammates to stay on top of their work. The meeting allows teams to ask and answer a few simple questions that help everyone stay aligned. Geekbot makes running daily updates asynchronous and customizable to your team’s needs. For example, you can choose to send the questions to teammates at a time that’s convenient for them in their local timezone (rather than at an overly early or late time) and you can decide where you want the daily update answers to be sent to.

In addition, you can select which channels the daily update questions and answers will be broadcast to. Many teams choose to create a new, dedicated channel for daily updates (e.g., #daily-update) but you can also use an existing one. Geekbot also lets you set up optional reminder notifications that alert teammates to complete the daily update questions within a certain time frame.

To get started, open the Geekbot app and navigate to and then click the Add your custom commands or scenes tab. Click the + button to create a new scene and then select Daily updates from the list of prefilled templates.

After configuring your scene, you can test daily updates by invoking your Action and enabling the daily update subscription flow with Google Assistant on an Android or iOS device. Make sure to keep the conversation short after your update intent is triggered; most daily updates should only take a single response and then close without requiring further user input. If users are using their device as an alarm clock, you may also want to enable a daily wake-up notification for your Action.

The crypto market is the economic activity of buying and selling cryptocurrencies, with prices determined by supply and demand. Just like stock markets, commodities, and foreign exchange, the crypto market is a global network of buyers and sellers. This includes individual investors, financial institutions, hedge funds, currency traders, and national banks.

As a new and emerging asset, the crypto market is incredibly volatile. It can be hard for new investors to keep up with sudden price movements, and even experienced traders can struggle to understand why certain assets are rising or falling. This volatility can be profitable for high-powered Wall Street investors who know how to make quick trades and can predict where the market is headed, but it can be a minefield for novices.

One of the most important things to understand about the crypto market is that unlike traditional investments, cryptocurrencies are not backed by cash flows. They are instead a form of digital money that exists outside of the banking system and has the potential to disrupt the way we make payments. Because of this, the success of cryptocurrencies hasn’t yet been based on traditional investment analysis, and spectacular returns have created their own self-fulfilling prophecy: the higher they rise, the more interest and buying activity they attract, leading to even greater price increases.

Currently, the most popular cryptocurrencies are bitcoin and ether. Together, they account for about 73% of the total cryptocurrency market cap and more than half of trading volume. However, the crypto world is home to thousands of different currencies, and some are geared toward specific use cases. Investing in the right cryptos can help you diversify your portfolio and increase your chances of success.

Story development is the process of taking a small kernel of an idea and turning it into a fully fleshed out story. It’s a journey that every writer must take, and it takes time and practice to master.

One of the key challenges at this stage is finding a way to give your ideas story stakes — something that will make the protagonist have to choose between what’s best for themselves and what’s best for the story. These stakes can be obvious, like a life or death proposition, but they can also be more subtle, such as a character being asked to choose between a good and a bad thing. Once you find the right stakes for your story, you can start to create the progressive complications that will lead up to the climax.

It’s at this stage that writers often begin to get stuck, sometimes resulting in what is called “writer’s block.” There is no one-size-fits-all solution for beating writer’s block, but over time many writers learn to recognize the signs that they are starting to go off course. They might pick up a book on writing structure or look for ways to inspire themselves creatively. Some go for long walks in the woods or parks nearby while others research obsessively, visit art galleries, or make Pinterest boards.

After the first draft, it’s a matter of refining the story, tightening up the prose, and balancing macro edits (like plot structure) with micro edits (like grammatical clarity). It’s also when writers work out their characters’ secondary goals, motivations, and relationships, as well as their internal and external conflicts.

Governments and their policies are central to ensuring that essential services like education, health care and justice remain available to all citizens, while also regulating the economy and protecting the environment. Often, the development of government policy involves extensive research and consultation. Governments create policies to achieve particular goals or objectives, such as stimulating economic growth, reducing poverty, or maintaining law and order. These policies are implemented through various mechanisms, including laws, programs and funding initiatives.

A government’s choice of policy responses depends on the level at which a policy is developed and the resources it has at its disposal. For example, a country might choose to respond to an economic crisis with fiscal stimulus measures to boost spending or tax cuts to stimulate the economy, or monetary policy to control inflation or the exchange rate.

Developing effective policy requires a complex set of factors to align and guide the process, from agenda setting through evaluation. This includes the influence of political parties, considerations of national interests, and decisions about how to allocate resources in a limited timeframe. It also involves the identification and prioritization of issues that require action, as well as a clear understanding of what it means to ‘be a policy maker’.

In addition, today’s policy makers are collaborating with stakeholders from diverse backgrounds to identify and craft solutions to the most pressing challenges. This can include interest groups, private sector organizations, academic researchers and diverse constituency groups. Strong evidence-informed policy platforms that are supported by knowledge translation can facilitate this collaboration, enabling multisectoral actions to be designed, implemented and evaluated.

A broad field of study that examines the interactions among nations, encompassing such subfields as international law and politics, economics, history, geography and philosophy. It is a major multidiscipline in the social sciences, with prominent schools of thought ranging from realism to liberalism.

The practice and profession of managing international relations, typically by representatives abroad (see ambassador). As the United States has interests in more than 190 countries, its diplomats and other personnel involved in foreign policy must deal with a wide range of issues.

In a country, supreme power over the territory it governs. This idea is the basis of the modern international system outlined by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and embodied in the notion that nations–monarchs then, governments now–control what happens within their borders. See also sphere of influence, Responsibility to protect, Hegemon, Balance of power.

A group of nations or regions that share a common language, culture or religion. Historically, this has largely been a geographic term, but it is also used as an idea to describe a political bloc, such as the NATO-Warsaw Pact grouping of Central Europe or the BRICS intergovernmental organization that aims to promote economic co-operation in Africa.

The five largest emerging economies–Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa–plus Nigeria are a loosely-defined regional bloc that was formed in 1975. The group is dominated by Nigeria and has been moderately successful in promoting economic cooperation in the region and sending peacekeeping troops to other African countries beset by civil war.