Reuters
 — 

A restaurant fire in northeastern China killed 22 people on Tuesday, the official news agency Xinhua said, in the latest in a series of similar deadly incidents around the country.

Xinhua did not identify the cause of the fire but said President Xi Jinping called it “a deeply sobering lesson” and urged local officials to quickly treat the injured, determine what triggered the blaze and hold those responsible to account.

The fire broke out at 12:25 p.m. (0425 GMT) in a restaurant in a residential area of Liaoning Province’s Liaoyang City, state broadcaster CCTV said. Three people were injured.

Footage circulating on social media including X and Chinese platform Douyin, unverified by Reuters, showed bright orange flames engulfing a storefront on street level alongside scores of parked vehicles. Smoke was seen billowing out as paramedics tended to people on stretchers.

Hao Peng, secretary of Liaoning’s provincial ruling party committee, said 22 fire trucks and 85 firefighters were deployed to the scene. Hao said the on-site rescue work had been completed and people had been evacuated.

It was the latest in a spate of similar incidents across the country in recent years. In April, 20 people were killed in a fire that broke out in an apartment for the elderly at a nursing home in the northern province of Hebei.

Gas leaks caused at least two high-profile explosions in residential areas last year, with a blast at a restaurant in Hebei province killing two people and injuring 26 in March, and an explosion in a highrise building in southern Shenzhen province in September killing one person.

CNN
 — 

Luis Ibáñez Jiménez was driving on a highway in east Madrid when Spain lost power.

“Suddenly, there were no traffic lights,” the resident of the capital told CNN. Cars piled up, and nobody had right of way. “I was stopping so that people could pass… I saw a massive bus coming, and I had to accelerate a lot to go past it,” he said. “It was a bit of a jungle.”

Jiménez had just seen his entire country’s electrical supply wiped out in a matter of seconds. The lights went out in cities, villages, airports and train stations; computer screens and payment terminals shut to black in an instant. Confusion and concern coursed through Spain and Portugal. And for officials in the two countries, a race was sparked against the setting sun.

It was a battle the neighboring nations would lose. Several hours would pass until power was meaningfully restored; by nightfall, families gathered in candlelight and exchanged stories from a remarkable Monday.

“It was definitely one of the weirdest days of my life,” said Jiménez, a 29-year-old chief operating officer for a vocational training provider.

The outage was baffling, and a day later, remains unexplained. In the space of five seconds, 15 gigawatts of energy suddenly dropped from Spain’s supply, Spanish government sources told CNN – equivalent to 60% of the electricity being consumed at the time – and the entire Spanish grid collapsed as a result.

Virtually all energy had finally been restored by Tuesday morning, but confusion is still pulsing through Spain. “The investigation into the causes is ongoing,” a government source said. “All hypotheses remain open, and more details will emerge in the coming hours.”

Chaos, confusion and cash payments

Alanna Gladstone, a 40-year-old film editor, had landed in Portugal’s capital, Lisbon, on a flight from New York hours before the outage. She checked into her Airbnb and took a nap; by the time she woke up, the technology that the country takes for granted had gone dark.

“I didn’t know what was going on,” the New Yorker said. She went out looking for supplies, with two euros and 10 US dollars to her name.

“There was a bit of a pandemonium, and a bit of a frenzied energy,” Gladstone told CNN. Supermarkets were closed, so lines snaked through the street into fruit markets, where shopper after shopper was told they couldn’t pay with cards.

It took some time before Spanish and Portuguese people understood the scale of what was happening. “People were asking: is this hacking from Russia? Is this an act of terrorism?” Gladstone said.

Ellie Kenny, a holidaymaker inside Lisbon’s Humberto Delgado airport, said hundreds of people were stood in the dark in lines, with no air conditioning or running water. Shops were only accepting cash, she told CNN.

Hours later, with the power still out and the working day ending, people were adjusting to a strange new reality. Police officers directed traffic with hand signals. Major cities were clogged with traffic, and pavements heaved with busy crowds, trying to find a way home.

Jiménez drove home – carefully. “People were surprisingly polite and well coordinated,” he said. “But the whole city was blocked by around 4 p.m.” His journey, which usually takes 30 minutes, lasted two hours.

Gladstone had another problem: She returned to her apartment with shopping, but the electronic keypads that allowed access to the building and to her unit were down. After banging on the main entrance to no avail, a neighbor found a way into their own apartment, and welcomed her in for the night.

Madrid’s firefighters carried out hundreds of “elevator interventions” across the city on Monday, its Emergency Information Office said; members of Spain’s Civil Guard carried an elderly woman in a wheelchair to her apartment on the sixth floor, the agency said.

By early evening, with the sun sinking and power still out for most of Spain and Portugal, misinformation swirled online and in person. “The rumor mill was just going crazy,” she told CNN. A false theory circulated that all of Europe’s power was down, and with phone and internet access intermittent, it was impossible for many to check whether that was true.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez urged people to use phones “responsibly,” to make calls only when necessary and to keep them brief to ease strain on the system.

By early evening, with the sun sinking and power still out for most of Spain and Portugal, camaraderie became commonplace. “People took the opportunity to ‘get on it’… You could see people drinking beer everywhere,” buying rounds until the batteries in card payment machines went flat, Jiménez said. “All the terraces were full.”

In Lisbon, the lights came on around 10:30 p.m. By then, Gladstone’s neighbors had became her friends. “We spent the night discussing life, and how strange everything is,” she said. “They made food by Mag-Lite and flashlight, and we drank wine.”

“The kindness of strangers never ceases to amaze.”

CNN
 — 

Mankind’s achievements over the millennia have been bountiful. Their evolutionary fruits – from the harnessing of fire, to vaccines, to the art of diplomacy – were never low hanging; they were imagined before they were ever grasped.

But once held, they became indispensable. Until now that is, as 100 days into his presidency US President Donald Trump seems determined to throw this painful learning to the wind, risking a world forced into reverse.

A torrent of tariffs, unleashed against the better judgement of experts, yet exalted by Trump’s acolytes as the work of a deal-making genius are a case in point. So too is his willingness to throw allies to the wind, by threatening to grab Greenland, Canada even Panama by force if necessary.

Whatever one’s view of the policies themselves, Trump’s total upending of the global status quo has sewn fear and uncertainty among America’s friends, exacerbated market volatility and normalized economic aggression. It’s a formula that over the centuries has rarely served the world well.

The president’s apparent over-arching ethos – might is right, and mine is greatest – is now demolishing geopolitical norms at speed. It is Ukraine that should give in to Russia, which “has all the cards,” Trump says. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “pretty big concession,” his US counterpart adds, is not “taking the whole country.”

Yet despite three years of “meat-grinding” war, Putin’s aim remains as contrary to international law as it was when he launched his unprovoked, full-scale invasion.

It is clear then why Trump struggles to do what all his allies find easy: to blame Putin for defying the rules-based world order in a brutal campaign to swallow his smaller neighbor. The US president often even blames Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky for the war in which at least 42,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed or injured, according to the United Nations, saying “he should never have started it.”

The implication – that the weak should capitulate to the strong – is an upending of millennia of evolution, culminating in the post-World War II, US-inspired rules-based international order that led to an unprecedented eight decades of relative global peace, prosperity and unimaginable scientific innovation.

Trump, as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has commented, has broken the mold. “Old assumptions can no longer be taken for granted, the world as we knew it is gone,” he said.

The president’s world view was nurtured by his property-developing, landlord father Fred Trump. Poor tenants unable to pay their rent claimed they were evicted; not an uncommon practice at the time, or since, but one that advantages the powerful over the weak.

The parallels are not hard to spot: the world’s most powerful man still relies on bravado and bullying to get what he wants. Today everyone is in his firing line. America has been “taken advantage of by virtually every country in the world,” Trump inaccurately claims, “we’re no longer going to be the country that’s ripped off by every country in the world.”

But here’s the rub. Such is Trump’s braggadocio, no one he trusts appears brave enough to challenge him. Only when global markets soured, and his Petri dish economic experiment turned putrid, did he backslide on the threat to impose immediate tariffs on both friends and foes of the US, and even then, it may not be enough to avoid economic pain.

China seems ready to wait out his trade-defying tariffs, having been preparing for this moment since Trump’s first term.

Now, it seems, he must learn a costly lesson for himself that economic evolution had already taught the experts.

And while Trump’s defiant pose after the July 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, was enough to convince Putin that he was “a courageous man,” the US president is already backing down on some of his tariff bravado, chastened by his loyalists who found their voices as bond markets tanked.

In the view of both Putin and Trump, it is the tough who set the rules, and the man in both their crosshairs, Ukraine’s President Zelensky, got this message Wednesday, “the man with ‘no cards to play’ should now, finally, GET IT DONE,” as Trump wrote on his social media platform.  Trump has since criticized Putin, questioning whether the Russian leader is interested in peace and suggesting “he’s just tapping me along.”

The world Trump and Putin seem to crave is one of spheres of influence run from islands of power, where diplomacy is a time-consuming irrelevance replaced by imperial decrees.

It would be a reset harking back to a darker time, essentially overturning the rules-based order. In the aftermath of great empires, regional warlords allied, feuded and fought each other for centuries before nations emerged, and largely did the same.

By the 19^th century diplomats like Klemens von Metternich, the Chancellor of the Austrian Empire, spent entire careers attempting to balance Europe’s feuding powers. He famously said, “when France sneezes, the rest of Europe catches cold.”

Today it is Trump spreading a chill. The Manhattan real estate developer has said he is going to “get” Greenland “for national security reasons.” Greenland and its Danish patron, a NATO ally that is no match militarily for the USA, say no.

Canada’s prime minister says the same about Trump’s plans to make his northern neighbor the USA’s 51st state, insisting “it will never happen.” Mark Carney, a former central banker already battling Trump’s aggressive trade tariffs, knows the threat is real, telling voters ahead of Monday’s election in which his Liberal Party won a stunning fourth consecutive victory “the Americans want our resources, our water, our land, our country.”

Trump’s world view is clear: he speaks as though he can reach out and take these things, and clearly believes he is working from an island of power, isolated from the negative consequences of his assumed conquests.

But no man, nor nation, is an Island.

Trump’s weakness is not just that he might buy Putin’s lie that he can conquer all Ukraine, or be outfoxed by Xi on tariffs, but that the rest of the world increasingly sees through his mantle of self-belief.

The costs of this muscle-power politics will be revealed more slowly than the near-instantaneous economic market pain to his trade tariffs. But it still marks a return to an era of dog eat dog. History has shown how that turns out.