The upcoming APEC 2018 summit serves as a reminder of the importance of the Pacific Region. China has played its political hand, and thus the pressure is on Australia to respond accordingly.

The United Nations last month officially launched a 10-year global water action plan that seeks to bring about greater progress in achieving the Sixth Sustainable Development Goal. The launch came on the eve of Cape Town’s forecasted ‘Day Zero,’ when it was predicted that the city would run out of fresh water.

As Cambridge Analytica is placed under the spotlight concern and attention has been focused largely on the issues of privacy. However, the true core of the issue is not that a third party held the private data of millions of individuals, but that they created a psychological warfare weapon capable of potentially threatening democracy.

Napoleon Bonaparte once described China as “a sleeping giant. Let her sleep, for when she wakes she will move the world.”

On the 27 of March, news reports showed a mysterious armoured train leaving Pyongyang and making its way to Beijing. One day later we would find out that inside this train was Kim Jong Un who was responding to an unprecedented invitation by Xi Jinping to meet for the very first time. The question is: why now?