Good morning, and welcome to the first full week of 2025. Let’s get after it.

🇺🇦 Ukraine began a new offensive into the Russian territory it holds in the Kursk region. Ukraine has held this since August, and reinforcing its hold on Russian ground will strengthen Kyiv’s hand in any upcoming peace talks. [More - Al Jazera]

🛢️ President Biden signed a last-minute order to prevent further oil and gas exploration in huge areas of the US coastline. [More - BBC]

🇨🇦 Canada’s Prime Minister Trudeau is reportedly planning to step down before a party meeting this Wednesday. His Liberal Party will select his successor, but Canada’s parliament may force a vote of no confidence in the spring. This could trigger elections in mid-2025, which the opposition Conservative Party expects to do well. [More - Bloomberg]

🇬🇧 Elon Musk has waded into British politics, falsely accusing Prime Minister Kier Starmer of covering up a years-old child abuse scandal (something Starmer took major steps to crack down on when was the UK’s director of public prosecutions (DPP)), attacking his former favorite Nigel Farage who leads the Reform party, and calling for the release of Tommy Robinson, a far-right agitator in jail for contempt of court. Musk’s false accusations are being amplified by the British Conservatives as well as his millions of social-media followers and will complicate relations between the UK and US. [More - BBC]

(Note - terms like ‘far-right’ are used broadly but Robinson’s positions are sufficiently extreme that even mainstream Conservatives and Reform party members in the UK disavow him. Musk’s support of him mirrors his promotion of the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, another extreme far-right party.)

🤖 AI Implementation Workshops

I mentioned these on Friday and am excited to be able to offer a series of highly practical AI implementation workshops starting in a couple of weeks. These all build upon the lessons I’ve learned over the past few years as I’ve integrated AI into all of my workflows, particularly the intelligence feeds you see from Decis, country risk assessment, report writing, and crisis planning.

The course will lead you through a tried and tested approach to understanding AI, determining how it can benefit your organization until finally building an actionable roadmap specific to your organization.

Over five weeks, we'll cover:

• What AIs are (and aren't) and the differences between the leading models

• Why prompting matters and how to write and apply these effectively

• How to determine the best tool for the job (and why that sometimes means not using AI)

• How to determine where AI can fit into your workflows most effectively

• Building an implementation roadmap and how to generate buy-in

Everything here is based on the tools and techniques I've used in my work to see improvements of up to 100x efficiency.

Moreover, the approach is firmly grounded in best consulting practices, building on my many years as a management consultant, so the focus is on delivering an actionable set of improvements to make you and your team more effective.

And as a newsletter reader you can use this special link to get 50% off this first cohort

(Just don’t delay - this discount expires on Friday)

If you're looking to take advantage of AI to improve your risk, crisis, and security operations, this is the place to start.

Note, these cohorts are deliberately small to maximize the practical nature of the sessions so there are only ten seats in each group.

You’ll know I am a big proponent of the advantages AI offers but I’ve also seen how people can struggle to get started with such a big topic, particularly in such a critical space as risk and crisis management. I ran an in-person version of this just before Christmas for a US organization, and it was a great success: we were able to identify significant areas for improvement in just a couple of sessions and reassure some of the skeptical members that they could use AI effectively and safely. I’m looking forward to doing the same for as many firms as possible in 2025.

On to the numbers…

Key Metrics

WTI is $72.44 (Down)

Low |------ < -------------| High

Wheat is $185.735 (Down)

Low |------ < -------------| High

EuroDollar is $1.03 (Down)

Low | < -------------------| High

YuanDollar is $0.14 (Unchanged)

Low |---------- < > ---------| High

Graphs are illustrative to show comparative price over last 180 days

Metrics via AlphaVantage updated Jan 05 2025 21:16 UTC

Global Stability Ratings

Here are the complete global stability rankings for all countries and territories covered by Decis Intelligence.