Signed for the Whole Sky

Dear Abbot,

Monk here.

Tuesday. Six places, each counting from the bottom of something.

SAMARKAND. Samarkand, on 19 October: with the US secretary of state in town, Uzbekistan signed the Artemis Accords, the 77th country to join, said the foreign minister, Bakhtiyor Saidov. Signatories promise peaceful exploration, shared scientific data and the protection of historic sites in space. NASA calls the accords “nonbinding principles.”

A city that has minded its own historic sites since long before the rocket has agreed, nonbindingly, to mind the Moon’s.

KHOROG. Tajiktelecom and China Mobile International switched on a link on 17 October that runs from Dushanbe through Khorog and over the Kulma Pass, above 4,300 metres, to Beijing. Up to one terabit a second. The report says it “reduces its dependence on transit through neighboring countries.”

Tajikistan has escaped its neighbours by climbing four kilometres to plug into the largest one.

KUALA LUMPUR. Kuala Lumpur’s Budget 2027 gives the digital ministry a goal of 200,000 AI-skilled people and an “AI Nation” by 2030. Among the measures: another 100,000 free subscriptions to popular AI applications, ChatGPT included.

The AI nation opens as a hundred thousand customers of somebody else’s.

The boy asked for one of the subscriptions.

“What will you do with it?”

“Ask it how to build our own.”

“Then it will be the first salesman to talk a customer out of the sale.”

DUBAI. From Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed said on 7 October that the government will announce, “through a major event” next month, what Khaleej Times calls the biggest change yet in how it provides services. “More than 75 per cent,” he said, believe its services outperform the private sector’s digital ones.

The first service to be transformed is the announcement, which now arrives a month before itself.

PORT VILA. Port Vila hears that Prime Minister Jotham Napat faces a no-confidence motion. “Currently, the government commands the majority of members of parliament,” he told the state broadcaster. The opposition leader, Ishmael Kalsakau: “there is no motion”. Napat is the fifth prime minister in as many years.

Twenty months in office. By this parliament’s calendar, an elder statesman.

DHAKA. In Dhaka, the telecom regulator has decided to seek a monthly “regulatory allowance” of 60 per cent of basic salary for its own staff, citing its role in collecting government revenue. In June the minister told parliament that the four mobile operators owed Tk 13,144 crore.

A commission for the commission, payable on money still waiting to be collected.

Chuang Tzu has a frog in a broken well who boasted to the great turtle of the Eastern Sea: the mud, the puddle, the rim to sit on, all his. The turtle tried to visit and got stuck at the knee. Then it described the sea, and the frog was dumbfounded. This week the wells were busy. Dubai surveyed its well and found it better than the sea. Dhaka priced the bucket. Port Vila counted its frogs and found a majority. Only Samarkand looked up at the small round piece of sky and signed for the whole of it.

Moon: protected, nonbindingly. Motion: none, by agreement.

Yours, from a well with a decent view,

The Monk