Challenges the world must confront in 2025

Global leaders will need to address questions arising from wars, the climate crisis, and evolution of Artificial Intelligence

- Shashi Shekhar

Let's look at some of New Year's Day headlines. In New Orleans, in the United States (US), a terrorist mowed down revelers, killing 15 people and injuring dozens. The driver, Shamsuddin Jabbar, later tried to fire at the crowd, but the police gunned him down. Jabbar once served in the US Army, and as such, it's the failure of the American intelligence agencies that ignored the signs of the impending mayhem. He had a criminal past and yet escaped tight security scrutiny. Innocent US civilians paid the price of this laxity.

For the US, the tragedy didn't end there. Within hours of the New Orleans incident, a truck exploded in front of the Donald Trump hotel in Las Vegas. An interesting fact is that the truck that exploded, killing a passerby, was manufactured at President-elect Trump's close associate Elon Musk's Tesla factory. The third incident happened in the Queens borough of New York. A shootout in a nightclub left 11 people injured. Both these incidents are being investigated. At the time of writing this article, police in the US had not declared them as clear acts of terrorism, but the incidents have once again brought to light the growing unease in American society.