Category: 2. World

(Web Desk) – A new study finds that even kids as young as three can tell whether a short, wordless music tune sounds happy, sad, calm, or scary – and they get better at it as they grow.

The researchers also looked at how certain personality traits, like low empathy or limited emotional expression, might affect this skill.

The findings reveal that, while most preschoolers have a natural ear for musical emotions, some patterns make certain feelings harder to recognize.

Kids match music to moods

Rebecca Waller and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts and Sciences tested 144 preschoolers using five-second instrumental clips and a forced-choice task that asked them to match each clip to one of four emotion faces.

The design let the team separate two basic emotion dimensions, valence and arousal. Valence ranges from positive to negative, while arousal reflects low to high energy in the music.

Performance was better than chance: overall accuracy was 36 percent compared with a 25 percent chance level on the four-option task, and the age trend favored older preschoolers.

High-energy emotions were easier to recognize. Recognition was higher for clips conveying high-arousal states, such as happiness and fear, than for low-arousal states, such as calmness and sadness.

Kids with emotion-reading difficulties

Children rated higher on callous-unemotional traits showed poorer recognition overall, with the clearest drop in positive, low-arousal music. Fear recognition, by contrast, did not differ in these children.

This pattern aligns with previous work which links callous traits to broader emotion-reading difficulties. These include problems recognizing distress in faces, as well as a higher risk for aggression and rule-breaking in youth.

In Western tonal music, mode and harmony often carry affective color. A major key is usually judged as brighter or happier, while minor often lands as darker, though cultural context shapes these mappings.

In the new data, children were more accurate when clips were in a major key, while tempo showed no main effect on accuracy in this sample, consistent with the broader finding that high-arousal cues drive performance at these ages.

Musical emotion is important

By the early school years, kids typically get better at mapping music to emotion categories – a trend documented across ages five, eight, and eleven in earlier lab studies using unfamiliar excerpts.

Because callous-unemotional traits carry elevated risk for externalizing problems, any channel that strengthens emotion knowledge could be useful in prevention or early support.

Family and culture shape listening

Early exposure to varied musical styles could help strengthen a kid’s ability to recognize emotions in music. Familiarity with a range of tempos, keys, and cultural traditions may broaden the cues they can pick up on, potentially improving accuracy beyond what age alone predicts.

Environmental factors such as family listening habits, preschool music programs, or even background music in public spaces might contribute to these abilities.

This opens the possibility that targeted musical activities in early childhood settings could have lasting effects on social-emotional learning.

Even very short, lyric-free clips can communicate basic feelings to preschoolers, which suggests simple listening tasks may be informative in classrooms and clinics.

Other recent work finds that five-year-olds can sort musical feelings along valence and intensity, hinting at a fast-maturing sense for emotional contours in sound.

Empathy and musical connections

Music does not only communicate emotion, it can elicit it. In one study of five- to six-year-olds, above-chance recognition coexisted with stronger felt responses among kids whose parents reported higher empathy, especially for sad music.

Beyond individuals, coordinated musical activity has been tied to social bonding through interpersonal synchrony and endorphin release in group contexts such as singing or dancing.

“We show that children are good at matching emotion faces to the ‘correct’ emotion music, even at age three,” said Waller. 

BEIRUT: Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem has thanked a senior Iranian official for his country’s ongoing support in confronting Israel, the Lebanese group said on Thursday.

For decades, Tehran has been the main backer of the Shiite Muslim group, which emerged badly weakened from last year’s war with Israel that saw its arsenal pummelled and senior commanders killed.

Qassem met with Iran’s Supreme National Security Council chief Ali Larijani, who arrived in Beirut on Wednesday, and thanked Iran “for the ongoing support to Lebanon and its resistance against the Israeli enemy”, the group said in a statement.

He also thanked Iran for its support for Lebanon’s “unity, sovereignty and independence”, and emphasised “the brotherly relations between the Lebanese and Iranian people”.

Four Israeli soldiers killed in accidental explosion in Lebanon

Larijani’s visit came after the Lebanese government tasked the army with drawing up a plan to disarm Hezbollah by the end of the year.

Recent statements from Iranian officials in support of Hezbollah keeping its weapons have angered Lebanese officials.

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun told Larijani on Wednesday that “we reject any interference in our internal affairs,” adding that “it is forbidden for anyone… to bear arms and to use foreign backing as leverage”.

Prime Minister Nawaf Salam was equally firm, saying that “Lebanon will not accept, in any form, any interference in its internal affairs, and expects from the Iranian side a clear and explicit commitment to respect these principles.”

Larijani said that “any decision that the Lebanese government makes in consultation with the resistance is respected by us”.

“The one who interferes in Lebanese affairs is the one who plans for you, gives you a timetable from thousands of kilometres away. We did not give you any plan,” he said.

He was alluding to Washington, which put heavy pressure on Beirut to disarm Hezbollah and even presented a detailed proposal, including a timeline, for the process.

The U.S. and Israel support GHF, an American contractor, as an alternative to the United Nations, which they claim allows Hamas to siphon off aid. The U.N., which has delivered aid throughout Gaza for decades when conditions allow, denies the allegations.

Aid convoys from other groups travel within 100 meters (328 feet) of GHF sites and draw crowds. An overwhelming majority of violent incidents over the past few weeks have been related to those convoys, the GHF said.

Israeli fire killed at least six other people waiting for aid trucks close to the Morag corridor, which separates parts of southern Gaza, Nasser hospital said.

Israel says it killed a Hamas militant who took hostages

The Israeli military said Wednesday that it killed last week a Hamas militant who took part in the 2023 attack that started the war. It blamed Abdullah Saeed Abd al-Baqin for participating in the abduction of three Israeli hostages.

The Hamas-led attack abducted 251 people and killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Israel’s air and ground offensive has since displaced most of Gaza’s population, destroyed vast areas and pushed the territory toward famine. The offensive has killed more than 61,700 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not say how many were fighters or civilians but says around half were women and children.

The ministry is part of the Hamas-run government and staffed by medical professionals. The U.N. and independent experts consider it the most reliable source on war casualties. Israel disputes its figures but has not provided its own.

Palestinian fatally shot in West Bank violence

An Israeli settler shot dead a Palestinian on Wednesday in the occupied West Bank, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

The Israeli military said dozens of Palestinians hurled rocks toward an off-duty soldier and another person carrying out “engineering works” near the village of Duma, lightly wounding them. It said the soldier initially fired warning shots, then opened fire in self-defense.

The Health Ministry identified the deceased as Thamin Dawabshe, 35, a distant relative of a family targeted in a 2015 firebombing in the village by a settler. That attack killed a toddler and his parents. The attacker was convicted and handed three life sentences.

The West Bank has seen a rise in settler violence as well as Palestinian attacks since the start of the war in Gaza, and the Israeli military has carried out major military operations there. Rights groups and Palestinians say the military often turns a blind eye to violent settlers or intervenes to protect them.

Today’s agenda: Alaska summit; UK non-dom exodus fears; French borrowing costs; US consumers; and Zelenskyy’s darkest hour.

Good morning. We begin with an exclusive story on Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek, which has delayed the release of its new model after failing to train it using Huawei’s chips.

What we know: DeepSeek encountered persistent technical issues during its R2 training process using Ascend chips, prompting it to use Nvidia chips for training and Huawei’s for inference, according to three people familiar with the matter. The start-up was encouraged by Chinese authorities to adopt Huawei’s Ascend processor rather than use Nvidia’s systems after releasing its R1 model in January, the people said.

Why it matters: The difficulties, which forced DeepSeek to push back the model’s targeted launch from May, show how Chinese chips still lag behind their US rivals for the critical task of model training and highlight the challenges facing Beijing’s drive to be technologically self-sufficient.

The Financial Times this week reported that Beijing has demanded that Chinese tech companies justify their orders of Nvidia’s H20, in a move to encourage them to adopt domestic chips. But industry insiders have said the Chinese chips suffer from stability issues, slower inter-chip connectivity and inferior software compared with Nvidia products. More on DeepSeek’s stumble.

Here’s what else we’re keeping tabs on today:

• Economic data: The UK and EU have preliminary second-quarter GDP estimates. The UK also releases trade figures for June. France publishes CPI inflation rate for July.

• Trade disputes: China’s preliminary 75.8 per cent duty on Canadian canola seed goes into effect, in an escalation of trade tensions between Beijing and Ottawa that has pushed down futures prices on fears of a supply glut.

• Marshall Islands: The Pacific island nation makes its football debut with its first international match in the US state of Arkansas today.

• Results: Admiral, Applied Materials, Aviva, Carlsberg, Deere & Co, Hapag-Lloyd, RWE, Savills, Standard Bank, Swiss Re and Thyssenkrupp report earnings. See our Week Ahead newsletter for the full list.

Five more top stories

1. Donald Trump promised “very severe consequences” for Russia if its leader Vladimir Putin refused to agree to end the war with Ukraine at tomorrow’s summit in Alaska. The US president issued the threat after holding talks with European leaders that alleviated concerns about territorial concessions. Read the rundown of yesterday’s meeting.

2. Fears of a non-dom exodus from the UK have been allayed by initial tax data, which suggests that total numbers leaving the country are in line with — or even below — official forecasts. The findings will be a relief to UK chancellor Rachel Reeves after a series of surveys suggested her tax policies had prompted huge numbers of wealthy individuals to flee the country.

3. A top Federal Reserve official has warned rate-setters against “lurching” towards new cuts before inflation is under control, even as traders grow certain that the US central bank will lower borrowing costs in September. The hawkish tone from Austan Goolsbee came as markets began pricing in a 25 basis-point cut.

• Fed chair race: Trump said he has narrowed his list of contenders to head the central bank to “three or four” candidates and left the door open to naming a shadow successor before Jay Powell departs.

• Dispatch from Cincinnati: In the Ohio hometown of big US companies and vice-president JD Vance, consumers are shrugging off anxiety on tariffs.

4. France’s long-term borrowing costs are closing in on Italy’s for the first time since the global financial crisis, as nervous bond investors put the EU’s second-biggest economy on a level with a country that has been one of its most troubled borrowers. Yields on 10-year French government bonds have jumped above 3 per cent over the past year. Read what the convergence means.

• UBS headcount: The Swiss lender is on track to miss an internal target to cut its workforce to 85,000 by the time it completes its integration of Credit Suisse next year.

5. Exclusive: Four Boston Consulting Group staff quit the team advising on a new aid system for Gaza in the early stages of the work, raising concerns about the project months before it spiralled into a reputational crisis for the firm. Read the full report.

The Big Read

Diminished at home by a political crisis, Volodymyr Zelenskyy is trying to shape this week’s Alaska summit between Trump and Putin. Confined outside the room where his country’s fate will be decided while losses on the frontline pile up, Ukraine’s president is facing his darkest hour yet.

We’re also reading . . . 

• ‘Money mules’: The UK’s financial regulator is alarmed by a sharp rise in the number of people letting criminals use their bank accounts to launder funds.

• PIF writedown: Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund has cut $8bn from the value of its holdings in the kingdom’s gigaprojects.

• The battle of Orgreave: John Gapper was at a decisive confrontation of the 1984-85 miners’ strike in the UK. Here’s what he saw.

• Fur parents: With fewer children and grandchildren to fawn over, Italians are channelling more of their emotional energy to pets, writes Amy Kazmin.

Chart of the day

Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta will spend more than $400bn on data centres in 2026 — on top of more than $350bn this year. But that is just a fraction of the spending required to build the data centres needed to power the artificial intelligence era: one of the biggest movements of capital in modern history. So who else is joining to cash in on the $3tn AI building boom?

Take a break from the news . . . 

It’s getting hotter — and that’s forced Robert Armstrong to make the case for a professional faux pas: wearing shorts in the office.

The humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza has reached an appalling new low. After months of siege, bombardment and displacement, what remains of the enclave is little more than a graveyard of rubble and grief. Entire neighbourhoods have been flattened, tens of thousands of innocent people have been killed and those who survive face an even slower death from hunger, disease and deprivation.

In a joint statement this week, the foreign ministers of 24 countries — including Britain, Canada, Australia and several European countries — warned that “famine is unfolding before our eyes” and urged Israel to allow aid to flow into Gaza unrestricted. Their primary demand is to open all crossings, permit international NGOs to operate in what is the world’s largest open air prison, and let in food, water, medicine, fuel and shelter materials without obstruction.

Yet such calls have been made for months, with little to show for it. Israel continues to control and restrict the flow of supplies, turning humanitarian relief into a bargaining chip, in defiance of international law. It is difficult to see the current Israeli policy as anything other than the use of starvation as a weapon — a crime under Geneva Conventions. The situation is made worse by the inability, or unwillingness, of global powers to move beyond statements of concern. Expressions of outrage have not translated into concrete steps — such as sanctions, arms suspensions or legal action — that might force a change in course.

The destruction of Gaza is an appalling indictment of the international system’s failure to uphold its own rules. If the world allows an entire population to be bombed and starved, it loses the moral authority to speak of justice and human rights elsewhere.

While covering the Iran-Israel-US war in June this year, I had concluded that: a) the combined US-Israeli attack had badly damaged the Irani nuclear infrastructure and ambition, without obliterating it, as President Trump had claimed; b) Iran will never abandon its nuclear ambition and will sooner than later acquire nuclear arms; c) the Shia arc stands eclipsed before a Sunni crescent given that Iran’s 3H proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthis) stand militarily degraded, and its client state Syria is out of Tehran’s orbit; d) in ‘missile economics’ Iran retains the capability to target Israel with precision using cruise and ballistic missiles and that threat remains; e) contrary to Western expectations, Iranians rallied around clerics whose grip on power remains firm ‘for now’; f) the battle redefines the nature of warfare, especially the non-contact conflict, particularly for India and Pakistan. Population on both sides must now contend with intense psy ops; and g) ‘counterintelligence’ and espionage emerge as niche force-multipliers in warfare.

An eminent US scholar of Irani descent, Prof Vali Nasr recently published his new book, Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History. The venerable professor, who has visited Pakistan and has previously worked with Richard Holbrooke, is a keen observer of the region. His MIT/Harvard educated father, Seyyed Hossein Nasr is also a respected scholar of Islam and a former professor at George Washington University. Mr Hossein has undertaken critical work on Allama Iqbal.

Back to the work of Prof Vali Nasr, who concedes Iran’s role in almost every crisis in the Middle East, that has caused ‘serial humiliations’ to Tehran recently. First, Prof Nasr thinks Iran’s contemporary strategic vision is driven more by Iran’s ‘national security rooted in regional rivalries’, and lesser by its revolutionary intent. Although Islam remains the language of Iran’s politics, whose ‘aims are now secular in nature’.

Second, the eight years’ war against Iraq in 1980s deeply affected every facet of Irani sociology and body politics. Western analysts generally downplay the effects of this conflict, as it mainly ended in a stalemate, despite overwhelming Western support to Iraq; and the West Plus subsequently took an embarrassing U-turn against Baghdad under Saddam Hussein. The ensuing strategic culture has guided Iran’s behaviour blending ‘encirclement fears with outsized ambition’. The response to Iraqi invasion in September 1980 strengthened Iran’s ayatollahs; engendered some sort of strategic autonomy; and ushered in self-sufficiency, religious zeal and patriotism. There are chronicled tales of Basij Militia’s heroism in the literature pertaining to Irani resolve during the war. Consequently, the war made Tehran lean towards and depend upon proxy power, and owing up the anti-Israel cause. A popular slogan among Irani volunteers was — “The path to Jerusalem runs through Karbala”.

Third, the strategic shift and revolutionary zest caused events like the 1979 storming of American embassy in Tehran and the ensuing ‘Iran Hostage Crisis’ for 444 days; the 1987 demonstration by Irani pilgrims at Mecca wanting to ‘uproot the Saudi rulers’; the 1988 downing of Flight 655 by the US; and the 1992 bombing of Israeli embassy in Argentine, to mention a few. Khomeini perceived the US determined for regime change in Tehran, and his characterisation of the US, the ‘Great Satan’, was that of a dog, that needed to be firmly confronted to make it back off.

Fourth, when President Rafsanjani pursued the ‘Grand Bargain with the Great Satan’ in the 1990s, and President Khatami in 2003 wrote a conciliatory letter to Washington, Khamenei – the successor to the leader of revolution, Imam Khomeini – held the view that rapprochement with the US was not possible. Emphasising continued resistance to the US, Khamenei reiterated that ‘pursuit of the ideals is more important than attainment of the ideals’; that setbacks would be temporary; and that victory may be long drawn. This proclivity still guides Iran under the gerontocracy of Khamenei and his inner circle.

Fifth, the war with Iraq gave the Pasadaran — the IRGC — more political power, a taste for private enterprise, and changed Iran into a ‘technical autarky’ resulting into self-sufficiency. The belief in rebounding from setbacks inspired Tehran’s strategic doctrine of ‘forward defence’ formally adopted in 2003. The doctrine nurtured raising, equipping and manipulating proxies to neutralise threats to Iran before they reached Tehran. The slain General Qasem Soleimani, who used the IRGC’s Quds and Jerusalem Brigades to deadly effect, was a great exponent of ‘forward defence’. Soleimani shared intelligence with the ‘Great Satan’ over Afghan Taliban after 9/11; persuaded President Putin and Hezbollah in 2015 to intervene militarily in Syria; and used Afghan Shias in Syria.

Sixth, however, despite heavy indoctrination through ‘sacred defence museums’ all over the country eulogising sacrifice, the Iranian old guard finds its rule over younger generations through revolutionary fervour and religious zeal, tenuous. Limited civil liberties, comparative oppression, economic hardships and lack of opportunity are making the young and the restless to question ‘forward defence’. There is palpable but slow unravelling of the clergy’s stranglehold on the levers of power.

Seventh, Iran’s limitations of resources finally caught up with its strategic overreach in the changed Middle East, where Israel backed by the US is now a resurgent and dominant power. Iran’s loss of Syria, key to the region, is far greater than its diminishing influence in Iraq, Lebanon or Yemen cumulatively. Iran may, however, find it difficult to stomach and abandon ‘forward defence’ anytime soon. The Arab states, guided by similar calculations, sided ostensibly with Israel during the recent conflict to deflate Irani dominance.

Finally, on the succession issue, Prof Nasr considers Mojtaba, the 56-year-old second son of Khamenei, as the likely and preferred candidate. He is principal advisor to his father. However, this succession might bring the ‘Islamic Republic closer to becoming a hereditary monarchy’. The change might perpetuate the ‘forward defence’ doctrine more aggressively under a relatively younger ideologue and that might have implications for Iran, its people and politics, the region and the world. And despite efforts by the EU, the nuclear deal with Iran over terms favourable to West Plus is likely to remain a pipedream.

In all this, the silver lining for Pakistan remains Tehran’s post-conflict realisation of the value of its friendship with Islamabad, at least for now.

This is Washington Edition, the newsletter about money, power and politics in the nation’s capital. Today, senior editor Joe Sobczyk looks at what comes next after the president’s summit with Putin. Sign up here and follow us at @bpolitics. Email our editors here.

President Donald Trump is already looking beyond his meeting on Friday with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.