What are the nuns doing that they can’t answer the phone? This is Pope Francis, I wanted to offer you greetings for the end of the year. Maybe I’ll try to call again later. May God bless you.

No matter what the aggressor intends to do, when the world is truly united, it is then the world, not the aggressor, determines how events develop.

In a democracy, that’s the only realistic path to Net Zero. Consent, not imposition. Honesty, not obfuscation. Pragmatism, not ideology.

So the 20th century taught the world not to use nuclear weapons and not to proliferate. This is not a good strategy because recent history has shown that wars could erupt with equal devastation.

In the past, human progress had to come at the cost of the environment. If we wanted energy, we had to burn wood or we had to burn fossil fuels. If we wanted to grow more food, we had to expand farmland, often at the cost of forests. But technology and innovation means we're very quickly decoupling these impacts, such that this conflict is no longer true.

[Angela Merkel] showed what can be achieved when politicians take the right course of action and work to find solutions to the world’s challenges rather than simply shift responsibility to others.

There is nothing that's off limits. If people think something is off limits, I make it my business to go make a joke about it; that's my job.

Is there anyone out there? Or am I all alone? It wouldn’t make a difference; still, I don’t wanna know.

On composure