In the 1990s, the international community was heavily criticised for failing to intervene in the Srebrenica massacre and the Rwandan genocide. This influenced NATO’s bombing of Kosovo in 1999, which was conducted to stop the ethnic cleansing of Albanian Muslim Kosovars by Serbian militias. Although the military intervention by NATO was widely deemed successful in preventing ethnic cleansing, an independent commission found it to be “illegal but legitimate”. In a move to codify legal humanitarian interventions, in 2005 the UN adopted The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. It states that each individual state has a responsibility to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. The UN is prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities fail to protect their populations. After NATO intervention in Libya, which was not authorised by the Security Council, some scholars and diplomats argue that R2P has lost its credibility in the eyes of the international community and is seen by some as a dated norm. Since 2012, R2P was not invoked in several instances of crimes against civilians, such as in Syria, Yemen and Myanmar.

During and after the COVID-19 pandemic, the cost of living crisis and inflation, corporations in industries such as online retail, energy, transportation, IT, healthcare, finances, and others, reported record-high profits. A windfall tax is a one-off additional tax for the companies or sectors on their excess (above average) profit.

Recent developments of easily accessible artificial intelligence models made several apps and websites working with computational creativity (a scientific field studying AI's potential to simulate or replicate human creativity) increasingly popular. Examples include: screenplays produced by ChatGPT, paintings created by Midjourney or DALL-E, and songs generated by Soundraw.

Back in 2019, the homicide rate in El Salvador was among the highest in Latin America when populist Nayib Bukele was elected president. As a response to the perpetual violence, in 2022 he launched the “war on gangs” that managed to reduce the annual homicide rate by half, reportedly dismantle the gangs and bring more peace to the citizens. Such results were achieved by months of declared state of emergency in the country, increased military presence, more than 67 thousand arrests, stricter prison sentences, and a newly built prison, able to house 40 thousand inmates. Various human rights groups expressed concern about thousands of innocent people arrested due to tipoffs or "resembling" criminals, over a 100 dead behind bars and a rollback of human rights laws, particularly the right to assembly. As of 2023, 70 percent of Salvadorans support the re-election of president Bukele.

A revolutionary new technology was invented - a button that can change the sex of every person in the world at once, with no adverse health effects.

Students in arts and social sciences often face choices of employment, with some of them conventionally seen as noble yet low-paying (e.g., drama teacher, bureaucrat in the public sector, NGO worker) and others seen as "selling out", or compromising on your principles and integrity for a higher quality of life (e.g., commercial singer signed for a major label, policy analyst for a consulting firm). You are Padvilas Relanis, a promising and capable graduate.

Nowadays, everyone has a goddamn podcast. For example, Milda Gadliauskaitė and some Canadian dude have a podcast about something.