Monday, 23 March 2026

Today's PGI: 5.26 — Diverging Narratives

The IRGC threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz completely. Trump gave Iran 48 hours before striking power plants. Iran fired missiles at Dimona. Iran threatened to destroy Gulf desalination plants. A former Pakistani ambassador threatened to bomb Mumbai and Delhi on live television.

Five escalations in a single day. Each one, in isolation, would dominate a week of news. Together, they create an information environment so saturated with threat that the individual stories start to blur — which is, itself, a perception phenomenon worth measuring.

Today's PGI: 5.26. Up 0.25 from yesterday's 5.01. The 4-day rolling average sits at 5.37. But the headline number understates March 23 for one reason: the geopolitics tributary crossed into Competing Realities for the first time since we started tracking. PGI-GP hit 6.12 — red territory. The war hasn't just escalated militarily. It has escalated informationally.

What happened today is a phase transition. The Iran conflict moved from battlefield exchanges into infrastructure warfare — threatening the water, food, energy, and helium supplies that keep the modern world running. And when a war enters infrastructure, the perception gaps don't narrow. They multiply. Because every region processes infrastructure threats through the lens of what it needs to survive. The Gulf sees water. South Korea sees oil. The chip industry sees helium. Latin America sees food prices. Same war, seven different survival anxieties — and now every one of them has a specific Iranian threat attached to it.

The Hormuz Threat: Total or Selective?

The day's highest-scoring story — IRGC threatens full Hormuz closure, PGI 7.50 — turns on a factual question that should be answerable with a phone call. Is the blockade total or selective?

The answer depends on where you read the news.

AP and Reuters reported the strait as "completely closed." Full stop. The framing is absolute: Iran is shutting down one-third of global seaborne trade. The implications are catastrophic and universal. Every oil tanker, every LNG carrier, every cargo ship — blocked.

The Guardian reported something different. Foreign Minister Araghchi said Tehran had imposed restrictions "only on vessels from countries involved in attacks against Iran, and would assist others that stayed out of the conflict." That's not a total blockade. That's a selective embargo with an explicit invitation to neutrality.

Al Jazeera added a third version: "closed until they are rebuilt" — a conditional permanence tied to the reconstruction of destroyed Iranian infrastructure. Not a blockade with a timer. A blockade with a bill.

Three versions of the same chokepoint. Total closure. Selective embargo. Conditional permanence. The difference between these three frames is worth trillions of dollars and millions of lives — because a total blockade justifies military intervention, a selective embargo creates a diplomatic opening, and a conditional closure makes the blockade Iran's bargaining chip rather than its weapon.

D6, Cui Bono Divergence, explains why the factual gap exists. The total-blockade frame serves the military intervention case — if Iran is choking global trade, force is the answer. The selective-blockade frame serves European interests specifically: if neutral vessels can still transit, then European energy security doesn't require war. It requires neutrality. The Guardian's inclusion of Araghchi's quote isn't editorial generosity. It's information that directly serves European strategic interests.

Both frames are sourced. Both are incomplete. The selection is doing all the work.

48 Hours: Four Readings of the Same Ultimatum

Trump's 48-hour ultimatum to Iran before striking power plants — PGI 7.48, the day's second-highest story — produced four cleanly distinct narratives that map precisely onto regional interests.

AP ran it as a mutual flashpoint: "Iran and US trade threats to attack civilian infrastructure." Balance. Two powers. Shared escalation. The framing positions the US as one of two participants in a dangerous standoff — neither the aggressor nor the defender, just one side of a bilateral crisis. This frame serves the US news consumer's need to see their country as a rational actor responding to provocation, not issuing threats unilaterally.

The Guardian ran it as a Trump story, with emphasis on a contradiction the US press didn't touch: Trump had said he was "winding down" military operations just one day earlier. The 48-hour ultimatum didn't read as strategy. It read as volatility — a president who reversed himself in 24 hours. This frame serves European anxieties about unreliable American leadership: if Trump can flip from de-escalation to ultimatum overnight, what's the value of any American commitment?

Al Jazeera ran it as the headline response: "Iran says will hit region's energy sites if US-Israel target power plants." The Iranian counter-threat led. Trump's ultimatum appeared as the provocation, not the headline. The frame positions Iran as the defender — it wouldn't threaten energy infrastructure if its power plants weren't about to be bombed. This inversion — leading with the response rather than the action — reverses the entire moral sequence for an audience that already processes the conflict as US-Israeli aggression.

SCMP barely engaged with the drama at all. Economic consequences. Supply chain analysis. China watching from above. The detachment is the frame: this is a Western-Middle Eastern crisis that China observes, calculates, and prepares for. The "readies response" language positions China as the rational actor in a room full of people shouting.

D5 (Actor Portrayal) scored 5.5 across the four regions because Trump alone occupies four mutually exclusive roles: deadline-setter, flip-flopper, aggressor, and irrelevance. The same man. The same statement. Four different characters.

But the detail that should trouble any reader is buried in the US coverage. AP noted that "the US has argued that Iran's Revolutionary Guard controls much of the country's infrastructure" — a single sentence that blurs the distinction between civilian and military targets. If the IRGC controls the power grid, then bombing the power grid is a military operation, not an attack on civilians. That framing appeared nowhere else. And it lays the groundwork — quietly, in a subordinate clause — for the legal and moral defence of strikes that would leave 85 million people in the dark.

Dimona: Five Stories From the Same Missiles

Iranian missiles struck Israel's Dimona nuclear facility and the nearby city of Arad. One hundred and seventy-five people were injured. PGI: 7.18.

The scored evidence reveals five distinct narratives constructed from identical facts.

The New York Times told a vulnerability story. The lead: "even battle-hardened Israelis seemed rattled." Netanyahu called it a "miracle." The frame is about Israeli resilience cracking under sustained assault — a defence-failure narrative that focuses American attention on whether Israel's missile shield is holding. The implication runs toward more US military support, not less.

The Guardian told a casualty story. The lead: hospital admissions, treatment figures, 36 hospitalised. Clinical, humanitarian, factual. The numbers create moral weight through precision rather than interpretation.

Al Jazeera told a context story. The strikes were "a response to an attack on Iran's Natanz nuclear enrichment complex earlier in the day." That sentence — present in Al Jazeera, absent from NYT and Guardian — changes everything. With it, the Dimona strike is retaliation. Without it, it's aggression. The same sentence adds a second set of casualties: "US-Israeli attacks since Feb 28 have killed more than 1,500 people, including at least 200 children." One hundred and seventy-five injured at Dimona sits in a different moral register when placed beside 1,500 dead in Iran. The ratio does work that no editorialising could accomplish.

NDTV told a nuclear doctrine story — a uniquely Indian frame. "Striking Dimona even without penetrating the nuclear facility itself carries a message." India's nuclear deterrence posture makes this framing inevitable: the country with its own nuclear ambiguity reads the attack through the lens of what it means for the concept of deterrence itself. Not military damage. Strategic signalling.

SCMP told a technology story. "Despite air defence interceptors" — the emphasis is on the failure of missile defence systems, with obvious implications for Taiwan Strait scenarios. China reads Dimona through the lens of what it teaches about defeating missile shields.

D3 (Narrative Market Distortion) scored 7.0. Five frames, zero overlap. The same missiles producing five fundamentally different news stories for five audiences — each story calibrated to the survival anxieties, strategic interests, and moral frameworks of its readers.

Infrastructure as Target: Water, Food, Helium

Three stories broke open new domains of the conflict today, each revealing how infrastructure warfare multiplies perception gaps.

Desalination plants (PGI: 6.75). Iran threatened to destroy Gulf desalination plants. For Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and parts of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, this isn't military escalation — it's a threat against the physical possibility of life. Gulf media treated it as existential: 100 million people depend on desalinated water. Western outlets buried it under oil price coverage. The Persian-language press framed it as legitimate deterrence — if your power plants are targets, our water infrastructure is too.

Food blockade (PGI: 7.25). The Hormuz blockade threatens food for 100 million people. Nearly half the world's traded urea transits the strait. Urea prices are up 40%. Gulf states import 80-90% of their food through Hormuz. This isn't a supply chain disruption. It's a famine scenario.

The story's PGI, despite its catastrophic implications, sits lower than the military stories above it because the sourcing is narrow — both primary sources are Al Jazeera editions (English and Arabic). The factual divergence is modest because the same outlet family reported both versions. But the significance score is 5 — maximum — because if this blockade holds, the human consequences dwarf any missile exchange.

Helium supply chain (PGI: 4.40). A drone strike on Qatar's Ras Laffan facility cut one of the world's primary helium supplies. Qatar produces 25% of global helium. Helium is required for MRI machines, semiconductor manufacturing, and fibre-optic production. A supply cut cascades from hospitals to chip fabs to telecom infrastructure in 30-40 days.

Nobody predicted this branch of the war three weeks ago. The helium story scored a lower PGI because it's still primarily being reported as a commodity price story — factual, agreed-upon, moderate divergence. But its GAI tells the other half: at 4.18, it's visible to only four regions. South Asia, Latin America, and Africa don't see it. The cascade from drone strike to MRI shortage will arrive before the news does.

The Sahel Confrontation: 7.5 Between Two Continents

The Sahel Alliance story — Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso protesting an EU resolution they called neo-colonial interference — scored PGI 6.70 and produced one of the sharpest bilateral gaps of the day: 7.5 between African and European coverage.

EU media framed the resolution as human rights accountability. The Sahel governments have expelled French troops, embraced Russian Wagner forces, and are running authoritarian security states. The EU resolution expresses concern about democratic regression and civilian casualties. In this frame, the EU is the responsible international actor holding failing states to account.

African media framed the same resolution as neo-colonial overreach. Three sovereign nations kicked out their former colonial power, and now that former colonial power is using institutional mechanisms to punish them for the exit. The protests in Bamako and Niamey aren't anti-European sentiment — they're pro-sovereignty assertion. In this frame, the Sahel Alliance is the hero and the EU resolution is the weapon of a power that can't accept losing influence.

D6 (Cui Bono) splits cleanly. The EU resolution serves European influence preservation — keeping the Sahel in the sphere of European normative frameworks even after military withdrawal. The African resistance narrative serves the Sahel governments' domestic legitimacy — nothing unifies a population faster than a foreign power telling you what to do.

This story is invisible to five of seven regions. The US didn't cover it. Asia didn't cover it. Latin America didn't cover it. The Middle East didn't cover it. Two continents are having a sovereignty argument that the rest of the world doesn't know exists — while the rest of the world watches Iran.

Cuba: The Five-Link Cascade Nobody Predicted

Cuba declared "war readiness" after its third national blackout this month. PGI: 6.73.

The cascade now runs five links deep. Oil blockade → power grid failure → water pump failure → hospital collapse → humanitarian emergency. Each link intensifies the gap between how Latin American media and US media describe what's happening.

Latin American coverage treats Cuba as a humanitarian catastrophe caused, in part, by US sanctions tightening during wartime. The framing is empathetic and structural: a small island nation's infrastructure is collapsing because the global system it depends on has been disrupted by a war it has nothing to do with, compounded by decades of embargo.

US coverage treats Cuba as a geopolitical development. The 51 prisoners released? A diplomatic gambit ahead of possible US military action. The blackouts? A failing state under an incompetent regime. The framing strips the humanitarian content and replaces it with strategic calculation — what does Cuba's weakness mean for US interests?

The water crisis (PGI: 6.50) is where the cascade becomes concrete. Blackouts killed the water pumps. No pumps, no running water. No running water, no functioning hospitals. Cuban state media is reporting people filling buckets from contaminated sources. That story reached two regions: Latin America and the US. The EU, Middle East, Asia, South Asia, and Africa don't see it. Five billion people are unaware that 11 million Cubans can't reliably access clean water tonight.

D6 on Cuba reveals a blunt interest alignment: the humanitarian frame supports sanctions relief, which the US opposes. The geopolitical frame supports continued pressure, which the US favours. The framing isn't incidental to policy — it's the mechanism through which policy is justified.

The River System: Where the Fractures Run

The seven tributaries of the PGI map today's information landscape like a river system — some streams running fast and red, others barely flowing.

PGI-GP (Geopolitics): 6.12 — Competing Realities 🔴. The hottest stream, and it crossed into red territory today for the first time. Thirty-three stories — nearly half of all scored coverage — flow through the geopolitics tributary. The Hormuz closure threat, Trump's ultimatum, the Dimona strikes, the desalination threats, the Sahel confrontation, Cuba's collapse, Russia's spring offensive, Pakistan's nuclear rhetoric — the stream is running so fast it's drowning everything downstream. When geopolitics crosses into Competing Realities, it means the world's media aren't just disagreeing about interpretation. They're constructing incompatible versions of what's happening.

PGI-IW (Information Warfare): 5.26 — Diverging Narratives 🟠. Two stories — France investigating Musk over Grok-generated deepfakes, and AI deepfake videos of the Iran war spreading faster than corrections. The stream is narrow but fast. The Grok story illustrates something new: a sovereign government treating an AI platform as an information warfare vector and opening a criminal investigation against its owner. France and the US see this differently — regulatory action vs. free speech overreach — and the gap runs through the same Silicon Valley fault line that's been widening for years.

PGI-HE (Health): 4.92 — Diverging Narratives 🟠. Cuba's water crisis and India's Nipah virus outbreak. Both stories are invisible outside their immediate regions. Health has climbed from yesterday's calms (2.33) into meaningful divergence — not because the world is arguing about health, but because health crises are becoming more severe while remaining trapped in regional information silos. The Cuba cascade elevated health from footnote to tributary contributor. Still, only 2 stories flow through this stream. The war is consuming the oxygen that health coverage needs to breathe.

PGI-EC (Economics): 4.61 — Diverging Narratives 🟠. Twenty stories, making this the second-busiest tributary. The economic cascade continues to fragment: Brent crude at $112, UK mortgages up £900/year, Indian rupee at record lows, Australian fuel running out by mid-April, Iran printing 10-million-rial banknotes worth $7, Goldman Sachs cutting US GDP forecasts. Each story is reported domestically. Each country experiences the same Hormuz-driven shock in isolation. The PGI runs moderate because economic facts generate less framing divergence than military ones — everyone agrees oil is expensive. The disagreement is about who broke the market.

PGI-TE (Technology): 4.50 — Diverging Narratives 🟠. Ten stories. The Pentagon dropped Anthropic over its refusal to build weapons applications — a story that reads as principled resistance (tech press), naive idealism (defence press), and irrelevance (Chinese press, which noted Palantir immediately won the replacement contract). The Supermicro co-founder indicted for smuggling Nvidia GPUs to China. The Iran war threatening global chip supply chains through the helium-from-Qatar pathway. Technology coverage is increasingly entangled with the war's second-order effects, and each entanglement creates new perception gaps.

PGI-WR (Women's Rights): 4.22 — Diverging Narratives 🟠. India's transgender rights bill removing protected categories and the Supreme Court rejecting menstrual leave. Both stories are invisible outside South Asia. The women's rights tributary runs quietly — not because the issues are uncontentious, but because the war has consumed the global information space that might otherwise carry these stories beyond their region. Two genuinely significant human rights developments, buried by geopolitics.

PGI-CL (Climate): 4.08 — Diverging Narratives 🟠. The calmest stream. Africa's sea levels rising faster than the global average. Arizona's record March heatwave. Wind and solar hitting 17% of US electricity. The climate stories exist, and they matter — Africa's sea level rise is a civilisational threat on a 20-year horizon. But they can't compete with missiles for attention. The war pushes climate to the bottom of every newsroom's priority list, and the PGI captures that: where climate is covered, the divergence is moderate. The problem isn't disagreement. It's absence.

Cui Bono: The Interest Map

Every region's narrative serves someone's interests. Not because editors conspire, but because information markets — like financial markets — reflect the incentives of their participants. Adam Smith's invisible hand operates in newsrooms as reliably as in stock exchanges: what gets covered, how it's framed, and what gets omitted all align with the interests of the audience being served.

March 23 makes the interest map visible across four fronts.

The blockade frame. Whether Hormuz is totally or selectively closed is the day's highest-stakes factual question. The total-blockade frame serves military intervention advocates: if Iran is choking the world, force is the only answer. The selective-blockade frame serves European neutrality interests: if Iran is only targeting belligerent nations' ships, then staying out of the war becomes a survival strategy, not appeasement. The conditional-blockade frame (closed until Iran's infrastructure is rebuilt) serves Iran's negotiating position: the blockade is a bargaining chip with a price tag, not an act of war.

AP and Reuters chose total. The Guardian chose selective. Al Jazeera chose conditional. Each choice aligns with the strategic interests of the region each outlet primarily serves. No editor needed to call anyone. The market did the work.

Iran's divide-and-conquer diplomacy. Iran offered Japan safe passage through Hormuz (PGI: 6.58) while threatening everyone else. Japan initially appeared interested, then publicly denied secret talks (PGI: 5.40). The sequence produced a clean interest-alignment split.

US coverage framed the offer as an attempt to fracture the coalition — a wedge strategy that must be resisted. Japan's denial confirmed the alliance holds. The frame serves coalition unity.

Asian coverage framed the offer as a pragmatic opening. Japan imports virtually all its oil through Hormuz. A safe-passage arrangement would solve Japan's energy crisis immediately. Japan's denial is read as a reluctant concession to US pressure, not genuine disinterest. The frame serves Asian nations weighing the cost of alignment against the benefit of independent diplomacy.

Middle Eastern coverage framed the offer as proof that Iran's blockade is rational, not nihilistic. Iran isn't trying to destroy global trade — it's trying to isolate its enemies while maintaining relationships with neutral parties. The frame positions Iran as a strategic actor rather than a rogue state.

Three readings, three sets of interests, one diplomatic overture.

The nuclear escalation rhetoric. Pakistan's former ambassador threatening to bomb Mumbai and Delhi on live television (PGI: 6.05) produced the day's starkest interest-alignment gap — because the story barely exists outside South Asia.

In Hindi and Urdu media, this is wall-to-wall coverage. The nuclear rhetoric is running hotter than at any point since the 1999 Kargil crisis. India's coverage foregrounds the threat as evidence of Pakistani instability — a country that now tops the Global Terrorism Index and whose former diplomats casually discuss nuclear first strikes. The frame serves India's defence establishment and its case for continued military readiness.

Pakistan's coverage — where the story appeared at all — treats Abdul Basit's comments as the regrettable outburst of a retired official, not state policy. The frame serves Pakistan's diplomatic position: this isn't who we are, this is one man talking.

Western coverage: silence. The US, EU, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and Africa didn't cover it. Four and a half billion people don't know that nuclear rhetoric on the subcontinent escalated today. The silence serves a global information ecosystem already saturated with Iran — there isn't bandwidth for a second nuclear crisis. But the absence creates its own risk: if the Pakistan-India escalation continues without international attention, the diplomatic guardrails that attention provides won't be in place.

The death toll arithmetic. The Iran war death toll passed 1,500 in March — the most visible story of the day (GAI: 1.74, covered by 6 of 7 regions). But how the number is presented reveals the clearest cui bono pattern of all.

Middle Eastern coverage leads with the ratio. One thousand five hundred Iranians dead. One hundred seventy-five Israelis injured at Dimona. The asymmetry is the story — it positions the war as a disproportionate assault on Iran and undermines the "mutual conflict" framing that US media maintains. The ratio serves Iran's diplomatic position and the broader case for ceasefire.

US coverage embeds the 1,500 in progress language: military leadership eliminated, nuclear capabilities degraded, strategic objectives advancing. The dead aren't absent, but they're contextualised as the cost of a campaign that's working. The frame serves the "strategic success" narrative that justifies continued operations.

Neither fabricates. Both select. The selection determines whether 1,500 dead reads as a crime or a cost.

The Global Attention Index: What the World Can't See

Today's GAI: 5.35 — Selective Visibility. Up 0.24 from yesterday's 5.11.

The number means this: in a world of 73 stories scanned across 7 regions, the average story reached fewer than half the world's information ecosystems. Not because the stories don't matter. Because the infrastructure of global information — news agencies, editorial priorities, bandwidth, interest — can't carry them all. The river of global attention is running shallow everywhere.

The attention desert: Health (GAI-HE: 6.23 — Information Shadow). Cuba's water crisis, invisible to five billion people. India's Nipah outbreak, invisible outside South Asia. Health has slipped into the Information Shadow tier — meaning these crises exist only for the populations living through them. No external witness. No international pressure. No context from how other regions are handling similar emergencies. Health coverage didn't just decline. It disappeared.

The climate desert: GAI-CL at 6.03 — also Information Shadow. Africa's accelerating sea-level rise is seen by two regions (Africa and the EU). The Arizona heatwave is seen by one (the US). Climate coverage has joined health in the shadow tier. The stories that operate on 20-year timelines can't compete with stories that operate on 48-hour ultimatums.

The global spotlight: Geopolitics (GAI-GP: 5.04 — Selective Visibility). The widest-covered stories are all geopolitical — Iran death toll, Trump's ultimatum, the Hormuz closure, the desalination threats. But even geopolitics at 5.04 is only Selective Visibility. Today, no tributary of global information reached Broad Awareness. The river is running shallow everywhere.

Latin America: the planet's blind spot. LatAm missed 90.4% of today's stories — 66 of 73. Worse than yesterday. A Latin American news consumer saw, on average, seven stories out of 73 tracked today. Africa followed at 84.9%. The gap between the US (32.9% missed) and LatAm (90.4% missed) represents two worlds sharing a hemisphere but seeing almost none of the same information.

The most invisible stories:

The PGI × GAI insight — the complete picture:

The Hormuz closure threat: PGI 7.50, GAI 3.20. High divergence, moderate visibility. The world can see the blockade. The world profoundly disagrees about whether it's total, selective, or conditional. This is a classic disagreement gap — broad attention, fractured interpretation.

Pakistan's nuclear threat: PGI 6.05, GAI 6.70. High divergence, near-total invisibility. Where it's covered, the framing diverges sharply. Where it's not covered — which is most of the planet — the story simply doesn't exist. This is the most dangerous combination: a nuclear escalation that the populations most able to apply diplomatic pressure don't know about.

The Iran war death toll: PGI 6.48, GAI 1.74. High divergence, global visibility. The most-seen story of the day is also one of the most fractured. Everyone knows 1,500 people died. Half the world reads it as a crime. Half reads it as a cost. Maximum attention, maximum disagreement.

Cuba's water crisis: PGI 6.50, GAI 6.66. High divergence, near-total invisibility. The worst combination for the people suffering — they're experiencing a humanitarian catastrophe that most of the world can't see, and the parts of the world that can see it disagree about whether it's a crisis of infrastructure or a crisis of governance.

Africa's sea levels rising faster than the global average: PGI 5.08, GAI 6.33. Moderate divergence, high invisibility. The slow-motion civilisational threat that nobody's watching. The continent most vulnerable to climate change is experiencing accelerated impact, and only two regions are reporting it. By the time the world notices, the water will be at the door.

The Region Pairs: The Fault Lines

Most divergent by volume: Middle East ↔ US (6.87 across 18 stories). This pair has been the planet's widest perception fault line since the war began. Eighteen stories is an enormous shared surface — and across all eighteen, the average gap runs deep into Competing Realities. The divergence isn't about one story or one flashpoint. It's about everything. Causal chains reverse (US as defender vs. US as aggressor). Actor portrayals invert (Iran as threat vs. Iran as victim). Factual selection diverges (total blockade vs. selective blockade). And the cui bono patterns align in opposite directions (military solution vs. ceasefire advocacy). Two media ecosystems serving two audiences whose survival interests point in opposite directions.

Sharpest bilateral gap: Middle East ↔ US on the Hormuz story (8.55). One story, one strait, two incompatible accounts of what's happening at it. Approaching Parallel Universes. At this distance, the two audiences aren't interpreting the same event differently — they're living in different events.

The Africa ↔ EU fracture (6.15 across 4 stories). Driven primarily by the Sahel confrontation. The EU and Africa are having a sovereignty argument that the rest of the world doesn't see — two former colonial partners disagreeing about who has the right to define good governance, with the perception gap running along the exact historical fault line you'd predict.

Latin America ↔ US (6.10 across 8 stories). Cuba and Venezuela drive this pair. Operation Southern Spear (159 dead in Venezuela), Cuba's blackouts, the prisoner release, the migrant crisis at Mexico's southern border — Latin American coverage treats these as consequences of US power projection. US coverage treats them as regional instability in countries with failed governance. The same events, filtered through the hemisphere's oldest disagreement about who is responsible for Latin America's crises.

The transatlantic consensus (EU ↔ US: 4.19 across 31 stories). Still the most aligned pair with the largest shared surface. But 4.19 is up from 3.05 yesterday — the Western consensus is fraying. The Trump flip-flop, the Hormuz selective-vs-total split, the "Trumpflation" frame emerging in European media — the EU and US still see the same world, but they're increasingly uncomfortable with each other's behaviour in it.

The quietest pair: China ↔ India (2.93, 1 story). A single shared story (China's trade surplus) with modest divergence. The number is meaningless as a trend indicator — it's one story — but its existence at the bottom of the table is telling. China and India share the least common information surface of any major pair. They're not disagreeing. They're not even looking at the same stories.