Each pattern is a cluster of past events that shared a set-up. When a live story matches one, we show the cases, how they resolved, and where the match breaks.
Every Yemeni war of the past forty years has turned on Aden. Whoever holds the port city holds the south's claim to legitimacy, so fighting there tends to be decisive locally even when the wider war grinds on for years.
When an isolated government loses its oil supply through sanctions, interdiction or the loss of a patron, it typically rations, adapts and survives for years; outright change has come later, through negotiation or outside force rather than the squeeze alone.
Israeli elections in which neither main camp can reach 61 seats without Arab-led parties. The arithmetic favours a change government, but Zionist leaders' reluctance to depend on Arab lists, often amplified by Netanyahu's delegitimisation of Arab votes, frequently produces reruns or unity deals instead.
A losing or trailing camp, often an incumbent, alleges fraud during or after the count without evidence that withstands scrutiny, while election authorities, courts and police defend the process. Results usually stand, but the claims can fuel protest and unrest.
One side attacks the other's airports, power or oil installations to raise the cost of continuing the war and drive it to the table. Roughly half the time it works within months. The other half, the target adapts and the war becomes a longer contest of attrition.
Every generation since the first power looms has been told that machines were about to end work. In the aggregate the prediction has failed every time: employment recovered and usually grew. For specific occupations it has often been right, and in the one case where it was most right, the handloom weavers, the adjustment took forty years and halved the pay of the people living through it.
A transformative technology triggers a capital-spending race. Leaders spend beyond their cash flow, financing moves off the balance sheet, and investors cheer until they start to punish the spending instead. Most of these booms bust within three years, and the infrastructure survives to be used cheaply by someone else.
A president leans publicly on the central bank to keep money easy while inflation is above target. The bank either holds its course, bends, or buys peace with a compromise. The outcome for inflation depends almost entirely on which of the three it chooses.
A general-purpose technology lifts output per worker, but the gains go first to profits and to the owners of the new capital. Workers' pay catches up only after a lag, and in the Industrial Revolution that lag lasted half a century. The postwar decades are the one period in the record where productivity and median pay rose together from the start.
A franchise ends decades without a championship. The city celebrates, the roster is young or expensive, and the question for the front office is whether this was the start of something or the one chance. In baseball's recent record the quick fade is slightly more common than the dynasty.
A mass-casualty crash on a modern railway, almost always traced to a chain of a technical failure and a human decision that the safety system should have caught. The cases diverge on what happens next: individual prosecutions, systemic reform with accountability at the top, or a political crisis that outlasts the inquiry.
A dominant technology company sees its core franchise threatened by a new platform and responds with heavy spending. The market punishes the cost first and judges the strategy later. Half the time the incumbent comes through stronger; half the time it spends its way to irrelevance.
Each wave of technology destroys visible occupations and creates invisible ones. The new work rarely appears where the old work was lost; it comes from second-order effects, from a collapse in the cost of something that creates demand for things nobody had thought to want. By one careful count, about 60% of the jobs Americans held in 2018 had titles that did not exist in 1940.
A state's nuclear facilities are destroyed by airstrikes or sabotage, inspectors lose access, and the world is left reading satellite images for signs of rebuilding. The record says the visible sites usually stay quiet while the programme goes somewhere less visible.
A central bank stops hiking weeks before an election, keeps a tightening bias in its language, and markets price the next hike for the following meeting. Sometimes the hike comes on schedule. More often the pause quietly becomes the top of the cycle.
Washington has repeatedly expelled Cuban diplomats, often from the UN mission; Havana has answered with loud protest rather than matching expulsions, and the episodes have deepened freezes without severing relations.