Beachgoers in Queensland, Australia were in for a shock after strong winds pushed enormous numbers of jellyfish ashore, stinging thousands and forcing the closure of many of the state’s famous swim spots.

The BBC reports that more than 2,600 people were treated over the weekend, while about 13,000 stings were reported over the past week.

Most of the encounters happened in the popular Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast regions.

A sting from the bluebottle jellyfish can be painful, but not life-threatening.

“I have never seen anything like this – ever,” Surf Life Saving duty officer Jeremy Sturges told the Guardian, calling the sudden surge of the creatures an “epidemic.”

Experts said the jellyfish were likely strewn ashore by unusually strong winds.

The geopolitical environment is the most dangerous it’s been in decades, and yet the global economy is faring well. Markets are taking hits and (mostly) bouncing back.

What’s wrong with this picture? Nothing … yet. The most serious geopolitical risks (a cyber confrontation with Russia, war with Iran, implosion in Europe, a true U.S.-China trade war) are more plausible than they’ve been, but none are particularly likely to play out in 2019. We are heading for serious longer-term trouble down the road, however. That’s the first of Eurasia Group’s Top 10 risks this year.

1. Bad seeds

World leaders are so busy dealing with local crises that they’re ignoring much bigger problems down the road. 2019 is the year “bad seeds” are being planted that will eventually threaten the entire global order.

Examples? Political institutions across the world’s advanced democracies, the transatlantic alliance, NATO, the European Union, the G20, the World Trade Organization, U.S.-China, Russia and the We..

Forty years ago, Pol Pot’s brutal regime in Cambodia fell from power — but it left behind lasting scars. The Khmer Rouge, a hardline-communist command, terrorized the Southeast Asian country from 1975 to 1979, killing between 1.7 million to 3 million people. In the regime’s pursuit of a classless agrarian society, many were sent to labor camps, prisons and killing fields across the nation, where they died of torture, disease and starvation.

It wasn’t until Jan. 7, 1979, that a Vietnam-backed invasion forced the Khmer Rouge to retreat into the jungle.

Four decades on, Cambodia, a developing nation of about 16 million people, is still grappling with its past — not just the tragedy beyond conception that was official Khmer Rouge rule, but also the civil war that followed and continued through the early 1990s. In November, a U.N. tribunal delivered a historic ruling, convicting two of the regime’s last surviving leaders of genocide. That significant verdict underscored the lingering lega..