United Kingdom

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The Two Fronts Testing Burnham’s Government

Andy Burnham built his premiership’s early identity around a single, emotionally resonant promise: not to manage rough sleeping, not to reduce it, but to end it. This week he put money behind that pledge – £442 million for a national drive modeled on the pandemic-era effort to get people off […]

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The Price Of ‘Expert Support’

Shavkat Mirziyoyev and Tony Blair have met three times now—most recently in April 2025. The first two were in Dubai and Baku, during COP summits. Sherzod Asadov, Uzbekistan’s presidential press secretary, says the cooperation with Blair’s institute is “systematic“. Tashkent frames it as a push for investors, digitalisation, and clean […]

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The Leverage Nobody Has Ever Held: Lagarde’s Warning About Europe’s AI Dependency

Christine Lagarde doesn’t typically frame central bank speeches around geopolitical vulnerability, but her address in Vienna this week did exactly that. The European Central Bank president argued that Europe’s growing reliance on American and Chinese artificial intelligence isn’t just a competitiveness gap – it’s a strategic exposure that could hand […]