Iain Overton travelled to Tashkent, where cranes rise over Soviet relics and Chinese cars fill the streets, to see how Uzbekistan has become the lodestar of Central Asia’s quiet pivot away from Moscow
China
So… NASA’s civil servant workforce has varied in size over the years, peaking during the Apollo program. During the 1990s, the Clinton administration reduced the workforce by 25% over five years, a process that some claim laid the groundwork for the shuttle Columbia disaster. This budget proposes to slash NASA’s workforce by nearly 1/3 in […]
Communities living near mines often bear the brunt of pollution, environmental degradation, and the economic instability brought by boom-and-bust cycles, while end-users and proprietors enjoy the economic and environmental gains.
Link: https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2025-10-16/debates/CD9953E1-3AFE-436A-BBD6-D170F107AE02/ShanghaiCooperationOrganisation I may have a closer connection with Tianjin than any Member of either House having gone to school there nearly 80 years ago. I hope this will not in itself cause me to be thought of as a security risk. I agree with the noble Baroness that the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation poses challenges … Continue reading Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Debate – House of Lords – 16th of October 2025
John Maynard Keynes believed that ideas, hospitality, travel, knowledge and science should move freely between nations. if a country could reasonably produce something physical it needed, it should. Trade should exist, but be kept to a minimum. I’d like to highlight something Matt Stoller (the anti-trust guy) recently wrote: In May of 2020, the Chinese […]
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Starbucks sells expensive sugared drinks, and some of them have coffee in them. It’s been very profitable and despite some declines, remains so. The CEO was paid about $96 million last year. He was brought in to “turn Starbucks around”, and his main moves have been towards returning Starbucks to its roots as a “third […]
Trump’s Presidency has exposed the weaknesses at the heart of our global security alliances, argues Alexandra Hall Hall
by Basak Kus* “It is China, more than any other place that has served as the ‘other’ for the modern West’s stories about itself, from Smith and Malthus to Marx and Weber,” wrote historian Kenneth Pomeranz in his book The Great Divergence. The historical origins of the East–West divide—why Europe and China’s developmental trajectories diverged […]
First economic: The US dollar is down 5% over the last six months against a basket of currencies. And over the past year, it’s lost 9.6%. The biggest winner against a dollar has been the euro which has gone up 13% however, which truly is a win for Europe because it makes their natural gas […]