Author
Reporting and analysis from the Morning Week newsroom.
Daron Acemoglu is the most cited economist of his generation, a Nobel laureate whose models reach into everything from ancient history to artificial intelligence. The strange thing is how often his dazzling machinery produces conclusions that fail to persuade.
5 min read
The Brandmauer was built to keep the far right out of power and to protect German democracy. A decade on, it is distorting the very system it was meant to defend, and the party it was designed to contain has never been stronger.
4 min read
The drones over the Baltics and the sabotage across Europe are not random harassment. They are a patient probe of the alliance's nerve, and the West is being asked a question it would rather not hear, whether its promise of mutual defence still means anything.
4 min read
Larry Sabato has spent his career reading the moods of the American electorate. His verdict on the present is bleak, that the country is more bitterly partisan than at any point in over a hundred years, and that the usual mechanisms for cooling it down may no longer work.
4 min read
Five years after the Taliban swept back to power, the guns have fallen silent across a country that knew almost nothing but war for two generations. The calm is real. So is the price, and it is being extracted above all from Afghan women.
4 min read
Cryptocurrency debit card provider faces mounting allegations of defrauding clients through hidden fees, frozen withdrawals, and deceptive review practices.
3 min read
In a pointed address in Sydney, Penny Wong argued that a nation which turns against its own diversity cannot hope to prosper in the region around it. The warning was aimed at the hard right at home, and at the company Australia keeps abroad.
4 min read
Alex Kendall built Wayve on a contrarian bet, that a car should learn to drive the way a person does rather than follow a pre drawn map. Now, with a fortune raised and the government clearing the road, his machines are about to carry paying passengers through British cities.
5 min read
The company that built the picks and shovels of the artificial intelligence boom still towers over its market. The threat now comes from the giants who buy the most chips of all, and who have decided they would rather make their own.
5 min read
Diamonds caught the light, champagne flowed and the Mediterranean provided the backdrop as BIG ART Festival returned to Porto Cervo on August 9, with Robbie Williams taking the stage for the night's spectacular finale.
2 min read
Influence is no longer defined by revenue, visibility, or media presence alone, but by the ability to convene exceptional people and unlock opportunities that would not exist in isolation. For Irina Biss, success has always been about designing the room where the right people meet.
2 min read
Richard Moore ran Britain's foreign intelligence service through five of the most unsettled years in living memory. His parting message is that in an age of China, Russia and artificial intelligence, the West's rarest asset is not technology but the trust it can build with its friends.
5 min read
Arab oil states are racing to lay pipelines that skirt the Strait of Hormuz, and the effort is understandable. Yet steel and sand will not solve a problem that is ultimately about Iran, and the cheaper insurance is a bargain the Gulf has so far been unwilling to strike.
5 min read
A wave of spending on data centres is now propping up growth, markets and even the plans of finance ministers. If the artificial intelligence payoff arrives late, or fails to arrive at all, a great many people will discover how much they were quietly counting on it.
4 min read
Artificial intelligence is already thinning the ranks of white collar America, and a new wave of money is pouring into retraining the displaced. The uncomfortable history of such programs suggests good intentions are not enough.
5 min read
Islamabad has asked Washington for a currency backstop worth up to 10 billion dollars, and the timing is no accident. Having played peacemaker between America and Iran, Pakistan is now presenting the bill, though the money may come with strings that reach all the way to Beijing.
4 min read
The new Federal Reserve chair wanted to sound flexible and free the central bank from its old habits. Instead he unsettled investors, sent long term yields climbing, and may have made the very rate rise he hoped to avoid more likely.
4 min read
A rally that made Seoul briefly the world's sixth largest market has reversed with terrifying speed, wiping out gains in weeks and catching an army of leveraged small investors on the wrong side. The trigger came from China.
4 min read
As the planet heats, air conditioning is turning from a comfort into a necessity, and into a source of leverage. Whoever controls the machines, the refrigerants and the electricity behind them will hold quiet power over how billions endure a warming world.
5 min read
Americans are starting businesses at a pace the country has never seen, and a new wave of them is being built by one person with a laptop. The boom is real, its newest engine is artificial intelligence, and Europe is being left behind.
5 min read
Cheap Ukrainian drones are destroying tanks worth millions, and the images are hard to look away from. The danger is that Europe reads them as permission to arm on a budget, when the real lesson is almost the opposite.
5 min read
Founded by Viktoriya Kukhta, THE Circle debuted at Zurich's Baur au Lac with a simple promise, that carefully chosen introductions can become capital. A European expansion is already on the calendar.
3 min read
Shares in the continent's traditional arms giants have stalled after a historic run, even as governments pledge record budgets. The money is not leaving defence. It is moving toward software, drones and the firms that build them.
4 min read
The Commission says Google rigged its own search results and boxed in app developers. The penalty is the largest yet under Europe's new digital rulebook, and it lands just as the United States sharpens its tariff threats.
4 min read
Hundreds of blue hulled trawlers sit at anchor in contested waters, catching almost nothing. They are Beijing's quietest weapon in the South China Sea, and the reason the region keeps sliding closer to a confrontation nobody has declared.
4 min read
Britain has its seventh prime minister in a decade, and he arrives without a single vote cast in his name. Andy Burnham inherits a party level with Reform in the polls and a country that has stopped listening. His honeymoon will be short.
5 min read
Brussels once told the world it would never chase American laxity on bank capital. Wall Street's profit boom has quietly changed the conversation, and the Commission's new competitiveness plan shows how far the mood has shifted.
5 min read
Hunger is spreading through the towns closest to the fighting, yet the convoys sent to relieve it are now being hunted by drones. Aid workers describe a slow squeeze in which delivering food has become an act of nerve.
4 min read
The world has spent years fretting about China flooding it with cheap goods. Yet the country's trade surplus is narrowing, and the story behind the numbers is stranger and more revealing than the headline suggests.
4 min read
The president has run through his choices for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and every path left to him carries a price. Fees on shipping look like extortion to allies, a naval campaign risks American lives, and diplomacy keeps collapsing under Iranian fire.
4 min read
The peninsula Moscow seized in 2014 was meant to be an unsinkable base for its war on Ukraine. A campaign of drones and missiles has turned that prize into a liability.
4 min read
President Volodymyr Zelensky says he will replace Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko as part of a broad government shake up, framing the changes as a reset for a country deep into its war with Russia.
3 min read
The firm is developing algorithmic trading systems on a par with the tools investment banks use for high frequency and strategic trading, and in 2026 it has begun testing advanced AI models in live conditions.
3 min read
As the United States turns 250, the fashionable talk is of decline. But a superpower barely a few generations old still holds the tools to shape the century, if it can avoid wounding itself.
4 min read
The European Commission president wants an age limit for social media across the bloc. Behind the slogans lies a harder fight over how to enforce it, and whether Brussels should try.
4 min read
As the thousand year old embroidery crosses the Channel for the first time since it was made, its journey is a reminder that some objects are priceless not because they are rare, but because they still speak.
4 min read
Oleg Deripaska, one of Russia's richest men, has become an unlikely critic of the Kremlin's economic course. His alarms say as much about the country's condition as about his own ambitions.
4 min read
An oyster farmer and Marine veteran was supposed to be the party's answer to the age of the outsider. His implosion in Maine has left Democrats scrambling and rethinking how they choose their fighters.
4 min read
Washington is thinning its forces in Europe and shifting its gaze to Asia. That leaves the alliance racing to work out whether Europeans can hold the eastern flank on their own.
4 min read
A year after NATO's leaders promised to lift military budgets toward 5 percent of GDP, the gap between grand commitments and actual spending is widening, held back by debt, politics and public resistance.
4 min read
Iran has opened a week of state funeral rites for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader killed in a wartime strike in February, drawing vast crowds in Tehran and delegations from more than 100 nations.
4 min read