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Joanathan Kanter is the Assistant Attorney General of the US. He was cleared to work on the Justice Department lawsuit against Google and antitrust matters. Kanter is critical of the way Google operates to act as a monopoly in its ad business.

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Bien and Xi Jinping of China meet for the first time at the G20 gathering in Indonesia. This leads to clarification of positions of both sides on Taiwan and the emphasis on peaceful cooperation to resolve differences. The US says Biden seeks peaceful competition with China and exchange of opinions on differences.

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The Guardian looks at high street, the small downtowns in urban areas across the north of England and the Midlands, coastal towns in decline, where Reform UK is offering an alternative to the decline.  Are Britain's best days in the past, and after the failure of Austerity, Brexit and the disappointment with Starmer, what lies ahead. If Farage wins and falters will this put Britain in a spiral of permanent decline? Boarded up shops, closed department stores and banks, with the rise of online shopping and online services, is creating a new situation on streets in mid and small towns in England. People see the decline all around them and this is creating anew mood in favor of trying something else after Labour and Tories have promised and things are taking a turn for the worse in the physical appearance of neighborhoods. Across the UK 34,000 shops closed in 2024, that is 37 a day, and this is true more for the north of England, the Midlands and deprived coastal towns, where Reform has come close to Labour in the last election. In one focus group in You.gov and other research a participant used strong words- that it was "soul destroying" to see the extent of the decline. Across Europe, in Germany as in UK, in France, the same sense of high street decline is evident. Underinvestment in transport, policing, healthcare, and social services. University of Warwick professor Fetzer  has studied this and the effects of austerity first under Cameron and Brexit under Johnson, the covid period, return of Labour but no lifting up program of large investments that would create a feeling of change, to replace the sense that somehow Britain was "going to the dogs," with half a million shoplifting offences in 2025, up 13% in 2025 over 2024, and the homelessness. ...

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Tim Kaine tells the audience at the Democratic National Convention that Hillary Clinton was in Spanish "lista" which means ready, the biggest compliment he said in Latin American life from his days in Honduras. He used Spanish frequently during his speech at the convention.  Kaine wins good marks for his knowledge of Spanish. Other politicians have used Spanish in an awkward way, failing to sound authentic, including president George W. Bush and Mayor De Blasio of New York.

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hosts military chiefs of 34 countries in Washington DC. He tells the gathering- “We must work together to prevent any adversary or criminal actor from exploiting your territory or using your infrastructure to threaten what a great former American president, Teddy Roosevelt, once called ‘permanent peace in this hemisphere.’ "

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On the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad against Nazi German invasion Russian president Putin says of the war in the Donbas region of Ukraine- "The legacy of generations, of values and traditions, that is what makes Russia different, what makes us strong and confident in ourselves, in our righteousness and in our victory." Putin sought to put the war in patriotic terms. This report in NYT shows a rocket attack on Kramatorsk in Donbas, about 20 miles from Bakhmut where intense battles are taking place.

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US president Biden calls on intelligence agencies in the US to complete an inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus in 90 days. Biden said he would publish the results of the 90 day inquiry. During the last months of the Trump administration the idea of the virus originating in a Wuhan lab was supported by parts of the US intelligence community. 

The WSJ reports show the intelligence community in the US saying that 3 members of a key Wuhan lab in China were taken to hospital with covid like symptoms before the first case of covid patient was recorded in Wuhan in early December 2019.

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BBC News covers the opposition by business leaders in the U.S. to president Trump's decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate change agreement. Elon Musk of Tesla and Robert Iger of Disney say they will quit working on the president's advisory councils. Walmart, Apple, Google and other companies also opposed the move. Energy companies Exxon and Chevron also opposed the move. This reduces the business community's confidence in and support for the Trump administration. Some analysts see the Trump move as a way to satisfy the mood of his own election base of support among people who see the climate change accord as one more aspect of a rigged system of globalization, a theme Trump has used during his campaign in 2016. During the first 100 days many of the decisions Trump made took into account the views of business leaders from Boeing on the Export Import Bank, of Gary Cohn on tax reforms, of Wilbur Ross, the Commerce Secretary on NAFTA trade agreement. With the investigations in Congress underway the analysts see the move as political to shore up support with the Trump base. Yet it also brings with it the cost of losing support in the business community that has traditionally supported Republican presidents. ...

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Big Tech's hiring of US inventors in large numbers can be a problem because once hired they are less productive, says this report in the WSJ. Big companies can discourage innovation because of the number of approvals needed, the corporate bureaucracy, and the need for promotions, more incentives for being cautious than being bold and taking risks.

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South Pars Field and Qatar North Field, the largest natural gas fields in the world, are Explained in DW.com. The two fields are divided by a maritime line and form an island divided between Qatar and Iran. Israel attacked the South Pars FIeld and Iran retaliated with an attack on Qatar North Field on March 18, 2026. South Pars field natural gas supplies homes in Iran and is used for fertilizer inside Iran. It also supplies Turkey and Bahrain with natural gas. In the absence of this gas Turkey would have to source gas from Russia or buy it on the world markets. Qatar's gas goes to world markets.

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Stephen Castle of the NYT gives an objective look at Andy Burnham of the Greater Manchester area and Labour party leader. Burnham has said that Britain has been on the wrong path for 40 years and had the courage to prove this by leaving London for his home region of Greater Manchester in the North of England, after serving as chief secretary of The Treasury and Labour minister under Gordon Brown around the time of the financial crisis of 2009. After winning in Greater Manchester he served as Mayor of this important region of Britain second only to London in importance, which after the fall of the British Empire, has led to politics focusing entirely on London. His term as Mayor involved getting transportation out of the hands of the private companies and having the government run it efficiently for the people of Manchester. His term is viewed favorably for improving the economy of the region. Compared to the people Britain has turned out previously- Thatcher, Blair,  Brown, Cameron, Starmer, he has genuine experience running a region and tackling tough problems, which none of the other leaders had, that comes from his hard work for the people of Greater Manchester as head of the local government. He has the skills to bring people together around his vision for the Labour party, similar to that brought by Clement Attlee. At Lyrarc we looked at what  Britannica Encylopedia has to say about Attlee and found that Attlee spent his first 15 years in the difficult working class district of East London, similar to what Burnham has done by moving back to his home region in the north and quietly working to understand the people, their aspirations and how to make them come true. Attlee did this in 1945-51 (setting up the National Health Service NHS and Bank of England, other revered institutions) the way Franklin Roosevelt did in the 1930's to establish the modernization of New York government that he later applied to 51 states as president. This is the kind of task similar to Attlee and FDR that Burnham has the potential to accomplish for Britain. Like Attlee Burnham is self effacing with little sense of wanting public recognition, comfortable with who he is and where he is from. Like Attlee staying away from Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government in 1931, when it failed to find a clear path ahead for Britain, (Burnham concentrated on Manchester away from London), and decided to forge his own way forward with new ideas and being creative- as it was under Attlee that the British Empire was converted into the British Commonwealth of Nations. An enormous feat that has not been fully grasped and will one day be seen as an amazing achievement of the 20th century- India independent and  creating a modernized state the size of the US, European Union or China by 2040/2047. This is our assessment at Lyrarc of the potential Burnham could have for Britain- and possibly for the world again like Clement Attlee in 1945-1951. ...

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The UK will drop retaliatory tariffs on Boeing on the issue of subsidies following final Brexit.

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EU's Leyen recasting environmental change plans to cut bureaucracy regulation and costs to match changes by DJT in the US. Leyen takes up the challenge to make the EU competitive and reduce burden of regulations, spur productivity in the EU.