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Critical points in Burnham's program for Britain in speech on June 29 2026 as at the Manchester People's History Museum covered by The Guardian- Devolution- "It will be about offering new opportunities to extend devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland by taking power deeper down." Cost of living "We will set out 10-year plans to bring down the cost of … essentials to individuals, families and businesses." Reindustrialize Britain region by region "We will support every region to set clear and credible industrial ambitions – and provide the support to achieve them." Burnham said he will “safeguard sovereign manufacturing and production capability across the country in critical sectors like steel, defence, energy, food and farming”.  Public ownership of Utilities for major services such as water, energy, transport. Work done in transport in Manchester as a sound example. "We will ensure all parts of the UK are able to take greater public control of essential services like water, housing, energy and transport …" Housing supply- a huge housing building program. Britain has lost almost 1.5m council homes since the 1980s and around the same number of people are now on housing waiting lists and have been there for a very long time. Streets and Neighborhoods pulled out of decline.  "Shouldn’t we make our high streets the symbols of Britain’s renaissance?" Education and Employment- "We need a complete rethink of how we support the next generation to succeed, and it has to start with the education system." Reform of Westmeinster and Whitehall- "They require radical change if the country is to get back on track." ...

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Mary -Louise Parker in movie Young Washington 2026 as Washington's mother Mary Ball. Here she talks to Marc Myers of the WSJ about her childhood growing up as an Army officer's daughter in different bases before settling down in Arizona. Her fight with shyness till she over compensated. Her father's confidence in her and pointing to her the prospect of going to the North Carolina Institute of Arts, where she learnt the craft of acting. She moved to New York for different roles including one in "Weeds."  She is 61 years, and lives with 2 sons 19 years and 22 years, in a large apartment in Brooklyn that overlooks the water with views of sunsets which she enjoys. It was Mary Ball who told her son not to join the British Navy, wanting to keep him in America. Washington joined the British forces in North America after a career as a surveyor. Land and landholdings were important at the time and as a surveyor with important connections to prominent British families Washington built his career, and further enhanced it by joining the British forces against Indian raids and the French in the coveted Ohio territory. Where did Washington get his keen knowledge of history and the Enlightenment thinkers that enabled him to grasp the ideas of Jefferson? Washington was like the first Chief Justice Marshall in the same communities at the time in the Virginia colony. Both were mentored by a major British landowner who built a large library in the colony that both were able to go to and learn what they later used to start the struggle for a new Nation. It shows the importance of books and libraries, of knowledge during the Enlightenment period in shaping the minds of the Nation's founding fathers- Jefferson, Marshall, Washington, Madison, Samuel Adams and others. ...

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Issues and controversy about coverage by New York Times NYT on the  Gaza War, Transgender that are obscuring important needed coverage on other important topics.  Topics such as infrastructure, workers and wages, changes in the economy, economic crises in other countries, cost of living action, climate change action get less coverage. The Washington Post has some pioneering work on Climate Change Action, Well Being and Nature. The Atlantic is moving in a new direction with indepth coverage. The Wall Street Journal is looking at changes in the economy in a new way.

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Satya Nadella - "we have to get society's permission" for what is done with AI. Nadella has an approach to AI to keep each company's human knowledge capital separate from AI, as its most valuable component of its operations. In the world he visualizes AI frontier models OpenAI, Gemini(Google) and Anthropic's Claude won't just keep saying they will use up all the resources they can use leaving little for education, healthcare and public services or infrastructure, and keep saying it will destroy all entry level and other white collar jobs, and the world will put up with that. His approach is to bring AI at a cost level that is much lower,including incorporating Chinese models for cost effectiveness. And at the same time making AI supplement each company's human capital working side by side so that jobs can be enhanced not destroyed willy nilly, in a careless random, disorganized way whether people like it or not because a few frontier AI models and their companies (Google, Anthropic and Open AI) have decided to do that. Nadella's thinking is worth listening to and reading about as it offers the first intelligent approach to making AI do what we want it to do for healthy societies. After all the destruction in world trade by shipping out supply chains by the US and Europe, after uncontrolled migration, after the loss of manufacturing and the good jobs that went with it, and the decision to reverse this and regain manufacturing and supply chains under both US presidents Biden and DJT, Nadella is right to conclude that society will not tolerate any more losses, and society is determined to retrieve losses from past mistakes. By preserving each company's human capital independent of AI Nadella is calling on individual leaders at all startup, midisized and large companies to have a clear idea of their precious human capital and set up AI independent of it at the company level to work alongside human capital. We at Lyrarc think this will give better results than no conscious approach that allows willy nilly the AI frontier models to shrivel the company's human capital and do what they are clearly incapable of doing in our view, which is to run companies or the principal functional areas of societies such as healthcare, transportation and public services. That even though Nadella does not say this is going to look good at first, then lead the company to catastrophic consequences of losing control of its own individual company's future and lead it to make huge mistakes that will be costly to correct and cause much damage to the Nation and its people. This is anew proposition that Nadella makes and should be grasped for a new approach, and constructive confrontations on this issue of how to incorporate AI at each company's level for hundreds of thousands of companies, alongside separate and supplementing the core strength of human capital, not displacing it to cause huge problems in future years. A company bereft of its human capital is a company bereft of what gives it life and vitality. ...

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China's export dependent economy with 4% decline in fixed investment Jan-May 2026 and 27% jump in exports.1 million car exports per month in June. Exports make up 20% of China's GDP. China is challenging German companies in their home markets in Europe. Domestic sales of cars are down 16% in June. What this means is that China's growth now depends on exports alone, with construction slowdown, and weak consumer spending. How does this tie into China's posture in trade with the US? It negotiated from a position of strength on rare earths not to give in to DJT tariffs yet knows the importance of trade for the Chinese economic model, importance of US and EU markets, markets worldwide. China's strategy is to shift some of the lost US sales due to tariffs to other countries in Latin America and Asia. A top priority is to keep trade with the US and European Union on a good footing, so that its exports can be absorbed. How does it affect Hormuz? For China Hormuz as an oil source is much lower in importance and China can do without Iran, it absolutely cannot do without the US and European Union to take a big part of its exports. It also does not openly say this but it also shares concerns similar to the US, on nuclear weapons in Iran. India, Japan and the EU have similar concerns. As shown in the articles on this page China has large unused oil in reserves and coal supplies, has lower oil demand at 4% growth, and is accelerating renewable energy, so that it is now importing 8.5 million barrels a day down from 12.5 million barrels a day. By doing this China puts this oil back into the world supply leading to lower oil prices. This means the world can do without the supplies from Hormuz, keep lower oil prices, and go on as before if Hormuz remains closed. The US can focus on domestic issues and its involvement in the Middle East can be limited to naval blockade which the US Navy is capable of doing. This is good for China, good for the US, and good for the World. Local governments in China, provincial authorites, pushed growth in building road, bridges, factories during the 30 year growth phase 1990-2020. In 2026 local governments with debt loads and lack of good projects for investment are a bottleneck to growth. This is the first time fixed investment is in decline, except for the years in 1961 and in 1967. The year 1961 is a result of many mistakes made by chairman of CCP, Mao, by shifting 2 million in farm labour to work in iron foundries, and the shift from private farm plots to soviet style commune farms, coupled with floods leading to 43-46 million famine deaths (1994, Chen Yizi, top advisor to CCP General Secretary Zhao Zhiyang). 1967 is the chaotic situation of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution launched by Mao. What it shows is that the China Miracle like the Japan Miracle and the German Miracle of recovery after World War II, is based on certain conditions and will enter a phase of lower growth closer to 3% like other industrialized nations over time. India and Indonesia are larger than China and will be the next growth story, which is also shown on these pages this week, with the address to the Indonesian parliament by Modi, and Indonesian president Prabovo's saying that he has studied Modi's economic changes and is copying them as there is no copyright. ...

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Stories of children in New York City overcoming adversity to go to college with the help of the New York Times College Scholarship Fund. Children with poor or sick parents in the city, from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ivory Coast, Ecuador, and other countries.

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The New York Times agreed to sell the Boston Globe to local owners for $70 million in 2013. In 1993 the New York Times acquired The Boston Globe for $1.1 billion. The value of newspapers has plummeted in recent years as newspapers lost advertising revenue and readership declined. A result of the shift to the internet for access to news and information, especially for the younger generation. The Washington Post was sold to Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com for $250 million, with readership having declined to about 457,000 in 2013. Philadelphia newspapers were sold for $55 millon in 2012, after being acquired for $515 millon in 2006, having lost about 90% of the value in just 6 years. In Oct. 2012 The Tampa Tribune sold for only $9.5 million. Estimates for the newspaper properties of the Tribune Company are about $623 million, according to analysts. This includes The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune.

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This is the Washignton Post's view of what is remarkable about the NYT reporter Schmidt's interview with Mr. Trump.

Trump says he hopes Mueller is fair, and will be fair, is going to be fair. Yet that is not what Conservative media is saying. Trump has criticized the Justice Department. Here he says that he the President can do what he wants with the Justice Department, using the words "absolute rights," for the president's powers. This is a misreading of the powers of the Presidency under the Constitution. If the president thinks this hope is not realized of Mueller acting fairly it could lead to a situation in which the president acts beyond the powers of the president, creating a new gap between Congress and the president and overreaching of powers.

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Baxter State, Park Adirondacks Park and other State Parks in the US. Adirondacks Park in upstate New York is huge 6 million acres with 3.4 million acres of private land and 100 small towns, 2.6 million acres of public land, 3000 lakes and 46 peaks over 4000 feet. It was set up as "forever wild" by the state constitution in 1892. Nearby is Maine's highest peak Mount Katahdin at 5300 feet in Maine Baxter State Park.

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Borchers of the Washington Post reflects on why president Trump gave the long rambling interview in July 2017 to the NYT.  President Trump has  called the NYT both "failing" and "a crown jewel." He particularly respects the reporter Maggie Haberman, a reporter with whom Trump has a long relationship and whose reporting he respects. Haberman is seen by Trump as an influential political reporter, whose view counts, and who can be critical but also seeks to be fair in reporting. During the election campaign the NYT carried reporting critical of Trump, yet it also had reporters who were critical of Hillary Clinton. In many ways both the NYT and the WSJ from different points of view seek a place in the middle with fair reporting, needed particularly in today's politics where ideology sometimes trumps common sense and U.S. traditions of fairness.