Really don’t understand why the OBR does this: “UK public sector debt as a share of GDP is nearly double the advanced-economy average.” It is if you use a simple rather than weighted average. The UK is not notably more indebted than the G7. It is more indebted than Estonia.
At 2.2% in 2025, the US economy grew at the slowest pace since the pandemic year of 2020. GDP (Advance Estimate), 4th Quarter and Year 2025 | U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA)
Christine Lagarde Says Her ‘Baseline’ Is Finishing ECB Term www.wsj.com/world/europe...
This innocuous looking piece of rock is Core 7, inspiration for a number of theories that involve aliens in ancient Egypt. You can see it for yourself at the Petrie Museum.
De Gaulle must be rotating.
This country's ability to rinse the young and then berate them as lazy avocado addicts is ridiculous.
They're so up against it, it's madness.
- as.ft.com/r/094f3968-1...
Germany’s economy grew last year for the first time since 2022, despite a decline in exports while imports jumped. Perhaps the start of something. Gross domestic product up 0.2% in 2025 - German Federal Statistical Office
Bank of France Gov Francois Villeroy is not happy with Europe’s response to the new disorder: “Let us draw at least one lesson from the excesses across the Atlantic: we must act faster, more clearly and more forcefully.”
Good goal. Did he do that at Lancaster?
Open to correction, but they seem to be diverging from their wild brethren, which I sometimes see in the countryside north of London, and which don’t seem keen to endure proximity. They also seem to have thicker fur than the city foxes.
It’s a sort of blueprint for dodging responsibility for all the dodgy stuff of empire building.
This allows the hero of that episode, Arthegall, to confine his efforts to chivalric combat with the monstrous Irish chieftain. He therefore avoids direct engagement with what amounts to ethnic cleansing.
Talus is an instrument of justice. To give you a sense of its purpose, in the conquest and pacification of Ireland (book 5) Talus is the relentless killing machine that rids the island of its many undesirables.
Just finished the 1050-page Faerie Queen, an Elizabethan epic heavy with knights and distressed damsels.The revelation for me was Talus, which seems to be a homicidal robot.
I hear everybody that you know is more relevant than everybody that I know.
For some reason, none of this seemed odd to me until I visited Seville and Cordoba, where buildings constructed for use by one faith were taken over by another when political power shifted.
Instead, its top Catholic edifice is located in another state (the U.K.). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Patr...
In other places, a change of regime (such as independence) might have seen one of Dublin’s two cathedrals returned to its majority faith. But no.
One of the many odd things about Ireland is that, having been one of the most Catholic countries, it’s capital city lacks a Catholic cathedral: www.rte.ie/news/dublin/...
www.rte.ie/news/ireland... what the story might not make clear for non-Irish readers is that this is a center for housing refugees while their applications for asylum are being processed.
The report shows a sharp rise in research security measures – policies designed to protect sensitive research and prevent foreign interference. In 2025, countries reported 250 such policies — almost ten times more than in 2018.
Who else could have pulled it off?
They only have two centuries of experience to draw on, but GWR still surprised that a lot of people travel to and from Oxford. Maybe if they had some tangible sign of demand, like ticket sales, they could provide an adequate number of seats.
This may be obvious, but the trick to the BOE’s QT announcement seems to be that sales of long-term gilts are pretty much the same as last year (20% of £21 billion vs 33.3% of £13 billion) even as total sales rise. Some people might have wanted to see no further sales at the long end.
The Irish ambassador to Germany has conveyed her concern to German authorities after an Irish demonstrator was assaulted by police officers during a pro-Palestine protest in Berlin.
How it started….
Does the Bank of Italy have Daniel O’Connell’s heart?
I had not realised that the Bank of Italy was involved.
You think your country has problems - Ireland does not know where the heart of The Liberator lies: www.rte.ie/news/ireland...
