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Suella Braverman, home secretary, will on Monday reiterate the UK government’s commitment to bring down net migration as inflows are expected to hit a record high this year. Braverman will say in her keynote speech at the National Conservatism conference in London on Monday that she campaigned for Brexit because she wanted Britain to control
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Hello and welcome to the working week. There is a symmetry to the next seven days. We begin with the reaction to Turkey’s presidential and parliamentary elections and end next Sunday with another national vote in neighbouring Greece. In both cases, the ruling party has been on the ropes because of the government’s response to
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The sale of the UK water industry in 1989 is the most controversial of all Margaret Thatcher’s privatisations. Critics argue that it has been little more than a rip off: the privatised companies have failed to eliminate leaks, been permitted to dump vast quantities of untreated sewage into our waterways and used clever financial engineering
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Voters are heading to the polls in Turkey’s most consequential election in two decades as longtime leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan seeks to fend off a united opposition led by Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. Polls opened at 8am Ankara time on Sunday in presidential and parliamentary elections that offer two widely divergent paths for Turkey. Erdoğan, who first
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The G7 and EU will ban Russian gas imports on routes where Moscow has cut supplies, according to officials involved in the negotiations, the first time pipeline gas trade has been blocked by western powers since the invasion of Ukraine. The decision, which is to be finalised by G7 leaders at a summit in Hiroshima
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This week I went to Germany where I discovered they have a word for being excessively fond of abbreviations. The word is abkürzungsfimmel and it makes sense in a language with words of such dire length that they look as if they’ve been typed on a keyboard with no space bar. But the mania for
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During Google’s big I/O showcase event for developers — a protracted, glistening flex of the company’s new AI muscles — one of the keynote speakers dwelt on the risks posed by “bad actors”. The phrase, in the context of an otherwise self-consciously optimistic event, came with a balance of real and abstract threat. There was
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When Recep Tayyip Erdoğan first led his Justice and Development party (AKP) to victory, he used a campaign of fear and hope: promising an economic renaissance and to save Turkey from rival politicians bringing “poverty, famine and hunger”. Two decades later, the president, who has towered over his nation like no other leader since the republic’s
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He is the son of public-sector professionals. He worked in finance before running the country. He was born around the turn of the 1980s. (A cohort of men to be honoured for their fine minds and astonishing looks, I think.) He turned against his political patron en route to the top. He “presents” as metropolitan
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