🇭🇷⚖️🇪🇺 This is also a momentous victory of Advocate-General Tamara Ćapeta, the Croatian maverick of EU values, whose opinion in this case formed the backbone of CJEU's argumentation. Watch out for other cases where she wrote the opinion (esp. the European judicial orgs. vs EU case regarding Poland).

Breaking:

Chinese rail giant CRRC's Portuguese subsidiary withdrew from a consortium to provide trams to metro project in Lisbon after EU foreign subsidies regulation probe - replaced by a Polish company

Story to follow with Xiaofei Xu

Thiel meant you can choose to open an online shop selling your own products or you can choose to be Shopify. Unlike in meatspace, this mall has few physical limitations and many economies of scale. Shopify has unrivaled fraud data (for example) so retailers using them has few chargebacks.

Artefacts have politics: The distributed nature always meant there would be a role for centralised players doing the discovery, coordination. No borders supersized everything. Coupled with digital technology's marginal price of a copy, the dice were loaded for scale. 2/2

I like the sentiment but I'm sceptical. The initial protocols of the internet weren't particular friendly to big corporations. A lot was missing. An identity layer, a payments layer. The corporations that became big on the internet were start-ups, not Time Warner. 1/2

A very niche but very awesome data download app that I've used for years just closed because they get so many queries per minute it drains their hosting cost in days.

Magyar Péter (Ne féljetek) * ... @magyarpeterMP Until 31 May, the Orbán puppets may voluntarily step down from their positions. This applies to the President of Hungary, the President of the Curia, the President of the National Office for the Judiciary, the President of the Constitutional Court, and the Prosecutor General. On 12 April, the Hungarian people voted for a complete political transformation. If these officials do not step down voluntarily by 31 May, then - on the basis of the mandate received from millions of Hungarians — we will remove them from office.

Hungary’s Péter Magyar issues an ultimatum.

More from me after I read the judgment, but it's already clear that history will remember the presidential term of prof. Koen Lenaerts is one who reshaped EU law and altered several classic lines of interpretation by CJEU. One for the history books today, and a lot of scholarly writing.

Thanks.

Telegraph newspaper editorial on Mandelson's appointment in December 2024 versus editorial today

What's your take on the implications?

🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈⚖️🇭🇺 A legal earthquake - CJEU finds Hungary to have violated EU law on multiple counts with its anti-LGBT+ legislation (as expected) but also for the first time in history, in an EU law-reshaping precedent, finds Hungary to violate Art 2 TEU in a self-standing manner.

Surely it’s in Labour and the UK’s interest that it has a leader that has some theory, or at least an inkling of what’s going on with the world — and how to the UK should react?

"Sweden agreed with the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, that Russia was understating its budget deficit by $30bn, and had also noticed some financial indicators that could point to a future banking crisis" www.ft.com/content/04a9...

Software called "harnesses" - basically the infrastructure that wraps around AI models to make them work reliably in real business applications. Three different business models are emerging.

The UK is even more dependent on US tech than Europe. But digital tech really thrives on scale. Either it builds tech that Europe also uses or it uses European tech. Probably it will need to do both. Now if Europe can get its act together.

By year-end 2025, the US had embedded digital trade clauses in deals with at least 10 countries—many signed after Trump's tariff threats. Indonesia committed to 'address barriers affecting digital trade' and allow data transfers to the US, contradicting its own data protection law.

The striking detail: China's export prices have plunged over recent years and are now at 2018 levels, whilst during the first China shock they rose 40%. Extinction level event for manufacturers around the globe.

China has rapidly overtaken the U.S. in total scientific output - including top journals. Other middle- and low-income countries - India, Russia and Brazil - have also increased their research output, collectively matching the total production of high-income EU countries.

Musk called French prosecutors 'retards' in a French-language post before skipping his summons. The investigation now covers X's algorithm interfering in French politics plus Grok generating Holocaust denials and sexual deepfakes.

OH no!

NATO already has its own messenger - The European Commission plans to switch by end of year - Belgium recently launched "BEAM" for government use.

This post argues the market is in for a correction because small models we can run ourselves on our own devices will be powerful enough in a few years time.

Kenneth Boulding famously quipped, “Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist” — he might have added, “or AI executives making investor pitches."

The data is clear: in no German state do 18-24 year old men vote AfD at higher rates than men aged 35-60. The 'young right-wing men' narrative persists despite lacking empirical support (In Germany at least.).

Paper argues slavery generated wealth equivalent to around a decade of economic growth for Britain—and increased local incomes by over 40% in places most involved.

The real insight here: Microsoft's Copilot sits on 85-90% of Fortune 500 seats unused not because it's bad, but because organisations can't absorb what agents produce.

"The compnay didn’t help its case when Microsoft France’s director of public and legal affairs told the French Senate under oath in June that it “cannot guarantee” it would be able to deny requests from the Trump administration for data stored on its servers within the European Union."

China's March 2026 exports:

Solar cells up 80%
EVs up 53%
Lithium-ion batteries up 34%

Electricity substitutes for fossil fuels are surging.

China, an Electrostate, competes against the Petrostates that include Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
www.bloomberg.com/news/article... #energysky

There are meaningful good non ethically dubious use cases for AI and data viz is a huge one. Helping me quickly read through API docs and spit out some info on specific scenarios is another clearly non morally dubious use case... I don't want to read 50 pages of API docs... and I don't need to.