Friday 3 July 2026 The first great boom in artificial intelligence has taken place almost entirely inside computers. Large language models have transformed the production of text, images, software and research. Businesses have rushed to automate customer service, legal drafting, marketing, accounting and countless other information-intensive tasks. Billions of dollars have flowed into data centres, graphics processors and cloud infrastructure, creating a technological revolut

Friday 3 July 2026 The Soviet Union was founded upon an explicit rejection of religion. Yet one of the great paradoxes of the twentieth century is that under the rule of Joseph Stalin, the officially atheist state developed many of the characteristics of a religious civilisation. Churches were demolished, priests were imprisoned and religious education was prohibited. Nevertheless faith did not disappear. Rather, it was redirected. Stalin’s regime created a political theology

Friday 3 July 2026 The modern Russian military-industrial complex is sustained not only by the giant state corporations whose names dominate official propaganda but also by a network of specialised research institutes that quietly develop the technologies upon which modern weapons depend. Amongst the most important of these is the Polyus Research Institute, formally the M. F. Stelmakh Polyus Scientific Research Institute, an organisation whose work spans quantum electronics,

Friday 3 July 2026 For decades, Albania’s Adriatic and Ionian coastlines have represented one of Europe’s last relatively untouched Mediterranean frontiers. Isolated during the communist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, much of the country’s coastline escaped the intensive commercial development that transformed neighbouring Croatia, Italy and Greece. Today that relative absence of development has become both Albania’s greatest natural asset and the focus of one of her most conte

Friday 3 July 2026 For much of the war, discussion of Crimea has oscillated between two extremes. Moscow has sought to portray the peninsula as irrevocably integrated into the Russian Federation, a settled question beyond political or military challenge. Nevertheless some outside observers have assumed that any attempt by Ukraine to recover Crimea would inevitably require a vast amphibious invasion or a costly frontal assault across the narrow approaches from Kherson. Both as