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Would Joe Biden be a friend to British PM?

The US election is weeks away and the doomsayers for the UK’s relationship with a post-Trump America are out in force. Joe Biden is “an Irish-American with no particular love for Boris Johnson or Brexit Britain” thundered a Times of London column last week. Other Conservative voices predict that a Democrat victory would be disastrous for the Brits and end ...

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Who are ‘Good Censors’ on internet

When talking among themselves, Silicon Valley big shots sometimes say weird things. In an internal presentation in March 2018, Google executives were asked to imagine their company acting as a “Good Censor,” in order to limit the impact of users “behaving badly.” In a 2016 internal video, Nick Foster, Google’s head of design, envisioned a “goal-driven ledger” of all users’ ...

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Do give China cheer for making polluters pay

China’s ambitious pledge to decarbonise by 2060 requires the world’s top polluter to dramatically raise the cost of spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. A long-awaited national carbon market that is finally set to begin trading this year will be less demanding and more limited than initially anticipated, if draft plans are a guide. It’s worth welcoming anyway. Beijing could ...

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