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Artificial-intelligence sovereignty sounds like national control over models, chips and computing infrastructure. For most countries, that goal is unrealistic. The frontier is increasingly dominated by America and China, whose governments can shape not only how advanced models are made safe, but also who is allowed to use them. The practical challenge for everyone else is therefore to reduce vulnerability without wasting fortunes on an impossible race for total independence.

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America’s effort to reduce its dependence on Chinese clean-energy companies is producing an unexpected result: Chinese owners are leaving, but much of their machinery, technical knowledge and supply chain remains. The policy may strengthen American manufacturing, yet it does not automatically create technological independence.

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This summary covers The Economist’s July 4th, 2026 Asia article listed in the contents as Subsea data cables and published under the headline The new geography of subsea cables.

The internet may feel weightless, but almost all international traffic still travels through fibre-optic cables on the ocean floor. Artificial intelligence is now changing where those cables go. Big technology companies need direct, high-capacity links between data centres, while governments and operators want routes that avoid politically risky waters. Together, those pressures are pulling Asia’s digital infrastructure away from familiar coastal corridors and across the open Indian and Pacific oceans.

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This summary covers The Economist’s July 4th, 2026 By Invitation essay by Carson Block, listed in the contents as Carson Block on what AI could do to markets and published under the headline When markets crash, stabilising them will be easy compared with reordering society for AI.

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This summary covers The Economist’s July 4th, 2026 Business article listed in the contents as The rise of vibe lawyering and published under the headline Trial and error.

Artificial intelligence is making it easier for people to enter court without hiring a lawyer. That can widen access to a system whose cost and complexity shut many people out. But early evidence suggests that chatbots are also filling courts with fabricated precedents, overconfident claims and far more paperwork. The result is not the disappearance of lawyers so much as a new division of labour between machines that make legal help cheaper and humans who verify what the machines produce.

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This summary covers The Economist’s July 4th, 2026 Science & technology article listed in the contents as Probing black holes and published under the headline Digging deeper.

Black holes are defined by a boundary that cannot be seen directly: the event horizon, beyond which even light cannot escape. A remarkably clear gravitational-wave signal has now let physicists examine that boundary through its effects on spacetime. The result agrees precisely with Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity and opens a new way to search for physics beyond it.

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This summary covers The Economist’s July 4th, 2026 Science & technology article listed in the contents as Sequencing babies' genomes and published under the headline The genomic generation.

Sequencing a newborn’s entire genome could reveal serious illnesses before symptoms appear, when treatment has the best chance of working. It could also burden healthy children with frightening predictions that never come true and place their most intimate data at risk for life. The article argues that the technology’s medical promise is real, but the case for universal screening depends on choosing carefully what to report, how to explain uncertainty and whether diagnosis should be tied to long-term research.

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This summary covers The Economist’s July 4th, 2026 Science & technology article listed in the contents as Synthetic biology and published under the headline A design for life.

Researchers have assembled cells that can grow, reproduce and evolve without inheriting any working parts from earlier life. The creations, called SpudCells, are still fragile and dependent on an artificial environment. Yet their importance lies precisely in how little they can do: every component was deliberately added, giving scientists an unusually clear view of how biological machinery works.

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This summary covers The Economist’s July 4th, 2026 Leaders article listed in the contents as The government and AI and published under the headline Rules for supermodels.

Frontier artificial intelligence is becoming too capable to release casually and too useful to lock away indefinitely. The article argues that governments need a durable system for managing that tension before a model enables a major cyberattack, helps a bioterrorist or causes some other disaster. America has begun regulating releases, but its improvisational approach shows why clearer institutions are urgently needed.

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This summary covers The Economist’s June 20th, 2026 Science & technology article listed as The biggest El Niño ever? and published under the headline Boy problems.

A new El Niño has begun, and climate forecasters think it could be the strongest in the modern record. The article’s warning is not simply that the planet may become hotter in 2027. El Niño redistributes heat and rainfall around the world, so an exceptionally powerful event could turn existing drought, hunger and conflict into overlapping humanitarian crises.